Hot Heart

Mixed feelings on the finale. Lots of great character moments (and one shit one) but in some ways it felt like the usual GoT finale business of things ticking along until next season. The music was really strong though. Lots of leitmotifs coming together with the characters.

Ace cover

Yeah, after the amount of news snippets and stuff I've seen all of a sudden, I'm thinking I'd rather leave a lot of it as a surprise. I've already seen enough that I'm confident the game will be worthwhile.

And here's some gameplay stuff now they're at Gamescon: I haven't had a chance to watch them myself but there are some things people have spotted or figured out based on stuff they saw. It feels stupid to spoiler this one but just in case anyone wants the surprise And something that's cool to see this time but possible story spoiler...

I'm glad to see Bungie starting to show more and more now, since stuff that was leaking, being gleaned, etc. made it sound like a step in the wrong direction. Anyway, there's a few more trailers

House of Flying Daggers One of my favourite films but only just "upgraded" to blu-ray. On that subject, first, it's not brilliant. For most of the running time it's a step-up but the overall quality leaves a lot to be desired and there are far too many shots that look almost "direct DVD transfer". Definitely not as good-looking as the blu-ray version of the other Zhang martial arts film, Hero. As for the film itself, it's still superb. The beginning feels a little laboured but it actually all pays off later when everything comes together in the most twisty and tragic of ways. It's got lots of great action scenes (even if the bamboo bit gets slightly absurd, relatively-speaking) and some really strong central performances with the usual mix of beautiful costume and scenery.

So weird but damn is it catchy

I know I'd said I felt something a little off about earlier episodes this season and while I enjoyed the Vindicators 3 episode ("Who's Noob Noob?" killed me), I think you've captured my vague issue with some of it so far. It's actually leaning too heavily on the "Rick is a total jerk" stuff. Sure, it was always there but you're then overlooking a lot of the earlier episodes both in terms of his actual love for Morty as well as the switches in "power" where he's revealed as an idiot and/or needs Summer or Morty's help. I mean, they've gone over those elements before as well so it doesn't need to linger on it, but I don't think it helps to keep it in one gear the whole time and especially not if it's to say to the audience, "you idiots, you're supposed to hate Rick" (I was never "Team Walt" by the way). Of course, this could all be deliberate setup as part of some larger arc (possibly involving "a Morty turning on his Rick") and will pay off but we'll see.

Like a few people have already said, it's hard to say that old favourites aren't currently not so great, but I'll go with an "all-time" approach. CDPR I love what they did with the Witcher franchise and they really seem like a dev that goes the extra mile. BioWare Obviously, there are multiple studios in the mix here now and later stuff hasn't been as good, but they'll always be the guys that made Mass Effect 1, Mass Effect 2, Mass Effect 3 multiplayer, Jade Empire and, of course, Knights of the Old Republic. Rocksteady Studios What they did with the Arkham games was brilliant. AK definitely had its issues (stealth tank missions?! A stealth tank boss battle?!) but it also gave you a phenomenal Batman experience as well. Harmonix The early Guitar Hero games and the Rock Band series were great and you could really tell these were also musicians who loved their work. RB4 is a little disappointing (particularly in terms of a reduction of features) but these are the guys who made The Beatles: Rock Band. Bungie Yes, Destiny has its problems and there are still quibbles I have with the direction of D2 (although, the more they're actually revealing now gives me confidence) but I still love the series. And, of course, these are the guys who made Halo. I've never seen anyone make (console) shooters as good as Bungie. Criterion Software The guys who made Burnout and should make more Burnout. I want more Burnout. Sandlot EDF! EDF! EDF!

That's not the Lost Odyssey trailer.

I think if things weren't moving so fast you could easily pick apart the stupid decisions being made by multiple characters. Latest episode was alright, and the actual highlights were the walking-and-talking stuff going on (particularly Tormund's) but definitely a case of the above, really.

Defenders has been okay so far. Iron Fist works slightly better as the naive part of the team while Jessica is the sort of audience surrogate. Not that he doesn't still suck. Best scene was early on when Luke is ripping Danny over his privilege. There was some actual character conflict in the team besides, "this is too weird/stupid and I don't know you so, no, I won't fight alongside you."

An RTS game based on the same source ("1920+) as the wonderful board game, Scythe.

Come to think of it, I've never seen ads play on Prime either.

NEW GAMES! Game of Thrones: Westeros Intrigue Ooh, "intrigue!", you say excitedly. With the background of complicated politics, double-crossing, etc. this could be very interesting. How have they've managed to capture all this in a simple card game? They haven't. However, that's not to say it's a bad game. Just throw away any notions you had, based on that title. It's a simple filler game where you have a hand of cards you're trying to get rid of by playing them into a pyramid. The basic rules are that the starting level cannot have more than 8 cards and whenever there are two cards, you can play either of the matching colours above it. The main aim is to have the fewest points, which are earned by cards left in-hand when you have to pass, along with a way to reduce your total by earning a negative points card (in 1-3 values) for being the last person to have successfully placed a card. So, there's a sort of balance between cutting off people's lines of succession (that sounds Games of Thronesy, right?) or getting in at the ground level to try and start a new chain. Also, you'll be wondering whatever happened to that Illyrio guy. Overall, an alright filler to break out every now and then and plays up to 6. Ryu A game about different races who worship some dragon god all racing to build their own version of it. It's a neat concept and has some really nice artwork, especially since each race's dragon is actually represented by 5 tiles that link together to form the finished article. So you get ones that look very robotic to one that is pretty much a tree. Other than that, the races are mechanically identical. Each part of the dragon must be built in order A-E and the costs for each stage are the same. The core of the game involves moving around and utilising the 9 various hex tiles, with 4 "neutral" areas that have special actions involving things like flipping hexes, trading cubes for tokens, peeking at other player's cubes and potentially stealing some. The other 5 hexes will be player/NPC islands. They're almost functionally the same, but the non-player ones just have a two-cube draw from a bag rather than a draft between the two players involved. With the player islands, you flip a token that determines whether 4 or 5 cubes get drawn, but these will be divided between the active player and whoever's island it is. With 4, the active player picks 1, the inactive picks 2 and then the active player gets the remaining 1 while a 5-cube draw means the inactive player chooses to split them into two piles of 4-1 or 3-2 but the active player gets first pick of which one to take. This means that the inactive player might put the more desired cube (usually a non-yellow) on its own but get 4 yellows for themselves. It really comes down to paying attention to what cubes people are drafting and which stage of dragon they're at. As it was our first game, I don't think we quite grasped the vital importance of this nor did we all grasp the rhythm of re-flipping our own islands to encourage others to use them again and gain us some more cubes. There's also one element that can throw things a little off-balance but something you could try and prepare for with experience: the white cube. When this is drawn it triggers an auction where everyone chooses however many cubes they want to bid, each worth 1 regardless of colour, with the winner getting to build a piece of their dragon immediately. All cubes used in the bidding (the white cube holder must compete with at least that counting as 1) are lost but there is still recompense for people who didn't get to build their piece in the form of tokens. It adds another factor in those drafting decisions if you can see the bag must be running low and decide to take more yellows in a draft than trying to get the exact colours you need. Overall, it's decent enough and should be more interesting with 5, but it feels a little bit of a letdown if the winner gets to build their last piece thanks to an auction. Medieval Mastery At first, I thought this game would be interesting. It's got some basic area control stuff with some interesting terrain effects along with various player powers in the form of randomly dealt artefacts for giving an extra option on your turn, a pre-battle power and a post-battle power (usually dependent on whether you're attacker/defender, winner/loser). However, if I were to be very unkind to the game, I would describe it as if someone made "a shit version of Cosmic Encounter." Now, it would be okay as a quick game but ours went back and forth for over two hours. I'm willing to believe we had a poor combination of elements with how the terrain and player powers turned out, along with how cards cycled. It happens. It happened with our game of Legendary earlier that evening and it happened before with Port Royal's Contracts expansion a few weeks back. See, the game is fairly simple in that you are trying to control terrain worth points, aiming to get a total of 13 to win. You do this by distributing "knights" (values of die pips) across your forces then advancing into other areas and butting up against other players. The battles are fairly straightforward affairs of each person playing a conflict card (attack value) that is added to the die value for their force(s) before the option to add reinforcements. It's very much like Cosmic Encounter, just with fewer options for player interaction or surprise. I mean, there are the special powers from artefacts as well as cards for fracturing (temporarily disabling) those artefacts, along with cards that mean you roll a die for your card value but it's kept straightforward. It's clear the game is more about choosing which fronts to weaken and leave more exposed to attack in order to buff your "advancing" force (a die that always advances from your castle into any hex adjacent to other ones you control). So, you have this constant struggle between players, where they're thinking through their best opportunities for expanding control without being stretched too thin. And I mean, there was some neat action from the eventual winner where he completely cut off one player's forces in a couple of hexes which meant those die couldn't be used for buffing his invading force but goddamn I had lots of annoying battles. See, I had a cool player power where my invading force could count as exactly the same value as the defender (e.g. I could send a 1-die up against a 6 and have it count the same) which made me best suited to wrest control from the player with 8 knights camped on a 3-point hex (the most valuable and of which there are only two in the game making them essential to victory). However, he had a power that meant I discarded a random card from my hand before battle. On two occasions this cost me a 4 and 5 value conflict card (another player got the same benefit as an attacker, costing me a 5 later on as well) which are the highest set values. Most annoying, however, was that three fucking times I got things to a draw, which defenders count as winning by 1. Every goddamn time I went against them, they happened to have exactly the cards they needed to match me, whether it was enough reinforcements, a die roll or the exact same conflict card. I mean, sure I could've gone after another player this was the player closest to winning, and you really have to player bash here. Plus, eventually I did break through and almost followed it up with a win (stopped by another draw, however)... only for the game to then go on for over an hour after that. It pretty much becomes a game where eventually a point or two here makes all the difference more than any true skill. All that said, I'd be up for trying it again to see if the combination of stuff and luck make a difference, and maybe play to the shorter game end... which I sense could be alarmingly unsatisfying, ironically enough.

Yeah, Preacher has been pretty good. Herr Starr is fantastic, considering Pip Torrens is usually just a "posh Englishman" character actor. It does feel a little "stuck" at the moment with Jesse's search dead-ended, so they're no longer "on the road", and a lot of time being given to the Tulip and Cassidy side stories (or the stuff in Hell) but it's still entertaining overall. It's more of a back and forth between a great episode and an okay episode for the past few.

I'm free this evening and tomorrow evening.

So, besides Game of Thrones, I've been watching a few other shows. Rick and Morty is one, of course. Although, I've not been feeling the last couple of episodes (2 & 3, as I'm watching on Netflix here). I mean, they're not bad by any means and they have some great moments (Jerry and his mail with the wolf was great "loooooser") but I guess I just miss the ones where they play with or send up other films/genres a bit more. The 100. I've finished everything available for free on Prime, which is seasons 1-3 and I'm tempted to find the others online. However, with the reveal at the end of S3, I'm not super confident with how things will continue. It's certainly a strange beast, without spoiling too much, it's gone from a simple Lord of the Flies-esque concept onto post-apocalypse outpost survival and then something more along the lines of Battlestar Galactica. As I've said before, the writing can be a bit hammy at times, but the actual long-form stuff with the characters is really good and there are some strong setups from episode to episode. I mean, it's got writers who have worked on The Shield and Angel as well as the guy who created the Handmaid's Tale series. So you'll see the characters falling in love, or just dying, or uh... committing mass murder or... all of the above? I think Raven is probably my favourite though. She's gone through so much bad stuff but she gets things done. Plus, the actress is really good. And, finally, Due South which I'd like to write a little about. This seems like one of those "forgotten" TV shows but it's one I absolutely loved as a kid when it first aired. It's still a great show (one of Paul Haggis' early works) and has a real pure charm to it. It's actually a mixture of two elements/tropes that were (still) popular in film and television in the mid to early '90s: fish out of water stories (Doc Hollywood, My Cousin Vinny) and buddy cop stuff (Lethal Weapon, Bad Boys, etc.). Except this isn't the city-dweller adapting to rural ways but a mountie used to the wilderness coming to the rough-and-ready Chicago. However, rather than making these jokes at his expense, his unshakable politeness rarely causes him harm and simply grates on his "buddy", the detective who's lived in Chicago all his life. And I think that's what really appealed to me as a child, this smartly-dressed, super observant, polite, clever, handsome mountie. When the Superman I grew up with was some dude who couldn't act, Benton Fraser was the super hero to me. He was part Superman, part Sherlock Holmes. It also has that weird opening to season three that completely blew my dumb child brain; where Fraser shows up and meets Ray... except it's not the guy he's been working with the past two years, even though absolutely everyone else is acting like nothing has changed and it's perfectly normal. They hadn't recast the part or anything, but the real Ray had gone undercover while the new guy was brought in to keep up appearances. For a while, it's like when Dawn was just "there" in Buffy all of a sudden. Anyway, great show.

Yeah, I imagine most fans would've picked up on it. Silly Samwell. That was a good episode, even without any big action setpieces. Some of the Davos stuff felt a bit too on-the-nose and obvious but Liam Cunningham himself is always great. Feels weird that there's only two episodes left this season, but I guess we'll see where they choose to end it. Earlier in the season, I was starting to think that some sort of "time-jump" between seasons might've been on the cards but I really doubt that now.

Played some new games with four people last night. First of the new games was Sherwood Forest I picked this up on eBay for £12 way back but never got to playing it because the rules (which are terribly written) made it sound way more complex than I was expecting. It's partly because there's a whole process of how you can negotiate alliances with other players to both occupy a hideout, ready to ambush passing carriages. The theme itself is that you all control bands of (assumably merry) men who loiter in Sherwood Forest, gathering info on the people who will be passing through, buying better equipment for tackling these travellers and donating gold to the church (which you assume goes onto "the poor") in order to gain glory. So it's sort of worker placement in that you can place men down to buy equipment, hire more men and peek at that round's cards which dictate the routes being taken by the merchants, monks or even sheriff (who can really ruin your day) then use your remaining men to pick the best hiding spot for attacking them. The variation to it all is that the cards are chosen one-by-one which could see the sheriff reach you before your intended target or a lesser-value target coming across your path and you attacking them instead. It's decent enough and goes fairly quickly once you've got the hang of it but I think it needs the full player count of 5 to really shine (and my copy appears to even have components to support 6). Then there was Sons of Anarchy: Men of Mayhem I'd heard this was a vastly underrated game from the makers of Firefly and Spartacus and so when I saw it for £15, I jumped at it. In the same mould as its other licensed games it uses familiar game mechanics but does a little more with it and brings the theme to life at the same time. Here, you're the different biker gangs trying to find ways to earn the most money... which is a bit more complicated than it sounds. The board is highly modular (the top 5 sites are always included), which means the types of actions and, therefore, value of certain resources will vary from game-to-game. Some will offer all sorts of ways to sell guns and contraband for money while others will offer more ways to buy guns or lose heat. Our setup was skewed towards buying bags of contraband which you sell during the "black market" phase at the end of each of the six rounds; only the amount you earn for each bag is dependent on the overall total that players are trafficking. It's also got a really cool "heat" system which is all public, so you can gauge whether someone is willing to risk one of their bikers "taking the fall" for bringing guns to a throwdown or exploiting a "hot" site but also give you an idea of who will be selling during the black market phase because different levels of heat limit the amount of contraband you can traffic. And round-to-round, there are "anarchy" cards which can really shake things up by introducing temporary rules, new sites to exploit, end-of-round penalties/bonuses. Funnily enough, this is what happened in the final round of our game... (Apologies for blurriness) The "Customs Crackdown" meant there would be no black market, which left us with only 3 sites from which to make money. Fortunately, I was first player that round and was already parked on the space where I could sell my contraband. The rest of the round turned into pure chaos of getting into fights just for the sake of a couple of dollars. Of course, the person who won the four-player pile-up for a site where you could sell guns used all his guns in the throwdown... Anyway, yes, it was a heap of fun and there's lots going on from one turn to the next. I think at 5 players it should be even more interesting.

This is good. And this is a good read. https://www.reddit.com/r/asoiaf/comments/6dx676/spoilers_main_ive_been_working_on_a_theory_about/