Back in late 2017 I started formally tracking my weekly playtest sessions in a google doc. One up-side of this is that I can go back now and review what was played each week, by whom, and what aspect I was looking to test that day. It's also interesting to see how much time we dedicated to each game, or how much time passed in between playtests of a game.
I'd like to use this post as a sort of retrospective on the last two years (or 28 months) of playtesting. Let's take a little trip down memory lane...
2017
Late August 2017 was the first session I'd logged, and that day we were evaluating 3 games I'd brought home from GenCon for TMG: Margrave, by Stan Kordonskiy, which turned into Old West Empresario, Rolled West, by Daniel Newman, and Embark, by Philip duBarry. Not only did we end up signing each of these, but all three are on store shelves now!
In September of that year we continued evaluating games: Pixel Factory was a neat one, but ultimately TMG did not sign it. Back to Earth was also neat, and we did sign it, but due to unrelated circumstances we ended up releasing it later. Railways is a game by some British designer friends of mine, and I liked it, but it needed some work. We did suggest the new title: Railblazers. My understanding is that at this point it has improved greatly, but the main mechanism which I was interested in (like the Mancala-rondel in Crusaders) has changed completely.
October saw us switch gears a bit. We spent a lot of time playing my games: Eminent Domain Origins (a Terra Prime reboot) and Eminent Domain: Chaos Theory (a dice game version of EmDo -- I should add those to the BGG database). This went on into November as well.
December was spent almost entirely on a dozen games of Embark, which had been signed by that point. I also see a lone play of Eminent Domain Origins at about Christmas time.
2018
We started off the new year with 2 more games of EDO, but then spent the rest of January, February, March, and half of April playing about 3 dozen (!) games of Old West Empresario, working on game balance and player powers. The only other playtests in those months were a few games of Harvest to test some potential expansion characters (unfortunately, we never did do an expansion to Harvest).
Late April through mid-May we tested the Crusaders: Divine Influence expansion, which was in pretty good shape to begin with, but we hammered out a few details. That one has now been printed, and is about to ship from the manufacturer in China and should be out later this year.
My son was born at the end of May, and my playtest sessions went on hiatus. The only other testing that happened in 2018 was at Rincon -- Michael was in town and we played a game of Deities & Demigods (now Olympus on the Serengeti), and several games of Imminent Domain (now Sails & Sorcery, but that title might not be final either), which is the game Michael designed based on the deck learning of Eminent Domain and the area control of El Grande.
2019
After an extended hiatus, I finally got back to regular playtest sessions in February of 2019, and we spent that first month back playing Eminent Domain Origins some more, fine tuning some last details.
March was spent on Emperor's Choice. TMG is doing a Deluxified version of that game, and we developed a 2 player variant which went over well with Richard Ham of Rahdo Runs Through, who famously only plays games with his wife.
April and May were dedicated almost entirely to developing Sails & Sorcery, changing up the format so it would play better, but keeping the core ideas of the game.
June was spent working on a new design of mine, Apotheosis. We iterated through several big changes as we quickly honed in on what worked and what didn't.
We started out July with a quick couple tests of a 5/6 player expansion to Crusaders. This worked out well, and we've got art done, but this won't come out until October. Then it was back to Sails & Sorcery through August. Most of the game was pretty solid by that point, but we were trying to fix this one niggling dynamic that just didn't work right.
We switched gears again and spent September and half of October playing Alter Ego, my co-operative deck learning game. We played quite a few games considering that one of my main testers doesn't like co-op games!
We ended October and spent most of November working on expansion content for Pioneer Days that we got from the designers.
We revisited Alter Ego once in November and once in December, and spent the rest of December testing Eminent Domain: Chaos Theory, and another one of my games: Riders of the Pony Express. Riders was in pretty good shape, but was a bit fiddly. We fixed a couple of small issues, and brainstormed how to remove some of the process a little bit.
In addition, we played a few non-playtest games including Tapestry (which did not go over well), In the Year of the Dragon (my favorite Feld game), and we tested a game for one of my playtesters (we actually did this a couple of other times, but I hadn't recorded those). Also, I took my players out for an annual Playtester Appreciation Day to see the new Star Wars movie (we saw Solo last year, and Episode VIII the year before that) -- only one of them could make it though.
Finally, we capped off the year reviving my oldest game design that was any good: All For One! I initially got involved in that co-design 17 years ago, and it had been so long since the last playtest (2012?) that I didn't try any changes, we played straight from the rulebook. It was great to revive this old classic, and we started off 2020 with some significant changes to All For One, which worked well and felt great!
Saturday, March 28, 2020
Tariffs And The Sixty Dollar Board Game
With 25% Chinese tariffs taking effect this month, I'm already seeing solicitations for board games with significantly higher prices. The $60+ board game is likely to be the norm, up from an average of $45-50. I wrote on my Facebook author page I thought my board game sales were likely to drop by 40%. That's a really high number and it's complete speculation, but let's take a look at what we know.
We know very little. If we try to read the tea leaves of market forecasts, they're concerned with publicly traded companies, most of whom can absorb some or all of a 25% tariff. Best Buy sources enough Chinese products with high margins, they may not even raise prices, just take the hit. For us small retailers, sellers of speciality goods without enough margin to absorb tariffs and no cushion to absorb higher costs, they just predict doom and gloom. A 25% tariff is a necessary 25% price increase.
One example of how price increases directly affect sales from comes from the auto industry. When vehicles rise in price, for every dollar of price increase, demand drops by .87%. With a 25% increase in price, we should expect a 22% decrease in sales using the auto industry numbers. That's our baseline though, a starting point. Buying a vehicle is different than a board game.
If you don't like Chevy dealer A, Chevy dealer B isn't going to have a significantly different price. That's because vehicles are sold through a closed dealer network and gross margin on board games is about 45% compared to 8-10% on vehicles. There's no wiggle room to sell you a Chevy Colorado for 25% off, even if dealer B wanted to. And there's no online clearinghouse for a third party to devalue a new Colorado. If you don't want to spend $60 for a board game at my store, there will always be someone selling that game for 20-30% off online, even in the age of MAP price protection. There is someone selling that same game with an MSRP of $45, right now for $30-35, which is probably half the regional sales of that game. It's more complicated than that though.
As the price of an item increases over psychological thresholds, the pressure to buy it online increases dramatically. Most store owners will tell you once a game hits a certain price plateau, sales drop off considerably as customers seek better value. It's why many of us sell so many little card games and so few $100 board games. The impulse purchase, in which calculations don't play much of a role, is probably around $30-40 nowadays. At $40-50, there's some thinking and we lose a lot of sales to discounters, and at over $50, there's a lot of thought into how to acquire that item most efficiently. We are certainly earning that business in some fashion. And that's where board games will go, breaking that price ceiling (the one I artificially created for this example).
If you think this will be business as usual, we're going from a strong economy to where, "Markets are pricing in rate cuts in September and December." Markets are already signaling they expect pain in the second half of the year with interest rate increases up a quarter percent. My store sales for 2019 are up a staggering 20%, due to a number of factors. I'm predicting I end the year up 4% due to tariffs. It's a complicated bit of bistro math, but I'm expecting a lot of pain. I know I'll be doing a lot of dancing, I just don't know the tune.
We know very little. If we try to read the tea leaves of market forecasts, they're concerned with publicly traded companies, most of whom can absorb some or all of a 25% tariff. Best Buy sources enough Chinese products with high margins, they may not even raise prices, just take the hit. For us small retailers, sellers of speciality goods without enough margin to absorb tariffs and no cushion to absorb higher costs, they just predict doom and gloom. A 25% tariff is a necessary 25% price increase.
One example of how price increases directly affect sales from comes from the auto industry. When vehicles rise in price, for every dollar of price increase, demand drops by .87%. With a 25% increase in price, we should expect a 22% decrease in sales using the auto industry numbers. That's our baseline though, a starting point. Buying a vehicle is different than a board game.
If you don't like Chevy dealer A, Chevy dealer B isn't going to have a significantly different price. That's because vehicles are sold through a closed dealer network and gross margin on board games is about 45% compared to 8-10% on vehicles. There's no wiggle room to sell you a Chevy Colorado for 25% off, even if dealer B wanted to. And there's no online clearinghouse for a third party to devalue a new Colorado. If you don't want to spend $60 for a board game at my store, there will always be someone selling that game for 20-30% off online, even in the age of MAP price protection. There is someone selling that same game with an MSRP of $45, right now for $30-35, which is probably half the regional sales of that game. It's more complicated than that though.
As the price of an item increases over psychological thresholds, the pressure to buy it online increases dramatically. Most store owners will tell you once a game hits a certain price plateau, sales drop off considerably as customers seek better value. It's why many of us sell so many little card games and so few $100 board games. The impulse purchase, in which calculations don't play much of a role, is probably around $30-40 nowadays. At $40-50, there's some thinking and we lose a lot of sales to discounters, and at over $50, there's a lot of thought into how to acquire that item most efficiently. We are certainly earning that business in some fashion. And that's where board games will go, breaking that price ceiling (the one I artificially created for this example).
If you think this will be business as usual, we're going from a strong economy to where, "Markets are pricing in rate cuts in September and December." Markets are already signaling they expect pain in the second half of the year with interest rate increases up a quarter percent. My store sales for 2019 are up a staggering 20%, due to a number of factors. I'm predicting I end the year up 4% due to tariffs. It's a complicated bit of bistro math, but I'm expecting a lot of pain. I know I'll be doing a lot of dancing, I just don't know the tune.
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Monday, March 23, 2020
Hex Grid Guide Load Time, Part 2
Last year I reimplemented my hexagon grid guide with the goals of making it easier for me to add content and also making it possible to load faster. I was able to speed up load time significantly by pre-rendering the SVG on the server. This is called "SSR with Rehydration" on Google's rendering tech page.
Last week I experimented with this a bit more. At load time, I was replacing the static SVGs with interactive SVGs. However, there's no need to do this immediately. I changed it to wait until the diagram was visible on screen (using IntersectionObserver). This helps quite a bit! The "time to interactive" score goes from 9.6sec to 4.9sec and the overall page speed score goes from 63 to 89:
I was wondering if I could make it even faster by prerendering only some things on the server ("CSR with Prerendering" on Google's rendering tech page). The page shrinks from 633k to 179k! And the page score goes from 89 to 96. Time to interactive goes from 4.9s to 3.5s:
Great! However, it started to bring back the problems that I had solved last year. This version doesn't allow printing the page, loading it without Javascript, using "Reader modes" (including Pocket, Instapaper, RSS, etc.), or Ctrl+F to find diagram text on the page. The more I used the page, the more little glitches I found. None of these are super important, but they're not going to get better. In contrast, the load time will continue to get better as cpu and network speeds increase, HTTP/2 is adopted, and compression protocols improve (Brotli, HPACK, etc.). Another consideration is accessibility. I've been told that most screen readers support Javascript, but deferring the creation of SVG using IntersectionObserver means the SVG may never get created, so it would have the same problem as printing and Ctrl+F.
I decided to keep the pre-rendered static SVG for now, with deferred interactive SVG. It's simpler for me and I have fewer corner cases to deal with. I'll revisit this in the future when I update my A* pages to load faster.
Friday, March 20, 2020
All Aboard The S.S. Anne!
My first morning in Vermilion City, I found myself down at the docks pushing my way through the crowds. Vermilion Port was easily the busiest place I'd ever been in my life up to that point. The sheer number of ships and trucks moving goods in and out of the Kanto region was overwhelming. Even still, the S.S. Anne stood out of the crowd as a majestic ocean liner built for luxurious and excessive lifestyles. It's glorious, gleaming white hull was a beacon you could see almost anywhere in Vermilion City. I'd had my eye on her since I came into town the night before and I had no trouble finding my way to the pier at which she was docked. Getting on to that pier without a ticket or an invitation to the tournament was a trial all its own. I spent most of the morning looking for a way past security.
The story of how I got aboard the S.S. Anne is a story of chance encounters and dumb luck. The first of which was a man fishing off the end of an unused pier. I was attempting to get a better vantage point of the S.S. Anne at the time, but I was also curious about the old fisherman. I sat with him a moment and he showed me how he supported himself just fishing up Pokémon out of the Vermilion Bay. After spending perhaps half an hour watching and listening to his old fish tales, he offered me one of his old rods that he wasn't too attached to. I was surprised at his generosity and thanked him graciously. He said the old rod wasn't great at pulling up any big catches, but it was a good starter rod to learn how to handle myself. I was eager to try it out.
There didn't seem to be any restrictions posted on where you were allowed to fish in Vermilion Port, so I plopped myself down right at the edge of the S.S.Anne pier. I cast my line into the waters and waited. Patiently. For a long time. As I sat there on the edge of the dock, I could hear battles going on the deck above me. I could hear the whoops and cheers of the gathered crowds as local trainers, decadent cruise passengers, and members of the crew fought for fun and money. I knew that as long as there were trainers ready to battle, the registration for this exhibition would be open, but I had to get aboard soon.
There was a tug on the line! A new type of Pokémon battle had begun. It was my strength and determination against that of whatever was on the other end of that line. I struggled for several minutes, worried that this old rod would snap clear in half at the tension on the line. Finally, a red scaled fish Pokémon lurched out of the water and flopped on to the pier. I frowned slightly. It was a Magikarp. I should have known. It was too weak to weaken, so I had Arnold put it to sleep and I carefully tried to get it into a Pokéball. The damn thing casually slapped 4 of my balls into the ocean in its fitful slumber before finally being secured in the 5th ball. I named him Royal, and although he was weak now, I had some big dreams for Royal in the distant future.
I had no idea at the time, but the entire Magikarp episode was being watched by a gentleman nearby. I called out Royal to get a good look at him and size up his potential - which admittedly was limited right now. As I was gazing down at him, a firm hand clasped my shoulder.
"I say, good show, old sport. Good show."
"Thank you," I managed to sputter in sudden confusion.
"Oh, I daresay, where are my manners? My name is Reginald and I'm the Chairman of the Pokémon Fan Club. We are headquartered right here in Vermilion City! I have personally collected over 100 Pokémon and I'm very fussy when it comes to Pokémon. I see you are less fussy and I admire your spirit, old sport." He motioned to Royal. "I could never bother myself with Pokémon like that, but there is something special about you. Come now, join me aboard the S.S. Anne, would you? I can see you are itching to join the tournament. Meanwhile, let me tell you all about my favorite Pokémon, Rapidash. It is the most spectacular and ravishing of all the Pokémon, don't you agree?"
All I really heard was "join me aboard the S.S. Anne" and I was packing up my belongings as quickly as I could. While Chairman Reginald prattled on and on about Rapidash, my attention was mainly focused on shoving the old rod into my backpack, and making sure my Boulder and Cascade Badges were clearly visible. I wanted everyone to know how far I'd come as we made our way on board the cruise ship.
Once aboard, I listened to Chairmain Reginald talk about Rapidash for what felt likean eternity a polite amount of time considering the great favor he'd just done for me. Eventually I excused myself and I found my way to the registration desk. I showed off my two badges and was put into a mid-level bracket. The tournament was scored on a point system where trainers lost the most points when their Pokémon fainted, and since I was determined not to allow them to faint I was sure to score very highly in the preliminary matches.
All the matches were happening along the promenade deck with spectators above able to look down into most of the arenas that were setup. As I stood along the promenade, it was crowded and difficult to see much, but I managed to push my way toward my first match-up near the aft of the ship. I was going to face off against an older gentlemen who happened to be a passenger aboard the cruise wanting to test his skill against the Kanto trainers. I was nervous, but also excited. He opened with a Growlithe - a Pokémon I'd never seen before. It was obviously a fire-type and so Douglas was the right choice. He needed the battle experience, as well.
Growlithe was faster than I anticipated! He landed a desperate attack on Douglas's head which nearly incapacitated him. I was shocked. I'd almost lost a Pokémon due to my overconfidence in type match-ups. I switched out Douglas for Rascal Jr. hoping to get the edge in speed. My swap paid off because Rascal Jr. landed a monstrous hyper fang on this Growlithe and knocked it completely out. The crowd went wild at this turn around and I remember how uplifting it made me feel. I couldn't help from smiling like a fool.
The passenger tossed out another Growlithe who met the same OHKO fate to the power of Rascal Jr. To punctuate just how amazing Rascal's victory over the Growlithe duo actually was, Rascal Jr. evolved into a Raticate in front of the entire crowd. It generated some hushed awe from the spectators, but I was just ecstatic to see Rascal Jr. grow in power. Rascal and I were victorious in our first match, but there were still several more ahead of us before we'd meet with the captain.
Current Team:
Attacks in Blue are recently learned.
Bill's Storage: Shakespear (Spearow) & Royal (Magikarp)
Old Man Daycare: Charlie (Pidgey)
The story of how I got aboard the S.S. Anne is a story of chance encounters and dumb luck. The first of which was a man fishing off the end of an unused pier. I was attempting to get a better vantage point of the S.S. Anne at the time, but I was also curious about the old fisherman. I sat with him a moment and he showed me how he supported himself just fishing up Pokémon out of the Vermilion Bay. After spending perhaps half an hour watching and listening to his old fish tales, he offered me one of his old rods that he wasn't too attached to. I was surprised at his generosity and thanked him graciously. He said the old rod wasn't great at pulling up any big catches, but it was a good starter rod to learn how to handle myself. I was eager to try it out.
There didn't seem to be any restrictions posted on where you were allowed to fish in Vermilion Port, so I plopped myself down right at the edge of the S.S.Anne pier. I cast my line into the waters and waited. Patiently. For a long time. As I sat there on the edge of the dock, I could hear battles going on the deck above me. I could hear the whoops and cheers of the gathered crowds as local trainers, decadent cruise passengers, and members of the crew fought for fun and money. I knew that as long as there were trainers ready to battle, the registration for this exhibition would be open, but I had to get aboard soon.There was a tug on the line! A new type of Pokémon battle had begun. It was my strength and determination against that of whatever was on the other end of that line. I struggled for several minutes, worried that this old rod would snap clear in half at the tension on the line. Finally, a red scaled fish Pokémon lurched out of the water and flopped on to the pier. I frowned slightly. It was a Magikarp. I should have known. It was too weak to weaken, so I had Arnold put it to sleep and I carefully tried to get it into a Pokéball. The damn thing casually slapped 4 of my balls into the ocean in its fitful slumber before finally being secured in the 5th ball. I named him Royal, and although he was weak now, I had some big dreams for Royal in the distant future.
I had no idea at the time, but the entire Magikarp episode was being watched by a gentleman nearby. I called out Royal to get a good look at him and size up his potential - which admittedly was limited right now. As I was gazing down at him, a firm hand clasped my shoulder.
"I say, good show, old sport. Good show."
"Thank you," I managed to sputter in sudden confusion.
"Oh, I daresay, where are my manners? My name is Reginald and I'm the Chairman of the Pokémon Fan Club. We are headquartered right here in Vermilion City! I have personally collected over 100 Pokémon and I'm very fussy when it comes to Pokémon. I see you are less fussy and I admire your spirit, old sport." He motioned to Royal. "I could never bother myself with Pokémon like that, but there is something special about you. Come now, join me aboard the S.S. Anne, would you? I can see you are itching to join the tournament. Meanwhile, let me tell you all about my favorite Pokémon, Rapidash. It is the most spectacular and ravishing of all the Pokémon, don't you agree?"
All I really heard was "join me aboard the S.S. Anne" and I was packing up my belongings as quickly as I could. While Chairman Reginald prattled on and on about Rapidash, my attention was mainly focused on shoving the old rod into my backpack, and making sure my Boulder and Cascade Badges were clearly visible. I wanted everyone to know how far I'd come as we made our way on board the cruise ship.
Once aboard, I listened to Chairmain Reginald talk about Rapidash for what felt like
All the matches were happening along the promenade deck with spectators above able to look down into most of the arenas that were setup. As I stood along the promenade, it was crowded and difficult to see much, but I managed to push my way toward my first match-up near the aft of the ship. I was going to face off against an older gentlemen who happened to be a passenger aboard the cruise wanting to test his skill against the Kanto trainers. I was nervous, but also excited. He opened with a Growlithe - a Pokémon I'd never seen before. It was obviously a fire-type and so Douglas was the right choice. He needed the battle experience, as well.
Growlithe was faster than I anticipated! He landed a desperate attack on Douglas's head which nearly incapacitated him. I was shocked. I'd almost lost a Pokémon due to my overconfidence in type match-ups. I switched out Douglas for Rascal Jr. hoping to get the edge in speed. My swap paid off because Rascal Jr. landed a monstrous hyper fang on this Growlithe and knocked it completely out. The crowd went wild at this turn around and I remember how uplifting it made me feel. I couldn't help from smiling like a fool.
The passenger tossed out another Growlithe who met the same OHKO fate to the power of Rascal Jr. To punctuate just how amazing Rascal's victory over the Growlithe duo actually was, Rascal Jr. evolved into a Raticate in front of the entire crowd. It generated some hushed awe from the spectators, but I was just ecstatic to see Rascal Jr. grow in power. Rascal and I were victorious in our first match, but there were still several more ahead of us before we'd meet with the captain.
Current Team:
Attacks in Blue are recently learned.
Bill's Storage: Shakespear (Spearow) & Royal (Magikarp)
Old Man Daycare: Charlie (Pidgey)
Thursday, March 19, 2020
Battlefield V - Review | Pro-GamersArena
Battlefield V - Review:
Battlefield V's (It's not Battlefield Vietnam which was released back in 2004) road to release hasn't actually been smooth, nor typical of an EA product. And to be honest, I didn't expected going in that playing Battlefield V's multiplayer would feel so much amazing and satisfying as Battlefield V doesn't feel like a complete experience at the launch. Battlefield V creates the impression that there's a sizeable number of modes and significant bug fixes still to be delivered. In this article, you're gonna hear from us about the Battlefield V Review.
Quick Facts:
- Initial release date: 15 November 2018
- First released: 20 November 2018
- Engine: Frostbite
- Platforms: PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Microsoft Windows
Straight away, it worth focusing on that while Battlefield V is set during WWII, it doesn't feel outdated. Mechanically speaking, it's the absolute best-feeling Battlefield in quite a while. These short stories plan to tell the stories behind the soldiers that battled in the two world wars, with Battlefield V's selection highlighting some of the more dark records of World War 2. The three being referred to bring a profound jump into the British Special Boat Section, the Norwegian resistance during the German occupation, and the efforts of black West African soldiers in their offer to overthrow the Nazi reign in France. Additionally: for better and for more worse, the game doesn't retread familiar. ground. It spins around the period's lesser-known stories and settings, which can be at the same time reviving and a bit of disappointing, particularly for 1942 fans.
Over the majority of its current multiplayer modes, Battlefield V's default mechanics step toward the hardcore. Health recovery is limited, The time to execute is reduced, and the spotting system is almost entirely removed. And keeping in mind that a portion of these changes feel like a Band-Aid being ripped off, Battlefield V is a superior shooter as a result of them. All things considered, the revisions are more thoughtful than essentially adopting the majority of the hardcore rules. And, in lieu of the whole removal of 3D spotting, just a bunch of gadgets and certain battle characteristics would now be able to put that infamous red circle over enemies heads. This change will help you remain connected with Battlefield V's stunning surroundings instead of playing the HUD. In nutshell, these changes aim to underscore teamplay, fulfilling gunplay, and immersion and every one of them find their marks.
Here's an amazing gameplay by TheRadBrad.
Also Read: Overkill's The Walking Dead - Review
Here's an amazing gameplay by TheRadBrad.
Also Read: Overkill's The Walking Dead - Review
Most important of all, the gun handling is fluid. Combat feels misleadingly easy, yet it's sufficiently layered to liberally reward skillful play, thoughtful strategies, or more all, teamwork. The maps are generally magnificent and advance shifted playstyles, from the flowing fields of Arras - a moment classic - to the omnipresent, all-knowing bridge of Twisted Steel. Wonderfully, every character class is impactful and enjoyable.
The incentives for coordinating with your four-person squad are borderline coercive. Lost health no longer again recovers past a specific point without a medkit, and ammo reserves are less abundant - most weapons are sustained by just two additional magazines to begin, making a Support partner an exceptionally welcome ally.
But there are many flaws which can't be neglected and need to be fixed as soon as possible like, at launch, Battlefield V was suffering from an unusually high amount of bugs and glitches which can possibly ruin a match. We've read reports of much further issues, but we ourselves have suffered with animation glitches that make pointing from turrets an impossibility, and the act of your weapon isolating from your character meaning you can't aim properly because the butt of your rifle is in your face as opposed to the iron sights. In addition, geometry in some cases neglects to stack in, leaving a church's bell tower suspended in mid-air, while trees and rocks don't show up properly, making them look like pixelated messes. The wonderful finish, however, was the point at which the 'Return to combat area' warning inaccurately showed up on our screen, which means we were killed following eight seconds for absolutely no reason. All of these issues is in all likelihood a basic fix via a patch, but they start to add up after occurring consecutively match after match to make an experience that you can't completely depend on to be reasonable nor stable.
An amazing video showing some funny glitches in Battlefield V by IGN.
Also Read: Cyberpunk 2077 | Release date, trailer, gameplay, news and more.
Battlefield V: Maps And Modes
Battlefield V offers eight maps at launch, and I felt all the maps to be quite enjoyable. Fjell 652 happens on a high-altitude Norwegian mountain overlooking the total of the Norvik map and is liable to exceptional and atmospheric snowstorms. Twisted Steel is built around a huge bridge that serves in as both a fabulous milestone and a functional mechanism to add a straight path to the map's familiar open environment speckled with rural villages.
And coming to modes, Shorter game modes, for example, Team Deathmatch, Domination, and Frontlines make up the numbers to give a multiplayer experience that will feel exceptionally familiar to returning players. Instead of update any of its online mechanics, Battlefield V refines and makes minor enhancements to the chaotic and tremendous battlegrounds it is known for. Despite everything you'll have those great Battlefield moments as you hold out against axis forces while your ticket counter drops to an alarming number, explode a rooftop to cut the rubble down onto your opponents, or you swoop in from the air and take out a target from a plane's gunner seat. There's no enormous disclosure to reveal, rather a stunningly better Battlefield experience to find.
The incentives for coordinating with your four-person squad are borderline coercive. Lost health no longer again recovers past a specific point without a medkit, and ammo reserves are less abundant - most weapons are sustained by just two additional magazines to begin, making a Support partner an exceptionally welcome ally.
But there are many flaws which can't be neglected and need to be fixed as soon as possible like, at launch, Battlefield V was suffering from an unusually high amount of bugs and glitches which can possibly ruin a match. We've read reports of much further issues, but we ourselves have suffered with animation glitches that make pointing from turrets an impossibility, and the act of your weapon isolating from your character meaning you can't aim properly because the butt of your rifle is in your face as opposed to the iron sights. In addition, geometry in some cases neglects to stack in, leaving a church's bell tower suspended in mid-air, while trees and rocks don't show up properly, making them look like pixelated messes. The wonderful finish, however, was the point at which the 'Return to combat area' warning inaccurately showed up on our screen, which means we were killed following eight seconds for absolutely no reason. All of these issues is in all likelihood a basic fix via a patch, but they start to add up after occurring consecutively match after match to make an experience that you can't completely depend on to be reasonable nor stable.
An amazing video showing some funny glitches in Battlefield V by IGN.
Also Read: Cyberpunk 2077 | Release date, trailer, gameplay, news and more.
Battlefield V: Maps And Modes
Battlefield V offers eight maps at launch, and I felt all the maps to be quite enjoyable. Fjell 652 happens on a high-altitude Norwegian mountain overlooking the total of the Norvik map and is liable to exceptional and atmospheric snowstorms. Twisted Steel is built around a huge bridge that serves in as both a fabulous milestone and a functional mechanism to add a straight path to the map's familiar open environment speckled with rural villages.
And coming to modes, Shorter game modes, for example, Team Deathmatch, Domination, and Frontlines make up the numbers to give a multiplayer experience that will feel exceptionally familiar to returning players. Instead of update any of its online mechanics, Battlefield V refines and makes minor enhancements to the chaotic and tremendous battlegrounds it is known for. Despite everything you'll have those great Battlefield moments as you hold out against axis forces while your ticket counter drops to an alarming number, explode a rooftop to cut the rubble down onto your opponents, or you swoop in from the air and take out a target from a plane's gunner seat. There's no enormous disclosure to reveal, rather a stunningly better Battlefield experience to find.
Battlefield V: Company Coins?
Perhaps Battlefield V's greatest takeoff from what it's known for comes as its customization and cosmetic capabilities. Your Company enables you to kit out the four classes of assault, medic, support, and recon to your correct taste, with class particular weapons for each and a preposterous measure of customization to whack to finish everything. Specializations enable you to affect the stats of a weapon, choosing four of eight unique upgrades to better your odds of survival. And in addition that, you can give it an extension and add decals in five distinct territories, and after that, each weapon has its very own level progression to work through. And afterward, there's your soldier themselves, who can be kitted out with various headgear, outfits, and face paint to truly make them look like it. It's an astronomical measure of customisation, and it's everything fuelled by the in-game currency named Company Coins.
Earned by leveling up and finishing day by day orders, the money can be spent on cosmetic items for either your solider or skins for your weapons. This extends the visual abilities beyond basic unlocks via progression and enables you to pick what you need when you need it. There is no real way to buy Company Coins by means of microtransactions, however, EA has expressed that a different paid currency will be introduced at a later date.
Also Read: Days Gone | PS4 Release date, Gameplay
The Verdict:
Battlefield V is going to be an extraordinary game, of that we're certain, but because of various glaring omissions at launch and one an excessive number of glitches, the final product isn't there just yet. The good news is that fixes are already taking off, and with a year or a greater amount of free maps and modes on the way, Battlefield V can just show signs of improvement from here.
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Son Goku (Japanese: 孫 悟空（そん ごくう） Hepburn: Son Gokū) is a fictional character and main protagonist of the Dragon Ball manga series created by Akira Toriyama. He is based on Sun Wukong, a maincharacter in the classic Chinese novel Journey to the West.
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Monday, March 16, 2020
Storium Theory: Get Emotionally Invested
I've finished up my Storium Basics articles, so now, I'd like to take a little time to write about one more thing. This is something that I think is important for anyone playing Storium, or indeed any sort of RPG or storytelling system. Heck, it's important for general writing as well.
You have to let yourself feel.
If you want to tell powerful stories, you have to let yourself feel.
If you want to truly portray your character, you have to let yourself feel.
If you just want to have the best time you can roleplaying, to have an experience you'll remember and look back on fondly, you have to let yourself feel.
Some people can do this really easily. Others, myself included, have a tougher time with it.
I have a tendency to get pretty mechanical when I'm writing, particularly in RPGs, storytelling games, or the like. I find that I distance myself from the events of the story, from the emotional impact of what goes on, in a way that I don't if I'm just watching a movie or reading a book or playing a video game. When I'm not participating in the writing, I can get involved in the emotion of a story easily. But when I'm participating...
When I'm participating, I spend more time thinking about what should happen next, or what I'm going to do, or what cards I'm going to play, or what my strategy should be for the next step, what abilities I want to use, how my tactics will affect my dice rolls...any or all of that, depending on what sort of writing or gaming we're talking about. It's really easy to distance myself from feeling what's happening in the story, and look at things as the basic exercise of writing or gaming rather than the full-fledged emotional experience of a tale.
There's a social aspect, too, though that's less of a concern in a play-by-post sort of game like Storium. But still...I'm not a guy who likes to have his emotions on full display. I'm not that open, really, and so I tend to consciously or unconsciously resist letting myself react to story events emotionally when I'm writing or playing with others.
I've learned that I have to try to break out of that shell.
The best moments I've had in Storium, in tabletop gaming, in online roleplaying, in MUXes, in any kind of collaborative writing experience...those moments have all been when I let my walls drop. Those are the moments I remember most fondly.
The moments when I let the tears come while I read and wrote.
The moments when I felt anger at the deeds of a villain.
The moments when I worried for a hero who had disappeared.
The moments when I dove into my character's mindset and felt the fear he would about the monster lurking in the dark.
It's so very easy to separate ourselves from the tale. Sometimes we do it because we'd be uncomfortable otherwise. In a horror game, for instance, we'll crack jokes or make table talk about the real world, reemphasizing the unreality of the horror. In the midst of a tragedy, we'll have our heroes stand bold and proud, brushing off the sorrow and just going on being heroes. We can't have them break, because someone might think we've broken too.
But I've learned that when I allow myself to feel, when I allow that fear or horror or sadness or pain or joy or hope or dream or love to affect me, and then allow it to affect my writing, I get an experience I can remember, and an experience others can remember as well.
I've learned that I can best write a character who has gone through struggles and pain when I let myself feel the sadness, just as I would if I weren't participating in the writing. I've learned to force myself to treat roleplaying and collaborative storytelling just like watching a movie or reading a book or playing a video game with a great tale - I've learned to drop my guard and let things hit me.
Because when I let things hit me, I let them hit my character, and when I let them hit my character, my character's reactions are more honest, more powerful, more raw and pure. It makes the character feel like a full-fledged person, with hopes and dreams and fears and pain, who is affected by the tale, driven by the tale, pushed to react and to experience emotion and to be changed by those experiences.
For me, it's hard. It's honestly hard. It's so easy to slip back into just thinking, "Well, what should happen next?" or "What card should I use here?" or "What tactic seems best?" or "What would be a cool thing to do?" or "What's my next one-liner?" And look - all of those questions can be, frequently are good things to ask. But not if they separate you from actually feeling. And for me, they can, unless I force myself to into the right mindset. For me, they can, unless I specifically connect myself with the heart of the tale.
This isn't something I can tell you how to do. Everybody's different. Everybody reacts to a story differently. For some of you, this isn't even something you'll have to think about. Some of you are reading this article and thinking, "Wow, I mean, I just get in my character's head and I feel this stuff anyway." And that's great! There are people who can just do that, who can just feel like a character, get in their head, think like they do, and feel like they do. It's something you hear about from great actors all the time, and it's something I've heard from great roleplayers as well.
But if you're like me, and you find yourself thinking clinically about stories, thinking about plot designs, thinking about cards or dice or what-have-you, thinking about character motivations from a distance...I can't tell you how to do it, but I encourage you to try to break that. Think like a reader, think like someone who is experiencing the tale. Don't think what your character should do, feel what your character will do.
If you're like me, that isn't going to be easy, and you aren't going to succeed all the time. But those moments where you do succeed? Those are going to be the moments you remember, the moments you deeply treasure, the moments you look back on years from now and relive in your mind.
When that happens...you see the true treasure that roleplaying, that collaborative storytelling, that writing in general can be. You leave a part of yourself in that story. You become a part of it, and it becomes a part of you. It is a beautiful, wonderful experience.
So...let yourself feel. Open yourself to that experience. Let the story in.
This will be the final weekly article of Storium Theory. I'm not going to say that I'm solidly done, that there will never be another article, but I've said just about everything I can think of to say at present. I've written one hundred and thirty-three articles about Storium, counting this one, and I've written about it since November 2015. That's...probably more than I've written about anything else in my life, ever. And that's not counting my participation in Storium Arc, where I've spent many hours talking about this great system and community as well.
It's amazing to me the level of depth that a system like Storium has turned out to have...the fact that I could find so much to write about it, the fact that I could write for such a long time on it and it alone...that honestly surprised me. When I started this out, I didn't initially set it up on my blog. I was just going to have four or five little articles on a webpage somewhere, just a quick little guide of sorts for new Storium players or narrators.
But Storium was deeper than that. Storium was more than that. Exploring Storium took longer, took more thought, became more interesting to me. I found myself exploring the ways the system could be used, the ways you could use challenges to do interesting things, and that got me thinking about how things could work in my own games or with my own characters, and those fed back into articles here.
Now...again, I can't say I'm done. I'm still playing Storium, and topics will still likely arise. But for now, this is the end of weekly articles, of regularly scheduled articles.
I hope that those of you who have read these have found them useful. I hope that I've helped you get more comfortable with the Storium system, and to learn to use it in creative ways, ways that can enhance your stories and lead to memorable and fun games. I hope that I've helped you get into your characters and explore them more deeply.
But now, as ever, I want to emphasize something: My way to play Storium is not the only way to play Storium. My way to write is not the only way to write. As I close up this post, and with it, the regular Storium Theory articles, I want to encourage you to look not just here, but to the community in general, to other Storium games, to other resources. If you need help, ask for it - the community is willing. If you need examples, look for them among the other games out there. See how things have worked. Explore. And come up with your own methods, your own interesting ways to use the system, your own house rules.
Storium is a simple system in concept, but a deep one at heart. Take the time to get to know it and it will reward you.
May the future bring you friendship, great stories, and treasured memories.
You have to let yourself feel.
If you want to tell powerful stories, you have to let yourself feel.
If you want to truly portray your character, you have to let yourself feel.
If you just want to have the best time you can roleplaying, to have an experience you'll remember and look back on fondly, you have to let yourself feel.
Some people can do this really easily. Others, myself included, have a tougher time with it.
I have a tendency to get pretty mechanical when I'm writing, particularly in RPGs, storytelling games, or the like. I find that I distance myself from the events of the story, from the emotional impact of what goes on, in a way that I don't if I'm just watching a movie or reading a book or playing a video game. When I'm not participating in the writing, I can get involved in the emotion of a story easily. But when I'm participating...
When I'm participating, I spend more time thinking about what should happen next, or what I'm going to do, or what cards I'm going to play, or what my strategy should be for the next step, what abilities I want to use, how my tactics will affect my dice rolls...any or all of that, depending on what sort of writing or gaming we're talking about. It's really easy to distance myself from feeling what's happening in the story, and look at things as the basic exercise of writing or gaming rather than the full-fledged emotional experience of a tale.
There's a social aspect, too, though that's less of a concern in a play-by-post sort of game like Storium. But still...I'm not a guy who likes to have his emotions on full display. I'm not that open, really, and so I tend to consciously or unconsciously resist letting myself react to story events emotionally when I'm writing or playing with others.
I've learned that I have to try to break out of that shell.
The best moments I've had in Storium, in tabletop gaming, in online roleplaying, in MUXes, in any kind of collaborative writing experience...those moments have all been when I let my walls drop. Those are the moments I remember most fondly.
The moments when I let the tears come while I read and wrote.
The moments when I felt anger at the deeds of a villain.
The moments when I worried for a hero who had disappeared.
The moments when I dove into my character's mindset and felt the fear he would about the monster lurking in the dark.
It's so very easy to separate ourselves from the tale. Sometimes we do it because we'd be uncomfortable otherwise. In a horror game, for instance, we'll crack jokes or make table talk about the real world, reemphasizing the unreality of the horror. In the midst of a tragedy, we'll have our heroes stand bold and proud, brushing off the sorrow and just going on being heroes. We can't have them break, because someone might think we've broken too.
But I've learned that when I allow myself to feel, when I allow that fear or horror or sadness or pain or joy or hope or dream or love to affect me, and then allow it to affect my writing, I get an experience I can remember, and an experience others can remember as well.
I've learned that I can best write a character who has gone through struggles and pain when I let myself feel the sadness, just as I would if I weren't participating in the writing. I've learned to force myself to treat roleplaying and collaborative storytelling just like watching a movie or reading a book or playing a video game with a great tale - I've learned to drop my guard and let things hit me.
Because when I let things hit me, I let them hit my character, and when I let them hit my character, my character's reactions are more honest, more powerful, more raw and pure. It makes the character feel like a full-fledged person, with hopes and dreams and fears and pain, who is affected by the tale, driven by the tale, pushed to react and to experience emotion and to be changed by those experiences.
For me, it's hard. It's honestly hard. It's so easy to slip back into just thinking, "Well, what should happen next?" or "What card should I use here?" or "What tactic seems best?" or "What would be a cool thing to do?" or "What's my next one-liner?" And look - all of those questions can be, frequently are good things to ask. But not if they separate you from actually feeling. And for me, they can, unless I force myself to into the right mindset. For me, they can, unless I specifically connect myself with the heart of the tale.
This isn't something I can tell you how to do. Everybody's different. Everybody reacts to a story differently. For some of you, this isn't even something you'll have to think about. Some of you are reading this article and thinking, "Wow, I mean, I just get in my character's head and I feel this stuff anyway." And that's great! There are people who can just do that, who can just feel like a character, get in their head, think like they do, and feel like they do. It's something you hear about from great actors all the time, and it's something I've heard from great roleplayers as well.
But if you're like me, and you find yourself thinking clinically about stories, thinking about plot designs, thinking about cards or dice or what-have-you, thinking about character motivations from a distance...I can't tell you how to do it, but I encourage you to try to break that. Think like a reader, think like someone who is experiencing the tale. Don't think what your character should do, feel what your character will do.
If you're like me, that isn't going to be easy, and you aren't going to succeed all the time. But those moments where you do succeed? Those are going to be the moments you remember, the moments you deeply treasure, the moments you look back on years from now and relive in your mind.
When that happens...you see the true treasure that roleplaying, that collaborative storytelling, that writing in general can be. You leave a part of yourself in that story. You become a part of it, and it becomes a part of you. It is a beautiful, wonderful experience.
So...let yourself feel. Open yourself to that experience. Let the story in.
This will be the final weekly article of Storium Theory. I'm not going to say that I'm solidly done, that there will never be another article, but I've said just about everything I can think of to say at present. I've written one hundred and thirty-three articles about Storium, counting this one, and I've written about it since November 2015. That's...probably more than I've written about anything else in my life, ever. And that's not counting my participation in Storium Arc, where I've spent many hours talking about this great system and community as well.
It's amazing to me the level of depth that a system like Storium has turned out to have...the fact that I could find so much to write about it, the fact that I could write for such a long time on it and it alone...that honestly surprised me. When I started this out, I didn't initially set it up on my blog. I was just going to have four or five little articles on a webpage somewhere, just a quick little guide of sorts for new Storium players or narrators.
But Storium was deeper than that. Storium was more than that. Exploring Storium took longer, took more thought, became more interesting to me. I found myself exploring the ways the system could be used, the ways you could use challenges to do interesting things, and that got me thinking about how things could work in my own games or with my own characters, and those fed back into articles here.
Now...again, I can't say I'm done. I'm still playing Storium, and topics will still likely arise. But for now, this is the end of weekly articles, of regularly scheduled articles.
I hope that those of you who have read these have found them useful. I hope that I've helped you get more comfortable with the Storium system, and to learn to use it in creative ways, ways that can enhance your stories and lead to memorable and fun games. I hope that I've helped you get into your characters and explore them more deeply.
But now, as ever, I want to emphasize something: My way to play Storium is not the only way to play Storium. My way to write is not the only way to write. As I close up this post, and with it, the regular Storium Theory articles, I want to encourage you to look not just here, but to the community in general, to other Storium games, to other resources. If you need help, ask for it - the community is willing. If you need examples, look for them among the other games out there. See how things have worked. Explore. And come up with your own methods, your own interesting ways to use the system, your own house rules.
Storium is a simple system in concept, but a deep one at heart. Take the time to get to know it and it will reward you.
May the future bring you friendship, great stories, and treasured memories.
Sunday, March 15, 2020
A Pirate'S Life, Maybe Not For Me
A big part of it is that Tortuga 1667 wants to be a social deduction game, a genre of game that generally requires a large number of players to be interesting, and most of our non-RPG gaming tends to be done in groups of 2-4 players. Plus I don't really like social deduction games. I find them to be too abstract and lacking in interesting game mechanics or compelling adventure, the two things I tend to look for in a game.
So how did we end up with this game in the first place? Well, it is absolutely beautiful too look at, and it was offered as an add-on in Facade Games' Kickstarter campaign for Deadwood 1876. Plus the player official player count is 2-9, so we figured we might be able to make it work for smaller groups.
At the start of the game, each player is given a secret affiliation, either French or English. The game then involves jockeying for the positions on the board that allow you to either move the other players around, or allocate treasure chests to one side or the other. The trick is that you don't know which players are on your side, and every part of the game relies on anticipating whether or not you think the other players will help or hinder you.
For example, a player in the Captain position can call for an attack, which adds more treasure to his ship. But the attack is resolved by each whose pawn is currently on that ship secretly playing a card that will either help or hinder the attack, so an attack will only be successful if the majority of players on the ship think the Captain is on their side.
In our games we found that, due to this voting mechanic, it was very difficult for a player to actually accomplish anything on their turn. Attacks would get voted down, treasure would get moved back and forth, and the social deduction part of the game wasn't very interesting, and more aggravating than fun.
It's possible that this game just needs more players than we normally have on hand (we played one game with 3 and one with 5), but honestly, if we ever have a table of 6 or more players we're more likely to play a meatier game like Battlestar Galactica, which makes more interesting use of the "secret betrayer" idea, or Dune, which allows players to decide how much "shifting alliances" they want in the game.
Rating: 2 (out of 5) This game just isn't compelling enough at low player counts, and not worth the effort of getting a large group together.
Thursday, March 5, 2020
Game Store Tech
When I started in 2004, I was coming off an IT career, so I wanted to be up to speed on retail tech. It was really the only useful skill I brought to the new business, that and the ability to research any project.
I bought a new PC clone point of sale machine, custom made to handle the various peripherals. It was so complex, consultants were hired to work their black magic to get it all working. Could I have figured it out? Sure, but I respect expertise in IT and wanted to start out right.
Setting up the POS required the consultants go through complex processes, hand written in notebooks. They were like a cabal of wizards, summoning profit into existence. While on vacation in France a year later (frequent flyer miles), the consultants came and fixed it when it corrupted itself during a power outage. I was troubleshooting the best I could from an Internet cafe in Paris. IT was inescapable.
In the back office, I had a Windows server running tape backups. I used a complex, Grandfather-Father-Son (GFS) tape rotation and took tapes home each night in a briefcase like some sort of spy. My laptop was a bulletproof IBM Thinkpad T30 from my days in IT. In the new store, I learned a lesson in security when a gold toothed homeless man walked into our Game Center and immediately went into the unlocked door to my office. I caught up with him as he was zipping up his jacket to leave, with my Thinkpad hidden within. I already had a new laptop on order that week, but it was still a painful lesson.
I should mention that before I started the business, I was running multiple Red Hat Linux servers at home. When the store opening became inevitable, I wiped them clean and installed Windows servers. Nobody has time for that crap.
15 years later, and a lot of things have changed, but a lot has stayed the same. Our POS is an iMac, not that different from my first computer, although most of my peers are moving to the cloud. I can't imagine changing POS systems now and not moving to something cloud based. The innovation is happening with cloud based services, plus I can sleep at night knowing it's all backed up offsite. The backup server in the office has been replaced by a (terrible) dinky Apple time capsule backup device and cloud streaming.
On the sales floor are four iPads. One iPad plays music through our Sonos system. Two iPads play board game demos which drives sales. The fourth iPad is locked down to allow customers to sign up for WPN events (a weird Premium store requirement). Nine staff members use smartphones capable of running transactions using either a plug in card reader or a new Bluetooth unit we just got in. I'm a bit uncomfortable expecting staff to use their personal phones to ring up sales in an emergency, but there's always the junky iPad nearby as an alternative.
My goal is safe and ubiquitous computing. The thought of spending time fixing or upgrading a machine is irritating. We have a Windows laptop for events that reminds me of my old life, with its constant updates and problems finding printers. I'm not quite an Apple fan boy, but I appreciate the strong, Unix based underpinnings of their hardware and the extremely long product life cycle. My first laptop went six years before I replaced it, and we just resurrected it for my new manager.
I can't imagine spending time with some clunky tape rotation scheme. Still, when I go on vacation, I wonder if the consultants will come if the POS goes down in a power outage. They tend not to answer their phones. We spend a lot of time preparing for the reality the POS could fail at any moment. The cloud is definitely my future and I certainly don't miss the chilly server rooms of IT.
Movie Reviews: Black Panther, The Shape Of Water, The Greatest Showman, Darkest Hour, Professor Marston And The Wonder Women, McEnroe Vs Borg, Fifty Shades Freed
See all of my movie reviews.
Black Panther: So far, the only Marvel movies that I think are actually really good movies are X-Men 1, Iron Man 1, and the first two Tobey MacGuire Spider-Mans. I also enjoy the first The Avengers and was at least passably entertained by a few others, in that empty candy calorie sort of way.
That said, Black Panther is one of the better ones, possibly about as good as The Avengers. The most important thing that it does right (and please, please, movie producers, learn from this) is that it doesn't simply present us with a Big Evil bad guy and a two hour slug-fest until one of the heroes finally hits him hard enough. Instead, the bad guy has a compelling point of view; in fact, he is actually kind of right ... except that he takes it way too far. To mildly spoil things ...
Wakanda is an African nation with advanced techology that it hides from the rest of the world for ... reasons? Black Panther's father, the king, was killed in one of the other Marvel movies, and now BP is king, but a long lost cousin battles him for the throne, because said cousin has been living with the black people of the world and thinks that Wakanda's technology should be used to help them out of their oppression.
Ummmmmm .... yes, it should. Not to mention, Wakanda's advanced medical technology could be saving millions of lives around the world, instead of being kept hidden for no apparent reason.
Fortunately for the plot, cousin usurper doesn't simply want to help the world's black people out of their oppression, he also wants to help them kill and/or oppress everyone else, because it's "their turn". So, evil. If they had actually made his goal a little less obviously evil, the movie would have really risen to great. But then how would we be able to end the movie without a clear good guy and bad guy beating each other up in a slugfest until the hero finally hits the the bad guy hard enough?
The movie gets extra kudos for the same reason that Wonder Woman got extra kudos: it proves that a black cast, black writers, black director, etc can write a perfectly good and relatable superhero movie (why this should have had to be proven is still beyond me), which will hopefully lead to many more black characters as hero/protagonist in the future. It also has powerful black women fighters, which is still pretty rare.
The movie revels in a particular version of African culture - drums, clothes, hairstyles, language and tribes, etc. That doesn't speak to me as a white American/Israeli; it didn't bother me, either. I can't speak for its authenticity, as others do, but I guess it's a pretty idealized version of a monolithic idea of what African culture is supposed to be; I'm sure it is as representative of African culture as A Stranger Among Us was representative of Jewish culture.
The Shape of Water: It took me four tries to finish this movie. It is freakin' boring, predictable, and unoriginal. Well shot and acted is about all I can say for it. It is, nearly exactly, one part facile imitation of the movie Amelie - crossed with three parts non-amusing version of Splash. With a dash of gore, nudity, and cursing thrown in. The music is indie French accordion (something like what you heard in Hugo), but if it had any melody I forgot it.
In the 1960s, an American research institute has some kind of weird aquatic humanoid life-form in a top-secret lab - with what must be the worst security ever seen in a motion picture: the cleaning staff and Russian spies waltz in an out of the the creature's room and spend hours alone with it, all with nobody noticing or challenging them until the break-out scene. A mute cleaning women falls in love with the creature who is scheduled to be dissected, so she breaks it out of the lab. The scientists/military are caricature villains, the next door neighbor is a friend/artist who is useful as an interpreter and assistant to the plot. Another cleaner, played by Octavia Spencer, shows up in half of the movie's scenes but really serves no useful purpose to the plot, at all.
I was so uninterested with what was going on that I kept turning it off. And this was nominated for best film? Good grief.
The Greatest Showman: This was a fairly enjoyable musical, probably only green-lit for production after the success of La La Land. Its music was somewhat more forgettable than La La Land's was, but it was not too bad. Dancing and choreography were nice.
This is the sanitized story of how P.T. Barnum began his circus of human oddities and animal acts, with Hugh Jackman starring as Barnum. Barnum starts in poverty and marries a lovely woman Charity before starting his circus. After a slow start, he is successful, but he is mocked by the arts establishment as a low-brow panderer, and constantly facing protest from moral groups and "concerned citizens" (i.e. mobs) as a purveyor of filth (people with deformities and odd talents). He takes on a playwright as a partner and also flies in a European opera performer to try to raise his stature in the arts community with some success, but also some additional trouble. Meanwhile, the circus's "exhibits" are happy to be out of the shadows and be part of a family, while simultaneously upset at not being treated as humans. This last subject is, unfortunately, only given cursory treatment in the movie; also fairly neglected by the movie is anything having to do with US current events of the 1850s, such as slavery and so forth (despite there being at least one black person in the circus troupe).
It was quite fun, if a little overly showy at the expense of deeper characterization. I would see it again.
Hard to understand why the circus didn't get Wolverine as an exhibit, however; wasn't he around in the 1850's?
Darkest Hour: 2017 has several movies that covered the same ground or connected with other movies. This movie is the second of two about Winston Churchill, and it also managed to fit neatly in with Dunkirk; in fact, this movie and Dunkirk could be merged to form one movie. They cover just about the same amount of time and end at the exact same moment.
It is well acted, scripted, and shot, with great visuals and sound. There were a few scenes that crept into the same territory that ruined The Iron Lady - too much acting and not enough plot. Thankfully, most of the movie avoids that, and instead concerns itself with Churchill's coming into power and the enormous pressure he faced to sue for peace with Hitler's far larger and aggressive Germany, particularly since Great Britain was facing the imminent loss of their entire army on the beaches of Dunkirk.
It's a slice of history movie, not as thrilling as Dunkirk, and perhaps a little limited in scope, but still a success. But not one that I would see again (unless someone makes the merged movie that I suggested, above).
Professor Marston and the Wonder Women: The second movie about Wonder Woman from 2017, this one is not starring Wonder Woman, but instead the somewhat true story about the comic author and his weird life, perversions, and scientific theories and achievements. William Marston developed a minor psychological theory called DISC theory, which describes personalities based on dominance, inducement, submission, and compliance. He also, apparently together with his wife Elizabeth and their lover Olive, created the lie detector.
Not surprisingly regarding someone who could come up with DISC theory, he and his wife were into kinky games, and so, eventually, was Olive. All three loved each other, and this was not exactly a relationship that could be made public at that time (or even today, really). After suffering fallout due to the relationship being made public, he created a superhero comic book about domination and submission - based on his theories and his sex life and one of the fetish outfits that Olive had worn. Since it was also the first superhero comic with a strong woman (albeit one who was subject to domination by men, on occasion), it filled a niche in the comic world.
Kind of a far cry from the other Wonder Woman movie that we saw last year.
It's a well-told, well-made movie, a little kinky but not really (less than Fifty Shades of Gray, and it didn't have any nudity). It was well acted and shot, and the script moved well enough. The movie touched on a number of different subjects - morality, kink, DISC theory, lie detection, relationships, societal disapproval. All of these are touched upon, but the only one that really comes into focus is the last one: at least according to the movie, they really did all love each other in a way that was not acceptable by society, and that can be a hard thing to get around.
McEnroe vs Borg: The second 2017 move about a famous tennis match: Battle of the Sexes was the other one and was far better. This one is simply a depiction of the lead-up to McEnroe trying to prevent Borg from winning his fifth Wimbledon. McEnroe, as you know, was young, ill-tempered, and rude in a way that no tennis player had ever been (it was always considered an English gentleman's sport), and Borg was rumored to be an emotionless machine. Screentime is devoted in flashbacks to both of them as up and comers, and to the few days before the match, as well as the match itself.
I found the movie to be a big bore. Just watching the actual tennis match would be far more entertaining. You see scenes of them having difficulties and facing them, as well as people booing McEntosh and his young obnoxious ways. But the movie never makes us feel why we are watching them or gives us a reason to care one way or the other about the outcome of the match.
Fifty Shades Freed: Sure, why not? I saw the first one and actually thought it wasn't too bad. The second one was dismally bad. This one was somewhere in the middle. The first hour or so is shots of Anastasia and Christian on vacation with some furrowed brows over how Jack from the previous movie is still angry with them for ruining his life. The last 25 minutes or so is a kidnapping scene and a rescue that was shot and scripted well enough if not exactly surprising. This last part might have worked well as a mid-season episode of a drama show.
Everything about the movie, aside from the last 20 minutes, is dull. Dull scenery, dull characters, dull "tension" scenes, dull sex scenes. In some ways, the subplot with Jack is a bit of a shout-out to the #MeToo movement, since he acts like the perfect example of a sexual harasser, but, honestly, he is almost nothing compared to Christian. Christian continues his stalker ways ever worse than he did in previous movies. At least in those movies he made some moves in the direction of growing out of his obsessive, harassing, and terrifying behavior. In this movie he continues to do things that would make any sane person run screaming in terror from him, but Anastasia simply chastises him and then forgets about what happened moments later. And he hasn't changed at all by the end of the movie. Anastasia is somewhat more into submission by the end, but that doesn't even make sense, since Christian's dominance is shown to be the result of a severe pathology rather than a harmless kink. So are we supposed to be happy now that they found each other? Ugh.
Don't bother. Go watch Secretary, instead.
Black Panther: So far, the only Marvel movies that I think are actually really good movies are X-Men 1, Iron Man 1, and the first two Tobey MacGuire Spider-Mans. I also enjoy the first The Avengers and was at least passably entertained by a few others, in that empty candy calorie sort of way.
That said, Black Panther is one of the better ones, possibly about as good as The Avengers. The most important thing that it does right (and please, please, movie producers, learn from this) is that it doesn't simply present us with a Big Evil bad guy and a two hour slug-fest until one of the heroes finally hits him hard enough. Instead, the bad guy has a compelling point of view; in fact, he is actually kind of right ... except that he takes it way too far. To mildly spoil things ...
Wakanda is an African nation with advanced techology that it hides from the rest of the world for ... reasons? Black Panther's father, the king, was killed in one of the other Marvel movies, and now BP is king, but a long lost cousin battles him for the throne, because said cousin has been living with the black people of the world and thinks that Wakanda's technology should be used to help them out of their oppression.
Ummmmmm .... yes, it should. Not to mention, Wakanda's advanced medical technology could be saving millions of lives around the world, instead of being kept hidden for no apparent reason.
Fortunately for the plot, cousin usurper doesn't simply want to help the world's black people out of their oppression, he also wants to help them kill and/or oppress everyone else, because it's "their turn". So, evil. If they had actually made his goal a little less obviously evil, the movie would have really risen to great. But then how would we be able to end the movie without a clear good guy and bad guy beating each other up in a slugfest until the hero finally hits the the bad guy hard enough?
The movie gets extra kudos for the same reason that Wonder Woman got extra kudos: it proves that a black cast, black writers, black director, etc can write a perfectly good and relatable superhero movie (why this should have had to be proven is still beyond me), which will hopefully lead to many more black characters as hero/protagonist in the future. It also has powerful black women fighters, which is still pretty rare.
The movie revels in a particular version of African culture - drums, clothes, hairstyles, language and tribes, etc. That doesn't speak to me as a white American/Israeli; it didn't bother me, either. I can't speak for its authenticity, as others do, but I guess it's a pretty idealized version of a monolithic idea of what African culture is supposed to be; I'm sure it is as representative of African culture as A Stranger Among Us was representative of Jewish culture.
The Shape of Water: It took me four tries to finish this movie. It is freakin' boring, predictable, and unoriginal. Well shot and acted is about all I can say for it. It is, nearly exactly, one part facile imitation of the movie Amelie - crossed with three parts non-amusing version of Splash. With a dash of gore, nudity, and cursing thrown in. The music is indie French accordion (something like what you heard in Hugo), but if it had any melody I forgot it.
In the 1960s, an American research institute has some kind of weird aquatic humanoid life-form in a top-secret lab - with what must be the worst security ever seen in a motion picture: the cleaning staff and Russian spies waltz in an out of the the creature's room and spend hours alone with it, all with nobody noticing or challenging them until the break-out scene. A mute cleaning women falls in love with the creature who is scheduled to be dissected, so she breaks it out of the lab. The scientists/military are caricature villains, the next door neighbor is a friend/artist who is useful as an interpreter and assistant to the plot. Another cleaner, played by Octavia Spencer, shows up in half of the movie's scenes but really serves no useful purpose to the plot, at all.
I was so uninterested with what was going on that I kept turning it off. And this was nominated for best film? Good grief.
The Greatest Showman: This was a fairly enjoyable musical, probably only green-lit for production after the success of La La Land. Its music was somewhat more forgettable than La La Land's was, but it was not too bad. Dancing and choreography were nice.
This is the sanitized story of how P.T. Barnum began his circus of human oddities and animal acts, with Hugh Jackman starring as Barnum. Barnum starts in poverty and marries a lovely woman Charity before starting his circus. After a slow start, he is successful, but he is mocked by the arts establishment as a low-brow panderer, and constantly facing protest from moral groups and "concerned citizens" (i.e. mobs) as a purveyor of filth (people with deformities and odd talents). He takes on a playwright as a partner and also flies in a European opera performer to try to raise his stature in the arts community with some success, but also some additional trouble. Meanwhile, the circus's "exhibits" are happy to be out of the shadows and be part of a family, while simultaneously upset at not being treated as humans. This last subject is, unfortunately, only given cursory treatment in the movie; also fairly neglected by the movie is anything having to do with US current events of the 1850s, such as slavery and so forth (despite there being at least one black person in the circus troupe).
It was quite fun, if a little overly showy at the expense of deeper characterization. I would see it again.
Hard to understand why the circus didn't get Wolverine as an exhibit, however; wasn't he around in the 1850's?
Darkest Hour: 2017 has several movies that covered the same ground or connected with other movies. This movie is the second of two about Winston Churchill, and it also managed to fit neatly in with Dunkirk; in fact, this movie and Dunkirk could be merged to form one movie. They cover just about the same amount of time and end at the exact same moment.
It is well acted, scripted, and shot, with great visuals and sound. There were a few scenes that crept into the same territory that ruined The Iron Lady - too much acting and not enough plot. Thankfully, most of the movie avoids that, and instead concerns itself with Churchill's coming into power and the enormous pressure he faced to sue for peace with Hitler's far larger and aggressive Germany, particularly since Great Britain was facing the imminent loss of their entire army on the beaches of Dunkirk.
It's a slice of history movie, not as thrilling as Dunkirk, and perhaps a little limited in scope, but still a success. But not one that I would see again (unless someone makes the merged movie that I suggested, above).
Professor Marston and the Wonder Women: The second movie about Wonder Woman from 2017, this one is not starring Wonder Woman, but instead the somewhat true story about the comic author and his weird life, perversions, and scientific theories and achievements. William Marston developed a minor psychological theory called DISC theory, which describes personalities based on dominance, inducement, submission, and compliance. He also, apparently together with his wife Elizabeth and their lover Olive, created the lie detector.
Not surprisingly regarding someone who could come up with DISC theory, he and his wife were into kinky games, and so, eventually, was Olive. All three loved each other, and this was not exactly a relationship that could be made public at that time (or even today, really). After suffering fallout due to the relationship being made public, he created a superhero comic book about domination and submission - based on his theories and his sex life and one of the fetish outfits that Olive had worn. Since it was also the first superhero comic with a strong woman (albeit one who was subject to domination by men, on occasion), it filled a niche in the comic world.
Kind of a far cry from the other Wonder Woman movie that we saw last year.
It's a well-told, well-made movie, a little kinky but not really (less than Fifty Shades of Gray, and it didn't have any nudity). It was well acted and shot, and the script moved well enough. The movie touched on a number of different subjects - morality, kink, DISC theory, lie detection, relationships, societal disapproval. All of these are touched upon, but the only one that really comes into focus is the last one: at least according to the movie, they really did all love each other in a way that was not acceptable by society, and that can be a hard thing to get around.
McEnroe vs Borg: The second 2017 move about a famous tennis match: Battle of the Sexes was the other one and was far better. This one is simply a depiction of the lead-up to McEnroe trying to prevent Borg from winning his fifth Wimbledon. McEnroe, as you know, was young, ill-tempered, and rude in a way that no tennis player had ever been (it was always considered an English gentleman's sport), and Borg was rumored to be an emotionless machine. Screentime is devoted in flashbacks to both of them as up and comers, and to the few days before the match, as well as the match itself.
I found the movie to be a big bore. Just watching the actual tennis match would be far more entertaining. You see scenes of them having difficulties and facing them, as well as people booing McEntosh and his young obnoxious ways. But the movie never makes us feel why we are watching them or gives us a reason to care one way or the other about the outcome of the match.
Fifty Shades Freed: Sure, why not? I saw the first one and actually thought it wasn't too bad. The second one was dismally bad. This one was somewhere in the middle. The first hour or so is shots of Anastasia and Christian on vacation with some furrowed brows over how Jack from the previous movie is still angry with them for ruining his life. The last 25 minutes or so is a kidnapping scene and a rescue that was shot and scripted well enough if not exactly surprising. This last part might have worked well as a mid-season episode of a drama show.
Everything about the movie, aside from the last 20 minutes, is dull. Dull scenery, dull characters, dull "tension" scenes, dull sex scenes. In some ways, the subplot with Jack is a bit of a shout-out to the #MeToo movement, since he acts like the perfect example of a sexual harasser, but, honestly, he is almost nothing compared to Christian. Christian continues his stalker ways ever worse than he did in previous movies. At least in those movies he made some moves in the direction of growing out of his obsessive, harassing, and terrifying behavior. In this movie he continues to do things that would make any sane person run screaming in terror from him, but Anastasia simply chastises him and then forgets about what happened moments later. And he hasn't changed at all by the end of the movie. Anastasia is somewhat more into submission by the end, but that doesn't even make sense, since Christian's dominance is shown to be the result of a severe pathology rather than a harmless kink. So are we supposed to be happy now that they found each other? Ugh.
Don't bother. Go watch Secretary, instead.
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