Month: June 2017

So this week I thought I’d just signal boost a public service message for any of you that might be interested, on account of being fans of stories involving the supernatural and perhaps also not having a lot of cash to throw around, and that message is The Secret World has finally gone free-to-play.

What’s The Secret World? Well I more or less summed up my first impressions five years ago in a blog I wrote for The Satellite Show. It is (or was) a modern-day MMORPG set in a shadowy world where conspiracies are truths and monsters lurk just out of sight. I was middling in my first reactions, but about two years ago it had a steeply discounted Steam sale that had Dawn buying us both copies, and despite still having some of the shortcomings I mentioned it’s a great, well-acted storyline full of maturely-oriented mystery.

As of this past weekend Funcom has relaunched the title under the name Secret World: Legends, providing approximately the same storyline experience but streamlining and simplifying it, and while that does mean some of its unique elements have been lost and we’re back to classes and levels, the most important thing here is that all the content now has an entry barrier of free, and that may be the most important consideration of all for a lot of us. You can download it, have a look, maybe while away some of these Summer nights. Maybe you get hooked, maybe you don’t.

Now the new version isn’t integrated into Steam just yet, so you might want to wait for that (supposedly sometime in the next month) if you don’t want to run it independently, but I do highly recommend giving it a whirl. It’s probably about as close as an MMORPG has ever gotten to effectively presenting a horror/suspense game, and supposedly some features of the relaunch are geared towards making that more prominent, such as helping out solo play and limiting the amount of other players in your particular area at any given time so things feel a little more isolated. That said, don’t go in expecting the level of scripted atmospherics you get in games like Dead Space, Silent Hill or the better Resident Evils. But it definitely has its moments, and remains a unique entry in a genre mostly still chock full of fantasy.

Website: Secret World Legends

I remember back when the original Red Dead Redemption released, I had plans. Here was a big open world game set in the Old West, with all sorts of settings and characters, and more than that a possible answer to a problem we were already experiencing: I’d want a certain angle for some panel and Dawn would request references to base a drawing from, and what I thought would be a simple image search would become a nightmare. For crissake was there no photo in creation of someone shooting a rifle that way? But now I could set my own angles, take a screenshot, and blammo! References!

Now mind you I quite enjoyed the game as well, which was probably a good thing since those other plans ended up shelved due to things like transferring a screenshot from my Xbox to my PC being more complicated than I anticipated, up to and including running into some godawful version of copyright scrambling. I’m sure professional or even enthusiastic amateur gamers had their ways to do it even back in those ancient days of 2010, but between that and not really having good free camera options I could figure out, I gave up. Dawn eventually got some posing software on the (relative) cheap and we accumulated a collection of realistic enough toy and Airsoft firearms to supplement that with live pictures when we could.

But fast forward to recently when I once again found myself stymied. I wanted two Huachucas firing their rifles, shooting up at Suzie, and had a clear image in my head of how I hoped it would look. But that top down angle… Dawn needed some help. She could try mocking it up in her 3-D program but we’re getting close to SDCC and time is getting crunchy. And of course, Google imaging failed at the time, even though now it’s mocking me just now by returning at least one image that would have been close enough on what I swear is the exact same search terms.

Sigh.

Anyhow, frustrated, I fired up Fallout 4 on my PC to clear my head with some mutant shooting, and had to use a console command for something, and it suddenly hit me that Fallout 4 has a free camera feature and AI pausing features and setting-time-of-day features, etc. etc., and taking a screenshot through Steam is as simple as hitting F12. Oh and I could modify the look of my character on the fly to approximate the image(s) in my head.

It still wasn’t entirely simple since I had to take two separate screenshots at as similar an angle as possible (something that at least the vanilla Fallout engine doesn’t make easy as far as I know) and composite together a reference in Photoshop, but at the end, an hour or so’s work got me something usable. Not something I’d want to be doing on a regular basis, but 2010 Clint is no doubt decidedly jealous.

That title clickbait-y enough for y’all? Well, in this case I’m referring to the latest reports from the box office*, where Wonder Woman‘s domestic box office take fell only 43.2% from its first weekend to its second. To say “a movie has legs” in box office parlance means that the projections are it will continue to do well even after its opening, raking in a significant amount of extra cash by way of good word of mouth and repeat business. And while a 43.2% dropoff might seem high at first glance, as blockbuster superhero movies go it’s all but unheard of. The Avengers? Just over 50% The Dark Knight? Mid-50s. Only Batman Begins from more than a decade ago is in the same bracket, and only the original 2002 Spider-Man beats it. As far as more recent DC fare goes, its far and away the winner, with Man of Steel being the next best at a 64.6% cooldown.

Now, does this tell the whole story of a movie’s commercial success? Not necessarily. If you clicked on the link above then you might have noticed both Thor and Doctor Strange beating out The Avengers, and when the dust settled neither of the former were close to the latter in terms of gross receipts. This method of calculation can sometimes be kinder on those films who have humbler opening weekends and harsher on those with bigger ones. Wonder Woman‘s domestic opening gross of ~103 million, while eminently respectable and most certainly exceeding Warner Bros. original estimate of ~65 million, does not exceed Man of Steel‘s ~$117 million take and definitely doesn’t come close to Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice at ~166 million — but because of its frontloaded worldwide opening combined with not-so-great word of mouth/reviews BvS had nowhere to go but down, and its second weekend was a near 69% dropoff to a ~51 million second frame. If we look at the stats for two weekends (source) we get this:

Man of Steel: 116,619,362 opening + 41,287,206 second = 157,906,568

Batman v Superman: 166,007,347 opening + 51,335,254 second = 217,342,601

Wonder Woman: 103,251,471 + 58,520,672 second = 161,772,143

These calculations also do not count weekday totals or the vitally important foreign box office, so there are all sorts of statistics that could be massaged and interpreted, but there you have this particular snapshot: last place in terms of opening weekend but first place in second weekend, with a lot of positive vibe suggesting momentum moving forwards. I know my feed has been alive with plenty of friends declaring their intent to go see it again a second or even third time.

Also whatever your take on the politics surrounding the movie, there’s little doubt it struck a chord with the female audience, who made up what I believe is a genre-first majority of 52% of the demographic on opening weekend and are certainly amongst its most enthusiastic supporters. And here’s the thing about the ladies, to go by previous outings: you strike that chord successfully and they’ll keep coming back. Remember James Cameron’s Titanic? Sure we’re talking 20 years ago and a different genre, but still its opening weekend was less than 30 million, and even adjusting for inflation that seems low by today’s blockbuster standards. Yet Titanic was one of those films that didn’t have a second weekend drop-off, it had a ramp-up, +23.8% between weekends one and two, and it kept on keeping on for months after until it closed out with just over 600 million domestic and over 2 billion dollars worldwide. And I can all but guarantee you it wasn’t the 18-35 male demographic keeping it afloat for all that time (pardon the expression).

Mind you I don’t think any movie makes money by excluding a demographic, either, but Wonder Woman seems to be the kind of film that just about everyone can enjoy, unless you’re really prejudiced against superhero films in general. So my feeling is she’s going to stay in the theaters for awhile even with some stiff Summer competition coming up soon between a new Transformers movie and a new Spider-Man.

And yeah, I realize this post doesn’t have much to do with Zombie Ranch, but for obvious reasons we always take a keen interest in the zeitgeist involving female action leads. Also it’s been a long-running conceit of mine that Supergirl, Catwoman and Elektra didn’t fail because they were women-led, they failed by being terrible movies. Wonder Woman has finally seemed to emerge as living proof of that, so along with the rest of the film industry I want to keep an eye out and see where it ends up in practice to all of my theory.

(*She does have some fantastic legs, though.)

So, Wonder Woman premiered in the U.S. and many other countries last week and it’s naturally generating a lot of thinkpieces, particularly after defying both the low expectations plaguing the idea of a woman-led action movie (much less a superhero movie) and the bad-to-lukewarm critical response to the DC Cinematic Universe so far.

I know I was one of those with those low expectations, having been thoroughly unimpressed by Man of Steel, Batman V Superman, and most especially Suicide Squad, where my viscerally negative reaction surprised even myself since I went into it not really caring about any of the characters involved, and didn’t watch it until weeks after its release so thought I was prepared to be underwhelmed. But enough about me nearly breaking my television… the track record contributed to a degree of skepticism where despite my support for the idea of female-led superhero films, I just couldn’t bring myself to commit to making the theatrical exception.

But then the early reviews and word of mouth started coming in, from people who could hardly be described as shills or even just overly enthusiastic fans, and so in the end I counted myself among those contributing to WW’s historic 100+ million opening weekend.

Did it deserve it? I believe yes. Far worse movies have pulled in far more dollars, after all, and Wonder Woman is a genuinely well put together movie with a talented director at the helm who had a vision and something to say. Now, what message you took away from Patty Jenkins’ opus will vary from person to person. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I was not reduced to tears of joy like many of the grown, professional women who watched. Perhaps more surprisingly, Dawn did not tear up even though she sure as heck did when Rey caught the lightsaber or when Holtzmann two-gunned her way through a horde of ghosts.

But despite this both of us agree there is a sincerity of emotion and effort permeating the movie. And, I believe, an amazingly healthy take on men and women in the form of the lead characters Diana Prince and Steve Trevor. I mean, I was never a big fan of Wonder Woman, and Steve Trevor was just an absolute cipher to me until Chris Pine brought him to life on the big screen. There is a rare alchemy here. An equality of, if not power level, of spiritual importance. Some have compared the relationship to that of Superman and Lois Lane in the first 1978 film, and that seems to be a fairly interesting nexus because it’s part of the period that gave us the two other comparisons rattling around in my brain: Han Solo/Luke Skywalker & Princess Leia, and Indiana Jones/Marion Ravenwood. I always enjoyed those ladies because even if the movie wasn’t theirs, they acted like they didn’t know that, and their own demonstrations of verve, morals and resourcefulness elevated the film. There was an egalitarian flair to the proceedings. Not always, of course, but hell, I was pretty goddamned freaked out just watching the Well of Souls sequence on a movie screen so I didn’t much hold it against Marion that she, too, became a shrieky mess for its duration. Other than them, what have we seen since? I think we’d have to go further back instead to the era of Katharine Hepburn and such. Maybe this phenomenon has to go in 30-40 year cycles? I hope not.

But I’ve always wondered how it would feel being a woman and watching Leia or Marion onscreen, very plucky and capable sidekicks but sidekicks nonetheless. I think in Wonder Woman‘s Steve Trevor, I might at last have my answer, and it was quite satisfying. Mind you, I’m a white dude and so have gotten to see my identifier in the lead plenty of times, which might make this easier. I’ve seen some grumbling that Steve might be *too* developed, enough that he unjustly overshadows the rare leading lady in her own film. But it’s not just me taking the other perspective. To really go into it more would be to delve into spoiler territory which I want to avoid this early on, as I hope some of you who haven’t seen it yet will be moved to give it a go. I believe Patty Jenkins truly did achieve a balance whereby she elevated womankind without having to tear down mankind to do it, and that alone is worth tossing some hard-earned cash at. And Diana Prince throws tanks. Let’s not forget the tank throwing. Superheroes done right are awesome, no matter what’s under the hood.