Barnestorming #874- The Bad News Bears of Gaming, Batman, Hot

It sounds like we play board games somewhat similarly. I am terrible at them, mostly. As a former math-Ph.D. student specializing in probability, I *do* calculate the probabilities, though, when they're easy (or more likely, when someone else asks me to). And I always, always am trying to win the game; I never screw with shit just for the sake of screwing with shit. That said, while I always have a pretense of trying to win, I will pretty much always try to win in the splashiest, most aggressive and weird way possible, which is usually not the "ideal" path. I'm pretty notorious among my friends for being kind of stupidly aggressive in games and being the least trustworthy bastard, because winning with a big backstab is way more fun than winning as a friendly guy. Nonetheless, despite rarely winning games, because I'm the guy who owns the games everyone still wants to gang up on me in every single game we play, ever.

I'm good at Magic, though, and take that way more seriously than anything else. And I LOOOOOOVE reading strategy articles about any game; I spend at least an hour a day reading Magic strategy. Even then, though, I get pretty easily caught up in the game and make way more gut-level decisions than calculating decisions.

Brian Michael Bendis *sucks*. It boggles my mind that he is a superstar comic writer. I have liked one thing of his, and one thing only: his DAREDEVIL. This was the, I mean the least, you know, the least of his, ummmmmm, BOOKS, or comics, whatever you want to call them, that was written like THIS, y'know? Even then, I ended up selling it eventually, but it's worth reading. And it's ballsy, for sure. Kind of to a fault, though: it kind of feels like he had these radical ideas for how he was going to shake things up and all the big changes he'd make, but then didn't have any idea for how to wrap them up in a satisfying way. Have you read it? If so, what are your thoughts? If not, I really do recommend it; it feels like the defining superhero run of the 00s to me, even though it is not the best.

The thing that kills me the most about him: the WHOLE point of his dialogue is that it's supposed to be realistic, right? I do not not know *anyone* in my day-to-day life that talks like that. If they did, they'd have a speech impediment. Chris Ware actually sometimes has dialogue like that in his comics; it is almost always meant to imply that the characters are incredibly socially awkward.

Even if it were realistic: who GIVES a shit! Even in comics that are about realistic subjects I don't want realistic dialogue, mostly. Putting that shit into superhero comics? Give me a fucking break!

My guess, if you really loved the first Sandman book best so far, is that you'll be increasingly disappointed: the first book has a completely different, much more horror-based tone than the entire rest of the series. I think it might be my favorite, too! Book 4, Season of Mists, is pretty cool, though.

I'm with you on the Killers. I was surprised to even enjoy most of the album cuts on Hot Fuzz! No guilt there for me.

Resonance: Man, I wasted HOURS modding crazy ass guns. It was pretty anal. Was it worth the extra 1% fire rate? Can't answer that. It was an enjoyable game but got a little tedius and repetitive near the end. Once you master setting up the triangle, rinse, repeat, it doesn't evolve. It's been a while since I played it but the healing role seemed pointless when the best strategy is to focus on dmg output. Oh, and, "Are you some kinda beast?".

Persona 3 is virtually neverending. I put 120 hours into the PSP version of it over the last year - an absurd amount of time for me in a single game. It's one of my favorite RPGs of all time, and I'm really looking forward to Persona 4 Golden on the Vita later this year.

Xenogears is a great game until...well, I'll let you find that for yourself. Still one of my favorites and with an awesome soundtrack by Yasunori Mitsuda (of Chrono Trigger fame).

Valkyria Chronicles is tough for me because I really want to like it, but it seems more like a puzzle game than a...whatever it's supposed to be. I mean, you don't really use clever tactics - it's mostly about finding the quickest and most busted way to run around & kill everyone. Alicia is pretty much the one-woman army there...

Bendis has some talent within a very limited range, but Quesada tried to leverage him into a superstar by putting Bendis on high-profile group titles that are beyond his comfort zone. Bendis needed a tough editor and a personal assistant to research continuity before he could handle a books like Avengers, but he winged and we have been getting crap for years. To make matters worse, Marvel has really been pushing Avengers hard for years, because they have much better film rights with the Avengers characters than they do with X-Men or Spider-man. So Bendis has been writing the core of at least half the major events at Marvel for the last decade, and Marvel has been pushing events so hard that it's difficult to read any of their comics without keeping track of the current event storyline. I'm more than willing to give the Waid Daredevil a shot, but otherwise Marvel doesn't even get to look at my money anymore.

Barnes, you will get a chance to catch up with Grant Morrison's prodigious output. He recently announced that he is going to stop writing superhero comics for the forseeable future. I suppose that means that his long-awaited Multiversity project (an exploration of various DC alternate realities) has been shelved, but it was hard to see how it was going to fit in with the DCnU mess anyway.

Morrison mentioned that he's stopping writing superhero comics AFTER Multiversity (and some Wonder Woman project, and after finishing Action Comics and Batman Inc). "Prodigious" ain't the half of it.

Yeah, so in other words...never.

The funny thing is that in past fits of comics reading, I've never really read that much Morrisson outside of Invisibles and a couple of other books here and there. Like I stupidly never read those Doom Patrol books, which are way up high on the top of the "best runs ever" list. I missed his JLA stuff in the 90s because I was more into the Gaiman/Vertigo/Hellboy sort of stuff, not the shiny foil cover superhero stuff.

But yeah...reading his current Batman run from the start is kind of revelatory...even just five books in, I get more of what was going on in Batman Incorporated and what his point is. I really, really like that the entire run is kind of informed by Ra's Al Ghul's (and Morrisson's) perception of Bruce Wayne as the "optimum man"...and how that introduces some interesting possibilities like the biological son. The interactions with Bruce and Damian are just brilliant. Damian is a psychopath, a trained assassin, but he has this dynastic sensibility that the Al Ghuls have drilled into him that he is the heir to the Batman name. And Bruce actually has this too, the interactions are very aristocratic so there's a certain blue-blood side to Bruce that doesn't get played up very much beyond the vague "billionaire playboy" angle. But it's _Batman_ blue blood.

I think Steve is right on the money in regard to Bendis. He's a showboater, from the "oh, look at me" dialogue to "hey, I'mma kill the Avengers!" He's apparently just had carte blanche at Marvel, and I think that was a mistake. I've looked at quite a few of their books from 2000-2010 and his name is on just about all of them in some capacity, or there's some tie-in event (GRRR) that loops back to his stuff. So annoying.

I highly recommend the cosmic stuff though, Steve...it's _fun_ Marvel, and since it's all second-stringers there's a looseness...I mean, how involved in Civil War, House of M, etc. can Star-Lord be? There are obligatory tie-ins (Secret Invasion in particular), but like all of Annihilation is self-contained in just a couple of cosmic books.

I remember when they really started doing that stuff in the 1980s, maybe during Fall of the Mutants...I remember seeing "Story continued in X-Factor #XXX!" and thinking "but I don't have a subscription to X-Factor!" Man, I kind of miss comic subscriptions...getting that brown paper wrapped, folded, and dinged up X-Men book in the mail...

I actually read most of Sandman in issues, yes, Season of Mists is great and I recall that being the best chapter of what I had read, at least. But you're right, definitely more of a horror/Swamp Thing/Hellblazer vibe in that first book.

Valkyria Chronicles...yes, you are absolutely right that it's very puzzly. But most SRPGs tend to be. It's HUGELY gamey. You start a mission, run your people out, and oops! There's a tank. OK, restart and put a couple of lancers on that flank.

Andy, if you look at the facts above and can't math out the incredibly high probability that people gang up on you because you're a ruthless dick, not because you own the games, you may want to consider getting your money back on that statistics/math Ph.D.

LMAO

Just to rag on Brian Michael Bendis a little more, I enjoyed this mini-"review" of his latest issue of "Spider-Men" (supplemented by a picture of a sequence of panels that reminded me even more succinctly why he's so awful):