Tonight: Howard’s unnamed assistant is metal as hell, Zechs has performance anxiety, and Duo breaks the fourth wall. Plus, The Peacemillion is bigger than we thought, and the real crushing blow is yet to come.
By the time the Falconer got to the little village, the weather had turned foggy. Her falcon fidgeted on his perch in agitation. She stroked him softly, listening.
They’d made her sit through a town hall first, to acquaint her to the target, to hear his litany of sins against the villagers. It didn’t really matter to her. She’d been hired to do a job.
She hunted by sound, stalking past the gardens, through the pub and into the miniature village. It was still ahead of her, honking proudly, unaware.
Today, that goose would get what was coming to him.
This story originally appeared in Everyday Drabbles, a daily free fiction project on Wattpad. Visit the link for over a hundred free stories. And if you enjoy my writing, support my work by buying me a coffee!
The first collection of Everyday Drabbles stories, Winter, is now available as an eBook from Amazon! Enjoy over 90 short stories for less than two dollars!
And CLICK HERE to watch the movie yourself through the power of YouTube!
Chrononaut Cinema Reviews is presented by http://skinner.fm and http://hughjodonnell.com, and is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License.
Humanity’s first contact with another intelligent species occurred somewhere entirely unexpected: Mike Henderson’s shower curtain.
Nobody knows how long the algae had been on the curtain, but it was long enough for it to develop a sort of hive intelligence that introduced itself by writing a message of peace in green slime.
Mike took the logical first step of posting a picture of it online.
Unfortunately, his mom saw the post firs, and missing the historic significance entirely, used her spare key to enter the apartment and clean his bathroom. Thus a civilization died beneath a wave of scrubbing bubbles.
This story originally appeared in Everyday Drabbles, a daily free fiction project on Wattpad. Visit the link for over a hundred free stories. And if you enjoy my writing, support my work by buying me a coffee!
The first collection of Everyday Drabbles stories, Winter, is now available as an eBook from Amazon! Enjoy over 90 short stories for less than two dollars!
Dragon Quest XI S: Echoes of an Elusive Age Definitive Edition
Published and Developed by Square Enix
Played on Nintendo Switch
The Skinny: Dragon Quest returns with a massive JRPG in the classic style.
While technically the PS4 version of this game came out in the U.S. last year, Dragon Quest XI S: Echoes of an Elusive Age is probably one of my top games of 2019. I gave the original a pass because I just don’t have that much time to sit down in front of my television. But the portable version has been a delight.
The game follows the familiar tropes of the OGJRPG of a young man being chosen by a great force to leave his remote village and confront evil, recruiting a troupe of companions along the way. But like the other modern iterations of the series, it does a great job interrogating the tropes and cliches of the genre.
Particularly interesting is Sylvando, who is a powerful fighter, and an openly gay character in a genre of game that gets a lot of traction on AO3 but is somewhat lacking in official representation. And while the game does play him for laughs (he is a jester, after all) it also goes out of its way to portray him as strong, brave and chivalrous as well. It’s rare to see something so well done in a space where representation usually boils down to male-gaze lesbians and that time Cloud Strife wore a dress in FFVII.
Combat is fun, a little on the easy side, and about what you’ve come to expect from Dragon Quest over the past 30 years. The 3D mode has an option to let you move the characters around in battle, but it is more for aesthetics than a gameplay feature. Mini-games also make a return, from the ubiquitous Dragon Quest casino to a horse-racing mini-game and a portable forge for making weapons and armor from recipes.
Another nice feature is that while the default is to play in 3D mode, the game also includes the 3DS 2D version, which was previously unavailable in the US, as well as a massive sidequest that was unique to that version. You can even switch back and forth between the two if you want, although progress is gated to certain story chapters that aren’t so clearly delivered.
While the game looks and plays great, there are a few compromises in the animation and display. Some character animations feel jerky and off. Objects, particularly complex ones like trees, pop in as you get close to them. My Switch audibly chugged when it had to render too much in handheld mode. And like most Dragon Quest games, it is entertaining but long. I have already put in over 40 hours and from what I understand I’ve barely scratched the game’s surface. Also like modern localizations of the series, it’s full of puns. So many puns. If you aren’t onboard for a hundred hours of dad jokes, this is not the game for you.
Dragon Quest XI S is a delightful return to form for Square Enix, crammed full of exciting quests, memorable characters and a surprising story. Just be sure to set aside some time to play it, because this game is long.
Heist, or How To Steal a Planet #1
Written by Paul Tobin
Drawn by Arjuna Susini
Colored by Vittorio Astone
Lettered by Saida Temofonte
Published by Vault Comics
The Skinny: A love letter to Science Fiction Noir and the start of something great.
Theirs something about Sci-Fi Noir that I find inexplicably cool. GIve me the rain-soaked neon of Blade Runner, the pitiless urban sprawl of the BAMA. Heist delivers a whole new world of grimy future crime, and it does it with a love for the grubby subgenre on its sleeve. Welcome to Grave City.
The planet Heist was the last Independent hold-out against the monolithic Dignity Corporation. Glane Breld took the fall when Dignity took over. And the man who set him up took his car. Now Glane’s a free man again, and he has a lot of work ahead of him if he wants to put together a crew skilled enough to steal the planet back again.
Heist #1 is one of those rare great comics where the writer and artists are working in perfect synchronicity. Tobin’s writing sets up the characters and the world well, without being too dense. Susini’s art is grimy and evocative of the great indie sci-fi comics of the 80’s and 90’s. This comic feels like how fans talk about 2000 AD. Astone’s colors wash the whole thing in a murky shadowscape that is absolutely perfect and sets the right level of menace for the underground of Grave City.
Heist #1 is a dirty, rotten jewel of a Sci-Fi Crime comic. This is going to be a big one, and you can pick it up at your local shop, or digitally from Comixology. Go out and get it.
After the cure for death was discovered, he started sleeping in the graveyard. He climbed into bed at home, and stared at the ceiling hours until the first rays of light came creeping in his window.
Then he would rise, and go for a walk to clear his head, but his feet always took him to the boneyard, and next thing he knew, a hand would be on his shoulder, shaking him awake.
Hardly anyone else went there anymore. Everyone had forgotten the dead, but he couldn’t forget.
Humanity had learned how to live forever a week after her funeral.
This story originally appeared in Everyday Drabbles, a daily free fiction project on Wattpad. Visit the link for over a hundred free stories. And if you enjoy my writing, support my work by buying me a coffee!
The first collection of Everyday Drabbles stories, Winter, is now available as an eBook from Amazon! Enjoy over 90 short stories for less than two dollars!
A flower grew in a high, remote crag. On the eve of his sixteenth birthday, a boy in the village was sent to pick one and bring it back to the elders, as was tradition.
He forded rivers, climbed mountains, was hunted by wild animals, and had his every limit tested. But eventually he found his prize and returned home with it.
“So,” the newly-minted adult asked. “What does it do?”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s not a rare herb, or powerful reagent?”
The elder sighed. “Sometimes it is the deed that is important. The flower’s just a flower.”
This story originally appeared in Everyday Drabbles, a daily free fiction project on Wattpad. Visit the link for over a hundred free stories. And if you enjoy my writing, support my work by buying me a coffee!
The first collection of Everyday Drabbles stories, Winter, is now available as an eBook from Amazon! Enjoy over 90 short stories for less than two dollars!
This week: Lady Une is back, and maybe psychic! Plus, Zechs pushes the button, Tallgeese II is too sexy for its suit carrier, and Heero still doesn’t have a plan!
Marauders #1
Written by Gerry Duggan
Drawn by Matteo Lolli
Colored by Federico Blee
Lettered by VC’s Cory Petit
Design by Tom Muller
Published by Marvel Comics
The Skinny: X-Men’s big Sci-Fi experiment embraces the New Wave. On a boat.
Marauders #1 is the X-Men book I’ve been waiting for.
The X-Men, right down to their creation as five white teenagers in 1960’s America, has always been a metaphor for oppressed groups. This isn’t a new idea, whether Marvel Editorial admits it or not. But with House of X, Jonathan Hickman and Pepe Larraz changed tack. The core concept was still there, but Krakoa altered the dynamic and outlook of mutants so it became less of a struggle between them and human oppressors and more of a big, Golden-Age Science Fiction meditation on divergent futures.
But with Marauders #1, at least some corner of the X-line is back on solid New Wave SF ground, and examining the structures of what Krakoa hath wrought, because there’s no such thing as a problem-free utopia. The problem being that not everybody can use the gates to get to the distant island. In some cases, it is because the countries those gates are in have cordoned them off. For Kate, (formerly Kitty) Pride, it’s because Krakoa won’t let her in.
So, along with a crew of Iceman, Storm, and accidentally the original Pyro, she sets to sea in a boat to bring the mutants that want to come to Krakoa but can’f find a way. The result is the usual superhero dustup against a cadre of generic Russian soldier baddies, but the premise has legs to explore the real consequences of the new era. We get to see who’s being left behind, and where the cracks are in Moira and Xavier’s plans. Plus, this looks like the book where we’re going to see all of Emma Frost’s scheming play out, and that was the most interesting part of House of X, in my opinion.
X-Men as a concept always works better for me when it deals with characters rather than concepts. Marauders looks like the book where we’re actually going to see the two intersect in interesting ways. Issue one is out now digitally from Comixology, and in print at your local comics shop. Go check it out.
Hugh J. O'Donnell 