Udon Entertainment - Street Fighter Classic Hardcovers

With comics, I generally aim to follow good writers and well-reviewed runs.  For the most part, this leads to me grabbing books based on story over art, though some legendary runs have both going for them.  This leaves a bunch of comics that I find absolutely gorgeous but shy away from.

Street fighter is one of the exceptions to this rule.  My cousin is very into Street Fighter, so I grabbed the first 14 issue run second hand as a gift to him.  What I didn’t expect was how incredible the art was throughout the book.  Years later, I couldn’t resist grabbing the 3-volume oversized hardcover reprints of the entire series.

I should really start by saying that the writing by Ken Siu-Chong a bad writer.  The plotting and depth is very serviceable and stays true to the characters in the book.  The problem is that writing for such a strongly licensed IP brings up a bunch of issues that the Siu-Chong has to work around.  Even though Siu-Chong is handed interesting and unique characters, he has to keep true to the very large cast of characters and how they interact.  More importantly, the series is based off of a plot line from a video game which severely limits where the story can go creatively.  Lastly, by nature of it being a Street Fighter book, much of the page real estate has to go to action sequences, which goes double with such an art-oriented company like Udon Entertainment.  Overall, these hurdles led to a shallower storyline, but allows for an incredible platform to showcase the main draw with the book.

© Udon Entertainment

Udon Entertainment is renowned for high quality art.  Because of this, the small Canadian company works closely with Capcom for a number of their properties including Darkstalkers, Megaman, and of course, Street Fighter.  Gathering some of their best artists, Udon created the Street Fighter comic with Alvin Lee, Arnold Tsang, Omar Dogan and many more.

The book takes the well-established Street Fighter style, taking liberties with the size and muscle mass of the characters.  This is a style that I always really liked as it takes a cartoonish approach, but grounds it with real anatomy and consistent proportions.  By flipping to any given page, the art drips with quality, but reading the comic really shows the mastery of the craft.

Instead of defaulting to standard poses and angles, artists like Alvin Lee excel at different points of view.   Besides being notoriously hard to pull off, panels with non-traditional points of view are more exciting and interesting.  Beautiful panels where a character runs straight at the reader and amazing ground-up splash pages give the scenes so much more movement than any other series I’ve read.

© Udon Entertainment

Though pricey (as with hardcovers in general), I have no regrets getting these books.  Whenever someone new sees my collection, Street Fighter is almost always my showcase book.  The release of the ‘classic’ reprints also coincided with the more recent Street Fighter series’, which I constantly debate getting whenever browsing amazon.

The Room

I have a very split mindset in regards to the mobile games market.  It’s astonishing how quickly and powerfully the gaming market has entered the general public with Apple and Android.  Gaming has gained huge momentum and the market has cracked wide open for new developers with interesting game ideas.  On the other hand, I really dislike the direction the mobile market has taken videogames as a whole.

Still, it would be outright crazy for me to write off an entire platform of games so I hunted for some well-reviewed mobile games for my, then-new, android phone.  Inspired by my first real life escape room experience, I bought ‘The Room’ published by FireProof Games. 

At first, I was expecting an ‘escape-the-room’ game much like the old flash games in the past.  Instead, ‘The Room’ is essentially a big puzzle-box game.  By rotating the box and zooming in, the user must navigate the box and unlock its mysteries bit by bit.  With hidden keys, password-encoded latches and a magical lens, I picked up The Room and found it exceedingly hard to put down.  The puzzles are neither super easy nor are they all unfairly difficult, giving just the right frustration/satisfaction cycles with each new section.  If this game was released on a different platform the difficulty could of course be ramped up, but as an on-the-go game ‘The Room’ finds just the right level.

© FireProof Games

The game looks stunning for the mobile platform, standing out from the other cartoon 2D or pixel games that flood the market.  With ornate dark wood and old world latches, I was thoroughly impressed with the care taken to create such a specific look and feel.  Surprisingly, even the controls were good in ‘The Room’, which could have ended in disaster.  The puzzles in ‘The Room’ rely on very specific actions, such as turning a crank or lifting a latch which, in my case, had to be detected on a small screen.  This is hard enough to do with a static screen, but allowing the player to rotate and change the point of view seems like it would make detecting a user’s intent very difficult.  Despite this, there were almost no situations where I felt like the game wasn’t doing what I wanted it to or instances where the game let me solve a puzzle by randomly swiping around the screen.

I have yet to pick the sequels ‘The Room 2’ and ‘The Room 3’, but will gladly pay money into a game that doesn’t bombard me with ads or require me to constantly feed in dollars to get ahead.

J. Michael Straczynski - Amazing Spider-Man run

It is no question that I am a big Spider-man fan.  From my beautiful Kotobukiya statue to my professionally framed Stan Lee signed lithograph, my comic room shows exactly how much I care about Spider-man.  I guess I should also mention that my son is named Parker, but a big part of that is how much I love the name regardless of the comic attachment.

If my shaky memory is correct, my first Spider-man comic was given to me by my Marvel zombie of an older cousin.  The issue was Web of Spider-man #100, where he dons a gimmicky metallic version of his costume displayed proudly on the very 90’s holographic green cover.  It was this same cousin who would a decade later recommend the start of my hefty Amazing Spider-man collection.

When J Michael Straczinski (JMS) took the title of Amazing Spider-man, the title had been suffering in quality for a while.  The flagship Marvel character was in the same slump that the entire comic industry was going through in the 90s.  JMS along with artist John Romita Jr. are widely regarded as the creative team that revitalized the character and brought new readership to the title.

Having only knowledge of the character from the cartoon and movies, I was afraid I’d have a lot of catching up to do.  This simply was not the case with this run.  JMS’s run serves as a fantastic jumping on point for the series, and establishes a new status quo right off the bat.  Instead of the nerdy high school photographer that I was used to, Peter Parker was now a high school teacher with a marriage on the rocks.  That was the starting point to a soap opera that would take wild twists and turns as comics tend to do.

It should be noted that the run is not perfect, most noteworthy is one very egregious storyline involving the supposed children of the Saint Gwen Stacy.  Also, most people see the run and focus on the strange direction that the plot ended on that was quickly followed by a Spider-retcon that shook the world.  Still, I choose to accept editorial retcons for what they are, a way to keep the character fresh and allow for better stories to be told.  Taking entire the run at face value, the writing was solid, the plots were fun, and the ideas were daring.

© Marvel

The artwork was done by John Romita Jr. (JRJR), son of the legendary John Romita that worked on the same title with Stan Lee back in the 60’s.  JRJR is widely acclaimed as one of the top Marvel artists, and has a prolific and impressive resume to match it.  I personally feel that Romita Jr. is a bit overrated, but it is clear that he is in his element in this Spider-Man run.  With action oriented and quickly paced issues, Spider-man is a comic that highlights JRJR’s strengths while avoiding the ‘talking heads’ panels that I feel are his weak points.

Diving deep into my new obsession from the get go, I decided that this run would be the starting point of my Amazing Spider-man collection.  Indeed, on my shelf now sits every Amazing Spider-man issue since the beginning of this run collected into neat paperbacks, a run that spans over 14 years of Spider-man comics.

Hearthstone

The last of my 2015 overview posts, this has undoubtedly been my biggest obsession.  Being a Blizzard game, Hearthstone is what inspired me to do the series of posts for the Diablo franchise a couple months back.  Hearthstone lines up perfectly with Blizzard’s record of stellar games, and the quality of Hearthstone is unbelievable.

For those unaware, Hearthstone is a Collectable Card Game (CCG) developed by a small team at Blizzard.  With huge titles like Diablo 3, Starcraft 2, and World of Warcraft, Blizzard naturally needs large teams to develop and maintain the games.  For Hearthstone, Blizzard took a different approach, and sent a small team of fifteen people to start developing the game.  The team was named Team 5, but grew as the development continued.

I had played some Magic: The Gathering over the years and loved the rush of unpacking new cards and building decks.  My interest in Magic waned after a while as it became harder and harder to organize games.  When we did meet, there was an obvious skill gap as I tended to play more casual and preferred to make wacky decks.  Also with the rush of buying cards always came the realization that I was spending too much on little boosters.  Years later when I did download Hearthstone, both of these problems were solved.

First, Hearthstone is free.  This obviously saves me money, as I am not required to spend a single cent to earn packs.  Of course, people see this as very suspect, especially as game companies consistently abuse the micro-transaction systems nowadays.  Blizzard takes a very different approach to this.  I will say now that I haven’t put a dollar into Hearthstone, and I’ve never felt like the game was unfair to me because of it.  Buying packs does give you an edge, but generally that edge is reserved for the very high ranked players looking to stay competitive.  For casual and even semi-competitive players like myself, Hearthstone is very forgiving. 

A big part of the fairness is due to the crafting system.  Instead of allowing players to trade cards and create a black market, Blizzard locks all of your cards to your account.  If you ever get duplicates or want a specific card, you can destroy your own cards and use them to craft any card in the game.  For thrifty patient players, this means that you can save up winnings and craft cards that you really want.  For those willing to buy packs, this means that you can buy a ton of packs hoping to get that card you wanted without feeling like you wasted a bunch of money if you didn’t chance upon it.

Another thing to note is that Blizzard has balanced the game superbly and has avoided a great deal of power creep.  With five releases of new cards since Hearthstone went live, one would assume that the cards have gotten more and more powerful, almost requiring that players buy packs to stay competitive.  This isn’t really the case with Hearthstone.  All players start with a standard set of cards, and many of these cards are still very viable and make up a great deal of decks being played by high end competitors in the game.

Lastly, because Hearthstone is free and fair to new players, there is actually a huge player base.  With such a strong community, it’s much easier to find a player that matches closer to your own skill level.  Whether playing on casual mode or on the ranked ladder, new players can learn and get better while being matched accordingly.  Another game mode Arena, also removes the advantage of one player having more cards than another by giving all players a chance to create a deck with randomly generated options.

I can not express to you how much fun I’ve gotten out of Hearthstone this past year.  Instead of watching television or movies, I would opt for videos of Hearthstone players.  The sounds of the game have become comforting to me, and I look forward to finishing off my Hearthstone quests every day to get a bit more gold towards my next goal.  With all of the hours of entertainment, it’s pretty impressive that I’ve gotten so much without having to spend a slim dime.

Daredevil - Netflix

If you were to peruse my comic collection, it is clear that I collect two superhero titles regularly.  One is ‘The Amazing Spider-man’ which has been consistently great since it was taken over by writer Dan Slott.  The other is Daredevil.

Back when I started reading comics, I was told of the legendary run by Brian Michael Bendis and I dove in feet first.  While reading that 81 issue run, I became a die hard fan.  Like most people, I had no interest in Daredevil in the slightest.  The movie became synonymous with the terrible age of superhero adaptations and turned the masses against the character.  This put me in a strange place where I loved the character and saw all of the potential, but it was unlikely anyone would ever get to see it.

Then Marvel announced the show.  It was a big deal because up until that point, Daredevil rights were apparently locked in a loophole with 20th Century Fox.  With the character back in very competent hands, I was cautiously optimistic of the outcome.

The show is brilliant.  I being a comic nerd have issues with some of the choices made, but overall it’s hard to argue that Marvel knocked it out of the park.  With the success of the show now, it’s hard to remember how much of a gamble it was to take such a strong tonal shift with the show.  The gritty violence and slow-paced talking heads could have been a disaster for the property, but Marvel knew what market they were hitting kept the show pretty sophisticated.

© Marvel

The fight scenes in Daredevil are memorable and great but for a superhero show they are pretty unimportant.  The real interest comes in the plotting, which takes the viewer on a wild twisting road episode by episode.  The reveals come frequently, normally once per episode, which seems like it’d burn out the viewer.  Instead, the great characters and engaging dialogue make it easy to get invested which gives a hard hit with every twist.

Truly, the show’s strength comes in the character building.  With memorable and fleshed out roles played by amazing actor’s, pretty much the whole cast brings their A game.  Charlie Cox is the spitting image of Matt Murdock and plays his part incredibly well.  I was hoping he’d be directed to be the cocky fearless character that Matt Murdock is in the books, but this is more than made up for with the deep and interesting character choices made for the Kingpin played by Vincent D'Onofrio.

I am glad that the show did as well as it did.  Daredevil was the front runner for a new batch of shows for street-level heroes including the recently released Jessica Jones and upcoming Luke Cage and Iron Fist shows.  This is absolutely perfect as these are the types of stories that I love to read in comics.  With my life so engrossed in games right now, it’s hard for a show to pull my attention, not to mention that this is the first non-cartoon TV show I've blogged about.  Daredevil lived up to a high bar with the comics and Jessica Jones is shaping up to be even better.