Uncharted is a series which gets better with each entry. I first played the original game about two or three years ago on the PS3 as one of my first games after buying a used console, it was decent but nothing to write home about, 2.5/4. I then played the second one a year later and it was pretty good, not the best, but pretty good, 3/4. The third one was very good, but even then I still thought it was a notch or two below greatness, 3.5/4.
Uncharted 4 is 4/4, it is the one entry in the series that I consider to be a legitimately great game and it feels like the culmination of all of Naughty Dog’s previous efforts
The game is set several years after the end of Uncharted 3. Nathan has married Elena and settled into a quiet life, but this peace is disturbed when Sam, his long thought dead brother returns and convinces Nathan to go on a quest for Henry Avery’s lost treasure. From there, the brothers go on a journey which takes them from robbing an underworld auction in Italy to sneaking into a ruined Scottish Castle and finally to Madagascar and the lost pirate utopia of Libertalia.
In terms of formula, Uncharted 4 follows the pattern set by the previous games, segments of platforming while exploring ruins alternate with intense gunfights, with Nathan and whoever he happens to be with keep up a running commentary all the while. Uncharted 4 just does it all better than the previous games.
First the platforming. This is the part where the series has traditionally shone. This is due not so much to mechanics which are fairly basic, but due to the game’s superb presentation. It feels amazing to wander through these gorgeous environments, especially Libertalia which feels like a more lived in place than previous lost cities in the series. It is absolutely style over substance, but it works, by god it works. This is especially true with the game’s spectacular set pieces, my favorite by far being this massive car chase through the crowded streets of King’s Bay.
The combat on the other hand has always been the Achilles heel of the series with mediocre cover based third person shooting and truth be told it is also the case with this game as well. The difference is they add some very basic stealth mechanics which are like the gunplay very shallow, but manage to feel somewhat satisfying. So the combat isn’t good, but it is the least bad of all the series.
The plot and characters are where Uncharted 4 really shines though. I love Sam and the dynamic between him and his brother is the best part of this game. Sam is Nathan’s older, more cynical brother and his relationship to his younger sibling is both affectionate and manipulative, but no matter what he does, Sam is always charismatic while doing it. You can’t help but like him, probably shouldn’t like him, but you do anyway. Throughout most of the game, the brothers are constantly chatting, making comments on the situation and giving the occasional bit of advice to the player. The writing is witty, well acted and there is just a lot of it making every moment of the game better.
Puzzles are the one area where this game is not actually better than Uncharted 3, but I’m okay with that because Uncharted 3 had amazing puzzles and this does too. Unlike most developers, Naughty Dog doesn’t half ass the puzzles and put actual effort into making them original and satisfying. This is a game where you look forward to the puzzles and I like that.
In conclusion this game is great not because it innovates in terms of the mechanics of the series, but because it perfects them, creating by far the most satisfying of all the Uncharted games. If you only play one game in the series play this one.
Hi, this is going to be the first part of a series I am going to be doing on my “gaming memoirs” which is just a pretentious way of saying that I am just going to be writing about my history with video games beginning from a very young age. This first installment is going to be maybe a little light on the actual video games, but the next installment is going to be on the N64 and that should be more lively.
My mother didn’t believe in video games, thought they were a complete waste of time. I don’t think dad cared much about them either way, but just wasn’t willing to spend money on a console. So, for the first part of my life I didn’t have any sort of game system at home. Because of this, until I got into PC gaming, video games would always be something that was always on some level unobtainable.
Both of my parents worked so until I was old enough to just go home on my own after school, I had to go to a local daycare. I am from a small town in rural alberta of only 2000 people so the only option was a place run by a local woman called Manna. It was there that I first encountered video games.
I would have been just entering kindergarten at the time making it about 1999 (my memories of that time are frankly a little hazy being so young) and she had an old Sega Genesis with a copy of Sonic 2. This was my first video game. The funny thing is I really cannot remember much about that game or the specifics of my reactions to it. When I played it when I was older I though it was a good game, but I had no real nostalgia for it unlike a lot of other games from my childhood. I just remember that Sonic 2 and by extension video games themselves were the funnest and coolest thing ever.
Now when you’re a kid with no real responsibilities or commitments, fun is pretty damn important. There were a few other things like books and TV that I also enjoyed a lot, but for me video games were the ultimate way to have fun, better than anything else. But, again I own any sort of console so on one level video games were always unobtainable, I could only play them at specific times and places and I think this lack created a mystique around video games for me.
So the only time I could play video games was when I was at the daycare and that was always the highlight of my time there. Part of the issue was that at that establishment I was the oldest child who was there regularly. Children my age did come on occasion and playing with them was always a blast, but most of my time everyone else was always so much younger than I was which prevented me from relating to them .So basically because of that a lot of the time I spent there I was either lonely or bored. The one exception was always when I was playing video games. They wouldn’t let me spend all day playing video games, forcing me to….. go outside (The Horror!), but I generally had at least some time to play video games and it was always the highlight of my day.
Eventually, the daycare would replace the Sega Genesis with a Nintendo 64 and I am going to make my experience with that console the subject of the next blog post I make in this series. But , I am going to spend the rest of this time talking about the one video game experience I had outside the daycare system at this time.
One of the highlights of every year for me was the annual summer expedition to go see my Grandma in Saskatoon. After the mammoth 10 hour car ride across the endless expanse of the Canadian prairies we would spend the two weeks at what me and my sister called camp Grandma’s and it was the best. We would go to the zoo, to local day camps, to a brand new library, we would eat grandma’s delicious cooking and watch cable. But, the highlight was always interacting with whatever cousins happened to be there at the time and especially my cousin Tad who was the same age as me. I haven’t talked to him in about 10-15 years, but when I was kid Tad was probably my best friend in the world despite only seeing him a few times a year. We would always have so much fun together just messing around and playing and then one summer he had this brand new video game called Pokemon Yellow.
That rally is an angry looking pikachu isn’t it?
This was at the height of the Pokemon craze of the late 90’s and every person my age thought Pokemon was just the coolest thing ever, the anime, the video games, the card game all of it. That first movie coming out was the event of the summer. However, my mother hated Pokemon, thinking it was just awful and glorified fighting and violence. This may sound silly, but she kind of had a point, because when you look at it objectively it really is just dogfighting. Whatever the case, Pokemon was forbidden in my house.
However at Grandma’s house it was her rules that applied and she didn’t mind and my cousin Tad who was living with her at the time loved Pokemon. When I was there we watched the 3 or 4 Pokemon VHS tapes he had over and over again and despite not being able to see the show on a regular basis I think I got to the point where I could name all 151 pokemon.
Does anyone else remember this commercial that I am pretty sure was on all the Pokemon VHS tapes.
So when he showed me this thing called Pokemon Yellow my mind was just blown! Now I never actually got to play the game personally but I spent that entire two weeks hanging out with him on my Grandma’s back porch and looking over his shoulder while he was playing the game on my Grandma’s back porch and my younger sister looking over my shoulder. I didn’t even need to play the game to be in awe of its greatness, but just watching someone else play the game was enough for me to think this was all incredibly awesome.
I think my experience with this game reinforces a lot of the themes I was talking about earlier. Video games were to me the pinnacle of coolness and fun, but always on some level unobtainable because I never actually owned any. That will be all for this blog post, next week I am going to talk about my experiences with the N64 which all took place during the time I have described. In particular I am going to be talking about Super Mario 64 which to me was and to an extent still is the platonic ideal of what a video game should be.
Lists are probably the most basic sort of video game article one can write online. Instead of trying to come up with an original argument or an actual point, all you have to do is take a bunch of games, judge them by some arbitrary criteria, add a few lines of rudimentary comments and viola! Easy as pie!
But, people love lists though! As lazy as so many of them are, we just eat them up. I am also guilty of this, I’ll read best of lists, I’ll read worst of lists, but the lists I find most interesting are those of the most overrated games. They are always a great source of debate. And when I say great source of debate, I mean they start a lot of fights.
Now people on the internet will fight over anything and this is definitely true for lists or rankings, but it seems to me there is definitely something particularly inflammatory about discussions about the most overrated games. The main reason for this is that no one can really agree with what overrated actually means. Does something that is overrated actually have to bad? If everyone agrees that something is overrated is it still overrated? By what criteria is something rated highly in the first place? So a lot of arguments in regards to these lists bog down to fights about semantics. The other major thing is that to be overrated someone has to actually like a game in the first place and believe me people do not react well when you say something they like is overrated! So needless to say a lot of these lists can be very inflammatory!
But, I still think lists like these are interesting to look at as they make you judge a game on criteria beyond the basic question of whether you like it or not, instead to judge something as overrated you have to consider other perspectives as to why people would like this. When you do that your mind can go to some interesting places and gain some insights about games that you wouldn’t have thought of normally. I find this particularly true about old lists of this sort, because we are normally forced to view the past through the tyranny of present preoccupations and by actually reading things people were saying at the time we are forced to view things from the radically different perspective of the past. By doing this I think we can learn a lot of interesting things.
With this in mind, I am going to go over a list of Gamespy’s most overrated games from 2003. I ran across this list at random a few years ago and it somehow stuck in my mind, so I thought I would use the opportunity granted to me by this blog to talk about some things in it which I find interesting.
I will not be covering the entire list today, mainly because the entry is kind of long as it is, instead I will be covering #25 to #20 and doing the rest at some future date.
This one actually confused me, not that this is on the list, but the list’s particular reasoning . NWN was a massive critical hit for the time (95 on PC Gamer, 91 Gamespot, 90 on IGN), but most of it is also incredibly dated in terms of graphics and gameplay and it is probably one of the weakest storylines that Bioware has ever done. So one would guess that the list would judge the game disfavorably on that ground. Instead of focusing on this aspect, the list offers different grounds. Part of the appeal of NWN when it was first revealed was that because it offered a faithful D&D 3.0 rules adaptation, had robust multiplayer support and had the option for one player to host an online session as the D.M. it could basically replace the need for pen and paper sessions. From the article
“Neverwinter Nights promised to change everything. Here was a complete role-playing game engine for your PC, created by BioWare (the geniuses behind epics like Baldur’s Gate), and featuring the complete Dungeons & Dragons 3.0 rulesets. Neverwinter also promised a complete editor that you could use to create just about any scenario, and a “Dungeon Master” mode where you could run your friends through a campaign, jumping in and out of NPCs, and triggering off scripted events. THIS was the future of role-playing!
The actual game it’s self did not live up to these lofty expectations.
“ But the much-hyped DM tools? They were an enigma wrapped in a mystery controlled by an incredibly obtuse and almost completely undocumented scripting system. Forget running an adventure; most budding DMs couldn’t figure out how to get doors to work …the promise of a universal online role-playing game with a human DM remains unfulfilled.”
This is what I like about these lists, they reveal what the hopes and expectations of gamers were back then, the idea that NWN could basically be this stepping stone between the electronic world and pen and paper, essentially NWN was going to be the program to allow you to replicate your weekly roleplaying session in a video game. So if this was the expectation these people had going in, I can’t blame them for being a bit disappointed, but I really don’t think those expectations were reasonable. It’s been nearly 20 years since the game dropped out and the goal of having a game which you could run your D&D campaign in still has not been met and I don’t think it is fair to judge NWN by a standard which still has not been meant to this day.
Instead I think we should remember it as a valiant effort, because it is still arguably the game which came closest to achieving this unattainable goal and I think most people today do remember the multiplayer and modding aspect of the game very fondly. I myself spent most of my time in NWN playing modules like Penultima or Shadowlords which made people forget the lackluster campaign. So while I get where this list is coming from I would argue that this game is not overrated, at least by the criteria they use.
For as much as I played this game back in Junior High, I don’t think I have ever actually beat any of the campaigns.
24. Super Mario Sunshine
I actually played this for the first time about five years back and it really is a great game.
This is an interesting one. Whether or not a game is overrated is somewhat relative. By today’s standards I would say SMS is more divisive than overrated, a lot of people love this game (92 on Metacritic and I myself adore this game) and a lot of people don’t, but the two sides are probably mostly even in terms of size. Therefore I don’t really think the game can be considered overrated nowadays, especially as it is arguably one of the less talked about entries in the Mario series.
But that was not the perspective at the time of the article.
“Ever since the release of the GameCube, Nintendo gamers were desperately waiting for a new 3D incarnation of the Mario franchise. Given the massive success of Super Mario 64 on the N64 console, hopes and expectations for Miyamoto’s cash-cow franchise were incredibly lofty. Super Mario Sunshine turned out to be a really, really great game in its own right, but it certainly wasn’t the quantum leap that most of us were wishing for. The gameplay took a lot of direction from its predecessor, but overall, the whole package seemed to be lacking in longevity and innovation.”
So even though SMS is nowadays over shadowed by Super Mario 64 and Super Mario Galaxy, when it first came out people evidently thought that it was going to be a game changer that would be just as far a step forward as Super Mario 64 was. I mean I love the game, but Sunshine wasn’t that in the slightest! SM64 invented the 3D platformer, while Sunshine is merely a very good example of that genre. So by that criteria the authors of this article are right. But is this a fair standard? Let me put it this way, is there any platformer which was as much of a step forward as SM64 was? Still by the standards of the time I can definitely see the why the authors of this lists would consider the game to be overrated.
I just love that tropical aesthetic.
23. Battle Arena Toshinden
Lord in heaven that is some ugly cover art.
This is the first example on this list of a game which has been forgotten. People still have some pretty strong opinions on Super Mario Sunshine and they at least remember Neverwinter Nights, but Battle Arena Toshinden? There are frankly a bunch of games on here which I have never played and only know by reputation, but I have literally never actually heard of this one.
Battle Arena Toshinden was a series of very early 3d fighting games released on the PS1 which were meant to compete with Sega’s popular Virtua Fighter series. The series seems to have been very popular in part due to its next gen graphics, but the gameplay seems to have been lacking and the popularity of the series seems to have just withered away.
So if a game was once very highly regarded, but now has been almost completely forgotten I would say that it is definitely very overrated.
The Graphics really are pretty good for the early PS1
22. Star Fleet Battle Series
Oddly difficult to find cover shots of this series.
For the most part this Gamespy article has actually been pretty fair in it’s arguments and lacks a lot of the early 2000’s in your face attitude, but this segment is just incredibly obnoxious. Just a bunch of trekkie bashing and implying that the only reason this game has any fans at all is due to the delusions of sad pathetic Trekkies.
“Star Trek fans are kind of a funny bunch. There is, somewhere in the depths of their souls, a part of them that truly believes that the show is real. How else can you explain the frenzy over Starfleet Command? …Then a strange thing happened — the quasi-religious aura that surrounds Star Trek the TV show seemed to descend over Starfleet Command. Internet forums and chat rooms were filled with rabid gamers espousing the virtues of an entirely average product and viciously flaming anyone who dared say anything bad about their long-awaited “realistic” simulation. “
I really don’t have any investment in the series personally, but I am just going to side with the Trekkies on this one and declare it not overrated just out of spite.
21. Morrowind
Again another really cool early 2000’s CRPG cover, brings me back.
You will actually find plenty of people who will argue that Morrowind is overrated, that it’s not as good as you remember and it has since been far surpassed by later games, most notably Skyrim. Whatever the merits of these arguments, they are still arguments that really only make sense in today’s world. But, this list came out in 2003 when Morrowind was only a year old and Skyrim was a decade away, so any argument they advance that Morrowind was overrated would have to be based on different criteria. Now what were these reasons? Mainly that it’s very buggy, not that well balanced and has shitty character models.
“Unfortunately, this did not prevent the game’s freeform gameplay from eventually devolving into one samey errand after another, given by townspeople that all read from the same script. However, these flaws are not readily apparent when first playing the game, and only emerge over many hours of playing time. As a result, Morrowind left a great first impression, but proceeded to slide slowly but surely downhill from there. Toss in game-slowing copy protection, unavoidable “crash to desktops,” the worst character animation of 2002, and a framerate that cannot be tamed by the most expensive of hardware, and you have an ambitious but seriously flawed RPG.”
Honestly, this just feels nitpicky. I’m sure the game was buggy when it came out and not well balanced, but is that it? I mean people still make this same criticism about Skyrim and it is still regarded as a great game, because minor flaws like that get overshadowed by the good things. Honestly this entry just feels really nit picky, with the authors seeming to brush aside what was so revolutionary about Morrowind in favour of small quibbles. So I don’t think Morrowind deserved to be called overrated a year after it came out.
Like NWN, I played a lot of this game in Junior High, but never actually beat it.
20. Impossible Creatures.
Never owned this, but I do remember playing the demo at Mom’s work.
This is the first game in this list where I am going to argue it wasn’t overrated on the basis that I I don’t think anybody ever thought it was that good. I actually do remember playing the demo of this game when it came out and I remember it being decent but not great.It seems critics at the time agreed with me as it only has a 72 on Metacritic and while Metacritic scores from the early days of the internet are pretty dubious, it doesn’t really seem to have gotten many glowing reviews. IGN did give it a 83 and Gamespot gave it a 79, but those sites were notorious for giving 8/10’s at the drop of a hat for any game which was merely good.
So why was Impossible Creatures considered to be overrated? When you read the actual section in Gamespy’s article they talk about the hype the game had.
“the next big thing was an RTS game that was one part Island of Dr. Moreau and two parts 1930’s pulp-fiction campyness. The premise was genetic testing on animals gone mad. Two animals could be cross-bred with each other, allowing players the chance to create literally thousands of breeds, each with their own unique characteristics of attack, defense, stealth, etc. A cheetah’s body could be melded to a killer whale’s head for an extremely fast unit with a literally killer melee attack. It promised to be an RTS where players could develop their own armies to cater to their style of play. The possibilities were nearly endless, and the insane animal combinations were a marketer’s dream. Most publications (ourselves included) were drooling over Impossible Creatures virtually sight unseen.”
What was released was by no means a terrible game, but it was nothing revolutionary. The multitude of animals didn’t alter the same basic strategy: gather resources and develop your armies quicker than anyone else and beat the rush. Gamers quickly shrugged this off as just another strategy title destined to collect dust on a shelf.
This is actually a pretty common mistake that this article makes, they conflate games which are highly anticipated but disappointing, with games which are overrated. I think this is an important distinction to make, as at no point in the history of this game did people think it was great. They thought it might be great and that it probably would be great based on the previews, but that is not the same thing as people playing the game and thinking that it was great. So I am going to say that this is not overrated.
Okay, that will be enough for this entry and I will try to come back soon with two more entries which will hopefully cover the rest of this list. What games which are on the list but not covered, do you have some strong opinions on.
The more you learn the more you realize you don’t know jack. As one learns about subject, you begin to discover that there are vast subtleties and intricacies that not only do you not know about, but you didn’t know that you didn’t know about them. That’s the one thing I have been finding frustrating about writing about comics, I know a lot of things about characters, creators and controversies but there are a lot of things that I don’t have the foggiest idea about, but I feel if I want to speak intelligently on the subject I got to know these things. This is made worse by the fact that there is already so much stuff written about comics by people who know more than I ever will, so why the hell would anybody want to read anything by me? This obviously applies to video games as well. It’s all very anxiety inducing and it robs you of your will to go forward.
To get around this I have tried to write about my own personal feelings and experiences with comics and video games, there are always going to be people who know way more than I ever will about pretty much anything I would want to write about, but no one knows more about my experiences with comics and video games than me. Additionally I have always been fascinated by how video games are experienced not in isolation but within their relevant social contexts, because whenever I remember my experiences with games I remember their context, I don’t remember playing Donkey Kong Country II in some generic space, I remember playing it sitting on the couch in Mrs. Smiths basement when I was about 10 or 11, I remember Grand Theft Auto: Vice City as that game I downloaded off of Pirate Bay in junior high and played while watching reruns of South Park and so on and so forth.
Essentially what I want to do is to stop writing articles about more historical perspectives on things and start writing some more personal writings on things.As you can see by the fact that I began the last paragraph by writing about comics and video games and ended the paragraph by writing about video games, what I intend to write about has shifted somewhat. I am not sure I want to continue my series on “True Believer”, I don’t think the two entries are very good and the response to them has been underwhelming, so maybe I will continue that series, but probably not. Instead what I want to write now is a personal experience with my history with video games from the beginning up until say the last year of high school or so. I also want to write some oneoff pieces as well. In particular a review of the first part of Tom King’s Adam Strange Maxi-Series (I have no idea why they call it that, it’s only 12 issues, that is still a mini-series!) and something on a old article I found on Gamespy from about 2003 on what they consider to be the most overrated games of all time https://web.archive.org/web/20090415160611/http://archive.gamespy.com/articles/september03/25overrated/index.shtml (I have special fascination with lists of overrated games, mainly because no one can really decide what overrated actually means in most contexts)
So that’s the gist of it, more personal episodes with a focus on video games over comics. I never know how to end these.
Hi, again! This will be the second installment of this recurring series on Marvel’s True Believer comics. According to WordPresses handy stats thingy I got a total of nine visitors to this blog and no more than two of them were me!
This is the final week of Black Widow month for the True Believer series and we have two entries. A team up between Black Widow and the Thing in Marvel Team Up #10 and the first issue of the 1999 Black Widows Marvel Knights series .
Marvel Two-in-One #10-Written by Chris Claremont and drawn by Bob Brown-Cover date July 1975.
In this issue Black Widow and the Thing are captured by a terrorist organization The Sword of Judgement and they must both escape and prevent the group from setting off an H-Bomb which will wipe out the eastern seaboard. I think I’m going to make a rule for this series that in certain circumstances I’m not going to even bother recapping an issue.
My review of this issue
Boring and forgettable
Verdict? don’t buy it
1/4
Black Widow #1-Written by Devin Grayson and Drawn by J.G. Jones-Cover Date June 1999
This issue isn’t great, but it is still pretty good and is worth going into a bit. First, this comic was part of the “Marvel Knights” brand, which signified that the comics were going to be darker and more mature, though honestly it is not particularly dark by modern standards or even by the standards of 1999.
The issue opens with a scene of a new biological weapon being tested on soldiers on Rhapastan (Seems like the Marvel equivalent of Qurac from DC) before cutting to the apartment of Natasha Romonav (Black Widow) who in her own words is feeling a little mortal these days and revisiting old melancholy memories with Matt Murdoch before receiving summons by the Pentagon for a mission into Rhapastan to secure the weapon we saw in the opening page. Black Widow heads to the airport but is tailed by a mysterious blonde woman in a similar outfit to her.
We then cut to the camp in Rhapastan where the opening scene was. Black Widow is snooping around only to be interrupted by another spy in a similar outfit to hers who has run into some problems with the guards. After working together to beat them and finding the briefcase full of the biological weapon, the other spy reveals herself to be Yelena Belova a student from the Russian Red Room the same program which trained Natasha Romanov. Belova is working on behest of the working government to secure this weapon for themselves and in addition Belova is set on surpassing Romanov and becoming the Black Widow herself believing that the title belongs to someone loyal to the Russian people and not a traitor like Romanov.
The rest of the issue is a series of escalating action scenes with Romanov and Belova fighting each other and the guards. After a spectacular fake out by Romonav involving faking her own death via exploding helicopter, she escapes with the briefcase from the camp in a truck during the confusion with Belova hiding on the roof of the vehicle waiting for her chance to even the score and the issue ends.
This is not a great comic, the dialogue is meh and the art is just okay but it has some very good elements. First of all it is well paced. It sets up the relevant background and Romanov’s mental state early on, introduces the character of Belova to further complicate things and then finishes with a series of escalating action sequences ending with a striking cliffhanger on the final panel. Secondly, Belova is a good antagonist with a clearly defined set of internal motivations and reasons for opposing the protagonist (to surpass Romanov as Black Widow and be the hero to Russia that Romanov failed to be). She is almost sort of like a Venom or Bizarro-like villain, someone who is an inverted version of the hero and represents what Romanov could have been under a set of different circumstances. So there is a lot of good material in this comic, but it is let down by thestilted dialogue and so-so art. Still I think it is worth reading, especially if you are a fan of the character and looking forward to the upcoming MCU movie as it introduces a lot of important elements to the Black Widow mythos.
3/4
Next month’s True Believers are focused on issues which will tie into the “King in Black” event happening this december. This is one problem I have with this series. Sometimes it ties into events about which I don’t know the foggiest, I literally had not even heard of it until doing a quick google search while writing this very paragraph. It is supposed to be coming out of Donny Cate’s run on Venom and Carnage, I haven’t read a single page of any of it, but I did enjoy Cate’s “Thanos Wins” arch from a few years ago.
For the entire month of October “True Believers” has been focused on Black Widow adjacent issues which will tie in to the upcoming MCU Film coming out in May 2021. This week the comics are Avengers #111, #196 and Champions #7 Now I am not really a fan of the character, haven’t read that many of her comics and the whole cold-war spy thing is not my favorite genre, but suprisingly that really doesn’t matter with this week’s issues as they don’t really have that much to do with Black Widow.
This is actually kind of a trend with True Believers! Often the issues reprinted have only loose connections to the character they are supposed to be tied into. Though in the case of this week’s issues, part of that is because this is the third batch of True Believer comics released under the True Believers label this month and the earlier issues covered a bunch of key character moments.
The formula for how I am going to cover these issues is that I will provide a brief synopsis and then give my opinions and a grade afterward.
Avengers #111- Written by Steve Engelhardt and Drawn by Don Heck-May 1973
In the issue previous to this, Magneto had used mind control to gain power over the X-men and most of the Avengers and the surviving members, Black Panther, Thor and the Vision must fight back before Magneto completes his dastardly plan to hijack some nukes.
Magnetism in comics is such Bullshit! Also is that Desaad next to Magneto? I know it can’t be Desaad, but that is clearly Desaad!
The three remaining avengers Black Panther, Thor and the Vision recognizing the need for more numbers recruit Daredevil and Black Widow and after some love triangle nonsense between Black Widow, Daredevil and Hawkeye, they attack Magneto’s base and defeat him, with Black Widow deciding to break up with Daredevil and join the Avengers.
Kids never get your relationship advice from comics.
Honestly, kind of Mediocre. I’m not the biggest fan of what I’ve read of Engelhardt’s run on the Avengers, but at least it’s usually so far out there, that it’s pretty interesting, but this is pretty meh overall. The same can be said about the art. I like a lot of Don Heck’s Silver Age stuff but this isn’t his best work. Overall, though the main thing this issue has in its favour is its historical significance.
2/4
Avengers #196- Written by David Michelene and Drawn by George Perez – Cover date June 1980
For the record Taskmaster predates Deathstroke by a few years and they share the same co-creator in George Perez.
This issue doesn’t have Black Widow in it all, instead being the first full appearance of Task Master. The story is fairly simple. It begins with Wasp, Ant-Man and Yellow Jacket captured by this mysterious new villain Task Master after investigating his organization, while the rest of the Avengers (Beast, Miss Marvel, Jocasta, Iron Man, Vision, Wonder Man and Captain America) prepare to make their assault and rescue him. After a brief bit of monologuing by Task Master the Avengers break in and after initially facing some stiff resistance by Taskmaster, they defeat him and he flees.
As I said before the story is simple but it works, it works a lot! There are two main reasons for this. First, Taskmaster is just a cool villain. His whole gimmick is that he has photographic reflexes, wherein he only has to see something once in order to imitate it. As a result of this by watching the Avengers on TV he has learned to use their own techniques against them. While this is not exactly a new villain archetype (Amazo being the most obvious predecessor) it’s cool as hell and makes for some good fights.
What makes him even more compelling is that he has a bit of the ole’ genre awareness, he knows that the success rate for supervillains in the Marvel Universe is not exactly stellar and so he has specialized in training mooks and goons for other baddies, more low key, but still very profitable.
But honestly, the most compelling thing about Task Master is that he just looks cool as hell, with a striking blue, white, orange, colour scheme, a sort of mummified looking skull mask and a whole bunch of toys. He is the kind of character you just want to buy an action figure of.
This brings us to the other reason this comic works, George Perez’s artwork is great. I’m honestly not the biggest fan of Perez’s work (I like him, but I don’t think he is one of the all time greats like a lot of people do), but this is damn good. As mentioned before his design for Task Master is stellar, he has his usual gift for doing complicated battle scenes and there are just some striking panel designs.
Just noticed he has the T on the shield for Taskmaster.
Overall 3.5/4
Champions #7- Written by Tony Isabella and Drawn by George Tuska-August 1976
As this is the first installment of this series on the blog, I can’t really say that installment is running long, but I am going to make it quick anyway. The Champions are not a team I am even remotely familiar with and I really don’t have that much familiarity with any of it’s members which include Hercules, Black Widow, Angel, Ghost Rider and Ice Man. Combine that with the fact that the plot for this is kind of convoluted and it is no surprise that it didn’t really leave much of an impact at all. Which is a shame, because I think this may actually be a better issue than I am giving it credit for, but I can’t in all honesty say that I liked it at all. The only thing worth adding is that I did like the art, I am not sure how good it is on a objective level, but it has a very rough hewn look with a lot of heavy inking that I really enjoyed.
This actually reminds me of some of Don Heck’s stuff, not like Avengers #111, but his sixties Iron Man run with Stan Lee.
2/4- The weird thing is that even though I enjoyed this less than Avengers #111, I strongly suspect that this is a better comic, I would just need to do some more background reading. So I’m just going to rate it the same.
Anyway, I hope all of you enjoyed this and would appreciate any feedback.
Next week’s issues are “True Believers: Black Widow & The Thing #1” (Marvel Two-in-One #10) and “True Believers:Black Widow-Yelena Belova”(Black Widow (1999) #1). The latter is the Marvel Knights series I think? I plan to have the next entry out on either Friday or Saturday
The main issue with comics today in this writer’s humble opinion is that there just too damn expensive! For a comic book issue that can be finished off in about 20 minutes, I can expect to pay about $4.00 CAD, so an hour of reading comics is going to set me back $12.00. To put things in perspective, my Netflix subscription is about that much and my Spotify subscription is about half that. Now there are ways to avoid paying so much, buying GN, buying used, seeing what the Library has, but at the end of the day if you want bang for your entertainment buck avoid comics. The old days when some kid could buy a comic on a whim just because he liked the cover are sadly gone it seems. With one exception.
Marvel’s “True Believers” is a reprint series which every week reprints two or three key issues from Marvel’s past at the price of $1 each, mostly reprints from the Silver and Bronze age mostly tie ins to either to some upcoming Marvel movie or comic crossover. I love this series and beleive that it is the best bang for your buck you can get in comics right now.
For the last year or so, I have been buying these comics faithfully. It’s always a highlight of my week when every wednesday like clockwork while coming home from work, I get off the Calgary LRT at SAIT Station walk 10 minutes to the NW location of Phoenix Comics, grab the two or three true believer comics which have come into my pullbox (along with a few other regular series), walk another block to Carl’s Jr. to pick up a hamburger and then take the bus the rest of the way home eating hamburgers and reading these Marvel Reprints. it’s these sort of experiences which is
In order to share my love of this series I am going to be aiming to post a review of each week’s issues of True Believers as they come out. What I hope to do is encourage people to patronize this series and show Marvel that there is a market for affordable reprints and hopefully encourage them to print more.
Hi, this is Ryan aka Mr. Kltpzyxm and this is my blog
Hi, this is Ryan aka Mr. Kltpzyxm and this is my blog. I am person with a lot of opinions about things and like every other jerk on the internet I feel the need to share my opinions, despite the fact that no one asked for them. I figured the best way to go about this was through a blog and so here we are.
What I specifically want to talk about is fun stuff, things that make me happy in this grim, dark world of the future. Now my two favorite sources of fun stuff are comics and video games, so that is what I am going to be writing about.
I choose the name Mr. Kltpzyxm as a reference to what may be one of my favorite moment in comics when in the pages of Adventure Comics #286 they introduced what may be the single greatest characters in comic book history, Mr. Kltpzyxm.
Now if you don’t know in the old pre-crisis DC continuity Bizzaro was the result of Lex Luthor using a duplicator ray on Superman in order to create a perfect clone of Superman which he could control, however due to a flaw in the machine Bizzaro was created instead (Action Comics #254, 1959). In following issues the duplicator ray was used to create first Bizzaro Lois Lane (Action Comics #255, 1959) and eventually Bizzaro world an entire planet full of Bizzaros.
The strange adventures of Bizzaro on Bizzaro world was made into a recurring feature in the pages of Adventure Comics written by Superman creator Jerry Siegal and drawn by John Forte and readers… IT WAS GLORIOUS! Superman creator Jerry Siegel went all out in order to create what was one of the funnest and silliest comics of a very fun and silly age.
The pinnacle of all this was a story in Adventure Comics #288, “Bizzaro’s Secret Identity. In this comic everybody’s favorite fifth dimensional imp, Mr. Mxyzptlk gets exposed to aforementioned duplicate ray and becomes Mr. Kltpzyxm, the bizzaro Mr. Mxyzptlk! Who goes on a terrifying spree of unbizzarolike actions which threaten to undermine the stability of Bizzaro’s world’s perfect imperfect social order.
Mr.Kltpzyxm's Games and Comics Blog 