A Few Other Comics

Bitch Planet - A modern-day Handmaiden’s Tale (with a heaping helping of Orange is the New Black) in which “non-compliant” women are shipped off to a penal colony, and order is maintained on Earth by a “Council of Fathers” and mandatory viewing of a rugby-like sport called Megaton. It’s clever, but I think it may lay things on a bit thick. (I did love that there was a Megaton team called the “Florida Men”, though.)

(There’s also the issue of the gaping plot-hole: If you’re shipping off women to a prison planet for basically any old reason, including rich old guys trading-up their wives, there better be an unmentioned matching prison planet for men, or no amount of sci-fi rugby is going to keep your society harmonious.)

Descender - Everything was hunky-dory in the universe until giant world-destroying robots called Harvesters showed up and nobody knew why. Now a little boy android named Tim-21 might be the key to figuring out where the Harvesters came from and why. It’s an interesting concept, but I don’t trust Lemire’s ability to play it out.

Virgil - A gay cop in Kingston, Jamaica is outed and his boyfriend is seemingly killed. He goes on a roaring rampage of revenge. Bloody violence ensues. That’s pretty much it.

A Game of Thrones - I had thought the Humble Bundle contained the first four volumes of this—turns out that no, it has the first four issues, which means they barely get through two episodes of the TV series worth of material. I have no idea if it’s still going (these were published in 2011), but it’s entirely possible they won’t catch up with Martin before the next book comes out. (They seem a bit more thorough with scenes and characters and a bit lighter on the sexposition than the show, but if that’s what you want, why not just read the novels?)

Legends of Red Sonja - What it says on the tin told mostly in flashbacks, with the framing story of the Grey Riders trying to hunt down Red Sonja. A fun little collection that’s just long enough—Sonja is unbeatable, which would make this boring as an ongoing, but works for a series of “legends”.

The Twilight Zone Volume 2: The Way In - J. M. Straczynski apparently did an ongoing series of Twilight Zone stories, though this volume stands alone as a single story of a women gifted with strange visions of the future, and how she tries to deal with them. It’s basically a decent episode of the TV show, done in comic form.

Patricia Briggs’ Mercy Thompson: Hopcross Jilly - I’m not familiar with the novels this is a spinoff from, but Mercy is apparently a werecoyote; she and her werewolf friends fight crime. You can pick up enough of the worldbuilding to have everything make sense, though I suspect I missed things a fan of the novels would have caught. The ending of this was a little too pat—the pacing is a bit rocky given the length. Also, it barely counts as a mystery story when the audience can figure out what’s going on in the first dozen pages.

The Last Temptation A mysterious man who could easily be related to the Endless (or is, perhaps, Alice Cooper) entices a young boy with a free ticket to a grand guignol show: The Theatre of the Real. As goes the classic temptation, he shows the boy the sins of the world and invites him to forgo it and stay on as part of the theater. It’s predictable and not Gaiman’s best work, but it’s decently done.

Mini-Reviews of Games I May or May Not Revisit

The Legend of Zelda: Triforce Heroes - While this is a ¾-view Zelda game with my preferred control style, I'll admit, this wasn't quite what I expected. It's a more puzzle-style version of Children of Mana, with distinct areas that you need to make three heroes work together to get across. It's clearly really intended for group play via local or wireless multiplayer, but the single-player setup with three heroes you can switch between works reasonably for puzzles. It's a little irritating for combat. I’d really like to try the multiplayer version, but that’s going to wait until two of my friends buy the game and I can be in the same place as them long enough to play it. (Also, the plot is usually ridiculous—an evil witch has cursed the princess to be unfashionable, so you must venture to the “drab lands” to undo the curse.)

Final Fantasy 2 (Final Fantasy Portal Edition) - I think I’ve made it known in the past that FF2 is probably my least favorite game in the series. Free copies of it were given out with the FF Portal app, so I gave it a few minutes’ try. It’s very pretty (I think the graphics are cribbed from the PSP version), but the control scheme is the same “floating cross-key” nonsense that the FF Portal version of FF1 used and made it unpleasant to play. Also, while it appears that the difficulty level may have been reduced (I got Firion to gain three sword levels in five battles) that’s not enough to be worth my time. I mean, if you genuinely like FF2, the price was right, but between the game itself and the control scheme, I’m not sticking around.

Dungeons & Dragons Tactics - This is a classic example of a game that should work better than it does. It’s based on the 3.5 rules, which are pretty good “mechanically” for a tactical setup. The problem is, the interface is slow and clunky, and it follows the D&D rules to the letter—but the D&D rules are made for tabletop gaming with a DM’s oversight. The second scenario involves trying to chase down a fleeing enemy, which is made exceptionally difficult because the DM can’t handwave turns or make game-simplifying decisions. The CPU-controlled enemies move their speed every turn, and you need to make double moves while fighting off other enemies to catch them, and the entire experience becomes a slog. And if your D&D experience is a slog, you’re doing D&D wrong.