A mini series that is basically the epilogue to the Avengers vs. X-Men crossover. Unlike the entirely superfluous AvX: VS mini, which depicted battles between various characters during the event, Consequences is required reading for those who want to know what happened next to Scott Summers. Since his character has never been more interesting since they made him into a villain (arguably that just how he is presented and at least Kieron Gillen subtly acknowledges this), I say this is nearly just as good as the crossover its closing shop for.

One ingenious idea I really liked was how Scott communicated with Magneto while in prison. But that’s just a nice touch to make the good better. And it’s good because Gillen really gets these characters, writes them like real people with their own, conflicting agendas and unique voices. Even Colossus, who always struck me as a walking cliche of what a Russian must look like to Americans, felt like someone real, which I’ve never seen another writer manage.

So, essential reading if you liked Avengers vs. X-Men.

As far as value for money goes, this was the best pledge I ever did on kickstarter. Crayon Chronicles is one of the few games that came out on time and completely delivered. While it looks like a kids game, with the whole crayon art approach, underneath is a typical roguelike: Permadeath, randomized levels (though the overall level progression always remains the same (school, graveyard, swamp/ghost town, final dungeon)) and turn-based movement.

Admittedly, the style is not for everyone. It’s not just the crayon look. Every weapon, every cut scene between the levels, absolutely everything is done in a cutesy, kiddy-style, despite the fact that the game itself is never as forgiving as, say Dungeons of Dredmore, where you can easily beat everything with save scumming (okay, you can do that too here, but it’s a bit more cumbersome).

Weapons range from the expected (swords, hammers, bows) to the unexpected (ladders, rulers). Likewise armor or health items. Despite the sometimes unusual items, the underlying systems are pretty typical for CRPGs. You level up by collecting enough exp (which allows you to raise two of four attributes (power, dodge, aim and luck)), use better armor to boost your stats and better weapons to deal more damage. No magic though.

One original gameplay element I really liked (okay, original to me, maybe it’s been used somewhere else before) was how you could regenerate health. Most roguelikes either completely shun regenerative health or allow you to regenerate by moving around (which often makes those games a bit too easy). In Crayon Chronicles, you only regenerate health by getting a critical hit, using rare health items or by opening new areas. Which essentially forces you to move on, explore and fight. Which is pretty clever and ensure that you don’t just idle around until you’re back to full health and instead forces you to take your chances.

Really, really like the game. Like I said, best buck I spent so far on games on kickstarter.

The title of the game led me to believe this had anything to do with the Game Boy game, and it would have been admittedly great to see a 16bit full color remake of that game with better controls (the spiky wall of doom would have been great). Instead we got a game that feels a bit like a Frankenstein monster, with pieces, monster sprites and whole levels ripped from various Castlevania games and stitched together into this monstrosity.

Not that this is something new, most Castlevania games have repurposed art assets of previous games of the series, but never to the degree that the end result felt like it lacked completely an identity of its own.

Make no mistake, Castlevania ReBirth Adventures isn’t a bad game by any means. It plays just fine and offers the same, refined platforming experience most Castlevania games do. Sadly, when you play the game you feel like you replay all those other Castlevania games, instead of something new, and I say that knowing that most Castlevania games sport the same plot (go beat Dracula in his castle) with a very similar overall level designs.

But when even the weak Dracula X on the SNES felt original and unique in comparison, something really is off.

The second Super Mario Land game, set shortly after the first, introduced anti-Mario Wario as the main antagonist. While Mario was far away rescuing just another princess, Wario has taken over his kingdom and now Mario has to win it back.

The game sport an overland map, where you can go to five of the six sub-areas (one, the space area, can only be entered via a sort of secret route (well not that secret, it’s pretty easy to reach via the Hippo bubble and the upper exit from that level)) or various other single levels. The final castle, where Wario is waiting, can only be accessed once all the Coins have been collected by beating all the bosses in the six sub-areas. Compred to the first game, sprites, both Mario’s as well as all the enemies, were quite bigger.

To this day I’m pretty ambivalent about the game. As far as platformers go, it’s like most Mario games heavily refined, has some neat level designs (though less memorable than for example the first Super Mario Land) and is diverse and big enough to provide fun for a few hours. But two things always irked me about the game.

First is the difficulty, which is far too easy. Most levels can be beaten without even breaking a sweat, apart from Wario’s castle, where the difficutly (compared to the rest of the game) suddenly spiked (though not if you had the carrot update for flying). Nothing in the rest of the game came even close to that.

The second thing that annoyed me was that the controls felt different to other Mario games, even the first Super Mario Land. A bit sluggish, with the character sprite having more momentum than I expected. In a platformer, changing the controls between titles in a series is never a good thing, because it throws the player off (even with a game as easy as this).

I have a sentimental attachment to the first Super Mario World, mostly because it was one of the first if not the first Game Boy game I managed to beat after countless tries (all those years ago, man, how time has flown by). These days I don’t have the patience anymore to develop the muscle memory to play this type of game, though upon replay the game felt much easier than all these years ago (probably the muscle memory is partly still in place).

It’s a basic platformer, following the template set by the first NES Super Mario Bros., though with original stages and in a different setting. The plot is taken wholesale from the original (and reading it in the manual is quite trippy), you have to get a princess back (Daisy, who looks actually like Toadstool) and to do that you have to travel across four foreign countries full of various, Mario-typical monsters.

Compared to the NES game, your sprite looks tiny, which allowed for maximal space usage on the small Game Boy screen. And the designer certainly filled those levels with neat stuff. Each country had its own unique theme, reinforced by each level’s graphics and mixed with common Mario elements (typical destructible blocks, pipes, etc.). Also, the game has two or three shmup stages, including the last one with the final enemy (an alien named Tatanga).

As far as platformers go, it’s not the most original game (most of its gameplay elements where known even then), but the gameplay feels so refined and perfect, that it’s just fun to play through it from time to time because of how perfectly Mario’s sprite follows each keystroke. Even the difficulty, which is neither hard nor totally easy, seems like a perfect fit.

I can understand why some reviewers compared Matthew Hughes first Archonate novel to Pratchett in his early Discworld novels, despite the completely different setting. It’s a sly and witty travelogue that sports a fool as the main character (though not a foolish one) who, instead of seeing the wonders around him, looks at the world as something that is out to get or least annoy him. Unlike Rincewind, though, Matthew’s Filidor is allowed to grow over the course of his journey and earned the respect of his uncle (who forced him onto this journey in the first place) and also some new-found insights about himself.

It’s never easy to write a story entirely from the viewpoint of a character who is utterly ignorant and self-centered and who still remains interesting to the reader, but Hughes humor offsets this in spades and Filidor at least shows some glimmer of intelligence early on. Also, along the way he reads a book full of morality tales that have conflicting, confusing or just nonsensical lessons, which makes for quite an enjoyable diversion.

Warren Ellis and artist Cully Hamner’s three issue mini series is a study in lean storytelling. No words or panel is wasted, everything is optimized to tell the story in the smallest amount of space. At a time when Ellis and other writers were called out for decompressed storytelling, Ellis showed that it was just a choice and if he wanted, he could easily write something as compact as Red, without sacrificing coherence in the plot department.

That said, the story isn’t all that original: an old CIA assassin is ordered to be killed (oh the irony) so that his past never sees the light of days (because the new era doesn’t allow such a sordid past to be revealed). Expectedly, he reacts in a very direct and violent manner, showing that age hasn’t dulled his skills. On his way to those who ordered the kill, he leave a trail of dead bodies, while taunting his real targets along the way. But while it’s not all that original, the execution of the story is perfect and Hamner’s sparse but clean art makes it look all that much better.

I can easily understand why this got adapted into a movie. The concept is easy to summarize, the weary but still deadly old warrior who has to make one last run.

This is one of those rare movies (Disney or otherwise) that manages to be sweet without being saccharine, lovely without being kitschy. Probably because, despite the family-friendly message at the core of the movie (ohana means nobody gets left behind), the two main characters are deranged enough to offset any message of universal friendship and love by actually being truly weird and different.

Funnily, at least in the movies, Stitch, the alien bio-weapon from outer space, is the more normal of the two. Lilo is the kind of little girl that enjoys playing Frankenstein, has a collection of photos of ugly tourists (and believes that they are beautiful) and seems to live utterly in a space diverged from normal reality. Sure, behind all that is still a little girl that wants friends and a happy family, but her decidedly weird hands-on approach to solve reality problems (trying to solve Stitch’s violence problems by following the example set by Elvis) feels above all else both genuine character-wise and is really funny.

Stitch on the other hand is just searching for any kind of identity after he has been left in an environment where his inbred tendencies for mass destruction & mayhem (I really love that this is a kids movie by Disney) can’t be brought to bear. Most movies falters when more than one character has a movie-long character arc that is front and center, but Lilo’s and Stitch’s respective journeys perfectly complement each other and lead to a touching finale.

Swamp Thing’s history can be summed up as: Alan Moore did a groundbreaking run on the comic, others tried some weird stuff after it, but nothing managed to reach the same level of quality, before or after. That’s not entirely accurate, nor is the other stuff, either before Moore or after bad, but it’s an impression each new writer has to deal with.

Snyder certainly managed to get the new series running on all cylinders right out of the gate. Where Moore managed to redefine the creature with just one issue (The Anatomy Lesson, his second on the title), Snyder introduced a powerful and beautiful vision of plant life that few readers will have ever encountered, but which is so compelling that it sets an entirely new tone that feels both like an original take and yet one completely in sync with everything Swamp Thing.

Plant life isn’t less violent than flesh-and-bones driven biota (the whole red in tooth and claw), it just operates on a different time scale and is hidden from our everyday eyes, but on its own it’s just as violent, ferocious and callous. Together with Yanick Paquette’s great art, this metaphor for plant life comes to disturbing life on the pages, ready to haunt the reader, drawn him in.

The rest – a new villain (whose actually a redefinition of an old one), clever use of continuity bits, a slight retcon that explains why Alec Holland’s remains gave birth to the original Swamp Thing and why he’s still haunted by the Green, now that he’s alive again – all work great. But the one thing that made this new series got traction so easily with me, is the depiction of nature as green in thorn and strangling silence.

That was the mini series preceding Avengers vs X-Men (in terms of big plot developments), where Cyclops and Wolverine went their separate ways afterwards. This one was interesting, because I liked the plot development with all its consequences, though I think the delivery was kinda flaky. The evil four mini-geniuses that killed their parents, took over and then killed a branch of the Hellfire club and maneuvered the mutant community to present their new brand Sentinel to prospective buyers was way overdone and completely out of touch with the serious tone of the rest of the series.

Really, characters who are evil for evil’s sake and also sociopathic child geniuses, can you get more tired tropes in one extremely annoying package. This was just lazy writing.

But worse, beyond the ridiculous villains, Schism had exactly the same problem that Avengers vs. X-Men had. The writers tried to paint Cyclops as the wrong one and Wolverine as the one with the right vision, but that’s just not flying with me. By all accounts (objectively, canon-wise) mutant kids and teenagers were never safe in any of Charles Xavier’s schools (killed right and left with very few reaching adulthood alive, if not exactly undamaged).

Utopia and Cyclops at least were giving them a fighting chance at survival, while Wolverine’s sad attempt to recreate the better days at Xavier’s school will eventually only result in more dead kids.

It’s funny how the writers clear intention to make Wolverine look good makes him look like an ass (and not the lovable ass he was under Claremont) whereupon Cyclops cold and brush demeanor doesn’t take away an ounce from the reasonableness of his position.