Flash Friday: Double Down vs. Double Down

Happy Flash Friday everyone!  Before I get into today’s amazing bit of Flashy-ness I wanted to give you a quick explanation of what happened this week.  It’s not like me to miss two updates in a row and not give some explanation of what is going on.  Without going into too much detail, there has been an illness in the family that has me pretty distracted.  I’m going to be taking next week off too.  There may be an odd update if I feel like it, but I wouldn’t expect too much until December.

With all that said it should be pretty obvious that I haven’t been in the best of moods.  Last night I check my email and see a message from Newt over at the Newtcave blog.  He had stumbled across the old villain spotlight I had written about Double Down.  If you remember that article the last thing I mentioned was that I wished I could draw because I wanted to see a picture of Double Down eating a KFC Double Down.  I might have even begged for someone else to draw it for me.

Thanks to Newt you can now see exactly that.  Again, you can check out the Newtcave by clicking HERE.  And I just wanted to send a giant thank you to Newt, because this really did make me smile at a time I needed to.

Oderus Good Night Moon

The people over at Loudwire had Gwar’s lead singer, Oderus Urungus, read the children’s story book “Goodnight Moon.”  It is amazing as it sounds.  There are actually two versions of this video; a censored and an uncensored version.  I’m immature, I think swearwords are funny, but I think the censored version of this video is funnier than the uncensored one.  That being said, just because it is uncensored doesn’t mean it’s safe for small ears.  He manages to take the story to a few places that I don’t think are actually in the book.  Check it out for yourself.

 

We own "Goodnight Moon" for my son.  I think I'll wait a while before I show him Oderus' version though.  Now I have to start thinking about what will be the right age to introduce him to Gwar.  I know I discovered them right after Scumdogs of the Universe was released.  I guess it'll be a few years.





Loki and Sex

News has broke that in the Loki: Agent of Asgard book that starts in February the Marvel character will not only be bisexual but he’ll be changing shape also.  There is much online debate on if this is a good thing or a bad thing.  Loki is a trickster villain and one of the arguments is that as a villain it would put a LGBT character in a bad light.  Like if you’re LGBT you must be evil or something in that light. 

 

So let’s talk about Loki’s sexuality for a bit.  If we look back to the Poetic Edda and the Prose Edda; oh right I forgot I’m talking about the actual mythology here for and not the comic version.  Since you know, the myths came before the comics.  I just want to tell one story to show how this “new take” on Loki is pretty true to the character.  Sleipnir is Odin’s eight legged horse and according to Odin is the best of the horses.  Now here comes the fun, Loki is Sleipnir’s mother.  I know it’s surprising but let me explain how it all happened.  See Loki was in Vegas and…  Okay, that’s not true.  The actual myth is more fucked up than just a bender in Sin City.

Way back when the gods were first settling the area a builder shows up and says that he can build a fortification for them in three seasons that will keep all invaders out.  All he wants is Freyja, the sun, and the moon.  They want this incredible fortress but don’t want to pay for it.  The gods try to figure out a way to screw the builder out of the bet and agree only after laying down a bunch of conditions on the builder.  The important condition is that no man is able to help him build.  The builder tricks all of the gods and brings out this amazing horse named Svaoifari.  He and the horse begin working on the fortress and because this horse is such an amazing worker it looks like the gods are going to have to pay up.

The gods are all pissed that the builder has tricked them and blame Loki.  He’s the trickster god; certainly he should have been smart enough to stop this from happening.  With three days left before the deadline Loki comes up with a plan.  He changes shape into a mare and approaches Svaoifari.  Seeing the mare, the horse breaks free from its restraints and chases after the mare all night.  The builder is unable to finish the fortress because he is unable to reign in his horny horse and spends the nice chasing after him.  A while after this Loki gives birth to Sleipnir.  Loki gives birth to an eight legged horse.    I think it’s important here to mention that the other gods didn’t look down on Loki for getting him some of that sweet, sweet horse meat.  He was pretty much doing it because when the Norse gods wanted someone tricked they went to Loki. The other fun part of this story is when gods find out this mystery builder was actually a frost giant; Thor just outright kills him. 

So what does all this have to do with the new Loki being bisexual and all the arguments around it?  Nothing really I suppose.  I just wanted to point out that Loki has already turned into a female horse, had sex with a horse, and gave birth to a freak horse.  This is a character that gives birth to horses and fathers giant wolves; it seems silly to compare him to real life human standards and morals.

End of the Line

I’ve already posted music by Hurray for the Riff Raff on That F’ing Monkey but last week they released a brand new video for the song “End of the Line”.    The band will be releasing their newest album Small Town Heroes on ATO Records in February. 

I know I’m looking forward to the new album. Some days you just need good music to forget about everything else.  Hopefully this song will make your day a little better than mine is.

12 Days of Holiday Bullshit

The Cards Against Humanity people are at it again.  Last year they sent out the Holiday expansion at a “pay what you want” price.  It was an awesome item and a bunch of money actually got donated to charity.  This year they are doing something completely different.  If you sign up now and pay 12 dollars they will send you 12 presents.
 

What are they?  I honestly don’t know.  I haven't been disappointed by any of the items I've ordered from them before, so I trust them on this one.  There were initially 100,000 spots open to sign up for this, and at the time of me writing this 10,000 have already been filled.  This isn’t going to last long.  If you want in on all the surprises, you better sign up quick at www.holidaybullshit.com

UPDATE:  I knew Holiday Bullshit was going to sell out, but I'm still amazed at how quickly 100,000 orders went.  Hopefully if you were able to get your order in.  For those people who were too late or just didn't feel like dropping 12 bucks on chance; we will be running a follow up once the gifts start arriving.

Marvel Numbering

To be honest I haven’t bought a lot of comics in the past year.  I buy Flash more out of habit than anything at this point and the other few titles I’ve bought haven’t been from the big two.  I do like to keep up on what is going on in books though.  It’s because of this I was quick to read an announcement that Beta Ray Bill was going to be making an appearance in the new Nova comic.  I’m a huge Beta Ray Bill fan so I was excited to see what was going on.  The cover for the book he’ll be showing up in is posted below. 

 

The first thing you notice is that Beta Ray Bill is a bad ass.  This is normal and it’s how he should be portrayed.  The second thing you probably notice is the giant number one in the right hand corner.  The funny thing about the number one is that this is issue number 13.  You can actually see the 013. printed much smaller down on the bottom right hand corner.  Now it is entirely possible that this is only a promotional image and the real comic will not have a giant number one on the cover.  But if the comic does ship that way it is pretty interesting.

There will always be debate in comics if restarting numbering is more important than having huge issue numbers.  New number ones seem like a fresh start, but you can’t have a 100^th issue if you renumber every year.  Is Marvel going to start numbering their story arcs?  Would you jump into a comic you’ve never read before if they were on the third story in an arc of a book that’s on issue 20?  Again I’m speculating a lot over an image that might not even hit the comic stands that way.  It was something I noticed yesterday and haven’t been able to stop thinking about. 

Marvel and Netflix

Yesterday Marvel announced a new partnership with Netflix that will develop four series and a mini-series based on Marvel characters.  These live action shows are set to start Daredevil, Jessica Jones, Iron Fist, and Luke Cage.  The press release goes on to say that Netflix has committed to “a minimum of four, thirteen episodes series and a culminating Marvel’s “The Defenders” mini-series event that reimagines a dream team of self-sacrificing, heroic characters.

 

It’s an exciting announcement and it raises a lot of questions.  For budget reasons, it was smart for them to focus on some of Marvel’s street level heroes.  The group of characters they picked play pretty nice together.  Luke Cage and Iron Fist are the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups of the Marvel Universe.  Jessica Jones and Luke Cage have a daughter named after Danny Rand aka Iron Fist.  And finally, Rand actually took over for Daredevil for a short period of time.  These series have a great potential to be interconnected awesomeness.  I’m not just saying that because Iron Fist is my favorite Marvel character.

The strange part is the mention of the “self-sacrificing” Defenders.  The way it is written makes it sound like the Defenders is going to be this team of Daredevil, Jessica Jones, Luke Cage, and Iron Fist.  If it was called Heroes of Hire that would make total sense.  The Defenders originally were Doctor Strange, Hulk, Namor, and the Silver Surfer.  There have been a few different versions of the Defenders team and Iron Fist was on one of them.  Doctor Strange has been in most of the Defenders’ lineups, so it is very possible he could be introduced in all of this. 

I really like Marvel’s street level characters, so to me this is probably the most exciting thing that has been announced in a while.  What do you think?

WWE 2K14

I wasn’t planning on getting WWE 2K14 when it came out.  When I play a wrestling game I’m spending most of my time on created characters and don’t really need a yearly roster update.  I was very impressed by the new features that were being previewed.  I had begrudgingly changed my want level from “I don’t need it” to “I’ll pick it up when the price drops.”  And then I was pretty much gifted the game.  It’s been out for a week so I’ve been able to try everything out.  We don’t really do review scores, but I did want to talk about the game in depth.  There are some improvements over WW13 and there are missteps. 

Last year the main game play mode to unlock all the extras was the Attitude Era.  You played through the famous matches of DX, Stone Cold, and the Rock.  This year it is all about Wrestlemania, so the roster is a lot more varied.  It covers matches from each Wrestlemania so you get wrestlers from the past 30 years.  That include people like Andre the Giant, Hulk Hogan, Macho Man, Ultimate Warrior, Brett Hart, Yokozona, ect.  The presentation on the matches is fantastic although the announcing is a little strange.  Those older matches should have people like Gorilla Monsoon and Jesse Ventura calling them, but we get JR and King providing commentary for all the matches.

The most surprising thing is how much the game play has changed.  Basic strikes like punches and kicks have been sped up.  Actually they swung that pendulum a little too far.  Strikes went for super slow in 13 to super fast in 2K14.  Somewhere in the middle would have been much better, but I still prefer 2K14’s.  Reversals have been completely overhauled.  The biggest change is you can no longer go into long chains of reversals.  The window for actually reversing a move has been shortened too; they aren’t impossible to do, but they are more challenging. 

The create a wrestler is mostly unchanged.  I can copy down the options I chose in WWE13 and make exactly the same character in 2K14.  For some reason they decided to take away a major part of create an entrance.  In WWE13 I could create my own Titantron video for my wrestlers.  So when they walked down to the ring the video in the background actually had them in it.  I loved this feature and I have no idea why it was cut.  The create an arena also has some problems.  This deals with the ability to stretch logos across the ring mat and the announce table.  In 13 it worked perfectly, but in 14 the objects are limited to a much smaller area.  There are also a number of glitches that carried over from WWE13 that I really though would have been corrected in this version. 

So the short version is that I think 2K14 plays better than WWE13 but I’m still very disappointed with the lack of custom videos. 

Stick of Truth Delayed…Again

At the beginning of October I talked about how excited I am for South Park the Stick of Truth; a game I’ve had pre-ordered for over a year.  Well over the Halloween break Ubisoft delivered some bad news, the game has been delayed until March 4, 2014.  The game will now miss that holiday launch window and we’ll have to wait another 3 months before we’ll get “head on down to South Park”.

On the Ubisoft Announcement blog Ubisoft North America’s president Laurent Detoc said “Within three weeks after acquiring the game, we sadly realized we had to turn this thing upside down if we hoped to deliver the experience everybody wanted.  It’s been such a major overhaul to get to the point where we are that we couldn’t let it go, even if that meant missing December.”

Normally if a game is pushed back this many times I’m worried.  But Ubisoft didn’t just push the game back; they also showed us 7 minutes of gameplay.  This removes all doubt in my mind.  The game looks exactly like an episode of South Park.  It’s hard to tell where the cutscene ends and the gameplay begins.  It’s that seamless.  I hate having to wait even longer, but I’m very excited to finally get my hands on the game.