Clothing Review: My New Pax Beanie

So I have returned from the first international PAX in Melbourne Australia in possession of a new beanie. I outlayed $25 for this beanie, so I guess the question is whether it is worth it.

First things first, this beanie is very warm. I had it on while watching Pacific Rim again yesterday and it felt like an electric blanket was giving my head a nice, warm hug. It is also nice and easy to get on and take off, so from a pure utilitarian point of view this beanie gets perfect marks. It does everything you would expect from a beanie.



So onto the decorations on the beanie. The beanie is reversible with a light blue, smiley side and a darker, angry side (refer to photographs within this article). On the angry side, there are also two wings with plastic infill to keep them straight with a good definition. When the wings are folded on the inside, they are not uncomfortable at all. I really like the colours here and both sides maintain a very fun, cartoony feel. The darker side has the wings and a bigger mouth while the lighter side is a bit more restrained, so I think both sides balance eachother quite well.  Both sides also have ears.



One downside of this beanie is a lack of aerodynamics. With the dark side out, I tried flapping the wings multiple times by nodding my head vigorously. Despite all this, I didn’t take off and fly. Therefore, the wings are only there for decoration… Unless someone else with more skill points in head nodding managed to take off.

Overall, I really like this beanie. I really like the look of both sides and it is the warmest beanie I now own. I would have preffered if it was a bit cheaper than $25, but for a very popular event clothing piece I do not regret buying this. It is currently my first choice of headwear for any gaming or geek event I will attend in the future.

Signing off,

The Wafflepunchers.

Comic Review: Kingdom Come (Complete Series) in Episodic Format

Kingdom Come has a reputation as a modern comic book masterpiece. With this in mind, I have decided to read through the complete series. What follows is a brief breakdown of each of the comics that compose the series as I decide whether the reputation is deserved or if it is overhyped among comic aficionados. I have written this as I have read each chapter, so later events have not coloured my interpretation of earlier events. As always, spoilers will follow.

Chapter 0: Introduction and Foreword by Eliot S. Margin

 I thought the art was really strong here. I liked the look of the aging icons all standing together. I am also now expecting Captain Marvel to fight Superman which could be epic if handled well. Also, the foreword really sets the tone, with lines like:

“It is about the time in the lives of Superman, Captain Marvel, Wonder Woman, Batman and the others, when they learn that they are not gods. And it is about the time in their lives when finally they learn that despite their limitations they must be potent and responsible anyway. Now is the time in the human race when all of us need to learn these same things.”

So far so good. I am really looking forward to this.

Chapter 1: Strange Visitor

This chapter started a bit wordy, but then it eased up as I got into it. I really liked the art style here of the kind-of pastel painted / realistic tint to the characters. This chapter followed The Spectre, a sort-of avenging angel in DC, as he effectively chooses a moral compass to try and prevent Armageddon. It also sets up the premise of the story of the super-hero icons abandoning the world and the new breed of “heroes”. These “heroes” are not acting like heroes without the guidance of what the old heroes represent. I felt the pacing of this story was good for an initial chapter and look forward to seeing what they do with it.

Chapter 2: Truth and Justice

Once again, I really liked the art style in this book. As part of this story, The Spectre provides allot of narrative exposition. However, I found that this worked due to how it was set-up with him effectively trying to judge the world. This issue directly deals with the themes of superheroes as gods walking amongst us. It is also shows the struggle of Superman as he tries to reclaim his place in the world and be a hero while all the new “heroes” are shown acting no better than the villains. There is also the backstory of why Superman left the world (after a new hero, Magog, killed the Joker. This followed the Joker’s latest rampage which killed Lois and 91 other people. Despite this, Superman still tried to bring him in for justice). As more old heroes and villains are introduced (Luthor, Batman, Green Arrow) and their motivations (as well as existing characters motivations, such as Wonder Woman) are set-out and expanded upon, I am quite intrigued with how this is heading.

This chapter, however, was very narration heavy. I am hoping they slowly move to a more show-don’t-tell policy with the comic as the various characters are set-up and the plot continues. This chapter also had a couple of cuts between scenes that confused me a couple of times. But overall, another solid issue that has me looking forward to the next chapter.

 

Chapter 3: Up In The Sky

This is another solid chapter that once again advanced the story and raised the stakes. In this chapter, we see Batman’s and Lex Luthor’s plans advance. The growing rift within the new Justice League is also explored, particularly between Wonder Woman and Superman. This chapter also explores the thoughts of Superman and him wondering whether he is doing the right thing. I also thought it improved on the show-don’t-tell as this chapter felt less narrative heavy while still fitting in plenty of story and character development. Once again the writing and art style really suited the tone of the comic, and I am once again looking forward to the next chapter.

Chapter 4: Never-Ending Battle

The concluding chapter of Kingdom Come. The Spectre finally asks the human he recruited as his moral compass on whose side he should act, with both sides having grave consequences. We also see the fight between Captain Marvel and Superman as well as the Justice League fighting with superheroes who refused to comply with Superman and his value for life. Humanity also shows that they are willing to take radical measures to stamp out the superhero threat once and for all rather than be willing to lie down and let others decide their fate.

Although I really liked the art previously, I felt that allot of the splash pages and fight scenes were very confusing. This art style definitely stumbled when it came time to showing action. This was offset by the comic having a well-written payoff and a satisfying conclusion. My only criticism is that, despite being a central part of the conclusion to Kingdom Come, Captain Marvel feels more like a plot device than a proper character, but this is only because all the other characters are written so strongly. In a weaker comic, I would have thought he was very well written.

Chapter 5: One Year Later

This short comic just sees the reunion of Superman, Wonder Woman and Batman following the end of Chapter 4. It was a good for what it was and didn’t take itself too seriously. I also felt it got the dynamics of a relationship between Superman, Wonder Woman and Batman right, as it has done with the rest of the comic.

Conclusion:

Overall, I found Kingdom Come to be very enjoyable. I enjoyed reading about the exploration of what Superman and the other superheros mean to the rest of the world by the ideals they stand for, not just their brute force. The plot was well driven and the characters were well written. Kingdom Come relied on the characters to drive the plot as opposed to having the plot drive the characters to acting out of character. Although it was a bit narration and exposition heavy towards the beginning, I thought the writers found a good balance towards the final chapters once the world was established. The art style fitted in well with the tone of the comic. I would recommend Kingdom Come to everyone and his dog because it rightly deserves it’s place up there with the classics.

6/5 honey-coated, beautifully cooked waffles. That is not a typo.

Fire Emblem: Awakening revolves around two things: Complex tactical combat and sweet, sweet romance. It’s a turn-based tactical role-playing game like Final Fantasy Tactics, but with a twist: As your combatants fight alongside one another, they can fall in love. If you keep them paired up, they’ll boost one another’s stats, have conversations (called Support here) and they can even get married and have kids in a weird Back to the Future kind of way.

One of the biggest downside of the game is the story. I still have no idea what the story in Fire Emblem: Awakening revolves around at all. After the first pretty 3D intro I just would skip any story element, and then proceed to just create my own disjointed Game of Thrones like story instead with hookers, blackjack and a journey to get rum and raisin ice cream. So it might have been more a Harold and Kumar meets Game of Thrones like story. Every Once in awhile I did return to the games actually story, only to skip immediately to continue with my own. 

The Support conversations are pretty fun and give a bit of insight into characters. Each one is charming in their own special way although sometimes they border on the cliché. In reality it is just the Fire Emblem hook-up mechanic. After being paired up to a certain character long enough the 2 character decided its time to get married. Then some way in the middle of the game this romance of characters pays off.As the game introduce time travel to the story, you can get special future children. So after spend about 2/3 of the game leveling normal characters you are given new ones with similar stats but at a significantly lower level (which means better everything pretty much as they level up to an equivalent level), so you are forced to level your old characters  a bit or find almost immediately worthless in the coming chapters. I’m looking forward to doing another play through to get to see all the combinations of children that your bunch of romantic time warriors can produce. 

The combat revolves around a pretty a simple system. The usual strategy game rock beats scissors beats paper beats rock kind-of system. Once you really get down to grinding, it's a perfect balance of time consuming and rewarding. I've restarted a fair bit because of permadeath. It's fun, but it's frustrating fun not happy go lucky fun.

Fire Emblem: Awakening is an immaculately designed, rewarding, and difficult strategy game. With all the love and marriage, it offers something fresh and it is one of the best strategy games on any system, and certainly one of the best games on the 3DS.

3.5/5  Future Waffle Children.

Play Review: Un-Natural Selection

 In an attempt to become more cultured, I decided to spend a night watching a play. Un-Natural Selection was a play that was performed at the Gold Coast Performing Arts Centre. Although the season of this plays showing is now over, I really enjoyed this play for several reasons. These reasons included the story of the play, the acting in the play and the actual venue.

The story of the play follows a young couple, Di and Henry. When Di’s grandfather dies, she inherits his funeral home and business. Instead of selling up, she decides to run the business as she feels that it is what her grandfather would have wanted. Along the way, they hire a third member of the team which, although a love triangle is hinted at occasionally, it is mostly left alone (thank you play for not trying to turn into another Twilight wannabe). At the time that this is happening, there is also a serial killer on the loose in the city.

 

Although the story had the potential to be compelling, it felt more like an excuse to jump between different locales and set-ups. These set-ups were then used to explore certain themes, such as Di’s sense of obligation to her dead grandfather or how people deal with death, before having a relatively morbid ending. Although this style could have easily unravelled, this was made to work with the consistent dark humour that tied the different set-ups together as well as the skill of the actors in pulling off the required balance between humour and drama.

The acting cast was only a handful of people (5 from memory), despite the play having a wide variety of characters. The actors were easily split between the regulars in every scene (Di, Henry and the new funeral employee) and 2 actors who alternated between policemen, business gurus, news reporters, undertakers, doctors and I am sure others that I have forgotten. Although it would have been easy for these characters to become muddled, the actors managed to put enough distinct character in each of them to keep them entertaining. The energy the actors brought to the stage was also palpable, with the actors literally improvising lines on stage and looking like they are about to crack themselves up laughing.

 

Naturally this energy extended to the audience and was helped by the venue. This play was set in quite a small, intimate stage with only about 10 rows of wooden seats. This made the energy the actors put into the play palpable to the audience. Without this energy, it would have been easy for the audience to lose interest in the play. However, since the first scene where a reporter gets up and makes allot of lame puns about a serial killer on the loose, the audience was very responsive to the play and what was happening onstage.

Overall, this play was a highly enjoyable night out. The black comedy of the plays story combined with the skill of the actors helped make what easily could have been a disjointed experience a very funny and entertaining play. The small, intimate venue helped the audience become invested in the play and made this a very successful production in my opinion at least.

Signing off,

The Waffle Puncher

Book Review - Red Shirts

In the distant future the starship Intrepid seeks out new worlds and boldly goes where no man has gone before. However, as newly assigned Ensign Andrew Dahl soon discovers, it is the low-ranking crew members that die more often aboard the Intrepid than brain cells on a Friday night pub crawl, while the senior officers always survive without a scratch. 

If you have ever watched an episode or two of Star Trek you’ll know that it's always the crew member with a redshirt, that dies when the crew beams down to a planet or any other location that's not on the bridge of the ship. Why is that? That's the question Redshirts poses to the reader. 

Scalzi took what could be a one-joke premise from Star Trek about disposable extras with a short shelf life, and he turned that concept into a funny and interesting examination on the nature of fiction and free will. I don’t want to spoil much about the plot because the twists and turns are part of the fun and I enjoyed how the book went off in a couple of surprising directions. I did find Scalzi’s writing style a bit odd. It seems to skip almost any kind of descriptive writing to focus almost exclusively on dialogue or exposition in the interest of rushing through the main story. 

 It felt more like I was reading a script for a TV show than a book and I found it rather annoying that there isn’t much description about what the ship or the characters look like. I would just imagine generic looking Star Trek characters to give the world some more depth. While I was completely into the story of the crew fighting against their fate, a few more details about what they looked like would have been welcome. 

Red Shirts is compulsively readable, but it feels a bit thin. The codex at the end of the book is more enjoyable than the book as it helps to fill in the remaining plot points left from the main story. This book also clearly shows that Scalzi can be a great writer when he is not feeling lazy.

Red Shirts receives 2 and half accidently-killed-by-a-freak-accident waffles.

Movie Review: Pain and Gain

It has been awhile since I could recommend a Michael Bay film. Pain and Gain is, for me, a good example of what Michael Bay can do for a movie which compliments his normal approach to directing. Starring Mark Wahlberg and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson among others, Pain and Gain is a film I would recommend you see, although far from flawless.

Pain and Gain opens with a shot of Mark Wahlberg working out, but then getting chased by the cops. It then flashbacks and follows the story of three body builders (Mark Wahlberg and The Rock being two of them) from a gym as they embark on a plan to get rich. Their plan involves kidnapping a wealthy patron of the gym and then forcing him to relinquish all his property. The only downside to this plan is that they are not very good at kidnapping and extorting money and so tend to bumble from one mistake to the next. Bumble may not be the right word for this, as implies some kind of Three Stooges shenanigans. This movie is definitely a dark comedy, as some of my favourite scenes in the movies include The Rock trying to dispose of a body or them attempting to murder their wealthy patron, which are definitely not shenanigans.

The dark comedy style of the movie is further enhanced by the introduction sequences each character gets. Whenever a new character is introduced (right down to the ditzy blonde), they get a little cut-away flashback where they voice-over their lives to show how they ended up where they were. There were a couple of characters that they didn’t do this for which I would have liked to see their stories (the third richest man in Miami springs to mind), but that may have left it feeling overdone. I thought this really helped give even pretty bland characters a level of emotional connection with the audience.

The visual style of this film I felt meshed well with the plot. Allot of the events in the film were over-directed and shot to be bigger than they actually were, with things such as slow motion shots, revolving camera shots and rapid cuts. For the Transformers movies, I always wished the camera would just watch the robots fight rather than jumping around allot. Pain and Gain was the opposite. I felt that the film would have gotten visually boring (how many scenes of a man in captivity or working out do you need) pretty quickly without the visual flair that Michael Bay is accustomed to. Maybe Michael Bay’s over-directing style is much better suited to small-scale or no-action scenes, strangely enough.

Even with the unique style, however, the film is far from flawless. One of the biggest downsides is its length (130 minutes). This wasn’t helped by having to watch a Red Bull athlete profile (for my session anyway) giving this movie around 30 minutes of trailers. This movie also occasionally loses track of the plot or introduces elements that have no pay-off or are pointless (the private investigators back problem, for example).

Although I can see that Pain and Gain won’t be for everyone, overall I would recommend this film. The dark-comedy style meshed in well with the over-directed visual style. The plot was solid (and based on a true story apparently) and the actors also did a very good job with the material. With so many sequels and remakes coming out, I felt that this new movie gives Michael Bay some credit ... Until he destroys the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

4 out of 5 jacked-up waffles.

Videogame Review - The Last of Us

The developers behind the excellent Uncharted series, Naughty Dog, bring us their new IP. It’s a story of survival, and is also one of the most emotional gaming experiences I’ve had.

The prologue immediately grabs your attention. Set several years before the outbreak, you play as Joel's daughter Sarah as the event of the disaster unfold around her perspective. Its a very significant set piece us it show how unprepared the people where the infection hit. You can feel the chaos in the background as Joel, his brother and Sarah try to escape. Only more tragic as you watch Joel loss Sarah his arm after a collision. This sets up Joel’s primary flaw of having unresolved issues with loss after the death of his beloved daughter.  A few hours later Joel is paired up with the games second emotionally flawed protagonist in Ellie. We eventually find out that Ellie may be the only person to ever develop an immunity to the infection, and Joel is pressured by multiple interwoven events into escorting her from Boston to Colorado. Predictably the job goes south and soon Joel and Ellie are moving across the country from one city to another just trying to survive. Along the way they encounter hostile soldiers, murderous bandits, and of course the infected.

The story is possibly the greatest aspect of the game. It is well structured as each season acts like a chapter. I found that the story works well because it contains some of the most well rounded characters crafted in gaming. All the characters in the game felt so real and that each of them had faced real emotional problems from the world they live in now. Naughty Dog have uniquely captured the fragility of our society and demonstrated the brutality that some people are capable of. They made the real threat to the main characters of The Last of Us are not the infected but the humans that have survived.

Shamefully I did find the controls odd at first, but once you get a hang of them you feel like you have spent the last twenty years doing just this, and become scarily good at sneaking past the mutated fungus people. There is a decent amount of choice in the route or strategy you choose to take while going through this game. Depending on how you play it, it can be either a run-and-gun experience or a tense test of your nerves depending on the situation. My main strategy was generally going in guns a blazing. The game does encourage the stealthy approach but Naughty Dog made sure that the non-stealthy approach was still viable.

What annoyed me was the hit and miss detection system of the enemies. I would wait patiently for the perfect moment to stealthily move past an enemy, only to be discovered by the eagle eyes of the enemies that could distinguish seeing my hair from behind cover. Then other times they'll ignore you as I stuck my whole head out of cover to check the situation. This doesn't really cross over to the infected , because their sections are mostly based off of how much sound you make. Every time I encountered one of the infected I was terrified by the fact that any screw up meant instant death. The game doesn’t hold back in showing just what the consequences of failure are. My run and gun approach meant I got to see these rather nasty deaths a fair bit. These are small nitpicks though.

I enjoyed watching Ellie and Joel go from wary strangers to trusting friends. I think it’s a triumph of writing, performance, and technology. This is a game that will leave a lasting impression on you long after you have finished.

The Last Of Us is up there as being one of the best games I’ve ever played.

I Went To The Other Side Of The City $2 Burrito’s, But Was It Worth It?

 

Saturday the 13th of July marked the official grand opening of the Burrito Bar at Portside Wharf in Brisbane. This was punctuated by several different things.  The was a Mariachi band playing, free samples of chips and nachos, a huge cruise ship departing from the wharf, and of course the famous $2 Burrito. Today, for you dear audience, I will giving you my thoughts on these $2 Burritos.

The first thing that was noticed upon arrival was the line. It looked quite big, but this was 1 p.m., so a lunch rush wasn’t too unexpected. Fortunately, the line was moving quite briskly and after only 10 minutes, I found myself ready to order burrito number 1.

Burrito number 1 was the chicken burrito. This burrito came out in quite good time. It had plenty of cheese on it, which was a plus in my books. It was also quite warm. However, the sauce still tasted cold and it was quite disconcerting eating a warm burrito with a distinct cold section in it. However, the chicken was really nice and the proof was in the pudding. 2 minutes later I had devoured my first burrito and moved onto burrito number 2.

 

Burrito number 2 was the Ultimate Mexican. It did not have as much cheese as the chicken burrito, but this was probably my favourite burrito that I had. It was slightly spicy, but not overly so. This was good as I am not normally a huge fan of spicy food, although I can eat them if needed.

However, for my personal tastes, this had a good balance of spice without overwhelming the taste of the burrito. Also, this burrito was warm throughout and the actual pastry taste was more evident (and delicious) compared to the chicken in which it was overwhelmed by the cheese and cold sauce taste.

Burrito number 3 was the Californian. I was going for the Fish, but they had run out of Fish. This is basically a beef burrito with chips in it. Although I liked it,  this burrito was definitely a very heavy burrito due to the fries mashed within it. It also had the longest wait, as the wait staff lost the order. Despite it being the heaviest, it also had the least taste out of all three.

So I guess the real question is whether I think the burritos would be worth it if they weren’t $2. For a change and a quick meal, maybe. Although for their size, $7+ each burrito is kind of steep.  However, for $2 they were nice and I did devour all of them quite quickly. Also, the atmosphere with the band and store was really good.

If I had to rank the burritos I tasted, I would go Ultimate Mexican first, then Chicken and finally Californian last. But in short, for $2, they were nom-nom-nom delicious.