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There Are No Good Choices In Episode 5 Of Batman: The Enemy Within!

I have been kind of distracted, so it took me a while to finish off Batman: The Enemy Within, but the series really ends well.  All those choices you made finally pay off with a Joker of your making.  He either ends up trying to be a vigilantly or a villain, and you will have to deal with him either way.

Batman and the Joker have always had a very codependent relationship.  Without Batman there would be no Joker, so to see your choices bring a different Joker to life is kind of an amazing experience.  Sadly for Bruce, things still cannot end up the way he wants them.  He has to make a lot of tough choices in this episode, and almost all of them end poorly.  Which is the most Batman thing of all time.

Telltale has hit a bit of a rough patch, so I am not sure about the future of their Batman franchise, but I hope they find a way to keep making this story because it is excellent.  If only the Warner Brothers movie studio had this much writing talent, maybe we would finally get a good new Batman movie.  Regardless, now that the story is complete, there is no reason not to jump in to Telltale’s Batman: The Enemy Within, or go back and start at the beginning with Batman: The Telltales Series.  You will be glad you did.

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Shmee Is Engulfed In The Infinity War!

It has taken ten years to get here, but Marvel’s Cinematic Universe has finally all come together to take on its biggest bad guy yet, Thanos.  The fact they were able to pull something like this off on this kind of scale is incredible, and the fact it still manages to be a fairly focused movie and not some muddled mess is a minor miracle.  Of course you will have to wait for Infinity War 2 (or whatever the title of May 2019’s Avengers movie is going to be) to get the closure you were hoping for.

Avengers: Infinity War is the movie where Thanos actually does something, and he does it quite well.  For the most part I have never enjoyed overpowered comic book villains.  They are generally just massively powerful so that the comic book has a reason to cram in every hero known to man, and honestly Thanos isn’t any different, but Josh Brolin brings him to life perfectly.  He actually has a character of his own, and while his reason for wanting to kill half of all life in the universe, to stave off overpopulation, is iffy, you at least believe he believes it.  Even though if he hired a population expert, they would have pointed out that Earth, for instance, was at half its current population a little less that fifty years ago, meaning if he succeeds in his dark task it doesn’t buy the universe a lot of time.

The biggest problem for Avengers: Infinity War is that it feels a little like The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers.  It has epic battles and cool villains fighting heroes we love, but then it ends before it crosses the finish line, and there are two more Marvel movies we will probably need to watch before we can cross that line a year from now, but if this movie is yet just another setup movie, at least it was a good one.  It shows that Marvel has so far been the only studio capable of doing anything like this, and I am guess next year’s movie is going to be something special.

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The War For The Planet Of The Apes Proves There Are No Bad Ideas!

At this point you have either seen the Planet of the Apes prequels, or you are not interested in seeing them, but here is the deal, they are way better than they have any right to be.  War for the Planet of the Apes continues this trend, finishing the trilogy off perfectly.  Though it makes no sense by itself, so if you haven’t watched Rise and Dawn yet, than you really need to because War is the best of the three.  Somehow beating the curse of the third movie.

Since it is hard to review the third movie in a series were they all build on one another, I am instead going to use it to prove a point: For the most part there are no bad ideas.  If someone a decade ago would have come up to me and told me that some of the most thoughtful and well constructed blockbusters of the next ten years would be prequels to the old Planet of the Apes movies, I would have laughed at you.  What a terrible idea, but instead Rupert Wyatt (Director of Rise) and Matt Reeves (Director of Dawn and War) have created something wonderful.  How? By working hard and elevating the material.  Finding ways to explore humanity through the eyes of apes just gaining their sentience, continuing to find new and interesting ways to explore a being’s fight for survival, and the universal importance of family.

That can be true for all movies.  Movies with terrible premises can teach us and entertain us in all sorts novel ways, while movies with the best setups can be utter bores, or slapdash in their execution.  Wyatt and Reeves went the extra mile for movies that most people wouldn’t have given a second thought to, and they were fantastic and should be lauded for that.  All this to say, that I am still not sure I would greenlight a Planet of the Apes prequel if I was sent back in time, but at least it is good to know there are people out there who can make an outrageous idea like that work.  Plus, I am sure having Andy Serkis around always helps too.

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Shmee Is Ready As Player One!

While Ready Player One was a fine book, I doubt it will go down in history as a literary classic.  It was regurgitation of pop-culture that people either loved or hated.  It got even more backlash after all the Gamergate nonsense because in the book only certain people could be thought of as true “gunters” (egg hunters) if they knew enough 80’s trivia.  Which mirrored the ideas of Gamergaters’ who insisted that only certain people were true geeks.  Everyone else was just posing.  With all of that in mind, I was interested to see how the movie was going to deal with all that baggage, not to mention turn the book in to something filmable.  I am happy to report that Steven Spielberg and Co. did a pretty good job.

The movie Ready Player One changed pretty all of the major set pieces of book, and it cut out a lot of the book’s over the top nostalgia mining moments.  I mean there is still more than enough nostalgia to go around, but no one is reenacting War Games.  Though the movie does still follow Wade Watts (Tye Sheridan) and his friends as they try and find James Halliday’s (Mark Rylance) Easter Egg in his virtual world The Oasis, and if they find it, it will give them control of the company that owns the game.

I was pleasantly surprised with all the changes that they made.  Usually I prefer movies that stick closer to the source material, but in this case the source material was pretty thin anyway, and a lot of it would have been downright unfilmable.  Not to mention the film rights for a lot of the stuff would be way to expensive to secure.  Ready Player One the film is a streamlined adventure tale, but with video games and comic books instead of Egyptian hieroglyphs and ancient manuscripts, and it is better for it.

The actors are all fine in Ready Player One, but I don’t remember any standout performances, but what I do remember was all the wild spectacle that Spielberg was able to put up on the screen.  None of it really matters, but it can be breathtaking.  While it may be quite a bit different from the book, it is the same in that it is a large dose of nostalgic action packed explosive cotton candy, but this time it is injected in to your retinas via large format technicolor.

Ready Player One is a fun movie, but it may not be for everyone.  If the thought of large action sequences involving Batman and the Iron Giant excite you like a ten year old playing with his toys, you will like Ready Player One.  If that sounds like nonsense, it is, and this isn’t the movie you are looking for.  I, on the other hand, quite enjoyed myself.

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Shmee Plans Cities’ Skylines!

Are you someone who obsesses about budgets, and do you think that you could do a better job as City Planner than the dude or dudette they currently got in charge?  Colossal Order made the game for you, Cities: Skylines.  You are in charge of planning a city from the ground up, but you also have to provide services and keep that city running.  Which would be simple if the citizens of your city would just be happy with being sick, uneducated and stop setting their houses on fire.  That way you could spend all your time laying out roads and placing parks.

Cities: Skylines is actually a pretty simple game, you pick the grade of road you want, and then zone the areas on either side of that road for different things, like residential or heavy industrial.  Of course you will need to provide power to those areas, and clean water.  Not to mention those people will probably want their kids to go to a good school.  Then for some reason they like to start fires and get sick all the time, so you will have to manage the budget.  Which means setting the tax rate and overfunding or underfunding the schools and hospitals, that sort of thing.  Which sounds bad, but if you have too many schools for your small town, they don’t need to be fully funded to meet your town’s needs, but on the other hand, if you don’t have the money to build a new school, overfunding the ones you have can get you by for a few months.

That is the game: drawing roads, zoning, budgeting, and planning out city services.  All the while your citizens are doing everything they can to make your life difficult, but if you can keep everything under control, they will build an amazing city that you can watch grow.  It is fascinating and engrossing.  You will make plenty of mistakes, and you will want to tear everything down, but you would hate to evict all the people that are just doing the best they can.

For some this game sounds terrible, but don’t knock it until you have tried it.  It is always super cheap on Steam, and it is included with the Xbox Game Pass for now, so it is worth giving being a city planner a shot.  I think you have what it takes, but if not, you will at least apricate what the poor saps in city hall are going through.