Batman: Arkham City (2011) Xbox 360

I AM VENGEANCE!

Rating:  6 out of 5 Awesome Cakes Made by Magic Elves

Plot Synopsis:  Batman takes it out of the Asylum and into an abandoned chunk of Gotham City that’s being used to house all of Gotham’s criminals.

The Honored One-Hundred: Chapter One

       “This is an emergency broadcast, we now take you the President of the United States.”

            

        The screen with the Presidential Seal gave way to a view inside the Oval Office.  It was dark and the lone light shown down on the Presidents and it took a moment for the audience to recognize him under the bloody and bruised face.  The President sniffed a trickle of blood back into his nose and adjusted his rumpled tie.  His suit was dirty and damaged, several fingers were clearly broken.  He fixed his posture and trained his non-swollen eye on the camera.  A shadow stood behind him and the perspective made it obvious the President was on his knees.

            

         “My fellow Americans,” he composed himself and spoke “…my fellow American’s… I am… proud… to announce my resignation.” His voice was strained and hoarse as he clearly read from a prompter.

            

          The words struck a note of panic in everyone watching.

  

          “As of this moment… I am resigning my post… as The President as well as title of Commander and Chief of the United States of America… and am turning over all rights, powers… and responsibilities to Master Sargent Lane Wells… also known by the codename “Brace” from the Honored One-Hundred.”

            A black gloved hand reached from the shadows and grabbed the top of the President’s head.  As it squeezed blood began to run from each place where a finger grasped.  Finally blood trickled from the eyes and nose of President before a loud cracking was heard and the President fell limp to the side.  The shadow shook the blood off his hand, stepped over the body of the fallen President and grasped the camera lifting it to so he could look directly into it.  The camera showed a short blonde crew cut and the black and yellow stripped eyes of an Honored One.  He was clean shaven and square jawed.

            “I am Brace of the Honored One Hundred and I am now the head of the United States of America.  Tomorrow I will dismantle the three branches of the government.  All members of the central government will submit to interviews to determine usefulness, continued employment and reassignment.  I will then tour the country and revise all government structures.  Make no mistake, you are not living in a democracy anymore, you are now living under a benevolent dictatorship.  There will be changes and there will be progress.  Anyone who obstructs progress will be removed, forcefully, if needed.  I welcome any challenges to my authority.”

            He paused and stared intensely into the camera as if he were making eye contact with every person watching at home.

            “Let this be a warning to the heads of all other nations.  If you prove unable to handle the responsibility of running a nation that privilege will be taken from you and I will take on the burden of running your nation correctly.”

            He dropped the camera and as it hit the ground the feed cut off and the Seal of the President was shown again.  The high pitched beep was all that lingered for several minutes before the regular programming resumed.

Honored One-Hundred intro

  I wanted to try my hand at a monthly serial so in four days I will post the first chapter of a novella called The Honored One-Hundred.  Expect a new installment the 25th of every month for the rest of the year with each chapter being 1500-2000 words.  I hope you all enjoy it!  If it all works out this might end up being a yearly project.

If I Made It: R.E.D. 3

The Concept:  I decided to pop in R.E.D. 2 today and watch that.  In watching it I had some thoughts for a sequel.  Since Bruce Willis clearly doesn't want to action anymore, pretty much any interview in the last five years would tell you that so with that in mind it would probably be a good idea to free Bruce Willis from the franchise and conclude the trilogy on some growth.  So our plot catalyst will be the death of Frank Moses and who is our replacement?  Well we've been building her up for the last two movies, Mary-Louise Parker as Sarah Ross.  Here's my three act breakdown of R.E.D. 3:

My Fan Entitlement Analogy

  Fan entitlement comes up a lot it seems.  Pretty much anytime you get a bunch of fans in the room, fans of anything, you have a few people who steer the conversation into a negative direction and the basis of that is typically some form of entitlement.  That you are owed something because of your fandom.  I've already touched on that (here) pretty extensively but I thought I would add this as sort of a defining analogy to bottom line it (with some yelling afterwards).

  When I go to a restaurant, just a restaurant, not one that advertises or pivots on being "the best restaurant" or a "5 Star restaurant" but just an eating establishment, I am entitled to food.  That much is obvious.  I go there with the expressed intention of getting food and the establishment is designed around the concept that I exchange money for food.  So if I paid money and didn't get food, or got something entirely inedible (like a car engine) that's a whole different matter.  But I got food.  Now I'm not entitled to GOOD food, I gave them money to give me food.  The quality of the food is irrelevant because that was the extent of my transaction.  I give money, they give food.  Even if it wasn't what I ordered, I still got food.

  Now, if the food was good I go back.  If the food was bad then I don't and the economy will eventually work itself out and if the restaurant was truly bad it will go away.  But what I don't do is stand up on my chair and yell about how much eating has changed since I was a kid, eating used to be so much better when I started eating and things have really gone downhill in recent years, I can't believe all you sheeple can just blindly eat while I have a bad meal and do you know how much money I've put into the food industry over the years?  I've been eating my whole life, unlike some of these other people who don't deserve to eat, and I've put hundreds of thousands of dollars into the food industry and I demand a better meal, I deserve a better meal, a meal exactly the way I like it because I've been eating a really long time and have spent a lot of money eating.  I can't believe I wouldn't get a five star meal from Denny's, eating sucks now!  AND THIS CABERNET IS TOO DRY AND DOESN'T COMPLIMENT MY MOONS OVER MY HAMMY!

  Obviously things are slightly different if your doing a review of something, then you need to be somewhat critical and open to consuming bad stuff on purpose for the sake of reviewing.  But as a fan we paid our money for entertainment, regardless of what that entertainment was.  We buy a comic therefore we paid for 20-30 pages of sequential art designed to tell a story.  That's the extent of the transaction.  I can't stress this enough, WE.  ARE.  NOT.  OWED.  ANYTHING.  BEYOND.  THAT.  It doesn't have to be a good story, it doesn't have to be one we like, it doesn't have to have our favorite characters in it and it doesn't need to be tailored to our specific tastes.  The thing to consider is that other people might like it and you should let them.  Move on, find something else that makes YOU happy.  The great thing is you can DO that and STILL hold on this other awesome thing that makes you happy.  It's called growth.

  There used to be this guy at my local comic store when I was a kid and I'd go there on Tuesday's during the summer when there was no school.  But this guy, this adult, would show up in a suit, obviously on his lunch break and buy at least $100.00 of comics.  Every Tuesday.  So he was dropping around $400 a month on new comics.  They were reserved under his name so he just had to go up to the counter and they'd pull his stack and he'd stand there for probably 15 minutes and complain about how shitty comics were now days.  Openly and engage customers, he'd engage me to tell me how terrible my tastes in comics were and if I wanted to read REAL comics then I had to collect Silver Age or this or that.  MOTHER FUCKER, you are spending almost half a grand on comics a month, at least, and you HATE it!?!  What the hell!?!  Don't be that guy.  Buy what you like, keep what you like, if you buy something you don't like give it away to someone.  But don't stew in your entitlement, shaking your fist at the sky while you hand over money, angry and bitter the whole time.  You paid your money and you got your entertainment.  The End.

Batman: Arkham Asylum (2009) X-Box 360

I AM THE NIGHT!

Rating:  4 out of 5 Batarangs Whipped at the Heads of Thugs

Plot Synopsis:  Joker takes over the Asylum and it’s up to Batman to stop him.

If I Made It: Doctor Strange TV series

The Concept:  With a Doctor Strange all but cast (rumors point to Jon Hamm, which actually sounds pretty cool) I thought I would take a stab at a TV series, an hour long drama to be exact.  The idea is to make the show more of a medical procedural with supernatural elements as sort of House meets X-Files.
  So the confines are a 12 episode first season and I'll detail outline up to the mid season hiatus.

All Superheroes Must Die (Vs) (2013) Blu-Ray

Death Traps: The Movie.

Rating:  3 out of 5 Superheroes Surviving a Game of Death

Plot Synopsis:  A villain somehow captures a bunch of hero’s and says to them “Let’s play a game.” Forcing them into series of challenges under threat of killing a whole town.

The Top Tenth of the Month: Street Fighting Man

Top 10 Contenders in a (mostly) human bar brawl

The Concept: When you get a bunch of tough guys together and then fill said tough guys with booze something bad is bound to happen. But these aren’t the super powered toughs they’re just the regular Joes looking to blow off some steam and have a cold one. No one’s packing weapons or gimmicks it’s just a down and dirty brawl with the weapons at hand: bottles, bar stools, table legs and pool cues.

10) Jesse Custer-

--Who They Are: The Preacher himself, trained by the man who killed his daddy Jesse learned the art of street fighting from hardass hick Jody. Nothings fair or off limits to Jesses, eye gouges, bottle bashing, using said broken bottle to stab someone, jamming his fingers up their nose or just straight kicking them in the groin. The only thing that’s off limits is using his Word of God to make someone do whatever he tells them. It’s not about finesse with Jesse, it’s about doing damage and causing pain.

--Why They’re 10: Because it’s not about finesse with Jesse, he’s just a straight up brawler and probably the most human person on this list. Jesse can take punishment but it’s not going to do much against the guy who makes dying a major part of his life.

Thor: Tales of Asgard (2011) Netflix

More like Thor: Tales of Shit, am I right?

Rating: 1 out of 5 Characters Who Talks With an Appropriate Voice

Plot Synopsis: Young Thor is a terrible person.  He's followed by Loki who is almost entirely one dimensional.  They follow the Warriors Three who are cowardly liars and tell Sif she isn't man enough to matter.  Nothing happens and nobody cares.