Spoiler free intro, Infinity War is a remarkably good movie, especially when you consider all the weight, all the expectations, all the work it has to get done. It has to reunite, take apart, rebuild characters and teams, introduce and explain Thanos all while at the very least mentioning and showing a couple dozen characters. The movie does all that in fine fashion. Fun fights, fun banter and a…
On Earth, nothing but fear, propaganda and loyalty to a fascist regime that checks your ever move.
In space, freedom and the ability to create your own destiny, your own life.
That is the essential setup of Joyride Vol. 1, written by Collin Kelly and Jackson Lanzing with art by Marcus To. Set in the future, mankind should be out exploring the stars, making new friends and new enemies with all…
I think that the best thing about video games, as a medium, is that they can be almost whatever you want them to be. We are in a rather unique time period where there is a video game for just about every kind of person. Do you like high drama and story driven action? It’s there. Do you like simple but rewarding gameplay and don’t care about the story? It’s there. Do you want what amounts to an interactive story with very little danger of failure? It’s there. Do you just like a general tone but aren’t always sure what that means? It’s there, though you may have to do some looking for that last one. Rebel Galaxy, on Steam, PS4 and Xbox One is the kind of game that is easy to miss, I don’t remember very much buzz around it when it came out, I don’t even remember when or why I bought it, but when I finally booted it up a couple of weeks ago, I have been hard pressed to play anything else. While low on actual story, the gameplay, look and tone of the game has won me over in a big way.
What story there is serves simply as a reason to jump to different systems and to make sure that you have been honest about upgrading your ship; After receiving a cryptic message from your Aunt, the black sheep of the family, you take her old and unimpressive ship to an out of the way space station and begin the task of hunting her down. Along the way you pick up some friends who will probably betray you, come to possess an ancient AI that can’t remember who it is or what it’s purpose is and make money to upgrade your ship by completing an ever more difficult list of missions from various factions on both sides of the law. Along the way you will explore more than a few star systems that kind of all look the same and you will die. Remember, the game only saves when you dock with a space station. The ending is incredibly lame and underwhelming, but please, don’t come to Rebel Galaxy for the story. Tonally, this is a seedy side of Star Wars type world, with good old boys and girls mining, shooting and drinking their way across space. If you like Firefly or certain parts of Stargate, the atmosphere and flavor of Rebel Galaxy will feel right at home. The slightly generic blues and hillbilly rock soundtrack only enhances that feeling.
Combat is the heart of this game; it allows you to progress through all the systems the game has for you and is very enjoyable just on its own and even though you are in space and we have all watched Wrath of Khan, combat in this game is kept manageable by just dealing with a 2D section of space; so you can go forwards, backwards, left and right, but you can’t go up or down, though your enemies can and you are very capable of shooting in any direction. While an obvious limitation on the action of the game, it works because the combat actually revolves around broadsides. Each ship’s main weapon is some number of broadside cannons that you can upgrade but only really shoot at an angle from the side of your ship. You have other turrets that each kind of ship places at different parts of the hull, but the broadsides are always on the side. So, that means that you are not really charging or running from opponents as much as you are circling each other, speeding up, slowing down, flipping exposed flanks to allow shields to regenerate, all while you firing off a steady stream of space cannon fire at the enemy ships. Your turrets aid combat depending on what kind of ordinance you have equipped them with. Some fire flak to shoot missiles down and disrupt small, fighter class ships while other munch through shields and allow your broadsides and other weapons to deal direct damage on the hull. Others just deal additional damage and while you can control the turrets individually, I never found much reason to do so. If you have played Assassins Creed: Black Flag, you will be right at home with the combat in this game. Something the game does really well is capture a great impression of speed. Even though you are often fighting in front of a background of distant starts, your ship and those of your opponent, always feel like they are moving and turning quickly and with purpose, something that even Star Wars movies don’t always nail.
While on paper the combat might seem a bit limited, it’s actually really fun and stayed highly enjoyable right up until the end of the game. The straightforward nature of it allows you to get rather good at it very quickly. While I died a bunch during the first couple of hours, once I got a few upgrades and really understood a few things, I was expertly maneuvering through and around my enemies, cutting them off from each other, blocking whole fleets with asteroids and wreckage while I pounded one or two isolated ships into dust. Even thought the game has a few difficulty spikes that are hard to manage, I never felt outpaced or truly under gunned, rather that I just needed to play that last encounter a little bit smarter. Outside of combat, there is are some guild ranking systems that you will need to progress through in order to get the best ships and upgrades which is undoubtedly worth it. Different ships actually feel fairly different from each other; size, speed and maneuverability are noticeably different for each ship and when you combine that with the robust and diverse upgrades, I found that you can really craft a rather unique ship that fits how you want to play it. I found that I enjoyed pulling in incredibly close and unleashing powerful but short ranged broadsides while another player might want to stay back and snipe with some of the more long-range weapons or employ mines and missiles to trip up and stun enemy ships. Either choice seems to work; you can even buy special shields and ram other ships Roman style if you so want.
This slideshow requires JavaScript.
The mission selection is also pretty good. You have pretty standard combat missions where you have to go kill other ships, but there are also escort missions that work really well, missions where you have to defend a set point of space and medium sized engagements where you and allied factions must take down large amounts of enemy ships. While all of those are quite fun, and the game does a good job of giving you a large amount of choice, the best mission are the dead drops and blockade runs. Dropping out of warp into a contested nebular or asteroid field and searching for cargo/dead drop you need while fending off other ships is a lot of fun; it feels different and hectic in a way the more normal missions don’t. Running blockades in order to deliver some cargo is the most difficult and tense part of the game. Trying to balance killing ships with just getting to the dock is fun and annoying all at the same time. It’s also the most difficult part of the game, far as I can tell. I had by far the most trouble with the game whenever I was tying to get Designer Cloths our Space Slaves to some poor beleaguered space station. No, I don’t know why they are called Space Slaves.
Some people need strong story and characters to enjoy a game, with cinematic moments and emotional pay offs. I enjoy those games as much as the next person, but sometimes you just want put on a cowboy hat, jump into a ship and shoot people down and smuggle illegal soda across the cosmos (no, I am not kidding about the illegal soda). Rebel Galaxy is an incredibly fun, rewarding game with gameplay that never seems to get old.
Read my review of Rebel Galaxy, a game designed to bring out your inner Han Solo. I think that the best thing about video games, as a medium, is that they can be almost whatever you want them to be.
Ready Player One is a weird movie. Not the movie itself, but rather the idea behind it. A technological genius, James Halliday, invents a fully functioning and interactive virtual reality world (the Oasis) in which the entire near future population of Earth works and plays in. Whether you want to play war games, fly the Millennium Falcon, or just go to your job every day, chances are you are…
The best thing about Warhammer 40k is the size and scale of it. I’ve said it before, but it’s a setting with millions of planets, trillions of humans and trillions more aliens of all kinds all vying for survival in a harsh universe where there are immortal gods who seek mastery over humanity, xenomorphic space locusts who will eat a planet dry and haughty space elves who think, and probably are,…
For being such a straightforward game, They Are Billions messes with my head in a way that few games ever have managed. I walk into each run expecting to both win and to lose in almost equal measure. I expect to win because I have clearly gotten better at the game and figured out a lot of the mechanics and what I need to do in order to survive a full run. I expect to lose because losing is all I…
Bobby Drake is one of those comic book characters that has been around for decades and while I’m sure there are stories about him that are fun and interesting, I’m not going to pretend to know what they are, or if they do in fact exist; I suspect not. Really, all I know about him is that he is the slacker member of the first class of X-Men, the one who is wildly powerful when you think about it,…
Crash Override: How Gamergate (Nearly) Destroyed My Life, and How We Can Win the Fight Against Online Hate is one part memoir, one part historical document about Zoe Quinn’s experience at the very center of the Gamergate controversy, which, broadly speaking, was a online phenomenon amongst the video game community where reactionary parts of the gaming community lashed out and attacked various…
It should be noted that Thor, his story and his world, are my jam. I love them more than most things that I’ve read or watched over the years; even when I wasn’t really reading comics in my younger years, I was reading Thor comics or following the general story through Wikipedia or chat rooms. Also, Norse Mythology was one of my favorite set of myths to read as a kid. But even with all that…
Battle Chasers was published in the 90s and it looks and feels about as 90s as a comic book can really get. That doesn’t excuse some aspects of the book, but historical context is important when engaging with art from any period and, as depressing as it is, this book is almost 20 years old. Primarily written and drawn by Joe Madureira (Joe Mad), Battle Chasers is a fantasy/steampunk action…
Set in the ruins of a sprawling, diversely populated but dead empire, Hollow Knight is a 2D action platformer set firmly in the Metroidvania genre with a healthy infusion of some key Dark Souls mechanics. You enter this world of twilight and faded glory as a small, adorable looking bug knight armed with a nail (sword) who has come to Hallownest for some reason that I’m not quite sure of. Arriving…
Catwoman Volume 1: Trail of the Catwoman is one of the most masterful collection of comic books I have ever read. Truly great storytelling, some of the best art I’ve laid eyes on, it all comes together in this large volume in a singular way that blows the reader away. Ed Brubaker, Darwyn Cooke, Cameron Stewart, Mike Allred, Brad Nader, Rick Burchett and several more have combined their talents on…
Set in a future where humanity has mastered time travel as an aspect of warfare, Red Wing tells the story of Dominic Dorne, a young and inexperienced pilot in over his head who is seeking out his father, legendary pilot Robert Dorne, who was lost in time at some point during an interdimensional, time lost battle. Along the way, both Dominic and we the reader learn more about the inner workings of…
My fascination and exploration of the Warhammer 40,000 universe continues with Mechanicum, a novel that tells a story set during the Horus Heresy, when the Primarch Horus, second in command of the whole human empire, was corrupted by evil space gods and betrayed the Imperium of Mankind and started a civil war that would cost the lives of billions if not trillions of human; remember, 40k is a…
Written and Directed by Edgar Wright, Baby Driver is a fun, kinetic crime film with a winning cast and a wonderful sense of motion and, of course, a great soundtrack. Baby (Ansel Elgort), as he is known to his criminal compatriots, is an otherworldly talented wheel man, employed by Doc (Kevin Spacey) a criminal mastermind who organizes and plans bank heists in Atlanta. Having paid off his debts…
Anti-SJWs basically come in two flavors “lol kek u mad” and “alas this vexed correctness of thine politics doth trouble me in every hour verily I shall draw my blade of reason and stand firm against these blackguards”
I need to try this for trips I only bring a carry-on to.
I use to do this all the time in the military. Just forgot how to over time o.o
I wish I’d known about this when I was homeless.
I could’ve taught it to all the other ladies at the shelter and Darlene could’ve sucked a sour one because she never would have been able to bitch at us for “having too many clothes.”
reblogging this to have it forever because holy god damn
Yo, Mr Rogers was not fictional.
I hardly see any heroic posts about Muslims on here, so here you go.
I love that it takes the time to specify that his attack of choice was a flying kick
The hero the world needs
I remember this. But I feel we’re missing some key points. When it happened, he was out jogging with his puppy:
He heard screams and sprinted towards them. He jumped a fence, saw a man pinning a woman down and immediately fly-kicked him in the face, knocking him out. He then gave the woman his jacket because her dress was ripped and got her a taxi home. She only managed to get in contact with him and tell the papers cause she later found his driver’s license in the pocket of the jacket.
“If I see a person in danger then I will intervene. I would not want to ignore it and then read the next day that a woman had been raped or murdered.”
And his message to the attacker:
“He is a coward and a man with no morals. I won’t forget his face.”
That last line is some Damian-Wayne/Robin level shit, right there.
