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Disneyland Gets A Marvel Makeover This Summer!

This summer Marvel takes over Disneyland with Marvel’s Summer of Heroes!  It all starts May 27th with the opening of the Guardians of the Galaxy Mission: Breakout! ride (which used to be the Tower of Terror).  There will be all sorts of other events going on, and you will be able to hang out and take pictures with all your favorite Marvel superheroes (though mainly The Guardians of the Galaxy since their new movie is Disney’s big summer blockbuster this year).

Anyway if you don’t mind standing in line with thousands of people because summer is the worst time to go to Disneyland, and you like Marvel superheroes, it looks like you will have a good time at Disneyland this year!  To be totally honest the Shmees do want to go to Disneyland, and now I am thinking, “summer will not be too bad…”.  It will, but I am still thinking about it anyway.  Has this swayed you in to going to the land of Mouse?

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Shmee Takes A Stroll With The Vanishing Of Ethan Carter!

I have been wanting to try The Vanishing of Ethan Carter since it was announced, but because it has been described as a ‘walking simulator’ I was always hesitant to spend my hard earned cash on it.  Luckily it was included in a pay what you want bundle on Humble Bundle, and it came with the Unreal 4 version, Redux, for free!  Let me tell you it was well worth the $1 I spent.

In The Vanishing of Ethan Carter you take the role of paranormal investigator Paul Prospero looking for the titular Ethan Carter in the derelict town of Red Creek Valley, Wisconsin.  You use your skills of walking around and touching stuff to find out what has happened in this dead town and its inhabitants.  Hopefully you can stop whatever happened here from spreading.

Uncovering what happened in Red Creek Valley is a lot of fun, and for a game that is called a ‘walking simulator’, the puzzles are great.  They are just right for me.  They don’t hold my hand and tell me exactly what to do, but they also aren’t so complicated that I give up trying to solve them myself.  The problem is that a lot of these puzzles are optional, so you have to walk around to find them.  Worse the walking speed is super slow, so looking in every nook and cranny of this game for optional puzzles or puzzle pieces happens at an agonizing pace.

I understand that they don’t want people to run past their puzzles, and having a slow movement speed allows people to enjoy the amazing visuals this game has to offer.  I mean the game can be breathtaking, but you just move so freaking slowly.  Once you solve a puzzle cool things happen, and I love to see cool stuff, so that keeps my slow feet churning, but I just wish that there was a sprint button that activated when there were no more puzzles in the area or something.

I enjoyed The Vanishing of Ethan Carter.  It is a great adventure game, but it moves a little too slowly for its own good.  If you can put up with its sluggish protagonist, I think you should give The Vanishing of Ethan Carter a play through.  You can probably finish the game in one to two sittings, and it is a memorable experience.  It is out now on Steam and PS4.

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The Power Of Loving

Not long ago I reviewed the Jeff Nichols film The Midnight Special, but his latest film Loving couldn’t be more different.  While The Midnight Special was a Sci-Fi road trip movie, Loving is based on the true story of the Lovings who fought for their right to be married in Virginia as an interracial couple all the way to the Supreme Court.  What is the same however, is that the movie is very good (and it has a lot of the same actors).

There is not a lot to the Lovings’ story that you couldn’t have guessed or just remembered from US history.  They were a young couple that loved each other, got married, and then Virginia arrested them then kicked them out of the state.  If they came back to Virginia together they could be thrown in jail for five to twenty-five years.  Now if someone hated me that much, I would probably would want to leave and never go back, but Virginia was home and it was where the Lovings’ family lived, so with the help of the ACLU they fought for their right to move back.

What I loved about this movie is that it didn’t amp up the drama to nth degree by having tense moment after tense moment.  That is not to say there isn’t tension in this movie, but just that it is not artificially created.  Loving tells the sweet and gentle story about the Lovings, and that is more than enough to carry this movie.  It is enough that two people who loved each other deeply just wanted to live together by their family in the county they grew up in.  It was wise to not raise the stakes unnecessarily.

All good character dramas need good characters brought to life by good actors, and Loving has that covered.  Jeff Nichols has collected a great group of actors to be in his films, and they make this movie seem effortless.  You will believe that these are the same people that defied Virginia’s terrible marriage laws and won.  Ruth Negga who played Mildred Loving was the standout with her amazing performance, so it is no wonder that she has been nominated for an Academy Award.

You should watch Loving.  It is sweet and stirring, and the good guys win in the end.  Jeff Nichols is making quite the name for himself, and I will be very interested in what he does next.  If you are looking for a movie about love this Valentines season, Loving is a great choice.

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It Hurts Me That A Season Of Voltron: Legendary Defender Is Only 12 Episodes Long!

I finished Voltron: Legendary Defender season two last week and I instantly wanted more.  The series is sooo good.  I know that since Voltron is being made by the same people that did Avatar: The Legend of Korra, I shouldn’t be surprised, but with the show being this great it is hard only getting twelve episodes a season.  I mean with the old Voltron there were like 52 episodes a season.  Sure it was hot garbage, but there was a lot of it!

I should be grateful that this childhood property was brought back with such love and care, but this the era of complaining for no good reason, and I want more Voltron dang it!  In twelve excruciatingly long months I will get another twelve episodes.  It is just so long to be without something so good.  Annnnyyywayyy, if you haven’t watched Voltron: Legendary Defender yet, you should.  It is okay.

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Fire Emblem Heroes Is Pretty Great … The First Time Around

I haven’t owned a current Nintendo console for a while, so I have missed out on all the Fire Emblem games, but now that there is a mobile version I was able to get in on the fun, and I love it.  At least I used to love it.  It starts out really strong, and it has that Nintendo polish that you have come to expect.  The base gameplay is great, but the end game is terrible.

While the console version of Fire Emblem is a tactical turn based RPG, the mobile version is more like a miniatures game.  You get new units with new abilities, and then you swap them in and out depending on the abilities of your opponents.  Then you simply position them the best you can to best use those abilities.  It is simple to learn, but complex to master.

The problem is that Fire Emblem Heroes is also what is called a “gotcha game”.  To get new units you earn orbs, and then you cash in those orbs and pray you get something good.  Even if you do get the unit you want, it may be a lesser version of what you want.  You see all heroes have a star value attached to them, so you may get a cool hero, but he may only be the three star, and to up him a star level you need hundreds of thousands of “hero feathers”.  You can only use those feathers after he as gotten to level 20 in the game.  Not to mention if you add a star to your hero he starts again from scratch from level one with none of his learned skills.

At first this is okay because all your heroes are low level and the game is throwing orbs at you, but once you get to the upper levels of the game, the orb earn rate drops through the floor, and it will take forever to grind your hero back up to where he was.  Not to mention just earning all those dang feathers.  Worse yet the game uses the old mobile standby “stamina”.  Every level takes a bit of stamina to play, but once you get to the upper levels they take so much stamina that you can only try the level a couple of times before you have to quit and wait for your stamina to refill, or pay up for more.

The game is so fun that first time through you don’t care about all these free to play issues, but once you have gotten through the game once it really starts to make the game less fun.  There is no good end game unless you are willing to drop a bunch of cash, and that is a shame because if it had tweaked some of these game systems I could see Fire Emblem Heroes becoming a new obsession.  As it is now, it was just a really fun diversion for a couple of days.