Inside is a Trip

Posted on by Nimgimli

For random reasons I won’t bore you with, I started Playdead’s 2016 game Inside last night. Tonight I finished it. Yeah, it’s a short game.

But holy smokes is it ever good. Since the game is almost 10 years old I won’t worry too much about spoilers, but first a bit of spoiler-free setup. I’ll warn you before I start on the specifics.

So at its most basic Inside is a combat-free side scroller. You play a young boy who is running (generally) left to right across the screen, avoiding being detected by enemies and solving some environmental puzzles to proceed. The puzzles were perfect for me (I am NOT a puzzle person). Difficult enough to make me feel satisfied at figuring them out, but not so difficult that I got frustrated.

As far as the story goes, not much is explained. There are men and dogs hunting for this boy though you’re never told why. But these same men are rounding up other people and turning them into mindless automatons, again for unknown reasons. Although there is no out-going combat (ie, you have no weapons or combat moves) your pursuers will kill you viciously. It can be quite disturbing when you get caught; seeing this little boy getting torn up by dogs, choked to death by men, or just getting blown into little bits. It’s a lot.

You start in the woods but soon enter some kind of complex where they seem to be doing experiments on the people they’ve rounded up.

OK let’s start getting into spoiler territory but I kind of rather you stop reading and go play it if you haven’t. It only takes 3-4 hours to play through.

Assuming that’s not your thing, let’s continue.

So I was having fun figuring out how to sneak past spotlights and fool guard dogs. Then something attacked me in the water; something not-natural. This aquatic humanoid thing. It was tough to get away from that thing. Then I found a ‘cap’ that would let me control these mindless human drones, assuming I could set them free. Basically they copy whatever you do. So maybe there’s a door too heavy to life until you have a few zombie friends who will help. You can also trick them into walking off a high ledge, and then you can jump down on them using them as an organic cushion to break your fall. Or get them to throw you over gaps you can’t jump across.

That’s how things sat for a while. Weird but, y’know, manageable. You’re climbing, swimming through water, jumping, throwing switches, dragging crates etc. At the top of the post is you near the start of the game. Walk in the woods. Totally normal.

And then you come into areas where water flows across the ceiling rather than across the floor and sometimes you have to climb up and jump up into the water and swim over obstacles. OK, I can adapt to that, but it’s pretty out there. And then you get to the heart of the experiment which seems to be some plan to merge people into a ball of biomass, maybe to power something? Again it isn’t clear. You try to shut this down, but you get sucked into this mass, and for the last part of the game you’re this large flesh bubble with legs and arms sticking out all over the place. And that, my friends, was a trip. That was some WEIRD shit as first thing I had to do was learn how to move all over again. (You kind of roll-walk and you can squeeze through small opening, or just use your bulk to smash through some obstacles.)

I mean it was cool and fun, but also gross and just so damned weird…

A blob of flesh with too many arms and legs carries a large crate
Here “we” are carrying a crate across a level.

My only real complaint is the ending, because there kind of isn’t one. You finally escape, as a big bag of flesh, and roll down a mountainside, coming to rest near a body of water. And you can’t move for a few minutes. Then the credits roll. I guess we’re meant to interpret this in our own way. But aside from that, as someone who SUCKs at side-scrollers, I’d still recommend this. 9 years after launch. Me with my finger on the pulse of modern gaming!

[Not sure why my images came out so grainy… these are both taken on the Xbox in HDR mode. For some reason the Xbox wouldn’t sync to my OneDrive so I uploaded them to Google Photos from my phone. But then they were super dark. So I let google “adjust” them and I guess that’s where the grain comes from. The actual game is very clear. Simply graphics, but effective, and the character animations are top notch.]

Mental Compartmentalization and Grief

Posted on by Nimgimli

I know not everyone holds dogs or pets in as high esteem as we do, and plenty of people probably think it is crazy that we are this upset about losing a dog. But we are. Lola was such an integral part of our life that things seem very hollow and drab without her there to frequently make us smile, or even to just get us out of our chairs and doing things.

PartPurple and I process grief very differently, I think. She hasn’t experienced a lot of death. Her parents are both still alive, as are all her siblings. She’s lost grandparents and that can be hard, but they’re not typically someone you see EVERY day. I, on the other hand, lost both parents, a step-father and a step-brother. My dad when I was about 12, the step-brother when I was 14 and he was 17. Back in those days we didn’t have grief counselors or anything; we just dealt with it. When my dad died I remembered him speaking to one of his friends back when his mother died. “We all have to go some time.” he’d said, very stoically. I tried the same when he died, and had kids at school mocking me for “not caring that my father died.” Which led to some playground fights.

Anyway, along the way I learned my own technique for handling grief and it is pretty insular. I don’t want to talk to people, I try to find something to lose myself in, and just not think about things too much.

Since Lola was nearly always at my side, this isn’t working as well as it has in the past. But here is what is working, sort of. In my head, Lola (for some time now, in a way) has been two things. Lola, this beautiful joyous soul that is nearly always at my side, and Lola, the dog that I have to take care of and who mandates my schedule.

There is no bright side whatsoever when it comes to Lola-the-Soul being gone, but there are some upsides to not having a dog to take care of. I slept in this morning for the first time in almost 15 years. I have a lot more free time now that I’m not going for long walks with her. We’re going to save money on her medical bills, food and such (once we pay off the vet bills which will take years but let’s set that aside for now). Maybe I’ll get into multiplayer gaming, now that I don’t have to pause every 20 minutes to take care of something she needs.

So those are the things I’m focusing on, and it is helping. I still get blind-sided with sadness frequently but I’m trying to focus on the freedom that comes with not having any pets. Lola didn’t travel well at all, so we didn’t travel at all. And I don’t mean flying to Paris.. I mean something as simple as going for a drive out into the country as a day trip. So we can start doing things like that, eventually.

I think this is working because I’ve been ‘practicing’ it for some time. As she got older and older, and I knew she had to go soon, I would think about things like how awful our dog park smells in the heat of summer (trash cans full of stinky poop bags baking in the heat) and how once I didn’t have a dog I wouldn’t ever have to go there again. Things like that: the lack of a dog, with dog being an abstract concept, had some up-sides. So now I’m embracing those.

Though at the same time I worry how this will impact my health. I need to find some other form of casual exercise or I’ll just sit at my PC or on the couch until I can no longer walk. Both my mother and grandmother did this once they stopped working and both went downhill fast once they stopped moving. So I need to be sure I do something. Maybe I’ll start hiking or something. Capture birds on my Merlin app or something.

Anyway, just kind of thinking out loud here. Today’s plan: Lola has a hole out on the woods that she loved to dig in, and since it was in the woods I let her dig in it. At the same time a random maple seed at some point landed in a flower pot out behind our building. The plant in the pot died long ago but the tree is a few feet tall now. I’m going to go plant it in Lola’s hole as a tribute to her

Close up of Lola intently staring at something off camera

Farewell, Lola-Girl, You Will Always Be in our Hearts

Posted on by Nimgimli

Last night we lost Lola. She would’ve been 15 had she made it to next month. That’s really old for a dog, and I kept telling myself I was prepared. I wasn’t prepared.

She got pretty sick last week and spent about 48 hours at an emergency vet hospital. If you want the whole horrible story, PartPurple set up a GoFundMe page that goes into ALL the details. Maybe I’ll copy what she wrote down at some point to save it but I don’t have it in me right now.

Puppy Lola in a cage
Oct 2010, When we first laid eyes on her at the rescue

Anyway she came home last Friday, and Friday and Saturday were tough. Sunday she was a bit better, better still on Monday, and Tuesday she had a great day, being her old smiling happy self. She saw a lot of her friends and got attention from so many people in the complex that know her.  I remember thinking “Thanks goodness she is back to normal.”

Wednesday started normally, then she started really hyperventilating. Then she fell and couldn’t get up. We scooped her up and rushed her back to the hospital where they found she had an extremely high fever, to the point where they starting bathing her in cool water to try to bring it down. We took her to veg.com which I have nothing but praise for. They do most of their work out in the open so the whole time they were working on her, PartPurple and I were giving her pets and talking to her and even helping to give her oxygen.

Lola the dog looking serious
July 2013, she’s growing up and getting sophisticated

Eventually they put her in in oxygen tank (like a big aquarium where they can oxygenate the air and temperature control things…rather than try to put an oxygen mask on a dog) and an in-depth ultrasound was scheduled for this morning. We left her in the care of the doctors and nurses, and came home; by then it was 5:30 PM or so. At about 10:30 the vet called and told us, basically, that she wasn’t going to make it. So we rushed back over and said our goodbyes. She was pretty out of it and I’m not sure if she knew we were there. Then she went peacefully with a bit of chemical assistance.

And now we have no dog. No morale officer. She was in many ways my best friend, and in some ways I have never loved an entity as much as I loved her. She was my companion pretty much 24/7 since I started working from home 12 years ago. She was the kind of dog that when you moved, she’d come move to just to be near you. She was always with us. In the nearly 15 years of her life I think we boarded her twice to go somewhere. She was almost never alone.

Lola the dog covered in dirt
March 2016, clearly the sophisticated phase has ended

Of course we loved her, but so many people in our rental complex loved her too. We’d go for a walk and folks would holler “Hey, Lola!” and she had this particular bark that meant “Hey, I see you, how are you?” that she would offer to folks she knew. She was a complete character and made folks smile where ever she went.

She was our heart dog. We will miss her forever.

Lola the dog looking thooughtful
Jan 2020, thinking about puppy stuff
Lola the dog propped up on an ottoman
August 2022, trying to convince me to take her for a walk
Lola enjoying a day in the grass and sun
May 2024, about a year ago and age is catching up to her
Lola resting in the grass, smiling
April 2025 This was just before she got sick. She seemed happy as a clam

April 2025

Posted on by Nimgimli

April has felt like a really long month at this point. We had a very stressful health crisis with Lola that felt like it erased a week of our lives due to sleep deprivation and worry. One of my best friends from high school died and that hit me really hard. And at work we’re in the middle of a huge transition between support partners so things have been crazy there, too. I was about to talk about how I hadn’t played much but thankfully I was keeping a list and in fact I finished two games before everything went to shit. It was just a couple weeks ago but it feels like months ago! (Lola seems to be on the mend now but she almost passed twice during the ordeal.) [Spoke too soon, as of this afternoon she is back in the hospital.]

Playing

I finished Death Stranding and really thought I had written a post about it, but I guess not. LOVED IT. In fact the only real reason I stopped playing after completing the story is that Death Stranding 2 is coming out at the end of June and I wanted to take a bit of a breather from wandering the wastelands before it arrived. I will be there Day 1 for Death Stranding 2, no doubt!!

A tallneck (from the Horizon series) hologram in Death Stranding
A tallneck (from the Horizon series) hologram in Death Stranding

I played through South of Midnight and that one I did write about. Really enjoyed it as well.

Dragon Age: Veilguard is still in rotation and I think I’m liking it more the longer I play it. Basically it took a while for my expectations to fade and for me to accept it for what it is. It feels like a game that would’ve done better if it had just been called Veilguard and they’d dropped Dragon Age from the title. I mean it takes place in the same world and all, but it doesn’t feel like a Dragon Age game to me. But it’s a decent enough action-RPG. The image at the top of this post is from Veilguard.

Oblivion Remastered hit Game Pass and I couldn’t NOT try it. It’s kind of my background game. I fire it up when I have 15 or 20 minutes and just putter around. I’m enjoying it. I never got very far into the game when it first came out. So far I’m ignoring the main story and just messing about in some small-ish town (Bruma??) I stumbled into.

Character sheet from Oblivion
Ready for some fisticuffs!

Clair Obscura: Expedition 33 also hit Game Pass. This is a turn-based RPG set in a really interesting (to me) world. It feels like Logan’s Run meets The Hunger Games or something. On this island, cut off from the rest of the world, an entity known as the Paintress writes a number on a monolith every year. When she does, everyone that is the same age as that number basically dissolves and is gone. Every year an Expedition leaves the island to try to stop the Paintress. The first Expedition was numbered 100 and they’re counting down, so there hasn’t been a lot of success, and no one returns from these expeditions. The world is really strange, the voice acting is top notch, the character models are amazing…there’s a lot to like about this one and I look forward to really digging into it. Semi-trying to finish Veilguard before I fully commit to Expedition 33.

Lune's character sheet from Expedition 33
Lune is a little worse for wear…been a minute since the team has had a chance to camp and clean up

Watching

Daredevil Reborn, which I wrote about.

Years & Years, which I ALSo wrote about.

The Last of Us season 2, which has only dropped 3 episodes so far but has been really good. It is different from the game, but I’m always fine with that kind of change. I’ve already experienced the story in the game; I’m fine with having a somewhat different story in the show.

The White Lotus came highly recommended and since we’d signed up for HBO the The Last of Us, we decided to give it a try. We’re mid-way through Season 2. I LOVED Season 1 but not loving Season 2 quite as much. But we’ll see; they could still turn things around. But Armond in Season 1 was just fascinating to watch… (The White Lotus is the name of a chain of resorts and the show is like a much darker Fantasy Island. Season 1 took place in White Lotus Hawaii and S2 takes place at White Lotus Italy.)

Reading

Still working through the pre-Shannara books, by Terry Brooks.

Finished The Elves of Cintra and started The Gypsy Morph. These books are really tightly coupled. Cintra just kind of ends and Gypsy Morph picks right up. We’re still trying to save the elves from the demons and once-men. Which won’t mean anything if you haven’t been reading the series. But I’m enjoying them well enough.

And that’s April in the rearview mirror. Here’s hoping for a quieter and less dramatic May. I’m ready to be back in a rut, bored by my routine. Never thought I’d miss that, but here we are!!

Wrestling With the “Too Many Games” Problem

Posted on by Nimgimli

There are a lot of great games out there, with more coming all the time. There are more that I want to play than I have time to play; there just aren’t enough hours in my days, even though gaming is my only real hobby. I’m sure the same could be said about other media that folks are passionate about, whether that is books or movies or heck, even online content. In some ways it’s a good problem to have — at least it’s better than the opposite problem: not having enough content to keep you entertained.

But I struggle with it because I am constantly sliding towards making gaming a kind of a second job. I feel pressure to finish the game I’m playing because I really want to get to the next game I want to play, so there are times when I play because I feel like I “should” or I “have to” in order to get the current game done. I have learned that if I put a game aside I’ll at best have to start over when I come back to it, and at worst I’ll never come back to it.

The knock-on effect of too many desirable games is that I’m never comfortable stopping to smell the roses (even though I am the World’s Slowest Gamer) in big games.

This all came into focus the other day when Oblivion Remastered dropped. I got through the tutorial and started roaming around, and soon enough got caught up in some side activities. I was having fun, at least at first. But by the end of the first day of playing I was already scolding myself for not getting on with it and moving the main quest forward. In a game like Oblivion I really think powering through the main quest is kind of defeating the purpose of playing, no? What my heart thinks I SHOULD be doing is just experiencing things. Putter around. Join a guild, explore a new area, talk to everyone to build up my speechcraft. Learn to pick pocket. Then learn to flee from the guards. Just LIVE in the world and enjoy it. Immerse myself in there. Lose myself in Tamriel.

But I just can’t seem to find that gaming ‘flow’ state for this kind of thing very often these days. I can’t ignore the fact that another game I want to play is coming out tomorrow or next week and already I’m super backlogged.

It struck me that this is why I’ve drifted away from MMOs, too. In Ye Olden Days I’d log in and just be in a virtual world for hours at a time without a care in the world. These days when I dabble in an MMO, at the end of a session I think about the time I spent, and what I got accomplished, and make a value judgement on whether or not that play session had been “worth it”. Usually the answer is no.

At least part of this very #FirstWorldProblem is Game Pass and Playstation Plus. Having games constantly being “given” to you (in quotes because of course the sub isn’t free) for a fixed but not infinite period of time is mostly a blessing, but also a little bit of a curse. When I have to open my wallet to play the next enticing game, I’m much more critical of what is worth my time. Having games constantly get dropped into my lap makes them hard to resist, particularly since I know if I don’t play now, that game might leave the service.

There’s no real point to this post…sometimes it just helps me organize my thoughts by writing them down. I don’t know how to re-condition myself to just ‘let go’ of some titles so I can comfortably wile away the hours in a given game for weeks or months. I mean sometimes a game just hits right and does push everything to the side for hundreds of hours: Genshin Impact, Snow Runner and Fallout 76 all have done it in the past couple years. Maybe that is what this post is about… convincing myself to go find a game where I just can’t RESIST spending time in it. (Death Stranding 2 soon, please??!).

The one practical thing I’ve been doing is uninstalling stuff from my consoles. Just not seeing 100 games installed helps a little. I winnow things down and get rid of the “Hmm, this could be interesting” stuff and I only leave the “I know this is a solid game” titles. But there are still a bunch to pick from!

I’d be curious to know if anyone else struggles with this situation and if you’ve found any coping mechanisms that help.

“Years and Years” Creeped Me Out

Posted on by Nimgimli

We recently re-subscribed to HBO for the new season of The Last of Us, and given how crazy expensive HBO is, I wanted to get Max (ha! see what I did there?) value out of it, so I went looking for other series to watch while the sub is active. That’s how I stumbled onto Years and Years. It’s a one season, 6 episode BBC show about, basically, the downfall of the way of life we’re all accustomed to in the West, and specifically in the UK.

The story starts in 2019, rapidly advances to 2024, and ends in 2028 or 2029. In it, the US starts a trade war and tanks the world economy. Russia invades and conquers Ukraine which causes a huge refugee issue, which leads to countries closing their borders. Climate change is wreaking havoc, and a pandemic grips the world. The governments start clamping down on the press, and sifting the truth from all the lies becomes more and more challenging.

Sounds familiar, right?

Here’s the kicker. The show came out in 2019. It really creeped me out how accurately the writers anticipated all the bad things that were about to happen. The only major thing they got wrong was how fast it would happen. In real life it’s all progressing more quickly than it did in the show. The show posits Trump being re-elected in 2020, and Pence (who is referred to as a Trump puppet) in 2024, so they got that wrong and STILL bad stuff is happening faster in real life than it did in the series.

Years and Years follows the lives of the Lyons family: Muriel and her 4 grown grand-children, their partners and their kids. All are living fairly comfortable (and in some cases VERY comfortable) lives as the story begins, but with all the upheaval happening that doesn’t last. The family tries its best to roll with the punches with limited success. One of my favorite lines is when a character says “I miss the days when the news was BORING.” Don’t we all, friend. Don’t we all.

I don’t want to go into too many details because that would ruin the fun (?) of watching and comparing this fictional future to our messed-up present. Personally I was just fascinated. And a little depressed. As mentioned, it’s on HBO in the US and maybe on the BBC in the UK? Not sure about that last bit.

Thoughts on South of Midnight

Posted on by Nimgimli

If you were to play Compulsion’s South of Midnight in a wireframe mode, devoid or art or sound, it would feel pretty ordinary. At its core it’s a fairly standard third person platformer. As the camera floats behind your character, you traverse along mostly linear levels, earning new movement skills as the game progresses. In fixed areas there is combat; you have to beat these fights to move forward. And that’s pretty much it.

Honestly this is not my preferred genre any more. I crave, at minimum, a semi-open world where I at least have the illusion that my choices matter. In fact as I was realizing this I wondered how present-day me would respond to a game like the Uncharted series; I LOVED those games back when I played them but I wonder if I still would today.

Hazel spots a cow on the peak of a barn roof
When the waters rise, the cows start to climb, I guess!

Anyway, back to South of Midnight. I loved this game, mostly because of its art style, music and story. It’s the story of Hazel, a young girl living on the outskirts of the Louisiana bayou with her mother. She and her mom get into an argument as they’re getting ready to evacuate from the path of incoming hurricane. The mother sends Hazel to check on some neighbors. While she is gone, their entire house is swept away by the rising flood waters. Hazel, who is a successful runner in school, chases after the house but can’t catch it. Driven by loss and guilt (due to the fight) she plunges into the swamp and into a mystical, creepy and eerily beautiful world that she’d been unaware of.

Hazel approaches a spinning wheel with a magical distaff attached
Dear Fiber Arts friends: Don’t get too hung up on the fact that they call her a weaver when really she is mostly a spinner

It turns out Hazel is a Weaver, a kind of magic user. Her gear, as she finds it, is related to fiber arts: over-sized crochet hooks, spindles and distaffs. Each comes with a new skill. By the end of the game Hazel will be double jumping, wall-running, grapple hooking and gliding to get from one spot to the next.

This gear is all one and done; you don’t ever replace it or anything. Hazel has some skills that can be leveled up via a currency called “Floofs” which she earns via combat or some light exploring. You can spend these floofs to level up skills. In my playthrough I unlocked all but one skill so floofs are fairly plentiful. Aside from the skills and the equipment (all of which is found very early) the only other character progression is increasing the size of your health bar via collectibles. There are no levels or exp or anything of that nature.

Combat is against “haints” — spectral creatures in various shapes and sizes. For the most part it is melee-based combat, and when an enemy’s health bar hits zero Hazel can “unravel” them and get a burst of health from doing so. There’s a lock-on camera that I found hampered me more than free aiming. Once the enemies in an area are conquered Hazel can untie a knot which dissolves walls of “stigma” — a mass of boils and thorns that tend to block Hazel’s path.

Here’s a random 60 seconds of combat to give you an idea of what it is like:

In between all this are some boss fights and some chase sequences. Each boss fight has some kind of mechanic you have to figure out but the game is pretty liberal with hints.

I had some technical issues with the game; there are some invisible walls here and there that will prevent you from making a jump that otherwise seem manageable, and there were a lot of times when I felt I was getting some input lag or just missed button presses. I feel like maybe they tried to put too many actions on too few buttons. None of this was game breaking or anything, but it made the combat, in particular, feel a bit frustrating. I eventually turned down the difficulty so I could focus on the story.

A worn old man stares into the camera
Itchy has lived in the swamp all his life, and the man has seen some things…

And the story is really good. Along her way Hazel encounters various creatures from the tall tales of the bayou. I’m honestly not sure how many of these are real stories and how many are made up, but my Mississippi-raised partner recognized at least some of them. There’s a boy who has turned into a tree, and a grieving mother who has turned into a kind of sea monster. Hazel is “helped” on her journey by a catfish the size of a school bus. Most of the stories are sad and the best Hazel can do is to try to give these spirits and creatures some kind of peace. Oh and her rather horrific-looking home-made childhood doll, Crouton, can now come alive and travel into tiny burrows inhabited by rabbits having tea and other such Wonderland-ian scenes, to get to areas Hazel can’t get to on her own.

The sound design is really good too. There’s a wide variety of folksy, bluesy swampy music and the voice acting is top notch and authentic. Heck there’s even a dance number. I thought about posting a video of that in this post but I think it is better appreciated if you experience it in context.

I also want to talk about Options. There are SO many. There are 5 difficulty levels (I played on #2 because of my combat issues) but additionally there are options to just skip the boss fights, or to skip the running sequences. You can even skip combat completely if you want. There are just a ton of options so you can tweak the game to be comfortable no matter what kind of gamer you are.

It’s not a very long game; my playthrough (and you know I am Mr. Slow Gamer) was under 14 hours. There are no real gameplay reasons for a second playthrough unless you just want to experience the story again. So keep that in mind. But damn, is it ever good. One of the better games I’ve played this year.

Hazel looks at a couple of abandoned stuffed animals out in the swamp
Sad stories are everywhere. Who lost these beloved toys?

Do Better By Your Customers, Playstation

Posted on by Nimgimli

I’m a fan of the Playstation hardware and lately it has been my preferred platform for gaming. I love a lot of Sony’s first party IPs and I’ve liked a number of their execs over the years.

But damn do their store policies suck.

The biggest issue is their refund policy, or lack thereof. If you buy a game on Steam or Xbox and it just sucks, you can ask for a refund (assuming your playtime is under a few hours… I don’t have the exact numbers at hand.) On Playstation, not so much. Even if a game outright fails to run, the only way to be considered for a refund is talking to customer support and hoping you get a reasonable representative on the line. The official policy is that if you’ve downloaded the game, you are no longer eligible for a refund. Which is completely ridiculous.

But that’s old news. What prompted today’s outrage is learning that Bethesda is running a sale on ESO Plus. You can get the 1st month of a recurring subscription for 50% off. Of course there are some conditions, depending on platform:

Steam: Sale is open to anyone, even if you currently have a sub. Steam wins! (again)
ESO Store: Anyone without a currently active sub can get the sale price
Xbox: Anyone without a currently active sub can get the sale price
Playstation: Only people who have NEVER had a sub can take advantage of the sale. Game has been out on the platform for 10 years, so if you signed up for a month at launch, no sale for you!

Why are Sony’s terms so much more strict? Who knows? Because whomever makes these store policies hates their customers, I guess.

Anyway, that’s my rant for today. I wish I could feel as good about the Playstation Store as I do about the Playstation hardware.

Commenting on Comments

Posted on by Nimgimli

Having some issue with comments here at Dragonchasers HQ. Specifically in Chrome, at least for me (the comment box isn’t displaying). But I need to get to the day job so will have to circle back to this tonight.

Update: It actually might be more than just comments… I think my new hosting plan has some ‘features’ I’m not aware of and I’m having strange caching issues…

OK I think we’re back. When I switched hosting plans the ISP turned on a really aggressive caching system. Since I already was caching via Cloudflare I think things were getting gummed up. Sorry to throw around these highly technical terms. LOL

But if anyone sees anything wonky PLEASE let me know. I appreciate you!!

And now that I have time we tentatively re-enable some caching options to keep things snappy…

Daredevil: Born Again — Spoiler Free Thoughts

Posted on by Nimgimli

Last night we finished up Season 1 of Daredevil: Born Again (Disney+) and I wanted to share some thoughts on it. Not a review but more like “this is the vibe I got”.

So first some background on my preferences. When Netflix was doing a slate of Marvel ‘street level hero’ shows, I really enjoyed most of them. Luke Cage, Jessica Jones and The Punisher were all really good, but Daredevil was my favorite. (Sorry Iron Fist, you don’t make my list…you staring at your hand all the time wasn’t that entertaining). Also I’m not a comic book reader so I don’t have any issues along the lines of “This is not who he is!” that I’m sure true fans of the original material might have had. This was all before Disney bought Marvel, which put an end to the Netflix shows.

It’s been a few years, but Disney decided to revive Daredevil. I don’t know if Daredevil: Born Again is the start of a new slate of shows or a one-off, but I was happy to see Charlie Cox return as Matt Murdock/Daredevil, and Vincent D’Nofrio as Wilson Fisk/Kingpin, because in my mind these two actors ARE these characters. Not to root for the bad guys but D’Nofrio just slays every scene he is in; he’s the best Marvel villain on video, in my opinion.

Anyway the season (9 episodes) was a little uneven for me. The premise at the start is that Matt Murdock has put aside the Daredevil gig in favor of helping people in his day job (he’s a lawyer). And while he was doing that bit, the show hit a bit of a lull for me, but towards the end it ramped up — as the title gives away, Daredevil is back, baby! — and the final episode left us on the edge of our seats and wanting more (a second season is coming).

Actually that’s not exactly true. It wasn’t so much that mid-season was a lull as more a change of focus on Fisk’s Machiavellian criminal dealings. I promised no spoilers and I’ll stick to that, except to say that the show kind of reflected real life is some pretty disturbing and obvious ways. The whole season felt like a long set-up to a new world for these heroes and villain to cavort in.

In addition to Daredevil and Kingpin, a few more characters from that universe pop up and I hope to see more of them next season. I mean what I REALLY want to see is a whole new set of shows focused on these characters, most of whom I find a lot more interesting and entertaining that Iron Man, Capt America and Thor.

Anyway, maybe I’ll circle back to this once the show has been out for a while and I feel more comfortable spoiling things, but for now I just want to say Daredevil: Born Again is in my opinion well worth watching. (The critics don’t seem to agree with me but what do they know, right!? Actually I dunno where I got that idea but after I posted I went off to read some reviews and they’re actually pretty good.) If you started but stopped partway through the season I’d urge you to go back and finish because it gets really good towards the end!

Kingpin and Daredevil profiles, back to back
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