Barnestorming #672- Starship Merchants in Review, Young Justice, Pet Shop Boys Hot

Pet Shop Boys has always been one of my favorites. I've always wanted to check them out live, but never had the opportunity. West End Girls is a great song. My favorites are Love Comes Quickly, Opportunities, King's Cross, and What Have I Done to Deserve This?

It's got the Barnes seal of approval, someone please buy my RUNAWAYS hardcovers! Hell, it's even got my seal of approval, just not enough to keep it now that I've moved into a smaller place. Sounds like you and I synch up on the "good stuff by writers we mostly dislike", like Bendis' Daredevil and Vaughan's Runaways. And that was the EXACT feeling I had reading Runaways; it wasn't just that I enjoyed it, but that it also seemed like the perfect comic to give an early teen. And yeah, I guess you had to be there for New Teen Titans and the Judas Project. I feel the exact same way about its contemporary rival, the Claremont/Byrne X-Men. Both are painfully dated and awkwardly written with wildly overrated art.

I can't handle the "lots of irons in lots of fires" approach you take to reading all those serials, though. It also kind of misleads you about lots of comics/runs that start strong and fizzle out (and you still haven't finished Doom Patrol, dammit!); for example, while I liked the Bendis Daredevil run, it's a LOT stronger in the first half than the last half. It's like he had all these ideas of how to push the character into really unusual territory and make lots of "no way could that just happen!" moments, but then didn't really satisfactorily clean up after himself. When a writer is getting a lot of mileage out of "how the hell are they going to resolve THIS??!?", it's a pretty bad flaw when they *don't* resolve it.

Morrison is also known for being bad at endings. His Doom Patrol ending and All-Star Superman ending are perfect, though.

Wow you must be old! You state that West End Girls was the first 45 you ever bought! Half the people that read your stuff won't even know what a 45 is/was!

For the record (ha see what I just did) the first 45 I bought for 99 cents at Caldor's was Heart of Glass by Blondie. So I guess that makes me even older than you, you relic.

I think Tooth and Nail Factions is his prettiest game, by far, and I love that there's different teams to choose from rather than simply a big ass pile of cards that you draft from.

Fuck Sage Games. Their customer service is TERRIBLE. I still can't play T&E over multiplayer, which is the only reason I bought it. Fuck them with a white hot metal dildo. In the arse, no less.

I've been playing Food Fight iOS, which is ridiculously stupid and also tremendously fun. Got it for 99 cents, hooked a bunch of friends up with it...as Steve Avery would say, "Muy bueno"

I'm sorry to say that my first 45 was Disco Duck. I was young.

West End Girls is a song that I've always loved. Never been to London, but in my imagination, this song perfectly captures the place. A friend of mine was a huge New Order and Pet Shop Boys fan, and finally started his own synth pop retro 80s band about ten years ago, called Signal & Report. They put out an album on a local label, but that was around the time when people were already illegally downloading music like crazy. Tough time to try to break into the music business. Fortunately, he never quit his day job in IT support.

Although I despise what Bendis has done with the Avengers, I did randomly pick up an issue from his Daredevil run. It was the trial of the White Tiger, and it was the most realistic depiction of a courtroom scene that I've ever seen in fiction, based on my two experiences with jury duty. I meant to try more of that run, but then I started to hear that Bendis had clumsy endings, falling back on deus ex machina too often. It's too bad, Bendis could have been legendary if he had been paired up with a great old school editor like Julie Schwartz or Len Wein. I bet in ten years, fans will look back on him the way they look back on Rob Liefeld now... WTF was I thinking? Based on his Avengers work, I sometimes wonder if Bendis has a special key board he swaps in, with keys marked with "uh", "huh", and "you know."

The Judas Contract was pretty good back in the day. I never warmed up to a certain team member who seemed like an over-the-top version of the stereotypical team jerk character. But many Titans fans fell hook, line, and sinker, so when that character turned out to be a villain, it was shocking. My favorite issue was the opening with Terminator ruthlessly ambushing each Titan alone. The origin of the Terminator was better than expected, but Perez crapped out one of his all-time worst costumes in that storyline. When I re-read the Wolfman/Perez Titans run a couple of years ago, I found the writing to be just a touch above average, and apparently I will always be a Perez fan, despite a few really bad costumes.

OK Michael, how would you compare Starship Merchants to Merchants of Venus ? The one thing that kind of throws me off is the board for SM - it doesn't look to have the exploration aspect many people, including myself, find appealing about MoV. While I am sure the SM rule set is more accessible than the MoV one, which came out during the Greenwood era of dense poorly laid out rules, assuming FFG does a decent job cleaning up the MoV rules ( and ditching the combat rules, which almost nobody uses )

Get it On by TRex. That's got to trump you kids...

Your lack of interest in Darksiders II puzzles me...

OK Michael, how would you compare Starship Merchants to Merchants of Venus ? The one thing that kind of throws me off is the board for SM - it doesn't look to have the exploration aspect many people, including myself, find appealing about MoV. While I am sure the SM rule set is more accessible than the MoV one, which came out during the Greenwood era of dense poorly laid out rules, assuming FFG does a decent job cleaning up the MoV rules ( and ditching the combat rules, which almost nobody uses )

Great question. There are definitely some similarities at a very, very high level in terms of the theme (making money, investing to make money better, and working out profitable routes) but the key word in the comparison is abstraction.

SM's board obviously isn't a starmap, it's a depiction of process. One of the neat things about the game is that this four-stage process would likely have been four phases of a single turn in past designs. But it's fragmented such that you can either go to the next phase and do one of those actions or you can hang out and keep doing the same action in the phase you're in. But the trade-off is you don't get that visual sense of geography, and proximities to destinations are often uncertain because you may have to burn through a bunch of energy, sweeping the destination display, to get to where you want to go- but time is money in this game, very much so.

There are no cultures, and there's not that sense of discovering who lives where and then working out your routes. Again, it's abstracted. The cards give you a feel for distances and depending on what mines you've claimed, are refining, and the size of your cargo holds what your "route" actually is may vary. Instead of picking up passengers and loading them into your holds, there are destinations that give you money for empty holds...which I imagine as carrying fares, refugees, prisoners, and so forth.

Exploring is a matter spending energy in the Belt and drawing a mine tile from a bag. You can keep it or put it into a local space area. If you don't do anything with it, at the end of the round it goes into a common pool and can be claimed without penalty by anyone. You might get some equipment or a pilot that helps you explore better, to reduce the time it takes to get the higher value mines.

Upgrading ships feels very similar, but in SM you can run multiple ships. Your piece on the board is- yes, again- an abstraction. So when you get to the Belt, you might be making decisions for three different vessels and weighing your energy expenditures to get things done.

It's a much tighter game than MoV, but it is less vivid and variable. One thing that is HUGELY different is that SM has just a small handful of components in contrast to MoV's piles and piles of counters.

I'd be willing to wager that the designers had MoV in mind, along with 18xx games, when they were coming up with the concept.

Your lack of interest in Darksiders II puzzles me...

Eh, if Gamefly sends it, I'll play it. I liked the first one a lot, I'm just not really up for that kind of game right now.

Thanks for the MoV comparison Michael - I daresay you should have put something along those lines in the review, as I imagine a lot of people probably wonder about the same thing, MoV reprint on the horizon or not. From the sounds of it, I'd prefer to stick with MoV - I don't like abstraction like the kind you described.

MoV is supposed to be out in the next couple months; I'll be curious to see what they did with it. If nothing else, they hopefully slimmed down the rulebook. While it's not that hard a game, the rules are longer and more complicated than they need to be for the amount of gameplay there is.

WRT Starship Merchants: Tom Lehmann is a huge Merchant of Venus fan, so the connection is not surprising.

I gotta say, I was remembering parts of the Bendis Daredevil run this morning, and I kinda regret selling it. I think I partly sold it because I was so repelled by Bendis' other comics that I thought it couldn't possibly be as good as I remembered. I did remember, though, that near the end of the run, Bendis embarks on a "Decalogue" series, with each issue covering a different one of the Ten Commandments...and then he got bored and quit after 5 or 6 commandments! Which, while showing mind-bogglingly poor planning, wasn't such a bad thing, as that storyline is easily the weakest part of the whole run.

Since Zev's the one I sold those Daredevils too, I'd love to hear him chime in on what he thought of them.

I agree on the Bendis' Daredevil run, although I read them as they were published. All this talk has got me itching to reread them. I will say I don't hate Bendis as some of you do. I think this stems mostly from the fact that after he left Daredevil, I've only continued to read Powers. I doubt I would like his big event Marvel stuff, but let's be honest, no one could salvage those terrible stories. Bendis is and always will be a passable genre writer, superheroes are not his genre.

Edit: I just finished Jeff Lemire's Essex County. Highly enjoyable and available on Comixology. Check it out.

I've been wondering about some of Jeff Lemire's other stuff after his current Animal Man stuff, which is definitely in the whole Grant Morrison psychedelic mode. I'll have to take a look.

Speaking of...I just started Flex Mentallo...WOW.

That's really what it comes down to with Bendis. He's not a good- or even really capable- writer of mainstream, blockbuster superheroes. He works best at a street level, doing crime-oriented material. This means Daredevil is perfect for him. Avengers, not so much.

When, precisely, was the moment that this changed into a comic book site?

I blame that bastard Cloudy.

:)

There was a memo passed around- "comics > board games".

And since I am the Chief Tastemaker in Residence...Cloudy just fell in line.

But seriously, more people have read $3 comic books than played $70 board games so it's easier to discuss.

"Just started Flex Mentallo"? It's four issues long, dude, just finish the damn thing! Too many irons in too many fires if that's not a one-sitting book (wouldn't be a bad idea to have read to the point in Doom Patrol where he's introduced, either).

I disagree with both of you on Bendis; I think he actually does BETTER with superheroes than with crime. I think Jinx is crap, Goldfish is crap, Sam & Twitch is crap, Fortune & Glory (his autobio comic) is GODawful, don't like Powers either. They're all just super-padded and give in to his worst excesses of dialogue, with zero redeeming qualities that I can think of (character? plot?). When he started on Daredevil, I think the fact that it was a mainstream superhero forced him to correctly tone his tics down a bit; the same happened with Ultimate Spider-Man (oh yeah, ALIAS is also decent). With Daredevil he was also doing interesting character work for the first time, perhaps because he had the groundwork laid for him by having the character already established by hundreds of comics. hen, as he became more and more popular and was given more creative freedom again, he cut loose again and became more awful than ever.

I.E. dude seriously needs an editor.

I'm 43 and don't know what a 45 is.

I read all of Flex today, Stout...WOW. That's about all I have to say about it right now. I may read it again tonight.

Best line- "Only a bitter, adolescent boy would confuse realism with pessimism."

Don't feel bad...up until 2 weeks ago Repoman didn't either.

There's at least as much money in video game collecting as there is in old board games.

Most hardware depreciates in value over time, though some consoles remain bullshittily expensive, like the TurboGrafx-16, and of all things, the fucking Atari Jaguar. Hell, I just saw an NES in the original box go for $200 eBay. Not even one of the older runs, either; it was the set with the orange gun and the Mario/Duck Hunt cart that everyone had, and there weren't extra games with it or anything. Now yes, if this is a console that you paid $200 for brand new in 1987, you're losing money. Then again, if it's something you picked up for $50 at a thrift store or garage sale last week, you just made a nice little chunk of change. Then, of course, there's always weird peripheral hardware like the Nintendo robot that does quite well in the collector's market. Good luck getting a pair of 3D glasses for the Sega Master System without seriously lightening your billfold. On the other hand, I'm seeing that crazy Steel Battalion Xbox controller going for a quarter of the original retail price, so you never know.

It's actually pretty easy to turn around old games for profit as well if you know what you're looking for, and no, you don't need to score one of those tournament cartridges to do it. Most resale shops aren't going to bother looking up the value of every single old video game that comes in, so they just put a flat price on everything. Granted, you're overpaying if you chuck $5 down for a bare 2600 Pac-Man cart, but if you find a copy of, say, Ducktales 2 for the NES, you'll turn your Lincoln into a Benjamin fairly easily. There are collectors for these old systems, and anything that came out toward the end of a console's lifespan is a pretty good bet. For one thing, fewer of them get made, and for another, the games tend to be pretty good since they came out at a time when developers really knew what they were doing with the hardware. Then, there's stuff like Ico for the PS2, which was critically acclaimed but largely ignored when it came out. I got mine for $5 out of the bargain bin, but then the game really became the darling of the games-as-art crowd, and even Gamestop was selling used copies for $40. Not a huge profit, of course, and what with the HD version out there, I couldn't make that now. Still, if I'd sold mine at the time, I'd have made $35. That's half of my electric bill for this month; not bad for a game I paid next to nothing to play in the first place.

I'm just talking about mainstream consoles that sold millions and millions of units here. If you want to see people shelling out real money consistently for old video games, look at the old "home computers." I mean pre-IBM PC format stuff. Atari, Commodore, Apple. This is more of a European thing, but even in the US, these systems have a devoted following and collector community to this day, and they are fucking rabid. Now, as long as you take care of them, cartridges and CDs basically last forever. Floppy disks? Not so much. More than that, the packaging for old computer games wasn't standardized like with consoles, so the boxes either had stuff that was necessary to play the game, or they were just plain cooler. Either way, that's the kind of original packaging that people really want. Ultima IV on NES? Not worth jack. Ultima IV for the Apple II with the box, the cloth map, and the nice, full-sized manual? Jackpot. H.E.R.O. for the Atari 2600? $.50. H.E.R.O. for the Atari 800? $50. You're going to have an easier time getting what this stuff is worth, too, because aside from the fact that the hardware and software both shit the bed more often than their console counterparts, they just don't come up on the market that often. If you see a copy of the original version of M.U.L.E., even if it's at a stupid high asking price, you're going to need to jump on it if you really want that game. There's just not going to be another auction for the same thing next week.

I mean, you're right, most old video games are essentially worthless. So are most comic books, vinyl LPs, action figures, and antiques. I don't care what you're collecting; the odds of you scoring a million dollar payday off of old crap is practically zero. There is a market for this stuff, though, and there is money to be made if you're savvy, and if you're willing to get your eyeballs everywhere they need to be.

If this were not the case, I'd have the most bitchin' old-school retro game collection ever.