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Category: Off Topic

Posts that don’t really fit into news or reviews

  • 2023 In Review: Nick’s Top Video Games, Media, Tabletop, and Even LEGO

    2023 In Review: Nick’s Top Video Games, Media, Tabletop, and Even LEGO

    No, that year is not a typo.

    So… I wrote this whole thing about a year ago and never got around to posting it. Here we are, at the end of 2024 and I’m working on my current year and so little feels like it hasn’t changed. So my 2024 review makes sense, I’m going to just post this and go from there. Below is the unedited post that I’d more or less wrapped up back in February. Look for this year’s “year in review stuff” soon, likely on New Year’s Eve. But who knows. I’m scheduling this to post at the start of December and a lot can go seriously wrong between now and then.

    Also, it’s just sad how much of this is the same, except worse.

    2023 can * bleep * right off. I don’t think that’s honestly a controversial opinion. Sure, 2020 gave us a Pandemic, and 2021 gave us it’s terrible sequel year. 2022 was the year where things looked like they were improving a little bit, but not really, while 2023 is where everything started to come apart at the seems. Not sure about you, but it’s the year where all the inflation caused by unchecked corporate greed, legislative inaction, and decades of tax breaks that benefit the .01% have made everything vastly more expensive than it has to be.

    Not gonna lie, this last year was absolutely brutal for me. I have scaled back my posting over the years just because… you know, life and what not, but this year there are a few more things pushing that. (Not at all) fun fact… I learned this year that long-term general anxiety can develop into full-on depression. You can probably guess how I learned that. So here we are, in mid-February, and I’m finally getting around to writing about last year.

    There’s a whole bunch of talk of “the economy” being good, except that honestly doesn’t feel true for the middle class (where I’m firmly seated). Where I live in Texas, houses went from “scrimp and save” to “you’re never gonna get one of these.” Groceries bills have more or less doubled, because that’s a spot where inflation has hit the hardest. So many companies that I like(d) or have purchased from have gone from “companies are not your friend” to “actively trying to destroy the world.” Oh, and obviously… Texas.

    So a lot of 2023 was spent treading water and spinning plates, desperately trying to keep them up… and by the end of the year, I’d mostly failed at that in the end. I won’t dump a whole lot here, that’s for when I talk to my therapist (seriously, y’all, therapy can help – it’s not a cure, but it helps)… more just saying why this list is what it is. There were also fun things like the vicious cycle of weight loss and gaining a lot of it back, some skin cancer and surgery to remove it (thankfully all gone), money troubles because of unexpected expenses, and working in technology when unchecked greed and corporations start laying of thousands for fun.

    It wasn’t all bad things, though, there were some legit fun things. I did more stuff this year in my core hobbies, and even may have purchased a toy or two for myself. Or one very expensive toy that 3D prints toys.

    LEGO Sets

    Wait, what? Since when do I get LEGO sets? True fact, I have a bunch of sets around that I need to take pictures of for reviews. Most didn’t come out this year, and my paralysis at getting things done has made some of them kind of pointless, since the sets are no longer available.

    LEGO Icons Atari 2600

    This is one of those reviews that I need to get done, because this might have become one of my favorite sets of all time now*. Which… is honestly saying something. The Atari has a weird place in my life… I never had one, but had a cousin that did. I was supposed to get one for a Christmas back in the early 80s, but my dick of a father decided to return it after I found the poorly hidden gift since it was “no longer a surprise.” Which, you know, is just a great thing to do to a five year old. Funny what memories you can remember despite it being several decades ago. Can’t remember what I did six months ago, can remember that as one of my earliest memories.

    While the Nintendo was a more formative part of my childhood, the Atari is what defined it early. I remember that ugly 2600 box and being blow away by the massive pixels of the machine and playing games with my cousin.

    More than that, though, as a LEGO set, this was simply a joy to build in a way that the Nintendo Entertainment System just… wasn’t. I still need to get the review done, but there’s so much to this set, so many little wonderful things, that are just fantastic. While I rated the NES highly, and love the set… the biggest knock on it was that it was more about the engineering than getting the little bits and touches. Fixed buttons, a cartridge insert that barely worked, and one Easter Egg that you wouldn’t ever see unless you knew it was there.

    This set, by contrast, is just dripping with those little touches and Easter Eggs. This set is designed as a celebration of the the set, rather than an engineering marvel of being able to turn a screen. There’s still some of that, with “working” switches and power buttons, but first and foremost, it’s about just being a beautiful celebration of when Atari wasn’t a shell of a company that just hawked its brand.

    This is a review i need to finish before the set gets retired, but since Icons stuff seems to hang around a lot longer than normal sets, it’ll likely stick around for some time.

    *For the record, I’d say my top five sets of all time are (in no particular order):

    Of course, if I had to build this list a week from now, it’d probably be full of different things. But those are sets that I have that get rebuilt and displayed occasionally, and I won’t ever get rid of.

    The Worst of LEGO

    It was very much a mixed bag for me in this little dabbling of LEGO, because honestly, most of them were just… not all that great? Either the set or the experience, or both. Most Star Wars and Marvel sets feel like “let’s throw this together and hit a price point” rather than builds that feel thought out and loved. The ones that are, like things in the UCS line, command prices that are just absurd and I wish no one would purchase at this point. The price escalation of LEGO overall should have killed it three or four times over, but they’ve strangled out so many other things, or hidden in a marketplace where people (i.e. adult nerds) have just started to accept forever escalating prices with less and less value.

    Marvel Collectable Minifigures Series 2

    This is another article that I never finished, but if you’re on our Discord, you know why I have a particular grudge against the CMF lines at this point. I stopped collecting them years ago, before i dropped other LEGO sets, mostly because the system was just… gross. It’s gatcha products, and they tie up too many interesting things

    Okay, so, I had a whole article that I never got around to finishing, about how bad my experience was. Spoiler for that article… but I bought 20 figures at a Target around me and got… four different minifigs in them. One of them was unique, the rest were repeats of just three figures. Clearly, it had been picked over or something like that, but they had just been put out on the cashwrap area when I got them.

    When these came out, there was a whole stream of articles for people who were buying up small portable scales to go and weigh the different boxes to figure out what’s inside, and clearly, I got the end result of that. I’ll go into this more in the article, but let me say this… if you’re an AFOL (or more likely a scalper) who does something like this – f*** you. Just, f*** you. You and the other “bag fondlers” that go through an entire store selection to strip out figures and leave the leftovers are a blight, and you’re no better than the people who buy up every set to sell on the aftermarket or parting them out so no one else can get them. In fact, people who go and strip out the minifigs are probably worse.

    I’m and adult and was buying these for myself, but I can easily imagine a parent getting a few figures for their kid while checking out. When said kid opens three of them and gets the same figure, likely someone they don’t even know… that kid’s day is kind of ruined and they’re never going to get another figure like this again. If I bought these for my kids and saw this, there’d be an outright “no, those things are a ripoff” line ready every time I saw a LEGO polybag.

    That there were honest discussions about bringing a scale and measuring these to find out what was inside, and that so few stepped back and asked themselves “wait a sec” is an indictment of that whole flavor of AFOL and the product in general.

    For my part, I completed my set after collaborating with someone in our Discord to get the ones I was missing after another trip to a different Target with fairly similar results. But those were the last CMF figures I will ever buy.

    Movies and Streaming

    Unlike last year, where I didn’t actually watch any new movies… I watched at three four* new movies this year. Okay, so, movies still aren’t really by thing to me anymore… most of my time is spent rewatching the old things I’ve always liked or just watching streaming shows or YouTube.

    *I forgot that I also saw Spider-Verse, but how about I don’t go into the fact that it was 90% awesome and 10% worst thing I watched all year.

    Super Mario Bros. 

    This was always going to be a movie that my family was going to see. My son loves Mario, and has loved him for a few years – though his favorite character from the series is Princess Peach, and his favorite Hot Wheel Mario Kart is Bowser. He was dressed as Mario for Halloween back in 2022 (he went as a Pokemon trainer this year)… owns a Cappy, and asked for a Mario-themed birthday party. So yeah, we were always going to watch it.

    It was surprisingly enjoyable… not saying that it’s going to win an Oscar or any real awards unless the Kid’s Choice Awards are still a thing (or a Grammy, cause, you know, Peaches).

    Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves

    This is the first of three times that D&D is going to show up on this list, so I’ll save the “oh my god, Hasbro, you suck” for a later section. But as a thing, D&D was a sandwich wrapped in a layer of thin crap, with a terrible start and a terrible end to the year with some wonderful things in the middle.

    The D&D movie, Honor Among Thieves, was one of those things that should have just been awful. D&D as a whole hasn’t exactly translated well to… anything other than video games, really. The last D&D movie was… just god awful, and followed up on a cartoon from the 80s that’s remembered fondly for just how terrible it was. So when a new one was announced, everything was stacked against it.

    At the same time, though, there were some actual big names tied to the movie. Chris Pine was set to star, along with plenty of other big names. It also didn’t look like it was going to be a straight-up lowest effort movie, with actual effects and an existing setting. Honestly, a lot of this has been driven by stuff like Critical Role being genuinely good and loved, and D&D having gone firmly mainstream compared to the other efforts. Still, like most video game movies, the chances of this being awful were high.

    So when I watched it in the theater, and not only was it fun and entertaining, it could be called legitimately a good movie. It’s not going to win any awards, and it was full of all the tropes and so many things that are just inside jokes and fan service… but it still was just fun. They managed to create a movie stuffed to the brim with those things, yet could be watched by anyone and still be fun. The story only was enriched by knowing all the jokes, but not required. Unlike anything Marvel does, you didn’t have to do homework in order to watch the film.

    Barbie

    I’m too “old man” at this point to have cared even a little bit about the whole Barbieheimer or whatever happened this summer… so I saw this when it came out on Max a few weeks ago. I knew I’d like it, and I did. It certainly had a message, one I was perfectly fine with, and it was funny as well. Not perfect, but still pretty great.

    The Not So Good

    Obviously, I’m not the person to ask about the latest movies coming out. When I can count the number of movies I’ve watched – not just went to in the theater (though that number was two), but new movies in general. Most of that is driven by the fact that I’m just… over a lot of stuff. I’m not going to put Ahsoka on this list, because I’m not really tired of Star Wars, per se, I just don’t feel the need to immediately watch anything that’s not named Andor.

    All things Marvel and DC

    What I am tired of is basically everything Marvel and Disney are doing in that space right now. I haven’t watched anything this year, and don’t really plan to. The last thing I watched through and enjoyed was Hawkeye… so that’s two years or so where I just gave Marvel a complete pass. They aren’t helped by the fact they waited until the very last minute to drop a known abuser, waiting for an official court verdict, because obviously that’s the thing that a private company needs to do.

    Beyond that, though… it’s just honestly not interesting. The last thing I watched and loved was Peacemaker, something I’ve rewatched a couple of times. Gunn, now lording over the DCU and killing the things that are interesting (Henry Cavill clearly needs a hug after losing Superman, and I enthusiastically volunteer to be the one to give it to him; don’t feel bad though, he’s got 40k now) but needed help.

    Comic movies, as a genre, are basically gone. The next and likely only thing I’ll watch will be Deadpool 3, mostly because my wife and I will go and watch it together. Oh, I guess I did watch Spider-Verse, I was supremely disappointed in the ending and the fact that the movie didn’t bother to wrap things up before just… ending. It pissed me off then, and pisses me off now. That turned a movie that was a 10/10 into a firm 5/10, because it undermined the whole movie.

    Revivals of Old Things

    I never watched Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull… Last Crusade was a wonderful way to end the story and it always felt “done.” So when another movie in the series was announced, I wasn’t enthused. In fact, I’m still not, and haven’t watched it.

    If the previous decade was all about reboots, the current era seems to be much more about “restarts.” Shows that had been off the air for a decade or more were getting additional, often terrible, seasons. Frasier wasn’t ever my favorite show, but oh my god, the new one is so terrible that it’s just replacements of the old characters with new ones. I made it through one episode before I just noped out and wouldn’t watch it.

    Same with “That 90s Show,” which was a new season of “That 70s Show,” something I did like… and oh my god is was as bad as Frasier. I couldn’t finish the second episode, because it was about as funny as anything Aston Kutcher has done outside of the original show. The Futurama “uncancelled again” season was hit-or-miss, with the real highlights coming towards the end and some real awful things in the middle.

    Nostalgia is already a dangerous thing to play with, and it seems to be the only idea going for a lot of things out there. Which is odd in a year where we got the best adaptation of a video game ever, and other new shows that are legitimately funnier than just revisiting the old things.

    Video Games

    I’ve probably played more video games this year than I have in more recent years on record. This was bolstered, in part, by the fact that my daughter, officially a preteen now (which, WTF, time, stop it), has also gotten into games in a big, big, way. She’s also too smart for her own good and snarky, so, she takes after me in a lot of ways – though she’s probably smarter. Not all of them, though, I can’t get her to watch Star Wars or Star Trek.

    Vampire Survivors

    This was my game at the end of last year, when it came out, and dominated the start, middle, and end of my year as the new DLC came out. I’m not a huge fan of roguelike’s, and yet… this game just does all the things for me.

    There were multiple patches and DLCs put out in 2023, including a surprise crossover with Among Us in early December. It also landed on Switch in 2023, added free content, and continued to be worth every single cent you put into it. It was my game of choice on the Steam Deck, and I strongly suggest everyone get it. It’s just that good.

    Baldur’s Gate 3

    The second major highlight of the D&D year was arguably the best game released all year. Don’t trust me though, the Video Game Advertisements gave it an award too – but didn’t let them stay and talk about a team member who died because there were more trailers to show! Fun fact, apparently 41.5 minutes of the nearly 4 hour show was spent on award announcements and speeches. In other words, the Video Game Trailers Show sucks, Geoff Keighley is a pandering sack of shit that doesn’t care about video games, and Baldur’s Gate 3 is one of the best games ever made.

    The original two games, and the spinoff Neverwinter Nights series, stand as some of the greatest RPGs ever made. The game Planescape: Torment, often tops the list of greatest ever, and arguably so (my personal top is Final Fantasy VI or Fallout New Vegas). It was simultaneously under-the-radar, while also being hugely hyped up, because as it got closer and closer to release, what was being said just became more and more bonkers.

    You know, like the bear sex.

    When the first reviews started to hit, the hype only increased, because people were overwhelmingly in love with the game. Part of that excitement is that Larian Studios made a game that didn’t have any microtransactions, day-0 DLC packs, or all the other crap that modern games “have to have.” It was just pay the money and you get to play the game, all of the game, and enjoy it. That aspect was so refreshing as to seem revolutionary, which is sad, because it’s how things used to work.

    That being said, the game itself is awesome, the hype is absolutely deserved. It’s a giant, sprawling, beautiful game. How you can play is unique almost every time, because there’s that D&D aspect of “rolls” tied in to checks, where you can be overpowered and still fail, or underpowered and succeed gloriously. Every quest had multiple, sometimes non-obvious, ways to solve and resolve them… better yet, sometimes, you could just fail and the game let you go on. The story was good and interesting, the companions were legitimately great and wonderful, and the gameplay managed to feel like D&D even with necessary changes to make it… not suck.

    And, of course, bear sex*.

    *Spoiler for this joke: it’s a druid companion you can romance, not an actual bear

    Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom

    I didn’t get super far into this game, but it basically controlled a few weeks of my life, and currently dominates my daughter’s life. Discussions with her right now are 2% what’s going on for an eleven-year-old and 98% talking endlessly about Zelda. I get to go full “god, I’m old” in response and point out that “yes, I know, I played the original back in 86” when it comes to Zelda lore.

    Much like Baldur’s Gate 3, it was a complete game, not split off into a lot of cosmetic loot box or mini DLC nonsense. Of course, for a lot of Nintendo (but not all, their mobile offerings are pure gacha garbage)  games that’s normal. It didn’t fix most of the fundamental issues I had with Breath of the Wild – a great game but by no mean’s perfect. There was still terrible direction-setting of what to do and a flow of the game, weapon durability is still a garbage mechanic that serves no real purpose other than to annoy people, and it’s just as incomprehensible as any other Zelda game.

    Yet… the loop is so satisfying and it’s still a Zelda game. More than that, the biggest marvel, is that the game is just huge. More than triple the size of the original game, with new modes of play and unique things to it that make it so, so satisfying. There was so much to it that just… works. It also pushes the switch to the absolute max, making a legitimately gorgeous game on a console that was old and out of date when it launched.

    Bad Video Games and Worse Companies Making Them

    2023 was a garbage year for video games, despite the great stuff I listed above. Layoffs and studio closures dominated the industry, often not even for failed projects, but perfectly successful ones where the company needed to make a nickel and couldn’t dare cut CEO salary or stop doing stock buybacks, so they instead laid off thousands of workers.

    Even with that, though, there were some things that just stood out as games.

    Starfield

    I’m sure some people in our Discord knew that this game was going to end up here, because I was pretty vocal on all of my problems with the game as I was playing it. Which I did, a lot, because it’s a Bethesda game and they have some things that I genuinely like. Maybe. Or maybe not…

    Maybe it’s time to just acknowledge that Bethesda make kind of crappy games that rely on the community to make not suck. Skyrim was not a good game, but you could make it good. Honestly, think about it… how many of you that have played it can explain what the plot of Skyrim is? Or those who enjoyed it have memories you enjoy that are related at all to that plot… or was it all the other things you could do?

    It pains me to think that, because I like games like Fallout 3 and 4, but they’re also… you know… not good. Fallout 4’s main plot was infamously bad, the companions were memes, and the best parts of the game had nothing to do at all with playing the story. It was little side quests, building, or doing weird and random things. Fallout 3’s ending was so bad they had to program and charge everyone for a DLC to write a better one.

    An aside, but the last act of Baldur’s Gate 3 was much weaker than the first two, and a lot of players were unsatisfied with how some stories wrapped up. Larian listened to player feedback and… patched in new stuff to fix that for free. Bethesda on the other hand screwed over Fallout 3 players more than a decade ago by charging for DLC to undue the stupid ending.

    So this was a chance at redemption, to prove they could do something great… and they really didn’t. Starfield is their first new IP of this century (or as my daughter liked to twist the knife when I made my ’86 comment and pointed out that was “last millennium”) – and it was hyped for years, first being teased with a single title screen eight years ago.

    The end product is a devoid, lifeless, mostly boring husk. Remember how No Man’s Sky was overhyped and ultimately disappointing? This is worse, because that was just a small studio that clearly overcommitted… this is a major AAA company backed with Microsoft money who underdelivered and made a repetitive and pointless game.

    I should do a whole review of it, in fact I was planning on doing it, but ultimately couldn’t get the motivation to do it. So much of the game is just examples where things were quarter-assed to stick in, with clearly too many ideas and not enough refinement of them, and it all comes together as a jumbled, unfun mess.

    The worst part, for me, was coming to this game right after playing Baldur’s Gate 3. A game so full of choices and personality, with interesting and fantastic companions who were all distinct and unique, and a story that drew you in while not sitting you entirely on rails. Yes, one is an “open” (and empty) world game, while the other is a structured linear experience, but they are the two biggest RPGs of the year and couldn’t be further apart in underlying execution and quality.

    You legitimately build, grow, and earn trust with the people around you in Baldur’s Gate 3. It goes to great length to make you the “hero” but not call you the special. In fact, at one point, you find out that a good portion of your companions are getting the exact same “special one” things you are… you just happen to be the one that the game is centered on as POV.

    In Starfield, you’re immediately just trusted (or hated) by everyone. Strangers on the street, on a planet you’ve never been too, walk up and give you life details or quests. The intro is quite literally “here, take my ship, you’re the hero now” and that’s it. And often, there are clearly multiple ways something could be done, but because they didn’t design it that way, you only have one choice to make and one way to go. The only time you have options are when it explicitly gives you more than one.

    Which is all to say it’s a bad game that has already been mostly forgotten. But hey, their first big update will be adding “new ways to travel” between pointless planets where you can accomplish nothing. Maybe it’s telling that the best game in any of the modern Bethesda settings was the one not made by Bethesda.

    I spent a lot of hours in Starfield, even “beating” the main story, trying to find the good game. But it’s just not there. Also, before anyone jumps in that you have to play it “such and such” way, or play it for so long before it gets good… those are both things that terrible games do.

    Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3

    It’s weird to put a game I play daily on the bad list, but I’ve talked about how this is a game with a satisfying loop and little else before. They put out a needless version this year of what was a hacked-together story no one remembers at this point, and the same fun multiplayer loop. Cheating is still rampant, there is both too much and not enough to do, and it’s stuffed to the gills with microtransactions.

    Really, it’s here because there was no reason for this to come out. MW2 was a solid game that was fun to play. MW3 was rushed and adds nothing of value overall. But still commanded a $70+ price tag supported by absurdly expensive cosmetic micro-transactions.

    Tabletop

    This will be a little bit different from the other sections, because my good and my bad for this category all stem from the same general places: Wizards of the Coast/Hasbro, Games Workshop, and Asmodee. Those are the three biggest “gaming” companies out there in the tabletop space, and the makers of the games that I deal with.

    Games Workshop Games

    I’ve been a player of almost everything that Games Workshop has done for years now. I’ve written about it here, covered it in depth with the calendars in 2022, and it’s been my primary hobby for several years. It started with Necromunda all the way back in 1996, which fun fact, I bought while I was traveling to Texas (I lived in the northern US back then) to visit a friend in the Army and drop off a car. We’d stopped off at a hobby store while going through Oklahoma City, saw it on the shelf, and figured it’d be fun to play with our friend while down there.

    That was a very expensive path to start down. That spiraled into Warhammer Fantasy, then Warhammer 40k, and I’ve taken several breaks over the years, but back in 2020, got back in, and play Necromunda (again, the new version), Warhammer 40k, Age of Sigmar, and several other games. Kill Team, and slow-planning an Old World army for when I see my friend again that I used to play Fantasy way back when.

    That being said… Games Workshop can be an absolutely infuriating company to be a fan and customer of. While a lot of their “fans” ascribe them to be some kind of sinister cabal and empire, they’re often the epitome of “don’t ascribe to malice what could be chalked up to incompetence.” They’re firmly stuck in the past, for better or worse, and they make decisions to protect their bottom line and sales.

    Capitalism sucks, and they are a company – not a friend, which means they will make decisions that will piss people off. Like releasing rules for free for 10th edition, which happened last year, only to start pulling them as books get released. Or constantly releasing and “patching” the game as they lean harder and harder into the more competitive modes of play, neglecting the casual and narrative players that make up the bulk of their player base.

  • Nick’s Painting Table: A Red Grimdark Tide Before the End of June

    Nick’s Painting Table: A Red Grimdark Tide Before the End of June

    I was going to come up with a more concise title, but that didn’t feel on brand for me or for a post talking about Warhammer 40,000, so I went with one that feels pretty on brand for a game that gives us titles like “Necromunda: The Aranthian Succession – The Vaults of Temenos” or “Liber Mechanicum: Forces of the Omnissiah Army Book.” Okay, one of those is a Horus Heresy book, but they were the longest books when I turned around to look at my book shelf. There are longer, but I’m lazy.

    This post is not about books.

    It’s about what we wargamers / miniature collectors / hobbyists colloqually call “the pile of shame.” Some try to call it a pile of opportunity, or pile of opportunity, but they’re kidding themselves, we all know. All of us buy more models and miniatures than we will ever be able to play with or field or paint even if we managed to gain immortality or the kind of money that means you never have to worry about working again. Of course, seemingly, the problem with that money, if the current world is any indication and we haven’t managed to get the guillotines out yet, is that getting that much money only seems to make you want to get more money, burn the world, and screw over as many other people as possible. See… well, all of the billionaires.

    I’ll never use all of these characters at once – in fact, I can’t. If I ever build a full Chapter, I will need 10 captains, so… I’m almost there. I’ve also got all of the “classic” Blood Angels characters in their itty-bitty Finecast forms, which is code for “terrible and too small.” There’s also the infamous Bladeguard Ancient – quite possibly the most common unpainted Space Marine in everyone’s collection. He’s sucked for all of 9th edition, and was in the launch box.

    Anyway, tangent aside, I’ve got a stupid amount of unfinished models and a stupid amount of games that I won’t ever play. I’ve already got a habit of jumping into a game, never playing it, and getting rid of the game when I finally give up. I’ve written here about Fallout Wasteland Warfare, which I’ve since sold off completely. I’ve also picked up, and sold off, multiple Warhammer 40k armies, Warhammer Age of Sigmar armies, and whole tabletop games (Conquest, Star Wars Armada, Blood Bowl).

    Decision making in this realm may not be my strong suit.

    There has been a pretty consistent line throughout all of it, though, and that’s my Blood Angels army that kicked off me getting back into Warhammer when the pandemic started and I was stuck inside, and has been around as the Pandemic continued but we have pretended it ended and I just stayed inside. My vampire boys weren’t my first 40k army… that was actually Eldar back in the early editions, but they were the Space Marine faction I’d started way back when and never got around to painting well.

    I love tanks, and was recently vindicated in this from a lore perspective. The book “First Founding” by Black Library specifically called out that the Blood Angels have always had a larger armor pool than most chapters, despite their reputation for close combat. Here, we have three Sicaran Tanks – all resin bricks from ForgeWorld that have since started to come out in plastic, the classic Blood Angels Baal Predator I’ve never gotten around to painting, and a Repulsor – one of the newest Space Marine Primaris tanks.

    There are a lot of reasons I went for them… I like the look, the lore, the backstory. And for some really strange reason, if you know what my background and beliefs are, I really like the motif of Angels and stuff like that. So the Angels of Death – the name given to two chapters of Space Marines, the Blood Angels and Dark Angels, have always been my jam. The Vampire Boys (which it talked about in our Advent Calendar run through last year) in particular lean into this extra hard, given that their Primarch was a literal Angel, their elite guard wears winged jetpacks, and they strap jetpacks on to everything to descend from the sky.

    Warhammer 40,000 is not a game of subtlety.

    My Blood Angels army was started as a Crusade force for a league at my local store, and has just grown along the way. I’m by no means a great painter… my shirt “world’s okayest miniature painter” is quite truthful. I paint to get miniatures on the tabletop and looking pretty good, and that’s about it. I’m always looking to improve and get better, but won’t be winning awards, or trying to win awards, anytime soon.

    Back to that pile of shame, though… one of the things about playing the game, and a weird thing about Warhammer and Games Workshop games in particular, is how much of their customer base only buys models for the hobby aspect, and not the game aspect. Or how many only want the game aspect and don’t care about the hobby. To be across both like I am is fairly rare, and as I get older I need to acknowledge that I’m probably more hobby than gaming just because I don’t have time, even if I buy like I play 40 hours a day, every day.

    Another “every Space Marine Player has some of these selection” – this is dominated by the remnants of my Indomitus boxes, which I’ve had since summer of 2020 and never finished. Outriders and Assault Intercessors were both a big part of that box. I’ve actually painted A LOT of Assault Intercessors, these I’m just repainting because they looked awful, so I stripped them and rebased coated. Five regular Intercessors, which round out the big squads, heavy Intercessors, and the Death Company which have been just primed black forever, make up the rest.

    This means I have a collection of models that I could field to play a bunch of different armies if I wanted, including three different space marine chapters: Blood Angels, Dark Angels, and Ultramarines. The Dark Angels are a relatively new addition, because I wanted to build a full Angels of Death force that fit with the “Arks of Omen” lore established at the end of 9th edition… basically the stories currently going on in game. The Ultramarines are there because they’re the default guys and you just get some, but also because I wanted to paint something blue, have a subscription to a monthly service called Imperium Magazine that’s sending me stuff, and it’s just something to have. The three armies play differently, and I like painting space marines, and this also lets me have loaner armies… in theory, if I finished painting them all.

    Right now, about 2/3rds of my 40k Blood Angels* are fully painted, based (the stands are decorated and painted), and battle ready. Recently, Games Workshop announced the next edition of the game coming out, 10th edition, and with it, a whole slew of new models and releases. Yeah, I’m a sucker, and I’m going to buy those models. Currently, the rumor is that they’ll go up for preorder in a month, on June 10th, and get released on June 24th. Which leaves about a month and a half before the next edition, and all of the new fancy Space Marines, come out.

    *This qualifier is important, because I have some Horus Heresy (30k) Blood Angels that aren’t fully painted, and I don’t feel as rushed to finish them since I can’t field them in games of 40k. 

    I have a bunch of Blood Angels and I’m going to buy more. I don’t care. In theory, a Codex Compliant – a chapter that’s built according to the rules laid down after the heresy, has no more than 1,000 ish marines, divided up into 10 companies of 100 marines each. I’m well, well short of a full thousand. But if I paint everything, I’m likely getting pretty close to at least two and a half chapters. Blood Angels are a mostly compliant chapter. Most chapters are somewhat loose in how they organize their first company of veterans, because the life of a Space Marine is violent and unlikely to last to veteran status. That means they don’t count them in the full number a lot if there happen to be a lot around.

    This represents the stuff that I have that’s closest to done… most of it just needs finishing touches, washes, basing, or things like that. Assault Marines, Infiltrators, Incursors, Rievers, and some Desolation Marines all are very close to done. A big Brutalis Dreadnought in the back just wants to give (pointy) hugs, while his two Dreadnought friends are just base coated but honestly don’t need much. The Warsuit behind everyone I’ve had for ages but never felt the need to field, because it’s just objectively worse than the Dreadnoughts that cost the same. Fun little fact about this picture, the oldest Warhammer 40k Space Marine model I own is in here… the Attack Bike is the tiny metal version from the late 90s.

    My marines are painted up as part of the 1st (Veterans), 3rd, and 4th companies – or they will be expanding in those directions. Someday, I’m going to get a full chapter assembled and painted, it will be glorious and stupid and pointless, but that’s not what this is all about. This is about trying to get through that other 1/3rd that’s unpainted, partially painted, or just not done yet.

    So this is about trying to get through the miniatures that I put in the pictures throughout this post that are unfinished, and probably posting some status updates over the next few weeks to see if I can actually do it. You know, before I dump another pile on top of my already substantial pile of shame.

    Because I’m not counting my Dark Angels, Ultramarines, Necrons, Eldar, Orks, Stormcast Eternals, Gloomspite Gitz, Kharadon Overlords (which aren’t even assembled), Lumineth Realmlords, the Van Saar and Escher gangs for Necromunda, the Grand Army of the Republic, my Imperial army lead by Darth Vader, those plucky Rebels, the upcoming Shatterpoint release, all of the Marvel Crisis Protocol stuff, several kill teams, tons of terrain, a Tau Empire force, or the aforementioned Horus Heresy Blood Angels.

    Maybe “pile” isn’t an accurate term for my shame.

    Here’s the full accounting of what’s left to paint in my Blood Angels army, and what’s all left to go with it. 137 models total, with an average of 40% finished. A lot of them are really close. I’m not going to count getting transfers on them as done, as I tend to do that well after the fact, but I am going to count getting them based. As unfinished bases are gross looking. For some shorthand here… 10% means it’s primed (everything is primed at least), 20% means I’ve put down a quick single basecoat color (probably red), 50% to 60% means I’ve probably done most basecoat and need to clean up and layer it, while 80% is in the tidy up and basing phase.

    Model Count % Done
    Captain (Necron Base) 1 80%
    Captain (Phobos) 1 60%
    Captain (Terminator) 1 40%
    Lieutenant (Ork Base) 1 70%
    Lieutenant (Storm Shield) 1 70%
    Lieutenant (Power Fist) 1 50%
    Librarian 1 80%
    Chaplain 1 40%
    Chaplain (Jump Pack) 1 40%
    Sanguinary Priest 1 40%
    Lemartes 1 40%
    Astorath 1 60%
    Tycho 1 60%
    Heavy Intercessor 5 20%
    Assault Intercessor 16 50%
    Intercessors 5 20%
    Reiver 5 80%
    Infiltrator 5 80%
    Incursors 5 80%
    Desolation Squad 5 70%
    Bladeguard Ancient 1 20%
    Outriders 6 30%
    Librarian 1 80%
    Firestrike Turret 1 20%
    Invader ATV 1 50%
    Invictor Warsuit 1 20%
    Death Company 15 30%
    Repulsor 1 20%
    Assault Marines 10 90%
    Tactical Squad 16 10%
    Devistators 10 10%
    Scouts 5 10%
    Attack Bike 1 60%
    Felblade 1 80%
    Sicaran Battle Tank 1 90%
    Sicaran Venator 1 90%
    Sicaran Arcus 1 90%
    Baal Predator 1 10%
    Drop Pod 1 20%
    Leviathan Dreadnought 1 20%
    Contemptor Dreadnought 1 20%
    Death Company Dreadnought 1 10%
    Furioso Dreadnought 1 10%
  • Blizzard Doesn’t Deserve Our Money

    Blizzard Doesn’t Deserve Our Money

    Being a consumer is both difficult and easy; we live in a world where nearly any wish or desire is yours to be had by opening your wallet and going and looking for it. There are a ton of companies just lining up to sell you all kinds of crap, and hopefully keep selling it to you. It’s difficult because if you stop to take a moment, and not only think of “do I need this” but also “what is the cost of me getting this” when it comes to something beyond the price.

    I’m a huge fan of NBC’s The Good Place, and they summed it up so well at the end of the last season when they pointed out that their point system was broken because all it took was buying a tomato for someone to end up in the Bad Place (or worse, a chicken sandwich). You end up contributing to climate change, pesticide usage, and labor abuses; and it’s not just a joke on a sitcom, there are protests going on against Wendy’s, maker of square hamburgers and scorching Twitter burns because of who they use to supply their tomatoes in some regions.

    A few months ago, I wrote an article that was a little bit weird for our site, mostly because it was getting past the product and looking at how the sausage was made for what has become a big focus of our site: video games. I won’t like, it wasn’t an easy article to write, mostly because it’s something that is still a struggle for me… I want to love video games, but the industry around it makes that hard. How long can I just hold my nose and ignore the bad things around them.

    I’d love to say that since I wrote that article, things have improved greatly and we can gleefully get back to buying all of the video games we want… but that’s not how the world seems to work in 2019. I’d been mulling an article for some time to write about why I would be passing on Borderlands 3 as a follow-up to that first article, while also talking about how some of the problems can extend even to smaller studios and publishers abusing employees, volunteers, and other studios.

    Before I could get it going, Activision|Blizzard (and the NBA) decided that they were going to face plant extra hard and bring the ethical price of games front and center in the ****show of the week. It’s not at all helped by the fact that every time I try to write something on it, they just make it worse.

    Calls to boycott followed (easy for me, since I’d started that before I wrote the last article), and there’s been all sorts of hot takes, on both sides, as the story keeps unfolding. Activision’s stock price has taken a small hit for it, which is kind of funny, since it’s the market behavior that encourages what they are doing, but it remains to be seen if any of this is lasting change or if they can ride it out before the next controversy hits next week.

    Let me be very clear, though, to start this… I am not here to talk about the ongoing protests in Hong Kong, or Chinese politics in general, in this story. I have opinions, but they’re not really relevant here (and if you’ve read my stuff, you can probably guess which way my opinions are leaning). This is about three American companies that are doing things that are, at best, dubious in their home country, and this was never going to end up going well for them. The complaints that drive the problems are well known, and I won’t go into them here directly, but let’s leave it that the people who are frustrated with these actions have some valid points about the problems going on.

    A Missed Layup

    I don’t know if this would have been quite as big of a story with Activision|Blizzard if the story around the NBA hadn’t have exploded first. You want to know when you messed up big in modern-day, Twitter-runs-the-world, America? When you get people like Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Beto O’Rourke, and Chuck Schumer (all politicians if the names don’t ring a bell) agreeing on anything. In a true show of bipartisanship, the anger was pretty unified over this one, and that’s just a weird thing these days.

    This all arguably started when the GM of the Houston Rocket’s, an NBA team that has fairly substantial ties to China: Yao Ming played for the Rockets, and they are among the most popular teams in the international market (despite, you know, being located in the armpit of the great state of Texas known as Houston), made a tweet that supported the ongoing protests.

    Just think, it’s probably 108 with 90% humidity outside of all those cars currently stopped on the interstate.

    The tweet was deleted, but the fallout was swift anyway. The NBA released two different responses, both condemning the GM for “saying something offensive,” though the Chinese version of the statement was harder in wording and called the tweet “inappropriate” and there was talk of disciplinary actions against him for it.

    The backlash to that was swift, because it basically boils down to this: the NBA, an American business, was punishing an American citizen for doing something that is fairly foundational to American identity and culture. I’m going to just push all of the “freedom of speech” talk, because that’s a huge, thorny, and contentious topic that… doesn’t really apply to the transactions of private entities in the states (the government can’t silence you or me, but I can silence all kinds of posts here, etc., because that’s how it’s supposed to work).

    Don’t worry about the NBA… their annual game release is just chock full of microtransactions, which aren’t gambling according to the industry. Please ignore that you purchase them using money in a virtual casino.

    The core of the problem, which is ultimately the core of all of the problems I’m going to talk about, is that the NBA looked to punish one of their own people, and throw him under the bus, because of pressure (and laws) from another country that they felt would threaten their market access to China. And, in truth, it did… after they changed their stance and tepidly backed the GM (and said it’s not their place to decide what is and isn’t right to say), China blacklisted NBA preseason games and denounced the people involved on their state-run media.

    For the NBA, the initial reaction seemed a bit out of character. As a league, they’ve usually been quite savvy in understanding their core demographics and supporters, and while they have been trying to expand more and more, they have typically backed their players and coaches when it comes to speaking out on social issues… or at least they did so when it helped the bottom line. Turns out, that may be the only thing they really care about.

    Blizzard tells the NBA “Hold my beer…”

    Not content to just stay in that specific realm of bad behavior, Actiblizz has decided that they want to start some sort of combination fire and ****storm and stick their faces squarely in the middle of the whole mess. The NBA reversed course, eventually, even if the response was rather lackluster… Blizzard doesn’t show any action, yet, but they also haven’t seen as much of the potential fallout.

    If you’ve been following the direction of Blizzard at any point in the last several years, you know that they are just all-in on trying to turn streaming into something they can monetize. Hearthstone and Overwatch, two of their biggest games (and where they make the majority of their money), are big competitive play games that regularly attract millions of viewers around the world. It’s debatable if that’s been a good or bad thing for the company and their games, but not the point here.

    It’s kind of a shame it wasn’t Overwatch that stirred up the pot, since the whole game is built around standing up to authority and tyranny.

    In a post-match interview on their Taiwanese Twitch stream, a popular streamer and professional player Chung “Blitzchung” Ng Wai, donned a gas mask that’s been worn by protestors in Hong Kong (in defense of, you know, getting gassed), and showed support for the protestors by sharing one of their slogans. It’s also notable that the streamer is based in Hong Kong, so he would seem to have a personal stake in what’s going on.

    Not one to be outdone or to do anything original or unique, just to take other people’s ideas and try to turn it to 11, Blizzard came down hard on the streamer. They kicked him out of the competition, stripped him of his prize money, and banned him. They also fired the two announcers, apparently for being there.

    Here’s the justification that Blizzard provided, which is apparently part of the rules they provide.

    [Any action] brings you into public disrepute, offends a portion or group of the public, or otherwise damages Blizzard image.

    Let’s go through all the things wrong with this “rule.” First, and foremost, it’s simply nonsense… it doesn’t provide any means or guidelines, it’s effectively just a “get out of jail free” card for Blizzard to punish, subjectively, as it sees fit. Of course, these rules only apply to players and fans, not to Blizzard. It can do disreputable things all day long, like laying off hundreds after a profitable year, cutting benefits and bonuses, abusing its workers with crunch periods, and pushing exploitative monetization tactics in its games.

    You know what can offend a portion or group of “the public?” Everything. Absolutely everything will offend someone, somewhere. I mean, I’m sure this article offends someone (and who knows, maybe will get us banned in China); it’s because we don’t cover enough LEGO… because LEGO does a lot of things that offends us (also another article I’m working on).

    I’m sure that the fact that an Activision game that’s intended to be a competitor for Fortnite is currently trying to get approved in China has nothing to do with the lack of spines in this whole thing.

    That’s not to say I’m all for going carte blanche on speech… that’s the tricky thing about freedom of speech (as it exists in the US, which is unique in how it treats it… and it’s even thornier here given that Blizzard is a US company but this was dealing with non-US participants); you know, freedom to say something isn’t freedom from consequences. It’s complex, weird, and a thorny thing.

    Here, the problem seems to be that Blizzard isn’t really punishing the speaker for what he said, per se, more where he said it and because who could have heard it. Make no mistake, it’s all about money… the speaker was in Taiwan (which, complexly, is and isn’t part of China), from Hong Kong (where his speech wasn’t illegal… even if it is contentious), but China hates all speech that isn’t “China is the Greatest” and also happens to be where Activision|Blizzard would like to grow their revenue.

    This person wasn’t fined, banned, or punished. They have more spine and ethics than anyone in Blizzard management has.

    When an American collegiate team did the exact same thing, they were not punished; users in America and Europe can post all day long, with thousands of duplicate threads, about this, and they aren’t getting punished. That team has more ethical backbone than Blizzard, and withdrew from a competition after stating it was hypocritical for Blizzard to punish one streamer and not them. The Blizzard subreddit shut down temporarily in protest, and the discussions there still seem to be overwhelmingly against Blizzard on it (though they have their defenders, because of course they do).

    How Important is the Money?

    I’m not saying that it’s an easy line for Blizzard… China is a growing market, while the Americas and Europe are more steady for them. However, it looks very much like this could cost them in the long run if sentiment continues to run against them. Blizzard makes up 30% of Activisions revenues, and that contribution is dropping. The reasons behind that are complex, but the main thing is Blizzard is simply out of ideas and isn’t releasing any new products. There are no expansions for WoW this year, Hearthstone has been bleeding players, they continue to pretend Starcraft isn’t a thing except in South Korea, and Diablo is apparently only relevant if you have phones.

    China is where Activision|Blizzard sees growth, and that isn’t a bad assumption. eSports is big there, and Hearthstone, the game at the root of this, has a significant audience in China. It gets stickier when you consider that Chinese company Tencent owns a 5% stake in Activision as well (as well as a similar stake in Ubisoft, Paradox Interactive, a 40% stake in Fortnite developer Epic, 80% stake in Standing Stone game, and 100% ownership of Riot) – they are the largest video game company in the world.

    I’m not claiming this is an easy line for the company to walk… it obviously is not, and there are costs and risks to being a big multinational corporation. If you want that Chinese money, you’re going to have to play by their very restrictive and draconian rules. Much like speech having consequences, so does acting against the norms and wishes of your customers. That’s what we’re seeing here… Activision|Blizzard doesn’t want to lose the money in China, but trying to play that game means they’re going to anger people that are still their core customers and lose money.

    I had to go and revise this article multiple times, because new things kept coming out as Blizzard decided the way to fight a dumpster fire was by throwing more dumpster, fire, and gasoline at it.

    That can have huge consequences… the stock market only cares about growth, which it (wrongly) assumes will go on forever and punishes them when it fails to do so. It’s how a company can have record earnings, and successfully hit targets, but still take a hit in stock prices because of some vague growth targets or expectations. That being said… growth means nothing if you anger your core and all of that growth is offset by losses elsewhere. EA learned that in a very hard way when it came to backlash on Battlefield V and Star Wars Battlefront 2… they angered their core customers, the games missed targets, and it impacted their earnings.

    It doesn’t just stop there… bad behavior continue to comes out that damages how the public sees Blizzard. A guild in WoW was forced to change their name and their founder suspended because a bunch of bigots found it offensive (based on the logs provided, anyway); it was a cheeky name that was meant as pride and taking ownership, but the automated tools banned them and apparently the people reviewing it agreed. Blizzard backtracked, and reinstated them, but said it can happen again.

    I wonder if anyone at EA is just running around, yelling “just be quiet” and hoping that Activision|Blizzard takes their Most Hated Company crown this year?

    A lot of the detractors from the current call to #boycottblizzard laugh and say most of the outraged people will be back and paying in a few weeks… and honestly, they’re probably right. Boycotts rarely work (and I’ll admit I’m not a fan of organized boycotts… they often strike at the wrong target, but that’s a different discussion)… at least in isolation. But when you see misstep after misstep by a company, and the anger keeps on coming, that can have lasting effects.

    EA has already seen this, with huge failures of major games that may have permanently tarnished the reputation of their brand and that of respected developers (like, say, Bioware) under their control. Activision|Blizzard is at risk of that same thing… maybe someone goes back to playing WoW or Hearthstone, but how likely are they to open their wallet and buy the next game? Based on slumping sales, the answer seems to be “less likely.”

    The problem here is that Blizzard isn’t just doing damage to their reputation among fans, they’re also damaging the trust of their own employees. You can’t claim to have company values (even putting up a statue for them) that every voice matters when you bow to authoritarian forces to silence those voices.

    If you follow the industry as much as the games (which, obviously, I do), it’s no secret that morale at Blizzard has been in the toilet lately. Internally, Activision has been taking over more and more of the management from Blizzard of old, and there have been a number of high-profile departures. As that’s happened, it feels like the Blizzard of old, at least the good parts, has slowly been hollowed out and replaced by a sterile and clueless set of drones that will rip the reputation and portfolio of the company apart to make a few extra bucks in the short term.

    As someone who’s played WoW from the very beginning… really, from before that back in beta, Chris leaving was when the game took its current downward turn. There have been ups and down before, but it feels less like going down a hill and more like taking a nosedive in a jet at this point…

    Chris Metzen was the heart of World of Warcraft and the voice of Thrall (and still is), left the company 2016. In hindsight, that was the start of an exodus that saw Frank Pearce and Michael Morhaime, both founders of the company, leave in the past year. Only Allen Adham remains, supposedly working on new IPs and projects, but based on other information, they are nowhere near launch. Ben Brode, the lead developer (and honestly, heart and soul) of Hearthstone left last April. Development was mostly scrapped for Heroes of the Storm, and the Diablo team has supposedly been working on a sequel that is repeatedly hampered by development… causing more of their rank and file to leave.

    Video games are made, and played, by people; that means it comes with the complexities, feelings, and beliefs of those people. Anyone who says they “aren’t political” is lying… everyone is to some extent. The world today is connected and full of conflict and change, and everything that’s made, be it music, movies, or video games, is in part an expression of the world around us. What Blizzard did may have been a good choice for their business one way, but I would argue that it was ethically wrong overall, at least in my personal opinions, but more than that, it was short-sighted. They’re banking on reputation and name in keeping existing customers… but that’s coin that’s no longer theirs to spend. And once a customer leaves, it’s expensive to get them back. It’s far cheaper to keep an existing customer happy and spending on your product than it is to go find a new one, after all.

    XKCD explains free speech better than I could. Most interestingly, the whole consequences and reactions applies to the people trying to control the narrative as well, and what we’re seeing here.

    What Blizzard did wasn’t illegal, but that doesn’t make it right. Interestingly, their bootlicking for China goes back awhile; months ago, they added several phrases related to the profanity filter for WoW that were directly related to the protests. After I wrote most of this article, Blizzard decided they were going to respond at long last… and let’s just say that it was mostly bending backwards to claim they were living up to their ideals, while in truth they were failing them at every level. I mean, come on… does anyone, anywhere, believe this line?

    The specific views expressed by blitzchung were NOT a factor in the decision we made. I want to be clear: our relationships in China had no influence on our decision.

    You know, I don’t think that anyone, even if you feel like defending Blizzard for what they did, will see that as anything other than a boldfaced lie. Blizzard wants it both way… it wants to design and market games that are around being a hero or savior, fighting against injustice and oppression… but at the same time will strike out at someone for doing that same thing because it “damages their brand.” They’re sitting at a crossroads, where they have to decide exactly how much they’re willing to bend to one country at the cost of support in another. They aren’t going to get it both ways, and it will be telling to see what’s more important to them in the long run.

    Jason Schrier at Kotaku, one of the single best writers and Journalists in gaming (seriously, I cannot recommend his book, Blood, Sweat, and Pixels, enough), had a very interesting point on Twitter in comparing the current actions of Blizzard to the International Olympic Committee (IoC)’s punishment and ban of Tommie Smith and John Carlos for throwing up the Black Power (or, as Smith claimed in his Autobiography, a human right salute).

    It was deemed an overtly political statement that took attention away from the athletic competition, which were supposedly supposed to be apolitical (you know, as competitions between nations always are). I mean, back in the late 1930s political salutes were fine, as long as the IoC agreed with them, but this one was obviously bad (despite, you know, being in the middle of the Civil rights struggles and violence in the US). Two men had a platform and used it to make a statement about a legitimate problem… and paid a huge price for it.

    Companies and Appeasement

    It’s easy for me to take swipes at Blizzard, because they’ve been frustrating me as a fan for some time, but what about companies that I like when it comes to bending over backwards (or companies that I really don’t)? I’m not a basketball fan… I neither like or dislike it, it’s just not my bag, so the NBA didn’t affect me all that much. Because examining ethical quandaries can’t be straight-forward or easy, shortly after news broke on all the Blizzard punching itself in the junk over and over, it was revealed that Apple bent over backwards as well.

    I suppose I’m an Apple fanboy in the same way that I’m a Final Fantasy fanboy… I don’t really think of myself as one, but I glance around and realize I’m heavily invested in a particular brand. I’m invested in Apple, both personally and professionally, and they’ve been my platform of choice for over a decade now. I’m typing this on a Macbook, after all… not even a work one (which I also have), but my personal one. I’ve been considering a replacement for it, as its getting a little long in the tooth, which if you’ve ever checked out Apple prices, is not an insignificant investment.

    The picture may have taken by an iPhone…

    Apple is a weird company, capable of doing both good and bad in the world. Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO, has been a huge advocate for corporate responsibility when it comes to sustainability and the environment. Their record with labor is a bit shakier, with most of their manufacturing being in China and through third-party OEMs like Foxconn (who basically make every PC and phone in the world).

    When it comes to China, Apple is in a strange spot that is hard to support, but also a lot more clear-cut compared to what the NBA and Activision|Blizzard are doing. Nearly all of Apple’s products are made in China – in fact, nearly all electronics are made in China. Numbers from 2015 show that over 80% of personal computers and 70% of smartphones were made in the country, and likely those percentages have only gone up. PC manufacturing has been shrinking slowly for years, but the result has been that US manufacturing has shut down – the only computer manufacturing of note still in the US is ironically Apple’s Mac Pro, which is assembled in Austin, Texas (every part inside it is likely still made in China, though).

    Prototype picture for new Mac Pro case.

    In short, Apple isn’t trying to get access to the Chinese market or money, they’re already there. Their products are sold in China, built in China, and marketed in China. It’s the third-largest market for Apple’s sales, accounting for some $44 billion dollars in sales last year. The stakes for Apple are huge, and losing access to that would hurt the company in unimaginable ways (though it should be stated that it would also hurt China, given the amount of manufacturing that Apple does there).

    That doesn’t make the slimy feeling of Apple removing an app from the Hong Kong app store that was designed to help protestors avoid the police (who have been employing some brutal tactics against them) just days after approving it. The move can’t been seen as anything other than bowing to Chinese pressure, and the public is taking it as well as the other moves. Apple’s half-hearted response isn’t any better than Blizzards, and their excuses don’t hold much water, given that one of the most popular navigation apps, Waze, does exactly the same thing that this app was banned for. Maybe Apple should have stuck with the credible excuse of “it’s all arbitrary, I can’t believe you think we have rules for approving apps.”

    It’s also not the first move by Apple in appeasement towards the Chinese government; in a recent iOS update, the company removed the Taiwanese flag from iOS 13.1, but only in China and Hong Kong. The app it removed wasn’t the first, either, as it’s removed dozens of other apps that can be used by people trying to bypass government control of the internet or censorship.

    Yes, that’s Christopher Lee; the entertainment industry has long struggled with problematic characters. I’m going to have to assume that Shang Chi will have some better casting choices than the movies that inspired the comic.

    Apple, of course, isn’t alone in this. Disney’s companies, especially Marvel, have long catered and altered their products so as not to offend Chinese audiences, by which they mean the Chinese government. The problematic character of the Ancient One in Doctor Strange, for example, is from a fictional land somewhere in Tibet in the comics, and was whitewashed to have Celtic history in the movie given China’s long-standing censorship of anything to do with Tibet.

    As a character, it was a landmine on multiple sides: the original character was a racist caricature, the new one was whitewashed, and the history of the character wouldn’t fly in the MCU’s largest international market. You can argue that this is a bit different from what the NBA or Blizzard did… and that’s a fair point. These companies are censoring themselves in trade for access to the market, and that isn’t an inherently bad thing (though it’s easy for such actions to get into bad places in how they do it). Activision|Blizzard and the NBA, on the other hand censored, and punished, others in fear of losing that market… and there’s no amount of spin or polish they can use to make that turd pile shine.

    Not everyone has been on board with the actions being taken, and some companies since have gone even farther. Riot games, maker of stupidly-popular League of Legends, which as I stated earlier is wholly owned by Tencent even though its based in the US, banned players and commentators from discussing politics on-air. Given that LoL’s popularity is around streaming and e-sports, it effectively silences everyone involved.

    Epic Game’s, maker of “I’m obviously too old to get why this is popular” Fortnite and the Unreal Engine, where Tencent has a huge minority stake, took the opposite stance. I could get into a ton of reasons why you should look side-eye at Epic and the Epic Store, and honestly, doubt some of the stuff that they promise to do and later backtrack on, but their statement was direct and clear… coming straight from studio head Tim Sweeney. Given that Fortnite makes somewhere in the realm of eighteen bajillion dollars a minute, this could have pretty huge ramifications on them making seven kajillion more dollars.

    Other studios have consistently resisted the efforts, or listened to their fans and backed off from plans to do the same thing. Ubisoft didn’t make changes to Rainbow Six Siege, one of their biggest titles (though as someone who owns, played, and really didn’t like it, I wonder why) after consumer backlash to it. Paradox Interactive has refused to make changes to their older games for using historically accurate maps that list Taiwan, Tibet, and other countries on them.

    What Does This All Mean?

    This problem isn’t going to go away anytime soon, and no one is going to be happy at the outcome from it. Mega-conglomerate Tencent, which I’ve mentioned several times above, is continuing its expansion into the video game industry and eventually it’s just going to be easier to list the companies they don’t have a stake in.

    This is, at its core, an issue where two things: capitalism and free speech, are in direct conflict. Companies are taking up the mantle to silence people and players in order to make more money and grow more internationally; as a system, capitalism rewards that behavior and punishes companies that don’t keep growing and expanding forever. Given other discussions lately, you can say the same thing about conflicts between the economy and environmentalism.

    I’m not advocating at overthrowing capitalism here… it’s a system I’m a part of and benefit from like anyone else. I’m not calling for boycotting anyone, or trying to punish companies for doing what’s within their rights. If anything, I’m just suggesting asking questions and looking at the things we use and consume… the world is complicated, messy, and weird. I’m not telling you to stop (sometimes I may be suggesting strongly), because often, the choice isn’t what right or wrong, it’s about what you’re willing to deal with.

    Sometimes we’re all doomed just because we once bought a tomato… but that doesn’t mean we should stop trying to change, or asking that the companies that get our money change as well. Activision|Blizzard has made it pretty clear that they aren’t going to listen to us, they’re going to continue to abuse customers, fans, and their own employees. They only care about money, ultimately… and it turns out, that’s the one thing we as consumers get to control.

  • I love my new iPhone 11 Pro Max

    I love my new iPhone 11 Pro Max

    I love my new iPhone. It was expensive, but after using it for just four days I can already say it was 1,000% worth it. I know for a fact there is at least one of you out there that is still using an iPhone 6 so hopefully you’ll find my anecdotes informative enough to try and justify the cost yourself. I’m not going to write about the new features, or detail any differences in specs between models; there are plenty of other sites for that. I’m just going to write out my experiences so far with my new toy.

    I said it was expensive, yes, you can’t get past that. And with iPhones starting at $699 for the low-end and topping out at $1449 for the high-end, there’s a good spread of options. I went big though and set myself up with an iPhone 11 Pro Max 512GB in Space Grey. I hadn’t bought a phone since my iPhone 6 Plus and my work provides me with a laptop for my computing needs, so I haven’t really poured any money into personal tech devices for years. I was due. Though, looking back at the technology leap from the 6 Plus to 11 Pro Max, I was LONG overdue.

    One of the first things I realized after using my phone this weekend was just how much time I wasted waiting for apps to open. I play Words with Friends with my wife, and if I’m in the middle of playing a board and I have to switch to another app, like to shoot off a text or an email or check the calendar, and then go back to Words, the app would reload from scratch as if it wasn’t even running. I mean, I was JUST there. But that didn’t matter; I was helpless in being forced to wait. The 6 Plus was underpowered in just about every way, so much so that it became a one-app-at-a-time device. I’d actually be surprised if I can switch between apps and not have it reload from scratch.

    Now, though, on the 11 Pro Max? Things loads lightning quick. I can switch between Words and another app or two or three or four without having it reload. And in the times it does need to load from scratch, it’s so fast it’s as if the app was already running. It doesn’t sound like much but the quality of life improvement is tangible.

    I picked up an online order from Best Buy this weekend, something I’ve done countless times before. And there was always a routine to these things. I’d take my phone out as I enter the main door and fire up my Yahoo! email app. I’d approach the pickup counter and wait off to the side while it loads. It would take about two or three minutes for it to load, for me to find my email, and bring up the barcode. This time, it was different. The app loaded, and I was able to bring up the email with the barcode while walking towards the pickup counter. It was up on my screen before I even reached my off-to-the-side waiting area. I went straight there and waited out of muscle memory. I looked down at my phone and realized I didn’t need to do that anymore. I think I muttered “Holy ****” under my breath.

    When I think back about the amount of time I wasted just waiting for apps to open and how much time I’ve already saved already from using it just this past weekend, it definitely justifies the cost. I’m no longer having to deal with waiting and life can flow normally without that kind of interruption. It feels like I’ve been anchored down for God knows how long, and the new phone has put some wind back in my sails. My head’s not down anymore. I can look up, and see what I’ve been missing out on in life.

    Even just unlocking the phone is better and faster with Face ID. My old 6 Plus had Touch ID, and when it worked there was always a pause from when you touch the sensor to having it unlocked. If all you’ve ever known was the 6 Plus you could say that it worked pretty fast. You could say that but you’d be flat out wrong. With Face ID on the 11, I can swipe up with my thumb as soon as I bring up the phone. Face ID unlocks it quick enough to feel like there’s barely a delay, and makes the old 6 Plus’s Touch ID feel like it’s moving at a glacial pace.

    That improvement in speed is felt everywhere in addition to apps loading and Face ID: quick reply on a notification text, app switching, Siri, starting the camera, everything. The iPhone doesn’t feel like a hindrance anymore. It feels like it moves as fast as I do. I have yet to come across a scenario where it is not doing something I want it to do fast enough.

    I liked using Apple CarPlay. What I didn’t like were the times when I’d have to unplug and replug the iPhone in order for it to be recognized, sometimes two or three times. And sometimes I’d have to power cycle the phone. I also didn’t like it when Siri refused to read a text. “Sorry, there was a problem with the app.” But now? Not once have I had to play the plug-in game with the 11, or pray that Siri will work. That negative cloud hanging over the CarPlay experience from it not working the first time or not working as intended is gone now.

    Although this isn’t hardware related, I’m really digging the new layout in CarPlay. Seeing the current map and having iTunes controls on one screen is awesome. Seeing favorite destinations and upcoming calendar events is just icing on an already tasty cake. Pretty sure it’s part of iOS 13 but experiencing the new layout coupled with the CarPlay coming up every single time I plugged my phone into the car makes it feel like it’s all part of one giant upgrade. For me and for people who got a new phone before upgrading their old one to iOS 13, it is just that.

    I’ve played around with the camera for a bit, taking a couple of selfies and trying out a couple of modes. It’s something I am definitely going to be playing with more as I didn’t use my old phone’s camera very often for a couple of reasons. One, it was slow. How many moments did I miss oh let me count the ways. Two, it’s old and I’ve mishandled it enough times for a specs of dust to lodge themselves right onto the sensor. There was no way to clean it without tearing the thing apart, and replacing the phone for some specs of dust is indefensible.

    76119 The Batmobile: Pursuit of The Joker full set
    Taken with an iPhone 6 Plus. Those dots? Those aren’t shadows.

    But with a new phone, I also happen to be getting a clean sensor along with what promises to be the most advanced camera system on the market, on a phone or dedicated compact camera. There are three lenses on the back right now, and I predict that next year’s phone or the one after will have a fourth macro lens. Might just be wishful thinking on my part but I’d love a macro lens. Not a complaint there, not at all, because it’s still an extremely capable camera system. I took this picture of an absolute unit of a spider hanging outside of my front door the other night at around 9pm:

    Pretty sure that if I let it bite me, I’ll gain super powers.

    Click and view the original file of Spider-Bro. The details it captures are pretty great.

    Nearly pitch-black room, severely back-lit from an overhead closet light. Extraordinary detail without blown-out highlights.

    Night mode on the iPhone is just fantastic. I’ve seen sample pictures but you have to experience it for yourself. You can read about how the iPhone takes multiple images after you press the shutter button, how the lens has optical image stabilization, how it combines the useful images into one and discard the unusable ones, how it uses a special chip and machine learning to bring up details in low light, and how all of that happens so fast it is completely invisible to the user. All of that doesn’t matter though because what matters is what you get after you press the button and what you get are awesome photos. It’s fast, it’s seamless, it’s downright magical.

    I can’t stop gushing about this phone.

    Back in the day, phones were cheap because the phone companies would subsidize the cost. Then that went away and then people had to pay full price or sign up with a monthly plan. That’s the route I took. Even though in my mind I was okay with spending that much money on a phone, spending it all at once was still a hard pill to swallow. But I was okay with paying monthly for my new phone for the next two years. That’s how long I expect to keep this phone at a bare minimum, contractual obligations or not. The gains in time recovered from not waiting for apps to load has made me rethink how often I should upgrade. But I can do two years at least.

    I love my new phone and I know you will too! Anyone and everyone reading this that owns an iPhone with a model number lower than X should upgrade. It is SO worth it.

  • Best Prices Ever on Dungeons & Dragons Books

    Best Prices Ever on Dungeons & Dragons Books

    This isn’t related to Nintendo, Video Games, or LEGO… but I’ve talked about how I’m a big D&D player on the site before. I’ve been playing it since I was a kid, and got back into playing it a lot a few years ago. I already own the full product line, but Amazon is making it very, very, attractive and inexpensive to get into the hobby. D&D has never been more popular than it is right now, but it’s kind of daunting taking that first step.

    While most of the books have an MSRP of $50, and usually sell through Amazon for about $35-40… most have been offered for $22+ this week (in the US… doesn’t look like the pricing cuts extend to other countries). Even better, the incredible and beautiful Art and Arcana Special Edition, which normally costs $125, is on sale for just north of $55. I picked that up immediately, and it’s gorgeous. The standard edition is also discounted, and has the same art book but none of the extras. The $25 extra for this version are worth it to me…

    If you’re interested in D&D, the Starter Set is a great thing to… you know, start with. As a gift for kids who might be interested, it’s also a great introduction, and gives you everything you need to play and run a first game. Plus, the included adventure is legit, and can be used even for experience groups.

    Two of the three core books are on sale as well, the PHB (which players should have), and the Monster Manual (which DMs should have, but also is just an essential sort of book). Curiously, the Dungeon Master’s Guide is not on sale, despite being as important to a DM as the Monster Manual.

    Setting and Expansion Books are on sale, including the relatively recent book that adds the first Wizards of the Coast crossover between D&D and Magic the Gathering. Guildmaster’s Guide to Ravnica adds that world and setting to D&D for the first time, officially, which is sort of amazing to think it took that long. Of these, Xanathar’s guide is close to essential, since it gives a lot of new things for players and Dungeon Masters to use. Mordenkainen’s Tome of Foes is more for DMs (but does include a couple of new races for players), and Sword Coast is more of a setting book, but has some new backgrounds. The holdout not on sale here is Volo’s Guide to Monsters, which is a shame. It’s a fun book.

    The Adventure Books provide pre-made adventures for Dungeon Masters to run, and several on sale, including the newly released Dungeon of the Mad Mage, and recent hits like Tomb of Annihilation, Curse of Strahd, and Waterdeep: Dragon Heist. Tales from the Yawning Portal is the curious holdout here, but honestly, it’s not that great. You can also pick up older adventures like Storm King’s Thunder, Out of the Abyss, Rise of Tiamat, Princes of the Apocalypse, and Horde of the Dragon Queen (the sale prices vary on them).

     

    Fun fact on our feature image… that was the result in a game that I’m playing in when the DM asked my party to roll for initiative when we walked into an ambush. We survived, but we all laughed about how badly we were caught flat-footed.

  • I Need to Find a Way to Start Writing Again

    I Need to Find a Way to Start Writing Again

    I read this blog post once, called “How to Write a Blog Post” (found via Daring Fireball) and one of the things that stuck with me was the very first paragraph of the post:

    “Randomly think of a thing. Let it bump around your head a bit. If the bumping gets too loud, start writing the words with the nearest writing device. See how far you get. The more words usually mean a higher degree of personal interest. Stop when it suits you.”

    I’ve had this bumping in my head for some time now, but couldn’t muster the will or the want to sit down and write. Scratch that, I did want to, but for the preservation of my own sanity I had to stay away from my laptop.

    My laptop represents work. It’s provided for by my work, it’s what I take home everyday, and what I bring back everyday. I’m with my laptop more than my own family.

    Work has been, to put it mildly, not the best. I’ve been working nights and weekends just to meet deadlines and keep up with the demand. So much so that when it came to doing anything fun and relaxing, the last thing I wanted to was crack this thing open and start blogging.

    As a result, this site has suffered, as well as other interesting things where a computing device was the main interface: my personal email inbox is exploding, I haven’t read any of my favorite sites in a while, I’m behind on the news, and… and… you get the picture. Even being on my phone feels like a chore.

    My only real escape was video games. Been playing Splatoon 2 and Hollow Knight on the Switch, and Spider-Man and God of War on the PS4. That was really my only escape from my terrible work situation.

    I can proudly say though that my family life has not suffered. I’ve always placed a priority on them and will continue to do so. But after they’ve gone to bed and I find myself awake and alone in the house, I’ll fire up a game system and lose myself in whatever make-believe world I picked for that night.

    But that bumping in my head never really went away. And like I said at the beginning of this blog post, I need to find a way to start writing again, to make it enjoyable again even if I have to use a computer as my main interface.

    It’s Wednesday night, and my Java class starts in exactly 15 minutes and 18 seconds. Normally, I’d have my Switch with me, but I forced myself to leave it at home so I can use this time to do exactly this: write. I did FaceTime with my daughter to help her with her math homework while I ate my bunless Fatburger. I have my Starbucks next to me. I sat and closed my eyes for a good three minutes just calming myself. Like I said in not so many words, work has been shitty, but writing for this site should no longer suffer because of that.

    Had this been a year ago or heck even a few weeks ago, I’d probably throw up an apology here. I won’t do that this time because I regret nothing. I have my priorities and anything non-family, non-work, I pushed off to the side.

    Oh did I tell you the hot water pipe under my house busted? That’s fun.

    Anyways, I know this post is all over the place but I needed to defib my brain, find a quiet moment, and just start writing. There’s no rhyme or reason, or a general point to this. It’s all just mental vomit. And I told myself I wouldn’t go back to do any editing other than for typos. This is what’s going on with me right now.

    I would like to say thank you to Eric and Nick for bailing water on what appears to be a sinking ship. I’m back and I’ll keep finding things to write about. Because now that the bumping in my head for THIS post has finally stopped, there’s lots of other things I want to talk about.

    One of my favorite all time quotes is from Edna Mode. In the first Incredibles movie, she says to Jack Parr, aka Mr. Incredible, “I never look back, darling. It distracts from the now.” Words to live by, I say. Words to live by.

    Time’s up. Class is starting.

  • R.I.P. MoviePass

    R.I.P. MoviePass

    My name is Eric Crittenden, and for 9 months, I was addicted to MoviePass.

    I was reading an article on CNN today about MoviePass, where the parent company of MoviePass, Helios and Matheson, is being investigated for misleading investors about its finances. Ever since July, their stocks have been going through all sorts of financial madness that I have neither the brain capacity nor the degree to understand.

    MoviePass, if you missed it, around August 2017, allowed subscribers for $10 a month to see any movie in theaters, one per day. It was fantastic. I saw so many bad movies, forgettable movies, and one or two great movies. Likewise, I fully realize that without MoviePass I never would have seen any of them, save for Star Wars and Marvel.

    I also fully realized that it was far, far too good to be true. I told my friends several times that I was riding the wave until it gave out. It was inevitable that MoviePass would eventually fail.

    And in April 2018, the wave faltered a little. A few days before the release of Infinity War, MoviePass announced the first of their subscription changes – you could only see a movie once. Thus crushing my week-long plan of watching Infinity War seven times in a row.

    Since then, the subscription has become unrecognizable. 3 movies a month for that same $10, with a $3 or so discount for any subsequent movies. Not to mention that you can’t see any movie that you want, only the 3-5 that MoviePass will let you see. As someone who enjoys small, weird movies like Upgrade or Believer (both of these are great, check them out), MoviePass was completely valueless. No, MoviePass, I don’t want to see the crappy PG-13 CGI-filled movie you’re selling me. Stop it.

    So I canceled about a month ago. And I haven’t seen a movie in theaters since.

    What’s the moral of the story, then? Take advantage of systems until they ultimately fail, desperately move money around, and are investigated for fraud. And enjoy your time doing it.

  • I Need This Batman: The Animated Series Board Game

    I Need This Batman: The Animated Series Board Game

    I’m a bit of a Batman: The Animated Series, or BTAS for brevity, fan. It helped me through a difficult time in my life, transporting me away from reality into the dark and gritty art deco world of Gotham. I’ll spin up the DVDs every now and then and try and get my kids to watch with me, but they may be a tad young to really appreciate the story telling and art direction. So when I came across this blog post from IDW Games for Batman: The Animated Series – Gotham Under Siege, I was ecstatic. From the blog post:

    “Batman: The Animated Series – Gotham Under Siege puts players in the role of Gotham’s heroes as they use dice allocation and threat management to defend the city against henchmen and bosses, and fight to save the city from being destroyed.”

    Here’s a shot of the miniatures from their Twitter account:

    And from the sounds of it, they’ll be releasing expansion packs too!

    I’m not a big board gamer. It’s something I want to start doing more of with the kids and family as good, wholesome, family fun. It’s one thing play video games with other people, but it’s a whole other experience when you go analog and face each other huddled over a board game. I know that world is just huge and my foray into that space is going to be a slow, timid affair. I have the basic Monopoly, chess, and checkers, but as the kids get older, I’ll be looking for more stuff to play with them. Once Gotham Under Siege comes out, I’ll be banking it until the littlest one can play on his own even though you can play by yourself (when did board games start having single-player campaigns?). And maybe by then, they’ll have watched the series and appreciate what the game is about.

    I also bought Gloomhaven on a caffeine-fueled impulse purchase. If I end up covering that, I may have to start a new category.

     

  • An Update On Me, And An Apology To You

    An Update On Me, And An Apology To You

    It’s pretty obvious this site has been lacking updates for the past week or two or three. Not gonna lie, I’ve been stressed about taxes. Like really stressed. Within the last year and a half, we’ve taken some steps to better our financial situation and that meant cutting down on expenditures, like LEGO. I mean, I’m not going to rehash my problem, but I cut back on that kind of spending like a lot. And while I still have to deal with liquidating the collection, I believe we’re in a better place with a better outlook.

    That being said though, taxes were giving me a ton of anxiety. Because of the lower amount of spending on business-related expenses, I was worried about our tax liability. I’ve been using video games as an escape. Except, it would kind of backfire because while I did enjoy my time in Zelda and Splatoon, it was just temporary. As soon as I shut off the console, I’d feel immense guilt and probably a little bit more stressful than before I started my gaming session. It was bad and I wasn’t dealing with it properly.

    But my tax appointment came up and it was time to face the music. I compiled all my receipts, added everything up, went to bed, and met with my CPA the next morning. I guess I was more stressed than I realized because when I walked into his office, the first thing he said to me was “You look really stressed out. Are you okay?” When he ran the numbers, he said I had nothing to worry about and we were actually in good shape. Like really good shape. I felt suuuuuch relief. I guess my spending habits didn’t change all that much, sadly.

    Anyway, this all went down last week and I decided to catch up on a couple of things this weekend that I was putting off because of my aforementioned escape-reality-by-playing-video-games coping mechanism. No, that was not healthy, but now that I got that out of the way and tended to some other matters over the weekend, I feel much better.

    As much as I want to say that I’m not making any excuses, it does kind of sound like it. That is the reality of what I was going through, not to mention my day job and all the related stresses that come with that. I need to better about stress management because you, the reader, deserve better. I owe it to all of you readers, and especially to you subscribers and donors. This isn’t what you signed up for. I am certainly capable of delivering content. I can only promise to try and be better at it.

    Tomorrow is Monday April 9th and I am going to be going to Disneyland for a father-son day. It may seem indulgent, but I’m going to enjoy every minute and recharge my batteries.

    Taxes are a hell of a thing.

  • Review: Star Wars Episode III – Revenge of the Sith

    Review: Star Wars Episode III – Revenge of the Sith

    As a lead up to Star Wars: The Force Awakens, FBTB is going to do something crazy (and likely something that a whole bunch of other sites are going to do too), and review the previous movies. Why? Because shut up, that’s why. We are going to take a slightly different take, other than just eviscerating the PT and fawning love on Empire Strikes back, and actually look at some of the impacts that it has on the toys and stuff we really love. Plus, it gives us an excuse to make fun of Jar Jar. It’s basically win-win. 

    Given the hate that I enjoy piling on The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones, I suppose it’s a little bit surprising that Revenge of the Sith is the Star Wars movie I’ve watched the fewest times. It’s easily the best of the Prequel Trilogy, but I just get so tired of the prequel by the time it gets to Revenge and something in my nerd brain won’t let me watch just one movie. But if I want to watch the good Star Wars movie, I have to get through the bad ones. Those are the rules, as ironclad as needing a flag if you want to have a country.

    Again, thanks to our man Austin for the incredibly poster art, because they should have just marketed the entire movie like pulp 50s Sci-Fi. I mean, this is such a “Revenge of the Creature” kind of movie compared to Episode II, it kind of fits. We don’t have any gill men running around, unless you count Grievous, but it was in black-and… you know, I really don’t know where I was going with that joke. It’s just that MST3K has been in at the forefront of my brain lately.

    As a collector, Episode III came at a pretty interesting time. There was a lot better feeling about Star Wars after Attack of the Clones (as compared to TPM), even if the film hasn’t aged quite as well. However, LEGO was also struggling at this time, and the action figure market was really starting to tumble around Star Wars. The initial wave of Episode III sets are still probably the worst overall lineup that LEGO has ever offered (in my never-ever humble opinion, anyway), and still includes some real stinker sets.

    Of course, for me, some of that is hindsight, as I was towards the tail end of a dark age. I also didn’t see the movie when it came out, waiting a few weeks after the release before I managed to get time to see it. I was busy with something… what was it… oh right, getting married. I didn’t have the heart to drag my wife to another movie like this, so had to find a friend who wanted to go again. So a whole lot of reasons why the best of the PT still doesn’t occupy as many of my opinions as the rest… maybe because it’s harder to hate. Or it could be because it’s the prequel film that lacks depth the most.

    (more…)