Bloody Games

Continuing on last weeks themes of Let's Plays, I've been watching several more. Maybe not the most productive way to spend my time, but it's entertaining and the players are people who do it for a living, so they get more viewers.

Being an old school fan of everything Warhammer, well not everything but you get the point, I discovered the joys of Blood Bowl. I played the board game version a bit back in the 90's, but it has existed as a computer game since 2009. Well there was version in 1995 but I know diddly-squat about it.

Anyway, I found a league on Youtube with some of my favorite 'tubers like TotalBiscuit and Angry Joe. It was a riot. Great fun, a laugh a minute. A heady mix of humor, American football and lots of fantasy style violence. If you like those things, it's well worth checking out. Personally the football part is my least favorite in itself, since I never watch sports, but here it works oh so well. I then found another league with most of the same people but played with forty second turns instead of three minutes. Very hectic but hilarious. Speed Bowl indeed.

It hasn't been all sports violence though. There's been murder as well. I've enjoyed watching Dodger play two Sherlock Holmes games on her channel, PressHeartToContinue.

Sherlock Holmes vs. Jack the Ripper wasn't a very good game to be honest. I enjoyed the play-through, but the game is pretty awful. Particularly the accents. “Goooood eeevening doctorrr” doesn't sound the least bit British no matter how you slice it. The story is OK, but the gameplay is ghastly. Way to many “I'll tell you, but first you must find my lost bag” elements.

Sherlock Holmes: Crimes and Punishments on the other hand is magnificent. Both technically and story wise, this is a superior game. Unlike the ripper game which is one case, in C&P you solve a series of different cases, two of which are based pretty faithfully on Doyle's original stories. The others could have been written by him though, that's how good they are.

Now in a way I wish I had played them myself, but I find I have very little patience for these kind of games, although I do like them. Thus Let's Plays are the perfect solution. I get the story and the mystery, and someone else get's to deal with the headache that comes from the puzzles.

That's it for this week folks, I'm a bit tired and my brain just won't cooperate today. See you next time, and until then, have a great week!

Outlast and Five Nights

Hello and welcome to another installment of Eccentric Spheres.

I've been exploring in the realm of horror again this week, but with games instead of movies. Not that I played these games. No, instead I have enjoyed quality Let's Plays. I started with Markiplier playing Five Nights at Freddy's 1-3, followed by Angry Joe's play-through of Outlast.

Mind you, this is not a review post. I have not played them, so I can't review them with a clean conscience. This is more of an impression post.

WARNING! SPOILERS AHEAD. AVERT YOUR EYES IF YOU SERIOUSLY INTEND TO PLAY THESE GAMES!

The Five Nights at Freddy's (FNaF) games are small indie games where you take the role of a night watchman in a pizzeria populated by animatronic characters that want to kill you. Each game has it's own strategy you need to figure out in order to survive. These games rely very heavily on jump scares, so if you're allergic to those, stay the hell away. I can't warn you enough about that. Just watching the LP was enough to unnerve me at times and I jumped a lot in my seat. That said, the games are pretty cool, and the fact that you can't move, only look around and use certain objects is a surprisingly effective technique. In most games you have to seek out the danger, but here you're sitting helplessly in place just waiting for the monsters to come to you. Over all FNaF is cartoony and silly but capable of laying down some seriously scary moments. Add to that the mystery of the murdered children and it gets even worse.

To my joy I then found a multi-part series by Angry Joe, in which he and his friend Other Joe played Outlast. I have been so close to buying this game several times, but always held back.

In Outlast you are Miles Upshur, a hard hitting investigative journalist who goes to a mental hospital to look into allegations of abuse and corruption. The kicker is that Miles can't fight. You can only try to outrun the enemies or hide and hope they don't find you.

The atmosphere in this game is top-notch. The graphics and sound are great and overall the guys and girls at Red Barrels have made an awesome game.

But I have several complaints. First off, there is really only one kind of enemy, loonies who want to beat you to death. This is varied a little bit by the hulking giant Walker who hunts you through out the game, the naked cannibal twins who do the same, and the crazy “doctor” who rules over one level. But until the very end that's it. Even in the Women's Ward it's the same dudes over and over again.

Then it's the fact that large parts of the game are pitch black, forcing you to use your camcorders night vision filter. Now this is a cool idea, but when you have to sprint away from crazy murderers in the dark with your camera glued to your face for the tenth time, it get's silly. And considering that the game is incredibly cool looking it's such a shame that you see so little of it. Shades of black and green get repetitive fast. And the repetition is Outlasts biggest problem. Things that terrify you in the beginning just get stale towards the end. Oh look, another scarred loony with a bat, better hide in that locker.

Speaking of the dark, I call shenanigans on the fact that you are blind without your camera, but the loonies can see you just fine most of the time. Also, there are several places that you easily get lost in, something that frustrates me enormously, but the biggest story failure is this:

Towards the end Miles is beaten, bloody and heavily traumatized, but although he manages to escape outside, you have to go back inside again, to find out what's actually going on. You have to go back inside! There's no way anyone would do that. Miles should have run screaming into the night. Considering how easy it would have been to lead him to the end without this tease, I find it almost insulting.

I know it sounds like I didn't enjoy the game, but I did. Despite these problems I think Outlast is a fine game. If you like survival horror, go play it..

So there you have it Ladies and Gentlemen, and until we meet again, have a great week!

Fargo

Back in 1996 I saw Fargo in the theater. It was a pretty good movie, but it wasn't really what I'd call great. In fact, I've never re-watched it, and I love watching movies again.

Then a friend of mine recommended the show Fargo (2014). From his descriptions of a couple of events, I knew I had to watch it, and watch it I did.

This is a good show, maybe even great. Some have compared it to True Detective which I consider erroneous. True Detective is in my opinion far better, but that doesn't mean Fargo is bad. Far from it. In fact, I watched the whole season in two days.

What we have here is a strange show. The actors are good, as is the cinematography and well, pretty much everything else. The story is the potential problem, since it is very convoluted. It jumps back and forth, and there are more twists and turns than a plate of spaghetti. If you pay attention and suppress your urge to have everything explained at once, it's not too hard to follow, but this does mean that it's not background entertainment.

Depending on how you like your TV series, that fact that Fargo leaves certain things up to your own interpretation is either good or bad. I like not having everything spelled out. But there was one series of events that felt half done and it never really got a conclusion.

It is a very violent show, with showers of blood (literally in one case) so be warned. Some sex, but compared to many others it's practically puritanical. What really amused me as a Fenno-Scandinavian was the pronunciations of Nordic names. The whole thing takes place in Minnesota, which was settled by mainly Scandinavian and German settlers back in the day. This heritage is apparent in both their names as well as their accent, which I could listen to for days.

Finally I want to bring up what I think makes this show really stand out. Character development. Considering that the first season is ten episodes, you get tons of it. But not all major characters change. Lester Nygaard does, but neither Lorne Malvo or Molly Solverson really change at all, and this makes them stand out against each other in a good way. Also, we get the always funny Key & Peele as a bonus.

Bottom line is, you really aught to watch Fargo if given the chance. Within the two first episodes, you're either hooked or repulsed, so go for it.

Until next time, have a great week!

Revolutionary Tales

This week we are talking revolution. The American revolution to be specific.

Countless books have been written on the subject, some fair and some... let's call them enthusiastically patriotic and leave it at that.

But today I want to talk about some of the myths and misconceptions that surround this conflict. Naturally with any subject this expansive, not to mention chronologically distant, it's hard to be certain exactly what went on.

We do however know quite a lot, and there are several myths that are just that, myths and legends. On the flip side, there are things no one really talks that much about. Finally, before we begin, I want to point out that I couldn't even begin to link sources here. That's beyond the scope of my humble little blog. If you are interested, do your own research, but keep a critical mind. After all, history is written by the winners and to the victors go the spoils.

The colonists were scrappy undermanned underdogs.

OK, first off let's point out that there were about 2.5 million colonists at the time. When the war broke out, about a third stayed right out of it, just under a third remained loyal to the king and the rest were revolutionaries. Naturally many were women, children and the elderly but that leaves about a quarter of a million troops on the colonial side against the 40.000 troops Britain could scrape together. Those are odds of six to one. Some sources claim that only 100.000 colonists fought the British, but those odds are still 2.5 to 1.

Now let's add in the French. France was spoiling for a fight with England and took every opportunity to harass them at sea, making resupplying the British army difficult. The French also supplied the colonists with tons of clothes, cannons, food and 90% of all their gunpowder.

Now who's the underdog here? I'm not so sure it's the colonists anymore.

The Boston Massacre.

Many sources claim the massacre of Bostonians at the hand of redcoat guards as one of the events that caused the colonial kettle to boil over. But there are some interesting facts here. First off, the crowd was goaded by secessionists into attacking the guards, first with taunts, and then with thrown rocks and ice. Finally one guard fired his musket which caused the rest to discharge theirs. When the smoke cleared, three locals were dead. That's all. Three guys. Some massacre... Eventually the guards were found not guilty in court, when their attorney John Adams pointed out that shooting people who physically assault them was in fact their job. And that's the John Adams, founding father and 2^nd president of the U.S.A.

Taxes, the French-Indian war and the Tea Party.

The whole “No taxation without representation” line is famous today. But there is some evidence that although the colonists were supposed to pay taxes to George III, those taxes were rarely ever collected.

Now, to the west of the original colonies lay a vast and open land, and many wanted to settle there. Unfortunately, much of that land was owned by France which led to violent border disputes. Fault on both sides and all that. Either way, this led to the French-Indian War, a.k.a. The Seven Years war. It was hugely expensive for the British, and to recoup some of the money, they levied the infamous tax on tea. They were adamant that the colonialists pay for some of the war costs, since they had directly benefited from the protection afforded them by the British Army. As we all know, the colonialists refused to pay, and dumped the tea into the sea.

So it seems that the cruel tyranny of the Crown was a bit overblown.

Paul Revere and Ben Franklin.

The story of how Paul Revere rode all night shouting “The British are coming, the British are coming” is a familiar one. It's mostly held up as an example that one man can make a difference, but it has been exaggerated quite a bit over the years. It seems he did indeed ride out, but mainly to warn Adams and Hancock, and to alert other messengers who in turn spread the word. Then he simply went home. Since his mission depended on stealth, shouting would be a very foolish thing to do. And Revere was not a fool. In fact he was a cunning silversmith, engraver and dentist.

Concerning Ben Franklin, we're not going to talk about lightning, kites or bifocals. I'm interested in his role as Colonial Ambassador to King George III. Franklin did oppose the Stamp Act 1765, but apart from that, he apparently failed to in any way make the British King and his government understand that the colonists were unhappy. Instead he was far more keen to attend parties, even going so far as to carouse the night away with the Monks of Medmenham Abbey, better known as The Hellfire Club. These guys who were synonymous with debauchery, hedonism and vice. Now, I'm not moralizing here, I enjoy a good time as much as anyone, but Franklin had a job to do, and at best he half assed it.

That's all we have space for this week. If you are interested, there's tons of information out there. Go forth and study, and I shall see you next time. Have a great week!

Dredd Sniper

Hello and welcome to a new week, complete with a brand new installment of Eccentric Spheres.

Today I'm in the mood for reviews, so to start off, I'll complete my review on Sniper Elite 3.

Having now completed the game, I'm still very satisfied. There's nothing in the last two missions that would make me change anything I said two weeks ago.

The last levels are just as good as the six previous, but I want to bring up three things that did bother me a bit. First off, in one level you get tons of re-spawns even if you carefully clear out the entire area like I did. It would have been nice if they arrived as reinforcements instead of just appearing out of thin air.

Secondly, there is a pretty bad cliché towards the end, not game breaking in any way, but totally cringe worthy.

And finally I witnessed enemy soldiers blissfully patrolling an area that was under heavy machine gun fire. They just calmly walked around while being shot to pieces. Saved me some ammo I guess.

These three tiny things are my only real complaints in Sniper Elite 3, so over all, I'm both pleased and impressed. So pleased I've already started a new run through on higher difficulty.

Next up, we're go from games to film. The other day I watched Dredd (2012) with Karl Urban in the title role.

Now I've never been a huge Judge Dredd fan, but I've read some of the comics and liked them well enough. Back in the nineties I watched Sylvester Stallone take on the same role in Judge Dredd (1995), and although I liked the beginning of that movie, they quickly wrecked the whole thing by removing Dredd's helmet. It's a thing in the comics that you never see Dredd without his helmet. So I was apprehensive about watching the new attempt. In fact, I wouldn't have bothered, except I saw a glowing review of it, and decided it sounded good enough. And you know what? It's actually pretty awesome.

Sure it's lacking some of the comic book flair the 95 film had, and Karl Urban’s chin is sub par compared to Stallone’s, but in every other way, Dredd (2012) was an enormous improvement.

It looks great, the actors are very good and the plot feels like an actual Judge Dredd story, compared to the 95 version that went completely off the rails. The pacing felt excellent, and at no time did it get boring. Seeing Judge Dredd mentor a young inexperienced Judge Anderson was a real treat. Anderson, while on the subject, was particularly well written. Going from a determined but rattled rookie to someone who just wants to get the job done right, made for a good female protagonist. In essence, her gender was almost irrelevant for the story. It could have worked just as well with a man, but Anderson is female and that's that. There were no romantic sub-plots, no “I can't because I'm a girl” moments, nothing like that.

In fact, even if you're not a Dredd fan, but you like action/ sci-fi, this is probably a good movie for you.

Well there you have it. So until I see you again, have a great week!