Addiction Is Not Gameplay - I'm Looking At You Diablo

    I've been playing Diablo 3 recently, and also played Diablo 2 in the past (never did play the first one though).  I don't really like Diablo 3, the only reason I'm still playing it is that it's one of the very few games where you can play with a friend on the couch (who do so many games let you play with people on the other side of the world but not right next to you?).  So the three of us have been grinding away characters.  I've got a level 70 Crusader, Monk, Witch Doctor, Wizard, and Barbarian - my Demon Hunter is only level 55.  Also got up to Paragon 83 and completed 61% of all the challenges in the game.  Which, for those who have not played, means I've put a pretty good amount of time into a game that I don't really like.  And while there are a bunch of reasons I don't like the game, one in particular I want to ramble on about for a few paragraphs - because it's relevent to my ongoing 13th Age campaign in a way.

    The Diablo series is really about one thing, collecting loot.  Yes, it has classes and levels and some RPG-like trappings, which don't mean much.  A naked character is impossible to play, since all your skills do damage based on your weapon - you at least need a rusty nail to channel magic through or stab someone with.  The bulk of your fighting ability comes from your gear, and the whole point of the game is to replay levels killing bigger monsters to get bigger gear.  It is a very well-designed skinner box: random rewards at random intervals produce the most addictive behavior.
    Now, as someone who has struggled with mental illness, namely depression but I've got plenty of other issues, I really don't appreciate game designers who deliberately design addictive behavior into their games.  It's a part of why I like crafting, it is a system of clear goals and deliberate creation instead of the "random loot drop" paradigm in most games.  It's also why I don't play most of the MMOs I used to play, eventually they tend to devolve into random loot drop timesink grinding as well.  If a friend is playing I'll hop on with them (and if I had more friends I might play more)(though what I lack in quantity of friends I make up for in quality).  But by and large when the game has run out of new experiences and story it just devolves into mindless addiction collecting, at which point I need to stop playing.  Like I said at the beginning, I played Diablo 2, and didn't know about skinner boxes or appreciate my own mental issues at the time, and I spent hundreds of hours on it.  Well, no, say wasted hundreds of hours on it.  Because ultimately, when you have grind-ed the very best of all gear for all your inventory slots and reached the pinnacle of power, what the hell do you do?  When killing the monsters is easy and offers no new reward, why keep playing?  Where are you at the end?  In a story-based adventure, you reach the end, you face the final boss, save the world, get the girl, and ride off into the sunset (weather you want to or not, damn you Fallout: New Vegas).  There is resolution, closure.  In a loot-grind like Diablo or most MMOs you don't end by killing the final boss, you've already killed him/her/it hundreds or thousands of times to try to grind a new shiny.

    Now, I mentioned that this was related to my 13th Age campaign.  See, what hit me was that as a GM I had been falling into the same sort of grinding rut myself - but this time inflicting it on my players.  I tend to be the oddball GM, the guy who runs the game when we don't have any characters, have some new people, and want to start playing right now.  I have developed a formula to deal with 30 minutes of prep time while my new group is making characters, I pick 5 groups of monsters and throw a veneer of story as to why the party would be fighting them.  It is not deep, but when my own players have no concept of their characters (since we usually throw them together at that moment and most games don't have you do a lot of character-building during character creation, Fate being about the only real game that does with its Aspects) and usually we are not in any published setting (I've literally never played in the Forgotten Realms in about 30 years of D&D except for a computer game) so this is a fast and dirty way to give everybody something to do.  Every game really has clear rules for "kill the monsters" and that is a pretty easy story to craft.
    The problem is that this is loot grinding in a slightly different form, 'monster grinding' if you will.  After playing the very long Rise of the Runelords campaign that was pretty boring overall, I really want to do something better, something deeper for my players and me.  What sucks is that requires a lot of prep time and creativity.  Thankfully we are now in a fixed situation, I know the characters involved, and each player has crafted some backstory to their characters (the One Unique Thing and Icon Relationships are great in 13th Age for helping to actually build characters instead of just combat roles) and we are committed to playing these characters for a while (11 more game sessions).
    But what still sucks is that while the game has lots of clear and detailed rules for how to kill monsters, it hand-waves everything else.  I want our next adventure to be somewhat of a mystery.  Something bad is going to happen, its been fated to happen so my little 3rd level players can't stop it - but then can mitigate it.  If they can figure it out beforehand and prepare themselves, then they can reduce the damage done and make their lives easier in upcoming adventures.  They just have to solve who is going to do the bad thing and where and how, in the few days before it happens.  Our first adventure was a pretty straight monster crawl except that the final boss monster wasn't really a bad guy and didn't need to be killed.  Our second adventure had a series of rooms/encounters that were riddles to solve.  So hopefully we are on a nice trend of doing things other than monster-killing (though we will get back to that in adventure 4, which is basically a dungeon-crawl with a few twists).  Creating this has been a headache though.  "Just role-play it" sounds like great advise, but this isn't a movie where we are all watching and waiting for the big reveal at the end; this is an RPG where the players have to do the hard work to figure out what the big reveal is at the end.  And "role-playing game" has two complimentary parts, "role-playing" and "game."  Games have rules, without rules they are just make-believe.  And rules are good because they provide a foundation, a box if you will, that players can play inside or outside of.  I think it was Joe Haldeman who once wrote "Art thrives on restriction."  He was talking about how people would ask him to write a story for them, which he was happy to do - but they had to give him something, some event or concept or seed to work from and build off of.  I think that principle applies very well to RPGs.  The rules are not a straight-jacket, they are a spring-board (well, as long as you don't have too many rules, eventually rules bloat will crush anybody).

    So this post has turned into an epic ramble, let me try to pull my thoughts together.  Making a grind is easy, weather by just adding more loot or more monsters.  But is that enough?  Maybe for a one-shot pick-up game it is, but for a long-term campaign that you want your players to be invested in I'm not so sure.  However, making non-combat and -loot activities is hard, most games do not support that very well and you are left with creating your own system of rules or trusting in your acting ability.  Still, I think it is a worthwhile goal.  Addiction is not gameplay, as I noted at the beginning; merely repeating the same actions in hopes of better loot or a higher level is a pretty small goal for something as vast and creative as an RPG.  I wish I had a great system or advise on how to make deeper games, but I've got my hands full trying to figure it out myself (before next Monday when we play again).

13th Age Impressions After 2 Adventures

    After wrapping up our Rise of the Runelords campaign GMed by my friend Aaron we have now started a 13th Age campaign GMed by me.  This is our first time playing 13th Age, and while I will try to write a good review of it later, here are some first impressions after finishing our 2nd adventure.

Simpler Is Better
    One thing about transitioning from Pathfinder to 13th Age is how much simpler 13th is by comparison.  In 13th Age classes only go up to 10 levels instead of 20, and there are fewer mechanical bits to track.  It's a general design philosophy that we have embraced, I don't bother to hand out gold pieces, I just assume that anything reasonable my characters want they have - and my players being reasonable people that works just fine.  We also don't do XP.  We played out Rise of the Runelords in 14 sessions, going from levels 1 to 18; my friend Aaron thought it would be cool to play 13th Age in 13 sessions going from levels 1 to the cap of 10.  So we will be leveling up after about every session, which takes care of the whole XP tracking thing.  In general we have streamlined everything from the overly-bloated Pathfinder into a more manageable system, and I love it.  Personally I don't feel like we have lost anything, but we only have 3 players of different classes and nobody wanted to try some weird or unusual idea for a character concept - so we haven't needed a lot of archetypes or alternate rules.

Rangers Get Hosed
     One bad simplification though is with the Ranger class, which Sara plays in our game.  Rangers either take weapon traits and are basically fighters, or they take an animal companion.  Seeings how there are only 3 of us, Sara decided to take the companion to have a 4th character and someone who could protect the squishy Wizard (me).  Which was cool, and had that Ranger vibe.  Except, that was it.  You only get 3 Class Talents to start, and taking the Animal Companion takes up 2 - so that companion is pretty much all that's unique/cool about your character.  The problem is that they are rather boring.  Every companion has the same stats, based on level, and one power based on the type of animal (Sara's Bear gains temporary HP when it hits something) but the stats are fixed and the power never changes.  You can add a few extra powers with feats, most of which are either passive one 1/day abilities.  Companions do not have attributes, do not have any special attacks or options in combat, and are quite boring to play really.  There are very few ways that the Ranger and Companion can interact, something that should be at the heart of that character concept.  We did get 13 True Ways, which added a few 1/day spells to use on a companion, but while that is better than nothing it is not an actual fix.
    My Wizard and Aaron's Rogue are both cool enough though.

Combat Is Unexpected
    Our first fight was 3 1st-level Goblins against the 1st-level Ranger and Rogue characters plus the Bear.  Some things are just tradition in D&D or any of its derivatives.  I expected the fight to be somewhat tough but doable, since Goblins are usually pushovers.  The Bear was knocked unconscious and both players injured before the Goblins were defeated.  It was a lot harder fight than I expected.  And combat has been like that, hard for me as GM to predict weather it will be easy or a TPK.  Part of that is because it is a new system and none of us are used to it yet (including my players knowing how to use their abilities to maximum advantage).  Part of that is because with fewer levels the monsters are kind of tougher - a 1st-level 13th age Goblin feels more like a 2nd-to-3rd-level Pathfinder Goblin.  It has been good so far, but is definitely taking some getting used to and adding to the burden of being GM (I don't like to kill players, so I hate not being sure just how many of what monsters they can handle).

It's Fun To Be Creative
    We last played a canned adventure straight out of the book with RotR, so I've been trying to do something different with 13th Age.  Our fist adventure had some fights, but also ways to non-violently end some confrontations and a bad guy who wasn't all bad at the end.  The second adventure was a series of riddle-encounters, which turned out to be the longest and hardest since one of my players was sleepy and not at the top of his game.  It's nice as GM to be free to make up things, while there is a sketchy outline of an adventure in the core rulebook and another in 13 True Ways, there is not really any kind of solid campaign so I've had to make stuff up.  That's also been kind of tricky, since I now have the burden of making stuff up for a game system I don't really know.  Overall though it has been good so far.
    I have ended up making some character sheets though, the ones in the book are mediocre at best.  That has added a lot of time behind Adobe Illustrator on top of writing out ideas.

There's Not A Lot Of Magic Items
    Magic Items are much simpler in 13th Age, each type of item having a fixed benefit (like a weapon giving a bonus to hit and damage, armor a bonus to AC, cloaks a bonus to saves) and then having one special property on top of that.  The core rulebook has several sample properties, but it is not a great selection.  I really wish they had dropped the concrete examples for a chapter on the idea behind magic items, how powerful roughly they should be and what kinds of abilities would be game-balanced.  Sara is the bow-wielding Ranger, so she would like a magic bow, but there is only 1 example in the book - the rest are magic ammunition, and the book does not say how many shots would be appropriate (though being Pathfinder-based I'll go with 50).  Likewise there are some armor special abilities that let you use your base AC for one of your other defenses (physical or mental, non-weapon stuff) - which is useless for my Wizard since my base AC is my lowest, and was no help for Aaron's Rogue where two of the three are the same number.  It's just hard to think of a new magic ability that is not over- or under-powered from the few examples in the book and no clue as to what the designers were thinking/planning for in the system.
    Also, the default bonuses are pretty small, a +1 to +3, which while better than nothing is not exactly a game-changer for the character.  Now, Pathfinder had to opposite problem of magic items being potentially over-powered, but here they feel not quite powerful enough.

    Anyways, there are a few of the things that have stuck out so far.  Again, we have only played 2 adventures, so we don't really know the system yet.  I have to say though, if I was forced to choose between playing 13th Age or Pathfinder, I think I would go with 13th Age.  I'm not really an "old school" player who misses the days of 1st Edition D&D, but I do think that Pathfinder has just gotten too big, too bloated to be fun anymore.  13th Age is a nice middle-ground between 1st and 3rd edition D&D styles of play and I am glad we have started playing it.  As a new game it requires some GM work to fill in the blanks, and there are some things about the rules I am not super-fond of, but on the whole it is a good game.  Aaron and Sara seem to like it overall too.

    I'm still working on my write-up about Rise of the Runelords, and when I finish my 13th Age character sheets I'll post them here as well.  Hope everyone has a Merry Christmas/Happy Holidays.

Women vs Cosplay Kickstarter

    A friend of mine is involved in the inaugural Kickstarter for the Women vs Cosplay calendar.  As a general geek myself I want to give them a shout-out and encourage any readers of mine to check out their site:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/anabelmartinez/women-vs-cosplay-2015-gaming-calendar-project

    I think that Kickstarter is awesome for how it allows smaller projects like this to get started.  Best of luck to them on meeting their funding goals.

Playing the Pathfinder Adventure Card Game, Again

    Last year my friend Aaron got the Pathfinder Adventure Card Game, and for the last few months since the next boxed set, Skulls and Shackles, came out I have been bugging him about buying the new ACG set (it has pirates, and I'll take any excuse to bug him).  Last weekend we played the original and I realized something - the more I play the Pathfinder card game the less I like it.
    I think I can actually trace the source of my dislike, something I don't think I did a great job of explaining in my last -post a year ago, so let me revisit the topic again (just for the heck of it).

    First off, last year I played two games of the ACG with my friend.  We were living in different cities at the time, so that was all we managed to play.  Since then he has played a few games with his wife and other friends, but I have not played the game at all.  Last weekend there were 5 of us, two of our friends came out to visit.  They had not played the game either, so there were three new players and two who mostly knew the rules.  We played one of the introductory adventures (Brigadoon) and then the first two parts (Attack on Sandpoint and Local Heroes) of the first Rise of the Runelords adventures (Burnt Offerings).  So while I more than doubled my previous play-time, I will admit up front that I have not played the game enough to feel like I have mastered it - which is something I'll come back to later.  While it was a very long session, I think at least 4 hours but it ended a very long day and weekend so I'm not sure, and I was getting tired and grouchy (which go hand in hand with me), overall we had fun.  Mostly.  More than not at least. (though it did fail to be sufficiently engaging to pull one friend away from her tumblr posting)  The last time I played I was the Bard, and I stuck with that choice this time, since it seemed to work out and I was gun shy after my favorite class, Wizard, seemed to suck badly in our playtesting last year.  I still think the Bard is an okay class.  I kind of described how the game played in a previous post, see there if you want an overview, in this post I'm just going to highlight a few parts of the rules and gameplay.

    So after playing it again, what can I add to my last post?  Well, just that I know exactly why I don't like this game, and I like it less every time I play it.  I touched on it (in a way) in my last post, but playing again drove it home.  And it is simply that I hate disassociated mechanics.  Sadly then, the Pathfinder Adventure Card Game is pretty much a giant collection of disassociated mechanics.
    What do I mean by disassociated mechanics?  Well, the term is not mine, I'm using it from an excellent post over at The Alexandrian that you can find here.  The article is great, read it, but I'll summarize.  In a nutshell, if a decision that the player has to make is also one that the character has to make, then a mechanic (or rule) is associated.  If the player and character are thinking in different ways about a mechanic/rule, then it is disassociated.  For example, a wizard is facing a horde of goblins and has to decide weather or not to cast a fireball spell.  This is associated, in that both the player and the character are weighing the same factors into this decision.  Both the player and character know that a spell can only be cast once per day, and that while it may get rid of this challenge, there may be other challenges to come before the new day.  Contrast this with 1/day abilities, like a Paladin's "Smite Evil."  Like a spell, the paladin's ability can only be used once per day (at first level, or a limited number of times per day in general), but the two abilities are not the same.  A spell, by its definition, and as it exists and works in the game world, is magic that is committed to memory, and that burns itself out of memory when used - this process is so fatiguing that the caster then has to get a full night's sleep to be ready to memorize spells again.  Smite evil however, has a totally arbitrary usage restriction.  Nowhere does the game ever explain why a god devoted to smiting evil would only allow its followers to do so once (or however many times) per day.  The paladin as a character has no reason to have to choose to use a limited power, while the wizard has had his restrictions defined and explained.  In both cases the player is making the exact same decisions, about the risk of using a finite resource, but the characters have very different outlooks on the same actions.
    This is one of the things that I do not like about Pathfinder in general, the proliferation of disassociated mechanics like the #/day abilities.  There is no concept of cost, that you only do things a limited number of times because they use up resources of some kind, or of preparation, that some things can only be done after you have laid sufficient groundwork - instead we get a hand-wave, most likely in the name of that chimera "game balance."  Most people don't care, they like the game side of their role-playing game, but I happen to like the role-playing side more (or, even better, the elusive character-playing side, but that's another rant).  This inclination of mine is what makes playing the ACG like listening to hours of non-stop nails on blackboard.  The ACS is full of disassociated things like:

• You might not be able to start with a weapon, but you can find one in the game.  If you do, you can use it at will.  But when the game is over, you have to throw it away or give it to someone else.  Why?  Because.
• After casting a spell, if you are an arcane or divine caster, you have to make a recharge roll.  Normally after casting a spell you discard it, but if you make the recharge roll then you can instead put it on the bottom of your character deck, and maybe use it again.  So not all spells are lost and not all spells are recharged.  Why?  Because.
• Speaking of your character deck, it is considered to be your hit points.  That means that every spell you know, piece of armor and weapons you use, equipment you are carrying and henchmen you have hired all make you more healthy.  And conversely, every spell you cast (and have to discard) or item you lose or henchman you send off on an errand brings you closer to death.  Why?  Because.
• Staying together is a staple of adventuring, and a good general concept.  When different people work together they can accomplish wonders - just look at society itself for proof of this concept.  But in the ACG only a few classes have an ability that can be used to help another player.  And challenges have to be fought by only one person.  Thus, having an ally who is not a specific class is not helpful at all.  Why?  Because.
• Speaking of helping each other, each character has some number of "blessing" cards, which represent the favor of the gods.  You spend a blessing to double your base die roll, making it possible to succeed at normally impossible tasks.  You can also spend one on another character's roll, even if that character is at a different location and thus your character would logically have no idea that they even needed any sort of aid.  Why?  Because.  And why can't any character at the same location as another add a die into a conflict to represent teamwork?  Because.
• The goal of a session is to explore locations to find the main villain and defeat said villain.  However, even if you defeat the villain in combat, the villain instead automatically runs away to another location that has not been "closed" in advance.  Why?  This one I really have a hard time with - if our fighter just slid 3 feet of steel between the ribs of the bandit leader how exactly does he manage to walk away, whistling jaunty tune, and not suffer any penalties at all?
• While you have a 15 card character deck that represents your life, you have a hand (of usually 5 or 6 cards) that represent the equipment/allies/blessings/spells that you can use.  Why?  Do I have so many pairs of pants that I can't remember which one I left my heavy crossbow in?  Do all my allies play a constant game of hide and go seek with me while we are fighting for our lives?  Since I am watched by the gods, as evidenced by my blessing cards, do they have a hard time keeping track of all us adventurers and so only glance any single individual's way intermittently?  Why?  Because.

    I could go on for pages and pages, but for the sake of your boredom and my blood pressure I won't.  Instead I want to make another point.  Some will not doubt, and have been for the entirety of this post, comment that the title of the game is the Pathfinder Adventure Card Game, not Role-Playing Game, and thus one should expect all mechanics to only be those that pertain to cards in general.  Which is a perfectly valid point.  And that's also the part of this game that just annoys the hell out of me and makes me hate Paizo (creators of Pathfinder).  While the title may say "cards" all the art and terminology and some of the mechanics are taken from the "role-playing" game - which makes the ACG confusing as hell.  It looks like an RPG, it walks kinda like an RPG, and then quacks like a CCG (collectable card game); making it a rather duckbill platypus Frankenstein abomination with the worst aspects of both.  Descent and Runebound have both shown and proven that RPG mechanics can be adapted to board games, which also use cards (and converting the board pieces to cards is fairly trivial).  Hell, even the old Call of Cuthulu CCG ("Mythos" I think it was called) had very definite RPG-like mechanics with its quest cards that required the player to play a certain order of cards in locations and challenges to follow a storyline. (though I admit that example is dating myself, and a lot of my readers may not be familiar with that now sadly out-of-print CCG from the early 90s)  My point is that if you are going to create a card game in a role-playing game universe I would think that you would borrow more from the RPG side, while the ACG takes most of its lead from the CCG industry.

    The design principles behind the ACG just do not work for me.  I think Pathfinder itself needs some overhaul to be a better RPG and embrace the character side more, but the ACG does not care about any of that, it is just a game about pushing around cards and rolling dice.  "Character," quite rightly, appears nowhere in the title.  Which makes it a game that I just cannot enjoy.  I am an RPG guy, I can play a CCG but they are not what make me happy to play.  And despite the RPG trappings, the ACG is a totally different animal.  This is not to say that there is anything wrong with the game, it is exactly what its designers intended it to be - but I do wish they had created it in its own universe instead of using the RPG trappings in a, frankly, misleading way.  I am disappointed that this will be one of Paizo's products I can't have fun with (and I'll stop bothering my friend about pirates, I'll just have to bother him about something else).  And for those of you who are considering playing it but have not done so yet I say this: which side means the most to you?  Do you really want a game with character and role-playing elements or are you just happy with some rules, some good artwork, and a few dice?  If you are not as crazy as I am, then I'm sure you will have a good time with this game.  Personally, I'd rather play Munchkin or the previously mentioned Runebound and Descent.

Some new posts coming soon

    This year has been horrible.  Just horrible.  Thus, there have not been many posts from me in a long time.  I am not gone however (in the off chance anybody out there cares).  I do have a few more posts I should be writing soon.  My friends and I have almost finished the Rise of the Runelords campaign for Pathfinder, and I have some thoughts on it, as well as on the state of Pathfinder in general.  Also we are going to try a new game, maybe 13th Age or D&D 5th ed, or both, which I'll talk about after we get around to them.  Not many new movies coming out, but I may review a few old ones I am catching up on.  So there will be some more activity in the future days and weeks, though nothing on any kind of fixed schedule.

Long-Overdue Movie Review- Transformers: Age of Extinction

At a glance- this is Michael Bay, thus it is full of eye-candy and brain-dead, with giant robots

What is it? Well, here we go with another Transformers movie, number 4.  I liked the original Transformers movie, it had its flaws (plenty) but it was watchable.  I loved the toys and cartoons as a kid.  But I have to say that Transformers 2 and 3 really were disappointing.  Revenge of the Fallen (#2) seemed like it was written by drunk and stoned frat boys while Dark of the Moon (#3) was just stupid, actually annoying and stupid.  So when I saw that Age of Extinction (#4) was coming out a few months ago, I was in no hurry to see it.  And in fact, it was just last night that I finally watched it on DVD with a friend.  It was as bad as I had figured.

The acting- Our hero is Cade Yeager, played by Mark Wahlberg, a Texas robot engineer who can't build a working robot, a family man who lost his wife and neglects his daughter, and all-around blue collar American who's full of some catchy one-liners and dumb as a post.  It is a hard, thankless role, and Mr. Wahlberg seems to try his best with it, but there is no meat there to work from.  He spends the whole movie off and on talking about how important it is to not make a mistake and how mistakes can bring wonderful surprises and the whole damn movie is about as clear as whatever he's trying to talk about.  He has a daughter, Nicola Peltz, and of course there is the boyfriend he doesn't know about, Jack Reynor, and both could have been cut from the movie with nothing important missing.  So far there is yet to be a decent female character in Transformers except for the blonde computer lady in the first - I don't think Michael Bay, or any of the writers he works with, actually knows how to make a three-dimensional and engaging female character.  The formula appears to be female = eye candy and that's about all we get, except for this girl being 17 years old and in a relationship, hinted at a sexual one, with her 20 year old boyfriend which is okay because a Texas law protects them since they met years earlier and what the hell does any of this crap have to do with a giant robot movie ?!?!?  Like I said, could cut them and not notice.  There are two females with very small roles, blonde scientist lady and Chinese businesswoman, played by Sophia Myles and Bingbing Li, who are watchable because they don't have enough screen time to be turned into anything stupid.  Otherwise there is Stanley Tucci as a misguided scientist/inventor who goes from sorta-evil to a good guy, and he is actually the best role in the film.  And there's Kelsey Grammer as the totally-evil black ops CIA chairman who might as well have his evil white cat to pet, since his character is about as well-defined as a Bond villain.
    But that's just the human roles, there are also the Transformers.  Optimus' voice actor, Peter Cullen, still has a great voice, but his character is a little confused between "I'm here to save you" and "I'm here to kill you," marking a change from the previously Mr. Goody Two-Shoes of the series.  I hate it when filmmakers feel like they have to make good guys 'dark and broody' myself, your mileage may vary.  Bumblebee still doesn't know how to talk in a running gag that really needs to stop already.  There is a samurai transformer and a green car transformer, and I'm not even going to bother finding out who voiced them because they are forgettable.  John Goodman does do a good job as Hound though, the tough military-type transformer who just wants to shoot everything in sight.  Sadly Megatron is back, and still has no worthwhile or intelligent dialogue - another running gag of the series that should be put to bed.  Amazingly, I almost missed Starscream.

The story- The first five minutes of the movie shows some alien ship with alien bombs that turns a bunch of plants and dinosaurs into metal.  You might think that was the story or plot for this movie, and you would be mostly wrong.  The super-bomb that makes Transformer metal is in the story, and it does kind of have something to do with it, but since we never really get a detailed explanation for this, or for why it has not been mentioned until now, it is actually just some cheap window-dressing for all the explosions we know and love from Michael Bay.  Flashing to the present, it has been 5 years since the last movie's climatic battle of Chicago, and a group of evil CIA agents are hunting down all Transformers, Autobot and Decepticon alike, and murdering them, in the name of safety for human-kind.  It is kind of nice to see that humans have finally developed a way to hurt Transformers, I was wondering over the last movies when they would figure that out, but the tone here feels off.  In all of our previous movies there have been some military soldiers working with the Autobots - what the hell happened to them?  Were they all killed along with some of the missing Autobots? (should have shown that, it would have added some depth)  Have they turned to the dark side and are now killing their former friends? (should have shown that, would have added some depth)  Are they helping hide the Autobots, at risk to themselves and their families? (should have shown that- oh hell)  You get the picture, instead of using some intelligence and making something deep and meaningful all we get is a caricature of a bad guy; reducing a legitimately complex problem (good aliens bringing along bad aliens and the balance of power between them and humans) into a line of empty dialogue like "my sister was killed in Chicago" and "there are no good or bad aliens."  So if the one guy's sister had been killed by a drunk driver would he be out murdering alcoholics? (would have been a better movie actually)  And there are obviously good and bad aliens, the good ones have been trying to keep the human race alive while the bad ones have been killing everybody - that's a fairly obvious distinction to anyone with a brain.
    And that is the crux of the story, instead of something logical and compelling we get a flat cardboard cutout of a plot.  Instead of having Yaeger's little girl and worthless boyfriend die at the beginning, thus showing the seriousness of the situation, we have the comic relief guy die at the beginning, who I personally did not mind seeing killed - I wish more of the humans in the story had been killed.  The is not a story, it is a series of special effects set pieces.  Turn your brain off and just enjoy the ride.
    Which almost works.  The movie is a rather long 2 hours and 40 minutes.  The first hour-and-half goes by at a good pace, but by then you haven't seen the dinobots (which were on almost every poster) and it starts to drag.  The last 30 minutes, which should be the most compelling, instead feel the longest after all the special effects have been burning out your retinas.  And then later, when the spectacle is over and you are left to actually think about the movie, you realize just how many inconsistencies and illogical moments there are - that, in fact, it makes only the most tenuous sense.  I don't think the writers of this movie actually knew what their story was about.
    In short (too late, I know) it's really stupid, but it looks pretty.  You can make some great wallpapers for your computer out of the screenshots.  And the CinemaSins count for this movie should be off the chart.

My recommendation- catch it for free on TV, if you are extremely bored and have nothing whatsoever worthwhile to do with your life ; or just tune in for the last 30 minutes when the dinobots show up

The Homeless Nerd Reviews- Captain America: The Winter Soldier

At a glance- superhero action with a dash of spy thriller for seasoning

What is it? In Captain America: The First Avenger we met 90-pound weakling Steve Rodgers who through the magic of science gets turned into 200-pound beefcake Captain America during World War 2.  He fought against Hydra, a splinter group of the Nazis who found magic-science weapons thanks to the Cosmic Cube (which was featured in The Avengers).  Along the way he loses his best friend "Bucky" Barnes to the Nazis and his budding girlfriend when he lands a plane full of deadly weapons, and himself, in the ocean.  Frozen on ice for 40-ish years his super-body manages to survive being a cap-scicle and he awakens in the modern world.  Winter Soldier picks up after The Avengers with cap working for S.H.I.E.L.D. and trying to adjust to the modern world.

The acting- A lot of people reprising roles, starting with Chris Evans as Captain America/Steve Rodgers.  I like him in this role, I think he brings exactly the right amount of earnest boy scout and super-soldier to his performance.  Samuel L Jackson is Nick Fury, and fits the role perfectly as usual.  Scarlett Johansson is The Black Widow/Natasha Romanoff, and is not just eye-candy, she does a great job of playing a complicated character.  New to the series is Robert Redford as S.H.I.E.L.D. top-man Alexander Pierce, and let's face it- Robert Redford rarely does a bad acting job.  Anthony Mackie is also new as Sam Wilson/ The Falcon, does a great job and I'm glad to see Marvel did a great job with updating the character from the comic books.

The story- Superhero movies are about two things: saving the world and action/explosions/fight-scenes.  Spy movies are about two things: lies and trust.  Combining them, like in Winter Soldier, makes for an interesting movie, if not exactly revolutionary.  Cap is a big boy scout at heart, wanting to do the right thing for mom and apple pie - but now he's working for S.H.I.E.L.D., who like all spy organizations is full of secrets and deception and 'trust me I'm doing it for the greater good but you can't know about it.'  I do love a line from Nick Fury where he reminds Cap that even the 'Greatest Generation' of the 40's did some things to be ashamed of - no generation has ever been perfect, and hindsight tends to gloss over the ugly parts of history.  And when Nick Fury is attacked, and warns Cap 'don't trust anyone,' it becomes apparent that something rotten is going on in S.H.I.E.L.D.'s shadowy Denmark.  Which then sends Cap, The Black Widow, and new friend Falcon on a race to save the world, since this is a superhero movie too.  And being a superhero movie, we need a super villain in The Winter Soldier, a Russian assassin with a robotic arm who can give even Cap a run for his money in a fight.
    I really liked this movie, and I really liked how Marvel branched out to make a superhero movie that isn't just about men in tights (and women in revealing tights).  The bit of spy thriller in the plot helps to make it a more well-rounded movie - and makes the Captain America series even better.  In the first Cap we had the period war drama/superhero movie, now we get Spy Games (I had to throw in the reference)/superhero movie and that is great since it covers all the the comic book Captain America's history and character.  He was a man of two eras, someone who struggled to do the right thing when that's not always easy to see, let alone do.  And added to the modern age of electronic surveillance, drones and the complicated threats the world faces it makes for an interesting story and makes Cap the one superhero from The Avengers who actually feels like he fits in the world.  Overall I'd have to say that even for its over-the-top special effects and save-the-world storyline, it actually feels like a very grounded and real kind of superhero movie, which is a neat trick.

My recommendation- worth paying full price, and if you're not really into superhero movies, you should give this one a try (catch the cheap show, it might surprise you)