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MST3K Is Back!

I was nervous that the new MST3K was not going to be funny.  It turns out that I was worried about nothing.  I am two movies in and loving it.  The new cast is great, though the new robot voices took a little getting used to, and it seems like they have amped the jokes per minute, so there are fewer of those jokeless lulls that sometimes would plague the older MST3K episodes.

If you are unaware of what Mystery Science Theater 3000 is, let me clear that up for you.  Pretty much the ‘Bads’, Kinga Forrester (Felicia Day) and Max “TV’s Son of TV’s Frank” (Patton Oswalt), go out and find terrible movies and then Jonah Heston (Jonah Ray) and his robots Crow (Hampton Yount) and Tom Servo (Baron Vaughn) make fun of them.  It is a simple setup, but it works well.

If you have been missing Mystery Science Theater 3000 like I have, the new Netflix series is a return to form.  I look forward to watching the remaining twelve flicks with Jonah and his robot pals.  Now that MST3K is back, I hope it stays back.  I don’t want to go through another long period without them.

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Shmee Battles Back The Vermintide!

How do you feel about rat-men?  If you like them this is not a game for you.  You will murder more of their kind in thirty minutes with Warhammer The End Times: Vermintide than you have probably seen in your entire life,  but if you enjoy crushing Skaven (what rat-men call themselves) under your boot, or just endless hordes in general, you will probably like Vermintide.

If you were wondering about Warhammer The End Times: Vermintides story, don’t.  It is simply that the world is coming to end and the city you are in, Ubersreik, is being overrun by Skaven.  You and a band of heroes must work together to save the people that remain.  What this means is that you will hack and slash and shoot your way through thousands of rats with up to three other players.  For all of you that have played Left 4 Dead this should be very familiar, but with more focus on melee.

That is not a knock on Vermintide.  In fact it is a compliment.  There has been a big hole in the gaming scene since Left 4 Dead 2 came out, and why Left 4 Dead 3 has never materialized is anyone’s guess.  Fatshark Games did change things up enough that it is not a ripoff of Valve’s zombie classic, so it is more like a game in the genre that Left 4 Dead helped define.  Not to mention the pull to slay endless waves of rat-type-people while leveling up and getting new loot is strong.

That is not to say everything is perfect.  Fatshark to prevent screen tearing has locked in the framerate to 30FPS and turned on V-Sync.  The problem is sometimes when there are a few dozen evil rats on screen the frame rate will dip a bit, and with V-Sync turned on, that means you will drop a frame or two.  When you are surrounded by rats it is not a great time for the game to “freeze” and then come back to show you that the world has changed around you.  AKA you are about to take quite a bit of damage.  They should let us turn off V-Sync,  a little screen tearing will be worth always keeping the swarm in front of you.

I have only played the first few levels of Warhammer The End Times: Vermintide, but it was a lot of fun (even though we got teamed up with an elite player who did not care a lot about hanging out with the party).  I will journey to Ubersreik to slay Skaven again, and since this game seems to always be on sale, you may want to come with me.  I mean who doesn’t like to take out their aggressions on a few hundred rats?

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Carmen Sandiego Is Hiding At Netflix HQ!

With just about all of my childhood favorite shows making a comeback it was only a matter of time before someone went to the map to find super-thief Carmen Sandiego.  If Netflix takes the same care with Carmen Sandiego as they did with Voltron, we are in for a treat!  The Gina Rodriguez staring vehicle will hit the small screen in 2019, and I will be there trying to track her down.

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Shmee Witnesses 13 Reasons Why

Leave it to Netflix to drop a TV show about one of the most troubling issues in America, teen suicide.  Suicide is the second leading cause of death for people from 15 to 24, and 13 Reasons Why takes it head on.  I am generally unaffected by what I watch.  Sure my friends will tell you that I jump out of my seat during a horror movie more than anyone they know, but I will sleep like a baby that night.  Not so with 13 Reasons Why.  It is keeping me up at night, and not just because I want to watch just one more episode.  Though that is true too.

The show starts in the aftermath of the suicide of Hannah Baker (Katherine Langford) and fellow Liberty High classmate Clay Jensen (Dylan Minnette) is not taking it well, and it gets even worse when a box full of cassette tapes is left on his front porch.  Each tape is narrated by Hannah Baker chronicling a reason why she decided to end her life.  Clay is informed that he is on one of these tapes, and he has no idea what he did.  He just knows he has to listen to the tapes and then send them to the next person on the list.

What is on the tapes is tragic, and Clay has a hard time listening to them.  He is our proxy for what is going on, and every tape devastates him further.  Of course he can only listen to the tapes a little at a time, so it takes him days to finish this task, which is convenient for the plot.  Some people are worried that this show glamorizes teen suicide, but this show is anything but glamorous.  It is sad and heart-wrenching, and it makes you angry at all the people involved in this poor girl’s life.

Granted with real life suicides we never get to hear the forlorn narration of why a person would make such horrible choice.  They are just gone, and they leave people to try and pick up the pieces of their lives.  Which is why I am torn about 13 Reasons Why.  On one hand it is an amazing drama that doesn’t shy away from its troubling theme, but on the other, as sad as it is, it is still not a realistic portrayal of a real life issue.  All I can say is that 13 Reasons Why is very good, but don’t say I didn’t warn you if it keeps you up at night.

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Mass Effect: Andromeda Post Game Thoughts!

After sixty-three hours and twenty minutes I have completed my first play through of Mass Effect: Andromeda, and I may play a little more to complete a couple of achievements and random quests.  You can play the game after you complete the main story, but of course any quests you complete will not affect the ending.  So, have my feelings about the game changed since my first ten hours?  Yes, and mostly for the better.  Here are some quick post game thoughts:

  • Crafting needs to be combined in to one interface.  Crafting is where you get all the cool items, so to have to navigate several menus to create the stuff you want is a little frustrating
  • There needs to be a way to land at forward stations from space.  Later on in the game several missions have you planet hopping, so it is supper annoying to have to land, fast travel, then drive.  I want to get straight to the driving.
  • There needs to be more enemy variety.  The same bad guys you see in the beginning of the game will be the same guys you see in the end.  The only difference is that they throw more of them at you, but you are so god-like at the end it doesn’t really matter how many guys run at you.
  • The story was a missed opportunity to do something different, but it ends well.  Even though you are still finding tech from long dead peeps and fighting faceless hoards the game still wraps up everything very nicely, and I was quite satisfied with how it ended.

I really enjoyed Mass Effect: Andromeda, but it was far from perfect.  I am hopeful they can fix the issues of the first game in the second.  We will see.  If you have yet to pick up ME:A, I recommended it to fans of the first games; though others may want to hold off until they have fixed a few more bugs and the game’s price comes down a bit.