My New Passion For Artbooks

A couple days ago, I got a package in the mail.  It’s something that I’ve been waiting for for the last month.  I backed it on Kickstarter, and it was worth every penny.  It was an artbook.  But not just any artbook.  See, this one was started by a YouTuber named VaatiVidya, who has become known as something of an Internet bard talking about the From Software games.  Every so often, on his channel, he would do art contests with a specific theme.  Some of the artwork submitted to him is spectacular.  It’s some genuinely amazing stuff.  He decided to amalgamate all of those works into this one book, and make it available to those who backed it.

Having gotten to look through its pages, I have seen the works of some of the most amazing people who chose to participate.  And don’t you worry, each and every one of them are credited.  Beneath every title of a piece, there is the name of the one who made it.  I can’t imagine how proud those people are to see their names immortalized.  I would be.  With how great this artbook looks, it would be such a privilege to be able to have something to show for it.  A book that could end up in a museum or a library of art.  Or at least it would, if video games got the respect that they deserve by the art community, who still see them as not worthy of the title.

This isn’t the first artbook that I’ve gotten, but this is the one that truly made me appreciate the term “artbook” and what goes along with that when you think about it.  But as I said, it’s not the first.  The first was years ago, for Christmas.  It was a gift from my parents.  A book that was made detailing the history of the “A Song of Ice and Fire” books.  The artwork inside was spectacular!  I cannot credit the artists who did that enough.  It was amazing stuff.  I have my favorite renditions, like the one where the Children of the Forest and the First Men make the Pact on the Isle of Faces.  Seeing the children dressed in garb of leaves is really neat stuff.  When I pictured them, that was what I had in mind.

From there, I got another artbook.  This time it was one that was connected to a game that was coming out – Cyberpunk 2077.  The “World of Cyberpunk 2077” is a fantastic book.  It got me so pumped for that game.  The artwork was, as with all the others I have talked about, sublime.  Getting to know the various parts of Night City and the images it made in my mind really had me pumped about all the potential in that game.  Granted, the final product wasn’t that great, but the world is still fascinating.  I can still see amazing stories being set in that world, because it is so rich of lore and vibrant culture.  A shame every game has to be open world.  If they had made that game open level, I can only imagine some of the areas they could create.

From there, I got an artbook showing off the amazing designs they made for Gwent cards for the game based on the card game, along with the version of it in The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt.  This one is probably my second favorite.  The Scoia’Tael deck was my favorite, and the artwork for that deck is incredible.  This book was even more special, because for some of the card designs, we got to see little blurbs from the creators of them detailing what their inspiration was, not to mention the backstories of them or just neat factoids.  But don’t get me wrong, all the other decks are great stuff too.  As the Gwent game is still ongoing, it would be neat to see down the line if there is another of these released with even more cards they create.

Then there was the artbook for the Mass Effect trilogy.  This one wasn’t as surprising as I was expecting.  But it did open up my eyes to the reality that there is so much of that universe that we haven’t seen.  It would have been cool to go to Palaven, or to see what Kar’Shan was really like, outside of the batarians lies about it.  Most of what was in that book was storyboard art for the series.  Not bad, but it wasn’t anything exceptional.

Finally, before Soul Arts, I got an artbook based on the Halo franchise.  This one was more of a history book of the series, but the art inside was still fantastic.  I have something of a love-hate relationship with that series.  I love the stories that were told, but I hate the multi-player aspect, which is all people play those games for, these days.  I’m a man out of time.  It’s a shame that 343 Industries has butchered this franchise as bad as they have, because there is still a wealth of creativity to be found there.  Oh well.

My Amazon list has even more artbooks.  I want to get the artwork for Ghost of Tsushima and Horizon: Zero Dawn.  I remember when I was watching the documentary Jodorowsky’s Dune, detailing the greatest science-fiction film never made, they talked about a complete book created to send to studios to pitch the film with all their production artwork.  There are only a few in existence.  If ever I get a chance to get ahold of one of those, I will beat an old lady with a stick to get it.  To have HR Giger’s last artwork before he died, not to mention one of the greatest book cover artist of the time’s work for the spaceships in my home, it would be a dream beyond my comprehension. If ever there is artbook with a compendium of the works of Bob Ross, I would most assuredly be all over that as well.

Part of me thinks that the reason I started this collection is because I want to one day have a home.  It’s a small dream.  One that I can have a coffee table for, where I can put the artbooks for other people to see.  To give potential guests in a home that I have an insight into some of the things that I find beautiful.  It’s a little dream.  One that feels surprisingly adult to me.  I like this idea that I am maturing as a person.  It doesn’t feel like it.  With my mother gone, I have this feeling sometimes that I am going nowhere as a person.  So many things that now I have to face on my own without her guidance.  I can’t imagine how hard this is for my old man and my sister, but for me, I have always counted Sally as a kindred intellect, and now I have to think about where I am going from here.

She would have looked through these artbooks and thought they were very pretty, but didn’t get what they were connected to.  I’m a nerd, but she was not.  The most nerdy she got was with Tetris on the Gameboy and Tetrisphere on my N64.  But it would have been nice to show her all the same.  More of those little what-ifs in my life.

Until next time, a quote,

“So please, take it all in!  Read the lore I’ve comprised for each entry, appreciate the hours of work behind each piece, and seek out the artist’s portfolio’s at the end.  I hope SoulArts goes onto inspire you.” – Michael “VaatiVidya” Samuel

Peace out,

Maverick

Top 10 Overrated Actors/Actresses

I’ve done a lot of bitching about modern Hollywood, so instead…I decided to do even more. Except this time, I’m going to be specific. This time, I’m going to focus on the very specific people who I think are in this industry and I cannot, for the LIFE of me figure out why.  Whether it be actors/actresses who always play the same character in every role, or just those who seem to be without talent except in a couple notable examples, these are the acting talent who is big now who I just cannot stand and don’t get why other people think so highly of them.

10. Ryan Reynolds
Oh yeah, starting off this list with one that is going to annoy people.  But this guy falls FIRMLY in the category of actors who always play the same character, regardless of film.  Sure, in the first Deadpool movie, that schtick worked.  It worked well.  But then the sequel came out and it wasn’t…bad, but not very good either.  It was passable.  But ever since then, the Ryan Reynolds voice and Ryan Reynolds acting style has become more and more apparent.  It’s tedious, and tiresome.  Not much more to say about that.

9. Tessa Thompson
I couldn’t tell you where this woman came from as an actress, but from where I’m sitting, I have seen her in NOTHING that is worth my time.  There was that Groj-awful Men in Black reboot that she was in, and it was terrible.  Granted, nobody in that film was good, but she was especially notable in how bad she was.  Then there was Thor: Love and Thunder.  The “comedy” that wasn’t even the slightest bit funny.  Here, her inability to act really shined.  I don’t know who has told this woman that her bland and stoic no expression face is good acting, but it’s not.  It’s really not.  I think I’ve seen one actress who can make the stoic thing work, and that’s Scarlett Johansson.  That woman has range.  Tessa Thompson, on the other hand, does not.  She’s a one-note pony, and the note isn’t that good.

8. Tom Holland
“But Lucien, he was Spider-Man!  And you said he was the only person who actually felt believable as Spider-Man that you’d seen on screen!”  Yeah, that was before Marvel’s Spider-Man on PS4 and that awful discount Tom Holland face change they did.  REALLY hoping the sequel ditches that.  The first look they had was classic and looked nice.  But back to the matter at hand, Tom Holland is a dude who also seems to have one note as an actor – the out of place dork.  Now, maybe when he grows a little and gets rid of the baby-face, he can be more convincing in other roles, but when I saw the Uncharted movie, I thought to myself – this dude looks like he’s 14.  He’s like Allison Lohman in Matchstick Men, except you learned that that was all a front for her to pretend to be 14.  This dude always sounds like a dork, in every role.  Maybe that’s just his American accent, and if he was able to do his standard British, he would have more range, but for now, I’m not impressed.  For an example of a British actor who can have range doing American roles, look no further than Tom Hardy or Andrew Garfield.

7. Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson
Everything I’ve heard about this guy says that he is one of the nicest people in Hollywood right now.  That’s commendable.  But here’s the problem – he’s not that great in film roles.  I’m sorry for people who think otherwise, but it’s true.  He’s not.  Maybe it’s the roles he’s being given.  The dude needs to fire his agent.  Bad role after bad role in terrible movies that, if the stories are to be believed, he has fun with.  So there’s that.  But none of these performances make me think he has any genuine acting talent.  Dave Bautista was able to rise from being a wrestler, thanks to getting the right directors.  Maybe The Rock just needs that too.

7. Brie Larson
Oh boy, this one is a doozy.  This woman came into stardom in a way that is so counterintuitive, but so fitting for modern times – by playing up the pop feminism.  She starred in one major Marvel film, and from there used that and the Disney-approved pop feminism to make her entire film platform into a mouthpiece.  However, this ignores the reality that she cannot act to save her life.  Brie Larson is the WORST in the world of modern “empowered” female character who have absolute ZERO character of their own.  All of her roles are either spastic crazy or wooden garbage.  She has two ranges, and that’s it.  She can’t do anything else.  The only time I enjoyed watching her was when Don Cheadle was telling her to keep her hands to herself during an interview.  That was great.

5. James Corden
Who told this man that he’s funny?  I have to know.  Somebody did, and that person needs to be shot.  Now, I have heard that he got his start on the BBC doing funny shows that actually are funny.  It seems that the fame went to his head in a big way.  He apparently is an awful person to interact with.  Which fits, given his inability to act to save his life.  Every role he’s had in awful.  Worse than John Oliver, by a country mile.  The dude is the graveyard of “funny” performances, and I can only assume that he gets roles because he has footage that Hollywood wants to keep under wraps.

4. Melissa McCarthy
This woman is an entrepreneur in terrible film-making.  Her husband and her own a production company, and much like Happy Madison with Adam Sandler (who only avoids this list because every 10 years or so he turns in a really fantastic performance.  He missed it by the slimmest margin ever), she uses it as a way to make whatever terrible films she wants to make.  They are all comedies, and they all have the same quality – they aren’t funny!  They are the antithesis to funny.  They are comedy’s sad abortion!  They are an orphan begging for food levels of funny, meaning not funny at all.  In her case, she gets roles because her husband owns the company and uses it as a platform for her movies and what I assume to be some VERY shady Hollywood accounting.  It’s the only way I can explain how they make money on the films, given that ALL of them are critically panned.  There are only so many ways I can say that she’s just not funny.

3. Emma Watson
Look, I know that all the millennials in my audience are about to get upset with me.  “But Lucien, she played Hermoine!  She’s a great actress!”  No, she’s not.  She had one role that was successful, but she wasn’t that great in that role.  Everyone has their nostalgia goggles on WAY too tight.  I never liked any of the Harry Potter movies.  They all fucked up the endings to the books, which was always the best part.  But Emma Watson’s performance was not all that good in any of them.  She’s not a TERRIBLE actress.  She’s just not that good.  She’s bland.  She’s white bread.  She’s a bologna sandwich.  Perfectly filling, but nothing you’ll remember two days from now.  That’s her.  That’s her acting repertoire.  In that Groj-awful Beauty and the Beast “live-action” remake, she said that she was peaking.  Given how they auto-tuned her into oblivion, I hope not.  She’s an actress who isn’t bad, she’s just not that good.

2. Paul Rudd
We’re back to actors who all play the same character in every film they are in.  This is Paul Rudd, to a FAULT!  This guy plays the exact same person in every role, regardless of context.  He is so one-note that I heard that a movie has him in it, and I already can judge what kind of movie it is going to be.  I do NOT get how this guy has gotten so popular, when he has no range or any kind.  I watched him in Ghostbusters: Afterlife, and I thought to myself – wow, it’s like I’m watching him as Ant-Man all over again.  He’s also not very funny.  It was kind of a choice between him and Seth Rogan, as far as actors who got famous because of comedies, but who haven’t been funny in a single thing they’ve been in.

And the most overrated actor/actress is…

1. Chris Pratt
This guy.  My whole reason for doing this list was because of Chris Pratt.  I don’t get what people like so much about this dude.  Yes, he was fun as Starlord…briefly.  But really, it was more the characters around him.  They were able to play off him in a way that was funny.  Then you have his TERRIBLE role in the TERRIBLE Jurassic World movies.  This guy is the peak of one-note performances.  Every character he plays in every movie is the same as every other.  Like Tom Holland, he’s a giant dork.  Like this weird middle-aged man who still acts like a nerdy teenager.  I’ve tried to figure out what it is about his performances that people gravitate towards, but I couldn’t tell you.  No performance is different than any other.  I am just assuming that he plays himself in every role.  That’s the only way I can see it.  He has no range.

Those are the actors who are on this list.  There are some who avoided it.  Kristen Stewart, because apparently she has finally found some performances that are able to bring out her acting range.  Took long enough.  I thought about putting Natalie Portman on the list, but with the right director, she has a lot of range.  The problem is that she doesn’t find that director often.

Until next time, a quote,

“He is not a dude.  You’re a dude.  This is a man.  A handsome, muscular man.” – Drax, Avengers: Infinity War

Peace out,

Maverick

I Have No Hope For Gaming

I recently read that Sony is starting up a mobile division for gaming.  I have also seen the endless praise showered on The Last of Us: Part I for how amazing it looks.  As I see this endless ball-washing of Naughty Dog, even though all they did with that game is amp up the visuals, a thought came to me – is all people care about is visuals anymore?  Is that it?  I remember when Elden Ring was being hyped, and people were bitching that the visuals aren’t good enough.  Granted, the game blew away expectations when it came out, but all up to that point, it was endless bitching that it doesn’t look pretty enough.

Gaming isn’t made for me anymore.  I game for story.  It has told some amazing stories that stick with me, with characters that I want to get to know and feel like I would like if they were real.  But the passion behind making great stories and great ideas is just going away in every company.  Now it’s all about making the prettiest, glossiest thing.  It’s about making games as marketable and money-making as possible.  Everything is about making video games into something that can generate the most cash.

I feel so lost in this modern world.  When I was younger, things were simpler and I didn’t have to deal with this endless greed-storm.  I remember when companies were all so excited about this medium and were trying to flex their creative muscles.  Sure, lots of things didn’t work, but lots more did.  It was a voyage of discovery, and everyone was so eager to see what happened next.  That’s not the world I live in anymore.  Now it’s all “how can we make this product as profitable as humanly possible?”  No excitement for the creativity.  Just make it look good.  Just make it look pretty.  Sure, you’re remaking a game from 2013, but it looks really pretty!  It’s prettier than its ever been!  Isn’t how pretty it is amazing?!

To say nothing about the live-service drive that now every studio seems to be going for.  Everything has to be marketable.  Everything has to be able to generate as much capital as possible.  The pro-capitalism crowd will come out and go “that’s the point!  You make these things to make money.”  Sure, but they already make money.  Before microtransactions, gaming made money hand over fist.  It was a multi-billion dollar industry before it all went to shit.  Now it isn’t about making money, it’s about bilking their customers for as much money as they can.  Because greed is the name of the game in this shithole country.

I played Stray, and the whole time I felt like a kid again.  This was something new.  This was something creative.  This was something special.  Then I go back to gaming news and see about how GTA V is being released for the fifth time.  How Skyrim is being released for the fifth time.  How a game made in 2013 is being remade, when there are so many other candidates that would be better for a remake.  Older classics that could use a touch-up in the gameplay and visuals department.  But nope.  Naughty Dog saw a way to make easy money and they took it.  Sony endorsed it because it is easy money for them too.  It is a cash-grab, plain and simple.  So much of gaming is that now.  Just endless cash grabs to make easy money with minimal effort.

You cannot imagine how frustrating it is to see a medium that I have loved go so close to doing cool things, only to stop and decide not to.  For games with cool concepts to be canned because they aren’t unique enough or because the studio doesn’t think it will do financially well enough.  This medium has endless creative potential.  And it’s being wasted.  Wasted on making more and more of the same thing they’ve been making before  More FPS franchise sequels.  More sequels to everything.  Because it’s a brand name that people know.  People are scared of new things, but the same thing they’ve played a thousand times, just with a new coat of paint, now that’s trustworthy.  This is why nostalgia owns entertainment now.

Everything I see just validates my belief that this medium’s best days are behind it, and that eventually I won’t even pay attention to what comes out anymore.  It didn’t have to be this way.  There were endless opportunities for things to not be like this.  For the voyage of discovery to keep going.  Alas, that’s hard, because then it might not make obscene amounts of money.  That’s the world we live in today.  I for one am exhausted by it.  I got the artbook that VaatiVidya did a Kickstarter for, and I see these amazing artistic drawings of new ideas for From Software games, and I see so much creativity.  Then I look at the trailer for the newest thing and I see corporate stink.

“Nothing is more frustrating than walking a game walk right up to doing something interesting and then changing its mind.” – Mr B Tongue, Uncomfort

Peace out,

Maverick

The Death of the Old Entertainment Adage

Growing up, I was always told that if you are making a form of entertainment, or any product that is meant to be consumed and enjoyed by the public, there is a simple adage to follow – give the people what they want.  This adage follows in a number of different other ones.  As a man who got my BA in Journalism and Public Communication, there was also the adage – who is your audience?  Because once you know that, they you can make a bunch of decisions about what you are putting into your story, since the goal is to give them what they want and keep them reading.  Ironically enough, I’ve never asked myself what you all want.  I just give you what I want to write about and hope that it finds an audience.  I’m over 1,100 strong now, so I guess I have some kind of dedicated audience.  I love you all so.

One group of people who seems to have forgot this old adage is Hollywood.  Well, them and the video game industry.  And this reality is so strange to me.  It seems like such a simple rule to follow.  I mean, if you want to make something that people consume, then why not make it into something that is meant to appeal to the audience you are catering to?  That makes perfect sense to me.  Especially when one thinks about the fact that lots of things are niche.

Say you have this major franchise that you’ve inherited because you bought the company who owned it and you are a giant, evil, soulless entertainment conglomerate who is trying to bank off of nostalgia to hide your creativity deficits.  If that’s the case, then you’d think that the goal would be to make something that would be as geared toward the audience you have as humanly possible.  After all, if you can guarantee that people will watch something by virtue of them being fans of it up ’til now, then why not exploit that?  If parents are super into something, and they have young kids, if it’s something good and caters to the audience they have, then odds are good that their kids will be into it as well.  Disney found this out with the MCU.  By playing to the audience of comic book nerds, and being faithful to that material, they were able to get an audience for the most ambitious franchise of all time.

However, the aforementioned giant, evil, soulless entertainment conglomerate seems to have forgotten that their built-in audiences exist.  Now, I get that they are going to try and appeal to the widest audience possible, which is good business, but if the built-in audience doesn’t engage with something because you aren’t trying to please them anymore, is it worth losing them to try and secure a larger marketshare with a different audience?  I’ve been struggling with this, because it just seems so ass-backwards to me.  The first rule in entertainment is to give people what they want.  If people want X, but you decide to give them Y, what reason do you have to complain when people don’t engage with it anymore?

Entertainment is doing everything it can to shit on existing audiences, all so that they can justify why entertainment companies don’t engage with them anymore.  And these companies don’t engage with their audiences.  You’d think they would.  You’d think that there would be some kind of forum where they ask people what they want, and then work to give that to them.  It seems so simple.  Granted, people can be uncertain and difficult to please, but if Sean Murray was able to sort out the complaints of people who were pissed at No Man’s Sky into usable data sets to figure out what people wanted and then run with it, surely companies as massive as Disney can do that too.  Probably way easier since they have a massive army of people working for them.

With video games, I am more understanding of why they are creatively bankrupt.  After all, with Hollywood, they actually have to ponder about this stuff.  With gaming it isn’t the question of what people want, but instead – what will people pay for?  If they can make money with something that is low-effort and mediocre and derivative and lacking in any creativity, they will do it.  It’s why we have endless CoD games, or any other franchise.  Why take a risk with a AA or A class game, when you can make one AAA game with a butt-load of microtransactions and then make money hand over fist?  These companies are now too big to risk smaller profits for different ideas.  If they don’t make obscene amounts of money, then their shareholders get nervous.

Gaming has become too big to succeed now.  They are so massive that they have to have income that is bigger than most Third World nations in a given year.  So they literally can’t afford to be creative.  You know those games where they are super unique and everything is into them?  You know how they immediately then get imitators that are trying to ape off that success?  It’s because they are too afraid to not do that.  We’ve seen it time and time again.  Remember all the WoW clones that said they were going to be the WoW killer?  Remember all the battle royale games that came out after the success of Fortnite and PUBG?  It’s so much easier to ape off the success of other things.  It’s easier to follow trends.  Remember, they don’t ask what people want, they ask what people will pay for.  So long as they have an answer that is good, then it’s off to the races.

But this is unsustainable because all it takes is for ONE major fuck-up, and then they are nearly sunk.  Because gaming companies now have so few releases in a given year, they have no way to mitigate risk.  Time was, the major gaming companies would have a plethora of games that they would release in a year so they could spread the budgets around and see what stuck.  If there was something good, then they could build off it with sequels.  Now, with the cost of development through the roof, and gaming companies insisting on being cutting-edge tech demos, the cost is so massive that they can literally not afford to spread it around.  Or so you’d think.  The reality is that companies are now making such obscene profits that they could EASILY do so, but they will then complain about not having enough people or any number of other things.  While they cut jobs to save money.  Gaming is becoming an ugly business.

It seems so simple, to just give people what they want.  Granted, this can lead to creative stagnation, but you have to ride the line, if you are going to insist on keeping a franchise going without leading it out to pasture.  Find something new to do that is interesting, but don’t do that in such a way that you alienate the audience you have.  It’s a balancing act.  Plus, when you have new ideas, you still have to respect what came before.  This isn’t easy.  In fact, it’s the hardest thing to do.  Engaging with the audience would help.  Talking with them about what they would like to see and what they think is a bad idea.

Too bad every company now has their pet media insisting that fans are evil monsters whose opinions should never be considered.

Until next time, a quote,

“What do you see right now?  You see exactly and only what I choose to show you.  That is illusion, Ivy.  That is the lie that I tell your eyes.  Making the magic happen in the moment.  In that split second!” – Buddy Israel, Smokin’ Aces

Peace out,

Maverick

Lucien’s Gaming Hot Takes, #2

I got more things to say about gaming that may be seen as divisive.  Let’s do this.

• The Last of Us: Part I is a cash-grab.  I don’t get why Naughty Dog is so butthurt about people saying this.  It is a $70 graphics mod.  That’s it.  There’s no new level designs.  No new weapons.  No new anything, except visuals.  The fact that they are charging $70 for it is shameless, but the fact that people are willing to shell out that kind of money for a blatant cash grab is even more insane.  Like, really?  Are none of these people financially struggling right now?  Wow.
• Play one battle royale game, you’ve played them all.
• Multiplayer games suck.  Why do studios keep making them?  I hate people enough as it is.  Why would I want to play video games with them?
• Final Fantasy X is the best that the franchise ever was and at this point, ever will be.  Square Enix sucks now.  They lost their way and can’t make good games anymore.
• I watched the 10 minute gameplay trailer for Forspoken, and all I think is – oh look, another open-world game that is huge and mostly empty with nothing that is all that interesting to do.
• Open world games are overdone and it’s gotten old.  Open level games are better.  When you have levels that let you explore, instead of one big open world where there are always a fuck-ton of bugs and huge gaps of space with nothing interesting to do.  When I hear that a new game is open-world, I am instantly less interested to play it.  One of the biggest things holding Cyberpunk 2077 back was being open world.
• Hearing Square Enix talk about how different the next part of the Final Fantasy VII remake is going to be from the original makes me not want to play it.
• Hearing Square Enix talk about how the Kingdom Hearts franchise doesn’t need Final Fantasy characters anymore and that they want to divorce this idea that it is Disney mixed with Final Fantasy makes me not want to play Kingdom Hearts IV.  In fact, everything they say about that game makes me less interested.  It’s going to suck.  Speaking of open worlds with nothing in them.
• Fallout 4 sucked.  I don’t get why people’s opinion of that game is so high.
• I miss when games that had choice-based gameplay let you have a fail state.  Like, if you said the wrong thing, you could fuck everything up and die.  Or fuck over what you’re trying to do.  The original Fallout had it that if you told too many people you are from a Vault, you could reveal its location and then you would fail in your mission because everyone would die.  Remember when games didn’t just have you win, no matter what you do?  People give David Cage games a lot of shit, but at least there you can have characters all die and it go nowhere.
• Great gameplay does nothing if the story sucks ass.  Like, sure, the gameplay to The Last of Us: Part II was worlds better, but the story sucked and I hated Abby as a character.  Plenty of games have great moment to moment gameplay, but I have zero desire to play them because they have no story or a shitty one.
• The gameplay showcase to The Callisto Protocol made me less interested to play it.  It’s like a slower and more deliberate version of Dead Space.
• Not enough games are made based on mythological tales of various cultures.  I remember this game called Never Alone based on Native Alaskan legends, and I thought to myself – man, I bet there are loads more of these kinds of stories that would make neat games.
• Gaming is wasting its potential in such a big way.  Just like my point about different cultures mythological legends, there are so many points of history that would make good games.  There is this vast plethora of ideas that could go somewhere neat that hasn’t been done to death.  Not another sequel.  Not another reboot.  Something new and fresh and interesting.  Instead of making one AAA game, gaming companies could be make 10 AA games.  Or 5 AA games and 10 A games.  I just don’t understand why every gaming company feels the need to take what budgets they have and confine them.  There are probably a fuck-ton of neat ideas that might find an audience and be able to be the next franchise, but we’ll never know!  Instead, it’s just more and more and more of the same shit, recycled for with visuals that are great, but overpriced and unnecessary.
• Not every game needs to be the latest cutting-edge thing.  I know that some gamers bitch when a game doesn’t have visuals that are new enough, but when push comes to shove if a game is fun to play, but doesn’t look like the latest thing, they will play it.  When all their friends are talking about how fun some game is, they will play it.  Visuals are nice, but they are icing on the cake.  If game visuals stopped at the PS3 generation, the world would be a better place.

And that’s my rant for tonight.  Hope you all are well.

Until next time, a quote,

“Growing old, Shepard.  Not many good years left.  But still best candidate for project.” – Mordin Solus, Mass Effect 3

Peace out,

Maverick

Why Does Every “Strong” Female Character Now Have to be a Bitch?

Something I thought of when I was playing Horizon: Forbidden West was – why is Aloy such a bitch?  I thought these were her friends.  So why is she being such a bitch to everyone?  She is literally being a bitch to a culture of warriors who love a good fight.  That doesn’t seem smart.  I kept waiting for her to have a real moment of having her bad attitude put in check by realizing that not every problem can be railroaded through, but it never happened.  It was bizarre.  It made me like her less and less as she is overly smug and superior to everyone around her.  It also made the cold confidence of Sylens that much better, because he wasn’t a complete cunt about it.  Sure, he wasn’t any nicer than she was, but he made it fun because of Lance Reddick’s amazing performance.  And, we weren’t supposed to like him.  So it worked.

When a buddy of mine asked me to watch the first episode of She-Hulk: Attorney at Law that he pirated and sent me (because my time is apparently not precious to people), I got EXACTLY the same feeling.  The woman who plays She-Hulk is such a bitch!  There is nothing even remotely likable about her.  She is the most unpleasant person.  I thought to myself – is she supposed to be this mean?  Why is she so unpleasant to every person she meets?  Why does she shit on Captain America?  Why does she get so angry when Bruce tells her that controlling her emotions is the key to taming the beast inside?  Oh, right, because of her laundry list of minor problems that she could easily ignore if she had a pair of ear buds.

In fact, let’s just get into something, because this show is ostensibly supposed to be for women – how are women not offended by women like She-Hulk?  When she talks about her problems, they are literally – being cat-called, being told to smile more, having men explain things, and being assertive for fear that a man will kill her.  Really?  That’s it?  So, the women in average America who are struggling to get by on a low-wage job, that’s what they think their biggest problem is?  A mother of two who has to work a job as well as her husband because the days of a one-income household are long gone.  They think this is their biggest concern?  A gay teenage girl who has been kicked out of her home and is a pariah at her school because she got outed.  This is what she’s so concerned with?  A college girl with crippling debt that there is virtually no way out of, who is thinking about turning to OnlyFans because they have done more to help young women get out of debt than the actual government.  This is what she’s supposed to be most concerned with?

How do women stomach how patronizing pop feminism is?  Say what you want about the star of Roseanne, but that show was a great look at the issues of middle American families.  And it was actually funny.  Let’s just ignore the main star’s political views, because she was really just acting out stuff other people wrote for her.  You had issues about marriage, and raising kids, and watching them grow up.  Roseanne was a strong woman who went through stuff and helped keep a family together with a spouse who cared.  She didn’t take people’s shit, because she had enough problems in her own life.  That’s part of why this show was so popular.

This show is supposed to be a sitcom, and they made their central protagonist a complete bitch.  And not in a funny way.  Like Elaine, from Seinfeld.  Yeah, she is a bitch too, but you aren’t supposed to like her personality.  In fact, all the characters in that show are assholes.  The idea is to enjoy the stupid shit they get into and laugh at what scum-fucks they are.  Is that what this show is going for?  I don’t think so.  Everything I’ve read from the writers of this show, she is meant to be the strong, empowered female character who will show the MEN how it’s done.  Ah yes, men.

Which brings me to the fact that every single man on this show is a patronizing asshole.  Why?  Does pop feminism really believe that men who are genuinely decent people don’t exist?  Or is the idea that if they are decent, then they have some kind of ulterior motive?  It wouldn’t be so bad, if the main character wasn’t constantly shitting on the men around her.  Does she have some kind of problem with men?  I’m assuming not, because we have seen in advertisements that eventually she is trying to find herself a man to be with.  One who she can pick up and carry like a little babe to bed.  Given that it is her She-Hulk side who is trying to find a man, she’ll need a black guy.  You know, because she needs a guy with a big dick.  Laughing writing that.  In a better show, they would joke about that.  But this isn’t that show.  This is a show where it will all be something other than the superficial, because women just don’t think about stuff like that.  Except all the gals I know who have talked about how big their boyfriends’ dicks are.

I just don’t get this idea that if a woman is to be a strong person, she has to be a total bitch.  It’s just not true.  I think back to my mother.  She was a strong woman, and she didn’t have to patronize anyone.  She was a kind person who treated everyone the way she wanted to be treated.  Sure, she had her limits, but that’s natural.  That’s human.  Same with my grandmother, who raised five kids at their homestead while her guy ran a gas station 60 miles away.  This was back when there were black bears and no troopers around to help.

But it isn’t like fiction always gets this wrong.  I think about CAPT. Katherine Janeway from Star Trek: Voyager.  She is a positive and upbeat person.  While she is the captain of a starship, she can’t be the same aloof captain that others are because of the fact that her ship is thousands of lightyears away from Earth.  She realized that in order to be the head of this crew, she had to be seen as a human being, not a monolith.  It worked, and her crew respects her decisions.  But, like my mother, she has her limits.  The point when she has decided that diplomacy has gone far enough and she’s ready to throw down.  She didn’t need to treat everyone who was beneath her as scum, even when they disagreed with her.

Or I think of Maiyuri, in Steins;Gate.  When Makise first meets her, and is scared stiff of the reality that she spends the majority of her time in the Lab with Okabe and Itaru, Maiyuri tells her that she’s their hostage.  Naturally, this leads Makise to attempt to call the cops, but Maiyuri tells her that it’s great, and that she has so much fun there with these two guys who are her closest friends.  She is overly friendly to everyone, but you see later that there are dark forces inside of her.  Okabe talks about how, after her grandmother died, she would be seen reaching up toward the sky, and how he gradually saw less and less of the person she was each day.  Realizing that if something wasn’t done, she might end up killing herself, he decided to say that she was his hostage and that she couldn’t up and vanish.  It worked.  But as the series goes on, and the Okabe keeps trying to stop her from dying over and over again, you realize that she has some memory of the events that keep happening, and that she remember her being dead over and over again, and it is wearing her down.  There’s even this moment where Okabe goes beyond a point where time can be altered and it is her who tells him about how fucked up the timeline has become.

Pop feminism is patronizing to women.  It talks down to them.  It tells them that men are the worst and the women have it so hard exclusively because of men.  It tells them that kindness is a weakness and that being human is wrong.  You need to be an ubermensch that does no wrong and can never be faulted.  You have to emasculate men at every turn, because men are the enemy.  You need to talk down about men and make other men feel bad for the awful things that some guys have done.

What’s even more frustrating about this is the fact that she talks down to regular Hulk about how experiences.  She shits all over the trauma he went through back when the Hulk was a monster inside of him, because her being cat-called is SO much worse.  In her word’s, it’s 1000x worse than anything he has gone through.  That’s so disgusting!  It would be fine, if this show had her character gradually eating some humble pie.  Maybe finding out that the Hulk side of her can be a monster and she does something horrible and realizes that maybe she needs to actually respect the violence that comes with this power.  But I know that isn’t going to happen.  Instead, it’s all going to be her being super awesome woman with no faults of any kind or things to overcome, outside of men being awful to her.  Because fuck us, am I right?

I don’t get why women have to be written this way.  There is no reason for it.  I love a good female character, when they are written well.  A pity that so many streaming shows, movies, and video games didn’t get the same message.

Until next time, a quote,

“Your people have placed a lot of responsibility on you.”
“No more than you.”
“Then maybe we can show the men how it’s done!” – Urdnot Bakara, Mass Effect 3

Peace out,

Maverick

Ghost of Tsushima, Two Years Later (and pondering a sequel I hope never gets made)

For those who didn’t know, the last update to Ghost of Tsushima was done about a month ago.  After two years, and a Director’s Cut version of the game for the PS5, they are finished updating it.  Since I am waiting for fall, when some of the games I am most stoked about come out, I thought I would revisit this one and see what I think, two years later and with more updates done.

Overall, I still love this game.  It is a great piece of historical fiction, which is a treasure trove that not enough game companies have delved into.  There are a TON of settings I can think of off the top of my head for places I would love to see great historical fiction in this game’s vein done.  Robin Hood of Sherwood Forest comes readily to mind.  Then there’s some of the Native American fights against the white man pushing them more and more.  The battle of Crazy Horse and how he nearly defeated the Union army, but then got killed in a battle and all of his efforts fell apart.  Ancient Egypt, looking into the culture there in a more militaristic sense, rather than a stealth game sounds fun.  Don’t wanna step on that awful game, Assassin’s Creed: Origins toe’s.  There are so many great realms of history that could be looked at with gaming.  It is criminal to not make the most of that.

With this game, however, I noticed that some things had changed, and it was all for the better.  They finally got around to adding New Game Plus, which is rad.  I like getting to have all my toys in my toolbox to play with right out of the gate.  We also have a new charm that you get access to from the Fox Dens, which is nice, considering there are SO many of them.  A fact that doesn’t get better for me.  It drives me nuts, if I am being completely honest.  With how much fun and meditative doing the haikus was, you could have cut out about five fox dens, and added some more haikus, and it would have been much more enjoyable.

The visuals in this game are at the top of their class.  Both the base game and Iki Island.  This game is GLORIOUS to look at.  With all the new stuff that you have access to in the expansion, it makes for some great options when you use New Game Plus and really go to town with all the stuff you now have access to for replays.  It’s rad.  The Legends mode for combat challenges are fun little diversions.  A shame you need an internet connection for them, but such is life.

Overall, the game, now two years later and with no further updates coming, is still a blast to play, and if you haven’t recommended it, and are looking for something to play, I cannot recommend it enough.  Which brings me to another thought – what about a sequel?  Honestly, I’ve been wracking my brain on this one.  This story seems so self-contained that I honestly can’t think of a really good way to make a sequel to this game that won’t either be really dour or really forced.  By the end, Lord Sakai has lost all status as a samurai.  Lord Shimura is dead, either by yours or his hand.  The island has been reclaimed by the Shogunate’s forces.  But there are hints that the elements of the island are split on supporting the samurai, and those who support the Ghost.  Jin talks to Yuna about how, if he hadn’t given himself up, it would have risked a civil war. 

In a sequel, there is the potential to expand on this.  To have Japan be on the verge of a civil war, all thanks to Jin Sakai and the strength he has over the people of Tsushima.  It wouldn’t be like this is unheard of in Japan’s history.  The Shogunate didn’t have perfect control over Japan.  Getting to delve into the cracks in their empire would be a neat thing, but it would result in Jin having to kill his fellow Japanese.  Having Jin become a leader of Tsushima, and taking what he has learned as the Ghost and having to use that against the very Shongunate he is supposed to support could be interesting.  Still, the plot of a game where we have an anti-hero character like Jin and have him go even darker into the world of Japanese political struggles against the Shogunate could be interesting.  I think back to Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, and have there are agents of the Shogunate watching the events that are happening in the game with a cautious eye is interesting. 

There is potential, but there is a part of me that doesn’t feel like there should be a sequel to this game.  It has a nice contained story, and I would much rather see a new setting and new characters.  With this kind of gameplay, it would be much more interesting if we could have it represented in other cultures, so we can really get to know them.  But that’s just me. 

Until next time, a quote,

“You have betrayed the way of the Samurai!”
“And you are a slave to it!” – Jin Sakai, Ghost of Tsushima

Peace out,

Maverick

Crafting the Narrative: Addams Family Edition

For those who didn’t know, Netflix has decided to continue the unending culture of reboots and do a reboot of a film classic – the Addams Family.  Starring the late Raul Julia and Christina Ricci as Gomez and Wednesday, respectively.  Two roles that were so iconic that there is literally no one else who could EVER do them justice.  Alas, we live in a world where nothing is allowed to rest on its laurels and everything has to be redone, with modern sensibilities.  This show is no exception.

The new Addams Family show has Catherine Zeta-Jones as Morticia.  I’m about to say something that is unpopular – Catherine Zeta-Jones can’t act.  She got popular because she had a TON of sex appeal, but the reality is that outside roles that capitalize on that, she’s not a good actress.  Not even to speak to her as the role of Morticia.  It’s just…no.  But far and away the worst casting decision is Luis Guzman as Gomez.  No.  Just, no.  This man is not Gomez.  He’s a dork in a suit.  A short man who looks like he is trying WAY too hard to be unique.

Raul Julia brought the heat as Gomez.  He was able to ride that line between romantic and insane with such flare.  He was a man who was passionate and romantic in a way that was beyond unhealthy.  He worshipped the ground that Morticia walked on.  He would do anything for her, without a second thought.  If she asked him to kill somebody, he’d do it.  In his most iconic monologue, he talked about how he would die for her or kill for her, and either way, it is a blissful experience.  NOBODY, and I mean nobody could bring the insane levels of fire and passion the way that Raul Julia did.  The romance between those two couldn’t be done in any other way by any other actors.  Especially not Catherine Zeta-Jones and Luis Guzman.

Alas, there is a narrative that has been crafted.  One by the pet online media who has to slobber all over crap like these soulless remakes that so many film studios do.  This time, it’s that people don’t like the new series because Gomez is played by a latino man.  Um…no.  That isn’t the problem here.  Raul Julia was from Puerto Rico.  I think that makes him a Latino man.  The problem isn’t the ethnicity, it’s the fact that Luiz Guzman looks like a fucking dork!  A short, chubby dork!  I don’t get maniacal passion from the promos showing him as Gomez.  I get smug businessman.  I don’t get maniacal romance from Catherine Zeta-Jones, either.  I get her still doing her sex symbol role.  You know, the thing that made her famous.

And let’s not even start with how Wednesday just doesn’t have the same presence.  Christina Ricci was flawless in that role.  Absolutely flawless.  The line between oblivious to what she does, and deliberately evil that Wednesday rode is not something easy to do.  Ricci did it.  The trailers I have seen for it, it’s night and day.  This character just isn’t the same.  I can already hear the pet media going – “that’s the point!  This is a new show for a new generation!”  Yeah?  And how many callbacks will there be the original?  How much nostalgia is it going to trade on?  I hate this argument.  I really do.  If you are going to make a new version of something, don’t trade on the nostalgia.  But they can’t do that, and they know it.  They have to count on the people who have seen the original, because otherwise, they might not hook their audience.  They would have the people bitching that there is not enough like what they are familiar with in the 1991 film and the show that preceded it.

All of this nuance is hard for pet online media.  They don’t like having to acknowledge that points of view are not black and white, so they craft narratives that are easy to sell.  For whatever reason, entertainment still markets itself on – see, people are hating on this!  You’d think this would be the easiest thing not to do.  Don’t market on the haters.  Because that gets audiences to go – why do people hate it?  What about this show makes it hate-able?  Which in turn gets people to think there is something wrong with it.  Online media does more damage to everything they promote trying to do damage control for the show.

Plus, networks need to get better about telling their stars to shut the fuck up.  Catherine Zeta-Jones has been big in promoting this narrative.  The woman who played Faye Valentine in Netflix’s last failed reboot, Cowboy Bebop, felt the need to go to Twitter and shit on the people who they want to watch their show too.  How did that turn out for them?  What’s that?  It was a horrible decisions and it led to massive backlash immediately?  Well, can’t let little things like that get in the way of a good narrative being made.

As for me, I don’t have any intention of watching this.  I am OVER reboots, remakes, and reimaginings of things in different genres.  All I know is that Luis Guzman doesn’t bring anything to the table as Gomez, and I will keep the image of the person who did the role justice in my mind – the late and truly great, Raul Julia.

Until next time, a quote,

“Look at her.  I would die for her.  I would kill for her.  Either way, what bliss.” – Gomez, The Addams Family

Peace out,

Maverick

Lucien’s Gaming Hot Takes, #1

I was inspired by a video I saw on YouTube, so I figured I am going to do one of these. There will be more in the future. I’m gonna make this a bulleted list for convenience.

• Bethesda has never been that good.  They made ONE good Fallout game and ONE good Elder Scrolls game.  The people who love Bethesda are the modding community, because that is what their shit engine is made for.  It’s made for people who mod.  It was hand crafted to be for modders, so they could build up a fanbase of people who just want their games so they can mod in Thomas the Tank Engine for some fucking reason.
• Every game in any Nintendo franchise is the same as any other.  Play ANY Pokemon game and you’ve played them all.  Play ANY Mario game and you’ve played them all.  People get on CoD for this, but are always giving Nintendo a free pass.  It’s weird.
• Mass Effect: Andromeda still sucks.  I am seeing more and more lists talking about how it is an underrated game that doesn’t deserve the hate it got.  It is not.  It’s a shit game with shit writing and shit characters and a shit story that makes no fucking sense.  It’s a bad game.  Just accept that.
• Sports games are all bad.  Without exception.
• The only reason EA is popular is because of the studios they buy.  If it wasn’t for that, they would be the tiniest company ever making decent money off sports games.
• I don’t even listen when Ubisoft announces something.  That company is so dead to me that I honestly have no idea what they have released in the last 2 – 3 years.
• Final Fantasy XV was a waste of a good premise.  A video game about a bunch of guys on a road trip in a fantasy realism world sounds awesome.  That concept should have been spectacular.  How Square Enix managed to fuck that up is beyond me.
• Kingdom Hearts III sucked.  Plain and simple.  It was just a shit game.  So was Batman: Arkham Knight.
• Final Fantasy VII: Remake is overly long.  I would love that game if it was about three hours shorter and got rid of the bloat.  The whole ghosts scene in the dead train station, could have nixed that.  The ENTIRE ending part after they flee the Shinra tower, could have nixed that.  The game went on so fucking long, and it didn’t have to.  Put aside my disgust for the story in The Last of Us: Part II, and it has the same problem.  That game went on for a good 12 hours longer than it needed to.
• Resident Evil 5 is a bad game, and a waste of a cool boss fight with Wesker.  How his whole plot ended was stupid beyond reason.  Everyone loves to shit on RE6 for how bad the plot was, but for me, RE5 is no better.
• Everyone who says that Halo fans are the worst needs to shut up.  Halo 5 was a bad game, and Halo Infinite is a middling one.  It’s not wrong for the fans to think that this franchise has lots its mojo.  Stop white knighting for 343 Industries.
• Video games are wasting all their creative potential.  Do you know why everyone is so in love with a game where you play as a cat?  Because it is something they haven’t seen a thousand fucking times!  This genre has the potential to do things that have never been seen before, and yet it’s always more and more of the same shit.  It’s part of why I have so little interest in playing new games and only get a few in any given year.  Because there are so few that actually interest me when I see their trailers.
• Grand Theft Auto games are all the same too.  I don’t get why everyone is so stoked about the new one.  Here’s what it will be – an open world game that is massive beyond reason, but with virtually nothing interesting to do and a story about criminals that is one we’ve seen in movies a thousand times.  Let’s all sit down and watch as I am proven right.
• The last time that Nintendo truly took a risk with something new and unique was with the first Metroid Prime game.  Taking a side-scrolling genre and making it into an FPS was a crazy risk and could have easily not worked.  I miss when Nintendo was actually brave enough to try new things.  Now they pretty much just milk their existing franchises to death for nostalgia.  Like Disney, except slightly less evil.  Just look at the new Pokemon games that are just remakes of older ones.
• Sony has better first-party releases than Microsoft.  Anyone who says otherwise is being intellectually dishonest.
• The best character in the Horizon games is Sylens.  Aloy sucks as a protagonist.  She is SO boring.
• Tales of the Abyss is the only good game in that franchise.  I have tried to love their other titles, but they are so JRPG shlock that I can’t.  Makes me wish that Bandai Namco would port that game over to modern consoles.  Just saying.
• Bloodborne is the only From Software game that I like.  It had vastly more forgiving mechanics than their other titles.  Plus, the setting of a gothic Victorian city was great. 
• Donkey Kong 64 is a REALLY mediocre game.  I don’t get what everyone was so in love with.
• Super Smash Bros. Melee is the best.  Know why?  Because not every single fucking character is one with a sword, like in their newest iterations.
• Cyberpunk 2077 was a great game.  The only thing holding it back is how anti-climactic the endings are and the glitches that they had to get over.  I look forward to playing it if I ever am able to find a PS5.  Though, hopefully that glitch in the newest downloads that made a physical disc copy unplayable is gone.
• Anyone who says that the Citadel DLC to Mass Effect 3 is bad can get fucked.  With how bad the ending to that game was, you bet your ass that that DLC was great.  It was nice to actually have something that didn’t take itself too seriously and let the writing team have fun with their comedic muscles.  In a better game, where the ending wasn’t dumb, it would have been a great extension of the ending.
• VR is never going to catch on.  The headsets give people (myself included) a headache from the screen being right in your face, and it expects gamers to get up and interact with their games.  Not happening.
• Ocarina of Time and Majora’s Mask are the best that the Legend of Zelda franchise was ever going to be.  I’m sorry, but it’s true.  And for fuck’s sake, stop saying that Breath of the Wild is the first open-world iteration of that franchise.  Did we all just collectively forget that Wind Waker exists?
• I liked Bioshock 2 better than Bioshock.
• People who think the first Mass Effect game is the best, I have no words for you.  I guess being born without any sense of taste comes naturally to you.

And I think that’s all my hot takes for tonight.  There will be more in the future, I’m sure.

Until next time, a quote,

“I like to expect the worst.  There’s a small chance I’ll be pleasantly surprised.” – Garrus Vakarian, Mass Effect 2

Peace out,

Maverick

Lucien’s Review: The Green Planet

I’ve never really talked about this, but I LOVE the BBC documentary series that is narrated by David Attenborough. I love Planet Earth and its sequel.  I love Life.  I think that Blue Planet is good, but its sequel is SO much better.  If, for no other reason, than the cinematography.  It is so much better to look at.  I haven’t seen Human Planet, though I mean to at some point.  But when I saw that he was making a documentary about plants, I was intrigued.  I love nature, and there are a TON of neat things with plants that I did know.  What I didn’t realize what the sheer amount of stuff I didn’t know, especially about how cutthroat the world of plants is.  It’s an violent little world, in its own way.  My fiancee and I were watching this, and were in love with almost every episode.  Let’s talk about The Green Planet.

Right off the top of my head, I can’t think of any documentary series that I’ve reviewed, if any at all.  But the thing that I wanted to talk about here is just how GORGEOUS the cinematography is.  This series is incredible to look at.  How they got some of these shots, I’ll never know.  But it is amazing to see.  Since the world of plants moves at a much slower pace than the rest of life, to really appreciate how it works, you have to see things on their timescale.  BBC put in the effort to capture this, and it is spectacular to see.  Not to mention some of the plants themselves, which are breath-taking to see. 

Another great thing is David Attenborough’s narrating.  One sad reality is that this man is 96 years old as of the writing of this post.  I have no idea how much longer he is going to be with us.  It will be a shame when he passes, because you can hear the passion for the subject matter that he is giving when he talks about it.  That being said, BBC really needed to keep the old guy in a much less demanding environment.  They made the old guy row a boat!  Come on!  At 96, he should be chilling in an easy chair with a script in that room that Morgan Freeman described in Family Guy.  That being said, it was clear how passionate the dude was about everything that he was out and about talking on, and it’s nice that even at his age, he’s making the most of life.  It will be a sad day when a man who has made these amazing series and who has put so much effort into showing this world and why it needs to be fought for passes on.  Hopefully we can at least get a Blue Planet III before he does.  Take a look at the cool world of Tide Pools and Lakes.  There is more blue on the planet than the ocean, BBC.  Just saying.

There was a lot to learn in this series, about plants in different kinds of environments.  My favorite episode was the one about water plants.  I love water, and seeing plants in freshwater environments was great.  I’m glad they kept it to freshwater and not salt-water.  We got to see that in Blue Planet II.  It was kind of freaky how EVIL the giant water lily is.  My fiancee and I were watching that open-mouthed, not believing how effed up this plant that everything thinks is just pretty is.  It’s a dog-eat-dog world with plants.  Kind of shocked about that.

It’s hard to critique something that I think is fantastic.  There’s only so much I can say without coming off as pretentious.  If I had one critique, it’s the episode focused around the plants of the concrete jungle.  I get what Attenborough was doing.  At first, the episode had some neat stuff, really getting into some of the adaptive plant life that has come into cities and just how hardy it can be.  Nature is an amazing and powerful force.  But hearing about just how fucked we are making our planet due to our activities with plants is..depressing.  I’m not saying we shouldn’t talk about it.  We should.  But I have no illusions about how fucked humanity is because of how we are treating Mother Nature.  It was nice to see him give some hopeful stories, about people in various communities working together to restore parts of nature.  But I think about how much we have destroyed, and it hurts.  We need less people.  Overpopulation is going to destroy this planet.  And us.  If they could have had just 15 more minutes of stuff focused on maybe the efforts taken to green cities, like in Singapore or cities in Italy, I think that would have been a nice counter-balance.  It’s good to talk about the serious stuff, but it sucks the life out of you when you have to hear about how fucked humanity is.

Overall, this was a breath-taking documentary series, and I cannot recommend it enough.  I got it in 4K blu-ray, and holy shit!  Best way to watch it.  With everything on streaming, people forget how pretty this stuff looks.  I like to own my media.  Don’t like to leave it to streaming services to hope they have what I want to watch.  And this was such a validation of that point of view.

Final Verdict
9 out of 10

Peace out,

Maverick