Category Archives: reviews

D&D Next Early Thoughts – It Works But It’s Boring

Posted on August 3, 2013 | 9 comments

DD-Next-Image-660x499As I’m sure you know, the fifth edition of Dungeons & Dragons, branded as “D&D Next,”  is in open playtest. I brought you stunning coverage of the 4e debacle and resulting edition wars, so surely I need to chime in here! Here’s my take on Next.

I liked and have played Basic, 1e, 2e, 3e, 3.5e, and Pathfinder in their turn. I hate 4e and eschew it. I said earlier what I’d like to see in 5e – moving back to a really stripped down core more at 2e levels of complexity. And it sounds like they’re doing that.

The D&D Next rules seem fine to me. I welcome a more light approach and removing a lot of the minmax frenzy from 3e+.  When 3e came out I was really excited and migrated from 2e but now in retrospect the rule bloat, christmas tree syndrome, legalism, and min-maxing made me sad and I like what I see in the D&D Next rules per se. Not everything is how I’d design it, but it’s well within the scope of “rules that will work for D&D.”

However, they are committing the cardinal sin of game design – it’s boring.

I can barely make myself read through the playtest packets. I think they’ve miscalculated badly in having no art, no layout, no fluff in there. I’m sure they’d say that’s by design (ignoring how much of a positive impact that had with the Pathfinder playtest – to this day Paizo makes sure to put all playtest docs through layout). But even without that, the text just has no voice.  It could – Savage Worlds, for example, presents a ruleset about the same size with some flair and savoir faire – but reading the Next playtests is like reading a really boring car manual.

Maybe that’ll all be in there when it launches – maybe.  Maybe Aleena the cleric gets whacked by Bargle again and gives us a hate hard-on for him and pulls us into the action. Maybe the art will be inspired and not just aping Pathfinder or using the current “I airbrushed this on my van” art style they seem to like. But even just the writing style does not say “Adventure!” to me, it says “Technical manual!”

Part of a playtest should be to whip up enthusiasm, but like many of my friends, I downloaded and eagerly read packet #1, I downloaded and skimmed , I downloaded and didn’t bother opening #3, I didn’t bother downloading #4 at all… It’s not the rules’ fault, and I’m sure if I playtested it my group of good roleplayers would have a grand old time. We know how to add “zazz” on top of any system you put before us.  But if I gave it to some 12 year olds who haven’t played an RPG before? Are they going to bother to finish reading even the reasonable and short page count? Will their imaginations be fired up by what they read – because mine’s not being?

Guys – lean doesn’t have to mean boring.  Someone at WotC, please force the Next design team into a room at gunpoint and tell them they can’t come out until they can tell you the most badass D&D story ever, and then make them write the rules around that story.

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Geek Movie Review: Iron Man 3

Posted on June 9, 2013 | Leave a comment

Iron Man 3 was an impressive movie, in my opinion possibly the best of the Iron Man franchise – and that’s high praise, because Iron Man is the best of Marvel superhero franchise films going. This picture sums up the movie.iron-man-3-tony-stark-robert-downey-jrAs we begin, Tony Stark is suffering from some kind of anxiety disorder stemming from the events of the Avengers movie.  Aliens, gods, destruction of Manhattan – he has retreated to his home and holed up, neurotically building Iron Man suit after Iron Man suit and having panic attacks. It’s a good riff off the Tony Stark of the comics, who would have drunk himself into a coma – I guess they decided that wasn’t good for the kids or something but this works.

A terrorist called The Mandarin, who looks all bristly and ringed and scary, not green and quite so Yellow Peril-y as in the comics but threatening as he releases his oddly paternal press releases upon commission of various bombings and other acts of terror.

As you already know from the trailers, Stark tries to stay out of that for a while, then gives the Mandarin some stick, and gets his house blown up good with him and Pepper in it.  And thus it begins!

The movie is a lot more about Stark’s journey than about Iron Man, so it gets to leverage Robert Downy Jr’s acting skills heavily – one of its key advantages over the otherwise puddin’-faced  Marvel lead actors (Captain America and Thor, I’m looking at you). There’s a great set of scenes where Stark is interacting with a precocious 10 year old kid, and it’s hilarious because he doesn’t know how to talk to a kid so he just treats him like Tony treats an adult. Like after he shares his little moppet story about his dad leaving, Stark replies, “Dads leave. No need to be such a pussy about it.”

I was wondering how they were going to avoid “jumping the shark” with the introduction of the Mandarin. Sure, the overall Marvel universe has every kind of weirdness in it, but they rightly try to usually keep it down to 1 or 2 even in a given comic, and Joe Sixpack is going to bail out if the Marvel movies ladle it on too thick.  I’m not going to spoil the big plot twist here, but I absolutely love and approve of what they did with the Mandarin in this movie. I will note that Ben Kingsley is unexpectedly hilarious.

They kept Tony out of the armor for a lot of the time, and that worked very well. There was one armor-holocaust fight scene, and that was nice, but they made a much stronger movie by not just “amping it up” for a third movie.  In fact, I’m even more impressed as I wonder how they got that to fly at all.  I can imagine the discussion with the Hollywood exec.  “Iron Man 3!  So we’re going to have like 4 story tall Iron Man right? And bigger explosions, we upped the effects budget by 250%!” “Uh, no, we were thinking Tony would be out of the armor and dealing with psychological stuff and talking to kids and stuff.”  The level of blackmail and extortion that must be required to make an actual good movie as the third in a blockbuster series is dizzying.

Anyway, we get to see A.I.M. in action (no MODOK, sadly) and their creation of Extremis, a bio-nanotech superjuice that isn’t all that unrealistic really. They don’t wear the cute little yellow suits though.

AIMI’m not saying any of the main actors should get an Oscar, but for a blockbuster/superhero movie, Iron Man 3 is remarkably well written, directed, and acted.  I give it 4 out of 5 M.O.D.O.K.s.

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Geek Book Review: Liar’s Blade

Posted on June 8, 2013 | Leave a comment

liarsbladeI just finished reading Liar’s Blade, one of a batch of Pathfinder Tales novels I got recently. This is a line of novels set in Pathfinder’s Golarion game world.

This is a well-crafted novel, not standard tie-in fiction fare by any means. It’s a story of a scoundrel named Rodrick and his magical intelligent sword, Hrym. They get hired by some weirdos to go across the River Kingdoms and Brevoy to get some mystery artifact.

The writing is good, with less of the tortured translation of game rules into prose than is customary (I hate that…). The banter between Rodrick and Hrym (and to a lesser extent with their other traveling companions) is really fun.  The two people who hire them, the dour priest Obed and his freaky companion Zaqen, remind me of the tag-along bad guys from the Curse of the Crimson Throne adventure path, who we affectionately referred to as “The Boner Squad” – Shadow Count Sial was the dour one, and then if you kinda combine the perky Laori Vaus and the chain devil into one person, you get a bit of the same dynamic.

Rodrick as a rogue was a well-realized character.  He wasn’t uber competent or a hopeless schlep, and he was avaricious but not vicious, scheming but occasionally letting his emotions get away with him. And Hrym is pretty funny, he’s a sword made of living ice who can’t really remember all of his millennia of life; he’s fond of sleeping on piles of gold coins and of Rodrick’s “twisty little mind.”  In the afterword Pratt credits Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser as the inspiration for his two characters’ adventures, and the main characters’ bromance in Liar’s Blade definitely puts one in mind of Leiber’s characters.

The travelogue through the River Kingdoms and Brevoy is also nice. The fight scenes aren’t anything to write home about, but since Hrym is super-magical many of the fights end quickly with a blast of ice magic, so we don’t have to dwell on many of them.

I’ve read a half dozen of these novels and this is definitely the best-written. Liar’s Blade is very entertaining, I give it 8 goblins out of 10!

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Geek Book Review: The Big Book Of Adventure Stories

Posted on February 13, 2013 | 2 comments

Big Book of Adventure StoriesI was in the library and saw the lurid cover to the left and figured what the heck, there might be something in there good for a laugh.

What I found was awesome.  It’s like a Penguin book of pulp classics, if Penguin wasn’t so stuck up that they didn’t have such a thing!  This massive 874-page tome contains everything from stories I read in high school English like “The Most Dangerous Game,” “The Soul of a Regiment,” “To Serve Man,” Jack London’s “The White Silence,” and Rudyard Kipling’s “The Man Who Would Be King” to representative stories from just about every pulp property you’ve ever heard of, from Tarzan to Zorro to Sheena to Buck Rogers! It’s a complete canon of pulp adventure fiction.

I’m not well versed in the pulps and so had never read the original stories for many of these – some yes, but others I know know through movies or general cultural osmosis. You have in one volume Lady Fulvia, Conan the Barbarian, Khlit the Cossack, Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, Peter the Brazen, The Spider, the Scarlet Pimpernel, Wandering Smith, Singapore Sammy, Beau Geste, Zorro, Hopalong Cassidy, Buck Rogers, The Cisco Kid, Sheena Queen of the Jungle, King Kong, Bulldog Drummond, Aubrey St. John Major, Allan Quartermain, and more! Plus stories by Clark Ashton Smith, H.G. Wells, O’Henry, Philip Jose Farmer, Sax Rohmer, and various other luminaries. Great, great stuff.

This is an awesome collection.  I may have to find and buy a copy; I already have recommended it to friends who have bought copies. I owe my library so much in fines now, it took me a good while to churn through this – it’s big and in small print.

It’s funny, the presentation is really over-lurid – the cover above, and it’s broken up into internal sections like “Future Shock,” “Yellow Peril,” and “Megalomania Rules”… I mean, perhaps it’s against their spirit to take pulps too seriously and present it like it’s a Penguin book but I really didn’t expect the sheer amount of truly great writing this book was going to contain from its cover. Otto Penzler did a great job with this too – it’s not all the “most famous” of each author’s works; there’s a generous selection of “never published before” in here too.  I am going to have to check out more anthologies this guy’s edited because he knows what the hell he’s doing for sure.

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Geek Movie Review: Django Unchained

Posted on January 5, 2013 | Leave a comment

Django_Unchained_PosterOn  my second attempt, I finally got to see Django Unchained at the lovely Alamo Drafthouse here in Austin.

I had mixed expectations.  In general, Quentin Tarantino has begun to wear on me. He’s big enough that his movies have become self-indulgent to the extreme. Oh, let’s wink a lot about that cameo, let’s drag out that murder or rape or torture scene about 5 minutes past where it needs to be, let’s toss up some labels on the screen with a whip-crack to be cute… Excess in place of storytelling. But Django was getting really high reviews (sitting at 88% on Rotten Tomatoes right now).

And I was pleasantly surprised.  Tarantino reins in his excess while still doing a bloody homage to westerns, and even delivers a coherent plot while doing so!

Jamie Foxx is Django, a slave in the antebellum South, who is freed by bounty hunter Dr. King Schultz (Christoph Waltz) in order to ID some criminals who need to be brought back dead-not-alive. Django decides he likes killing white folks and becomes a bounty hunter, and his new buddy helps him on his quest to find and free his wife, still a slave somewhere in the South. Basically “Ray” and “the Jew Hunter” in a spaghetti western quest to kill that kid from Titanic and Shane from The Shield.

It works! Oh sure, there’s screaming and blood. The brutality of slavery is shown. There’s cameos, including one of Tarantino.  You know, I saw his extended cameo in Sukiyaki Western Django, which is one of the worst 5 minutes of film you’ll ever sit through in  your life. He must have gotten the need to go totally hamhandedly over the top out in that, luckily, and he treats all of these elements as part of a coherent whole in Django. Worst cameo: Jonah Hill, given too much camera time for no good reason.  Well, maybe tied with the inexplicable “Zoe Bell with face always covered looking at a picture before dying unceremoniously.” Best cameo: Sex Machine! (You know, Tom Savini from From Dusk Till Dawn.  The guy with the crotch gun? Yeah, him.)

The story unfolds logically and at a realistic pace, without dwelling overlong on individual scenes – at the end of the movie, when we realized it had been nearly three hours, we were surprised because it had kept up a good but sustainable pace throughout.

Jamie Foxx puts in a good performance in a part that could easily have degenerated to “incoherent rage all the time” or “I’m too cool for all this.” The best performance is from Waltz, who we all know as the Jew Hunter from Inglorious Basterds. It’s a somewhat similar character, but he tones down the unctiousness from Basterds a lot here and is engaging without being distracting. Leonardo DiCaprio does a good job with the plantation owner.  The only weak performance is from Kerry Washington, Django’s wife Broomhilda. She didn’t have a lot to work with – maybe ten lines not counting screaming, sobbing, and other fun abused-woman noises – but was more a MacGuffin than a character.  And I always love it when Walton Goggins gets work, I’m always like “Oh look it’s Shane from The Shield, that makes me happy!” He even gets called a hillbilly.

The action was engaging, with one long shootout/bloodfest that was done in a pleasingly realistic way, and without being belabored into a half hour thing. There’s deaths by derringer, by pistol, by rifle, by dynamite…

The plot is good if not all that nuanced.  Some reviewers seem to think that the plot here is a brilliant dissection of white/black race relations or something; that must be their white guilt talking because it’s not more nuanced than Basterd’s “The Jews get to kill Nazis and Hitler woot!” It’s “ex slave gets to kill white slaveholders and an Uncle Tom woot!” Which is fun and viscerally satisfying, but not some complex thoughtful surprising statement or anything.

Most of Tarantino’s homage work seems to be “let’s take the most lurid elements of the source genre and TURN THEM UP TO ELEVEN and beat them to death in scenes twice as long as they need to be” and ends up generating something more parody than emulation. But in Django Unchained, he takes it to 8 instead of 11 and ends up turning in something that is actually honest-to-God like a good quality spaghetti western. Top flight acting and a good plot turn this into a solid and entertaining movie.

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Geek Book Review: This Book Is Full Of Spiders: Seriously Dude, Don’t Touch It

Posted on January 2, 2013 | 4 comments

spidersI haven’t read John Dies At The End, but I got to see Don Coscarelli (director of Phantasm) talk about it and show a trailer for the film two years ago at Fantastic Fest.  Well, the sequel is out just in time for John’s film debut this January!

This Book Is Full Of Spiders: Seriously Dude, Don’t Touch It is the second book from Cracked.com columnist David Wong (a pseudonym for Jason Pargin). It follows lovable (?) slackers John and Dave (and Dave’s girlfriend Amy) and all the crazy stuff that happens to them when orifice-invading, zombie-making spiders from space attack (think Stephen King’s Dreamcatchers).  It starts out weird even without that, as thanks to taking hits of “soy sauce,” a drug from the first book, the guys are in tune with the land of the supernatural and bizarre, which their home town has in spades – freaky occurrences, mystical portals to porta-johns, etc.

There’s a lot I could say that would ruin some of the twists of the book with spoilers – suffice it to say that this is not a straightforward zombie story by any means, and the sophomoric (though funny!) humor of the book lies alongside a very intelligent look at zombie hysteria and the dangers of human nature in a way more subtle than the usual “the asshole in the cellar is going to let the zombies in to get us eventually” style.

The book is funny, but about halfway through it takes a turn from the zany to the pretty dark, and carries in some honest-to-God psychological horror and depression stuff for the last half. Surprising, but good.  I had just read a collection of modern zombie stories that tried to be edgy (“21st century dead”) and frankly this book beat all those stories twenty ways to Sunday.  I strongly recommend it, and am gnashing my teeth waiting for John Dies At The End to come to theaters January 25th! It’s actually available to stream from several outlets now, but I still like the big screen better.

They even have a trailer for the book (odd, but…):

Bonus trailer for John Dies At The End:

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Geek Movie Review: Jack Reacher

Posted on January 1, 2013 | 1 comment

Welcome to the first Geek Movie Review!  Each year I have done a spate of movie reviews tied into Fantastic Fest, the super cool Austin genre film festival, but I’m going to expand that into my unsolicited opinions on other movies too.

I was planning to see Django Unchained tonight, which has a Rotten Tomatoes score so high it’s hard to believe it, given Quentin Tarantino’s long slow slide into self-indulgence. But it was sold out, so instead a friend and I saw Jack Reacher. My parents had seen it and enjoyed it, which isn’t necessarily a recommendation, but I wasn’t going to go see Les Mis with another guy, so…

Jack ReacherJack Reacher is serviceable, with some decent action scenes.  Your parents will enjoy it; it’s like an episode of NCIS with a larger budget. I wish my first Geek Movie Review had a more stirring tagline to it, but I call them like I see them.

Tom Cruise plays Jack Reacher, a former US Army MP investigator now drifting around America playing a one-man A-Team. A sniper decides to perforate five people outside PNC Park in Pittsburgh. The local cops snatch up the obvious perpetrator based on a wealth of forensic information, and right before he is cornholed into a coma by the rest of the prison population he will only tell the cops “Get Jack Reacher.”

pikeNeedless to say, Jack shows up as if magically summoned, and wanders about like Colombo meets Jason Bourne to crack the case. Cruise does a decent job with the role, though sometimes he seems a little to smiley and upbeat for a role that might be better played down a bit more. He works with a juggy if not entirely convincing female defense attorney played by Rosamund Pike. She seems a bit lost in this movie, with “what am I supposed to be feeling here” written on her face in many scenes. “I’m being used as a human shield… Am I… Miffed? Mildly afraid? Slightly defiant? Not sure, I’ll just stare blankly.”

I don’t want to sound too negative, there’s some good bits in there – Robert Duvall as the gun range owner is great. Alexia Fast as the Pennsylvania Strumpet is fun… (What, IMDB tells me she’s the little girl from Fido?!?  No way!  OK, now I feel strangely conflicted about ogling her in her going-out-to-get-a-baby-daddy outfit.) And Cruise as Reacher has some pretty good lines; I like the scene where he escapes from a cop chase into a bunch of bystanders and they help hide him as a reflex.  Yeah, that’s Pennsylvania for you, my grandparents lived there for many years and the country’s nice but the cities are pretty rough. And the bad guy is sure freaky as heck; Warner Herzog does a turn as anything but your usual guy behind the convoluted organized crime scheme; heck he’s even a bit too lurid to be a Bond villain.

The movie is based on a series of novels by Lee Child. There’s a couple lines, and the end scene, that make a half-hearted attempt to set up Jack as a super badass and jonesing for a sequel; that’s clearly not going to happen. They try to talk like he’s Mack Bolan: The Executioner but the PG-13 execution and smilin’ Cruise means that it really doesn’t come off that way.

I enjoyed Jack Reacher enough that I certainly don’t regret going, it was fine for an evening’s entertainment.  Your parents, though, will love it.

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Ten Year Old Girls Review Rise of the Runelords Miniatures

Posted on August 25, 2012 | 4 comments

I had my new minis out from yesterday’s post-purchase initial review of the new Wizkids Pathfinder Battles Rise of the Runelords minis. (My that’s a long name.)  Go there to see the pictures for context. My daughter and one of her little friends saw them and decided to give me their opinions on them.  It was hilarious. Here’s as much as I could capture from stream of consciousness 10 year old girlspeak…

Storm Giantess: “She looks like she’s about to do something to me.”
“Cut you into pieces?”
“Yeah.”

Ogre Brute: “Looks like trollface meme guy.” <brief interruption where they tell me I’m so uncool and not up with the hip new things and we have to Google trollface. He does.>

Mash-fell-knocker (their pronunciation of Malfeshnekor):  <in a high voice> “Who’s a good doggie, who’s a good doggie, who’s a good doggie?” <in a harsh voice> “I kill you!”
“He looks like a monkey with elf ears.”
“He looks like a mix between a bat, a dog, and the ‘My precious’ guy from Lord of the Rings.”

Lucretia: “Her hair and eyes look evil.  She’s kinda bald but pretty. She must be the queen of something.”
<imitating Lucretia>  “You must obey me or be cut into pieces!”

Lyrie Akenja: “For Pete’s sake woman, put on a shirt!”
“Put on a shirt!  Put on a shirt!  Put on a shirt!” <chanting together>
“She has a wand, what is this, Harry Potter?”
“Oh look she has a kitty!”
<a long discussion on the pros and cons of kitties ensues>

Ogrekin: “Looks like Invader Zim with a muscly body and something on his head.”
“Looks like a bodybuilder with a messed up face.”
“Yeah, his face is jacked up.”
“Is that a baby rattle he has?”
<i do have to admit the ogrekin’s weapon is underwhelming, needs more meat on it>

Faceless Stalker:  “It looks like a beast that paints itself.”
“Put on some clothes!”
“His weapon looks like a spoon.”
<reading the base> “6 of 65!  Wow!  Good job for nothin’, guy!”
<this is a pretty weak mini, I agree with the girls>

Wraith: “Tornado man!”
“He kinda reminds me of the Statue of Liberty!”
“I know!”
“He’s not the Statue of Liberty, he’s the Statue of Liberty’s torch.”
“Yeah.”

Goblin Commando on Goblin Dog: “Oh look it’s a gremlin!  It’s a gremlin riding a puppy.”
“He looks like the guy from that book… Origami Yoda!” <I feel pain and regret that apparently kids nowadays don’t know Yoda except via derivative media.>
“He looks like the gremlins from that movie where the girl’s little brother gets taken and she has to marry someone and they attack her face!”
<a long Q&A ensues where I try to figure out what movie she’s talking about>
“Yeah, Labyrinth!”
“I’m bored, can we go play Littlest Pet Shops now?”

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Pathfinder Rise of the Runelords Minis, I Haz Them

Posted on August 24, 2012 | Leave a comment

I was in a local game store and discovered they had the new Wizkids Pathfinder Battles Rise of the Runelords minis!  I grabbed some boxes and thought I’d share.

I got one Huge box that came with a Storm Giantess,

then each of the normal boosters had a Large; I got an Ogre Brute and Malfeshnekor himself;

and then each normal booster had three medium/smalls in it – from left to right, Lucrecia, a wraith, a faceless stalker, Lyrie Akenja, a goblin commando on a goblin dog, and an ogrekin.

And here they are in ensemble to show relative sizes.

The sculpts are very nice and the painting is very nice, I like all these figures, they’re very distinctive.

I am disappointed a little in the Huge, however.  For $25 there’s no real fine painting work – her cloak, for example, is one big ol’ swath of the same purple and her trident is a homogeneous green (and made of a much more flexible plastic than the rest of the mini, it’s quite warped and not able to be made convincingly straight.  On a Huge I expect more detail than that.  The Large ogre brute is really nice and has more detail and nice washes – he looks better than the Huge; heck that whore with the cat (Lyrie) has more detail than the storm giantess.  Lucretia’s high cheekbones and piercing eyes are really, really good

But there’s a lot of improvement from the already good Heroes and Monsters minis – go see my old review of those and compare the ogre and goblins to this ogre and goblin – the ogre in particular is like 1000% better sculpt and paint.  And the small boosters having 4 rather than 1 mini is much better.

What they did right, they kept up – the bases are nice and flat, none of that D&D Minis falling over/warped base crap. Easy to unbox, all were in fine shape.

They’re high quality and nice.  I am not sure I plan to buy a lot though – they are expensive as crap! I just dropped $60 on these 9 minis.  Sure, you can get discount cases blah blah – I might do it if I were about to run Runelords, but other than that I’ll get a couple and use my rich legacy base of minis, Reaper kickstarter unpainteds, and pawns to fill in the gaps.

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RPG Stack Exchange Launches!

Posted on April 11, 2012 | 3 comments

After a long 600 days, RPG Stack Exchange (RPG.SE) is out of beta.  It has a spiffy new design and is ready for your RPG questions and answers.

For those of you not familiar with the Stack Exchange concept, the original Stack Overflow was born out of a hatred for how crappy forums are when you have a real question that needs an answer – not people threadcrapping, or telling you your choice of language isn’t right, or people babbling on about irrelevant stuff, or flamewars over “the best,” and you maybe getting a decent answer on page 10.  SO was a huge success, and they’ve expanded (via community voting) to many other kinds of topics.

So if like me you’ve gotten sick of the sheer noise when trying to pose a real question on RPG.net, ENWorld, or the Paizo forums, give RPG.SE a try.  You post a question, which can get commented on or edited by you or high rep users, and then answers get voted up/down as well. No babbling or flamewars, just answers, and you get to choose the most helpful and the community gets to vote up the ones they consider the most helpful. I don’t go to forums any more unless I just want to hobnob – the SE format has made me impatient with trying to conduct real Q&A there.   Check it out.

You can also follow it as @StackRPG on Twitter!

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Pathfinder Minis: Heroes and Monsters Review

Posted on January 25, 2012 | 2 comments

Earlier this week I read this review on ENWorld about the new prepainted plastic Pathfinder minis licensed from Paizo to Wizkids. I was in my FLGS today and they had a batch, so I picked up a large and normal booster to see what I thought.

I was lucky in that my normal booster, which can have either one medium or two small minis contained two goblins, and the large booster, which has one large, contained an ogre. The goblins and ogre are very iconic monsters in Pathfinder and have a different and distinct look to them than in earlier D&D.

The figures came out well – in D&D Miniatures boosters figs were usually pretty bent up, and often they don’t stand straight (either the base being bent or the figure doing the “V8 lean” on the base). These figures have nice hard bases and the goblins’ little weapons were striaght and good-looking.  The ogre’s club was slightly bent (he came out of the plastic shell while still in the box) but one bend and it was true.

The sculpts are good and the paint jobs pretty detailed.  The one weakness is that the big primary color they use on each mini, usually for the skin, needs a little more something – a wash or whatnot, it looks very homogeneous.

Here’s some large scale pics for you to check out.

The ENWorld review complained a lot about the amount of wrapping they come in. I was ready to ding them on it too, but really it’s just a box with a plastic blister in it – not even the little annoying plastic baggies that D&D Miniatures used. I do wish that they had boosters with more minis in them – buying one or, in rarer cases, two to a pack is a little annoying – but here’s my “trash picture” to compare to the ENWorld one.

Basically I put the plastic blister back in the boxes and then put the small box inside the large one and closed it. Voila. Less packaging is always good but I think the guy was being a bit of a drama queen about it – of course if you’re buying cases worth you’re going to have box detritus. If you want them to just put a dozen minis in a ziploc and send them to you I suspect you’ll have a lot of complaints about other stuff in return. But I was happier with the packaging here than with D&D Minis because the unpack process is “open box top, pull out mini, done.”

In fact, I just went and bought a brick from RPG Locker because I enjoyed these guys so much! I’ve never bought minis “in bulk” before…

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Fantastic Fest 2011 Day Five

Posted on October 15, 2011 | Leave a comment

Whew, only halfway done and it’s already fading into the past, I need to pick up the pace.

Fantastic Fest 2011! Day five! Monday! Most of the filmmakers bail out, and it’s second screening time for the hot tickets.

Two Eyes Staring (8/10) – A little Dutch film about a little Dutch girl in a little Dutch house! (Well, Belgian, but that’s where we’d go to the grocery when we lived in Holland). Two Eyes Staring is a horror thriller, in which nine-year-old Lisa and her mom and dad move back to the ancestral home, and odd secrets start coming out… Like about her mom’s twin – did she kill her? Is she haunting the cellar? Does the mom not want Lisa? Are bad things about to happen? Yep!

I probably can’t give this movie a “fair” review. I lived in Holland for three years when I was young, I have a nine-year-old girl, and her mom, my ex, was a little on the haunted past/self centered side. So this movie landed right in my wheelhouse. It has a very slow build, but the twists are effective. I liked the interaction between the mom, dad, and kid – of course things don’t just go from zero to blow-up immediately, that’s how families work – and when weird/mildly bad things happen, you usually just have to live with it.

It’s not Paranormal Activity and doesn’t try to be; the horror elements are there but definitely made subsidiary to the family drama. To be fair, this is probably a 6/10 to those who haven’t lived in Holland and don’t have a little girl this age. But I do, so I guess I’m the target market!  Woot!

The Squad (2/10) – Okay, the previous movie proves that I don’t mind a slow pace. But The Squad totally sucked.

I was ready for some military horror.  I like me some military horror. After 10 minutes of film council logos, we open on a Columbian commando squad.

In fact, let me stop there.  A couple of the South American movies did this, but I’m going to complain about it here because this was the worst one.  What is up with the fricking logofest at the start of the movie?   OK, in some American movies you get a couple – Lionsgate!  Brought to you by Whoever! Produciton company! OK, fine, up to three I will tolerate. But these South Americans just run screen of logo after screen of logo.  Audience members started laughing after the same goddamn film council’s logo came up for the third time (no, seriously)!  Note to Columbia, Argentina, etc. – that shit has to stop. It’s like how your military strongmen have chests full of 200 bizarre medals – it makes you come across as corny, not cool.  FYI.

Now back to the sucking. This squad clearly has the military discipline of your average Boy Scout troop; they’re all violating orders and running out where they can get wounded within two minutes. They take over an empty abandoned base (apparently sending a squad of guys in by foot is the only way anyone gets in or out of this giant installation that clearly took heavy equipment to build) and they start to think oh maybe it’s witches or something, then they turn on each other. None of the actors are charismatic and the narrative doesn’t settle on any as a main character you can latch onto.The setting is awful, it’s mud + fog 90% of the time and the other 10% it’s unremarkable prefab buildings. The cinematography is dark and muddy and jerky. The characters are all goons; you’d think a Columbian death squad would have one intact pair of cojones amongst the lot of them, but it’s not to be. There’s just nothing good I could grab a hold of and say “Yes, but at least the.. characters, scenery, military tactics, cinematography, sound work… was good…”  In the end there is no tension, no release, no twist.  The ten minute MRE distribution scene was the most memorable, in retrospect. And it wasn’t good.

This movie is kinda like The Thing, without a Thing, and without Kurt Russell, and without John Carpenter directing. So it sucked is what I’m saying.

A Boy And His Samurai (9/10) – I was demoralized after The Squad, lucky I was about to be rescued by Yoshihiro Nakamura!  Nakamura-san’s movie Fish Story was my favorite of Fantastic Fest 2009, and I really liked Golden Slumber from Fantastic Fest 2010. So I couldn’t help but go see his latest at FF2011.It’s based on a manga, apparently.

A Boy And His Samurai is a family comedy. A kid and his barely-coping single mom run across a samurai who got zapped into modern day by praying at a Buddhist shrine. Now he has no idea what to do.  They take him in and he becomes a domestic ninja, so to speak. It’s funny and tender, and there’s conflict stemming from expected gender roles (without stupid Mr. Mom kinds of jokes). Even near the end, when the “young punks” scene jumps the shark a little bit, it’s a fun movie. And they’re not afraid to use the little kid to tug your heartstrings.

I described the movie to my daughter and she asked me who the “bad guy” was. That took me aback. I realized there usually has to be some bad guy or at least opposing foil in similar American movies to create tension.  But not in this case, everyone’s pretty much of good heart, and it highlights how even normal people trying to do the right thing are brought into conflict by the nature of the world.

Anyway, this just solidifies Nakamura in my mind as being a god of movies. I’ve seen one a year and every time they leave me moved and thankful. I can’t wait to watch this one with my daughter, once it’s released in some form!

Elite Squad: The Enemy Within (7/10) – This Brazilian movie reminded me of District B-13 in that you can’t miss that’s a sequel. I’ve never seen the original, and it became obvious that it would provide some more perspective on the plot and relation to the characters that they don’t bother to provide you with inside this one.  Once you get over that, it’s a reasonably engaging criminals vs police vs the system tale (again, very District B13-like). There’s some great scenery and music, since it’s set in Brazil.

Whew, only three more days to go, but plenty more good movies!

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