Beatdowns Even an Eternal Dragon Can't Undo

Dragon Ball FighterZ - I feel like the "Z" ought to be separate, but the case for the disc insists otherwise - is definitely the best looking DBZ game I've ever played. Damning with faint praise; it's the most recent DBZ game I've played by probably a decade, but it seemed like a good place to start.

It's bright, colorful. The signature attacks are made to look big and dramatic and flashy. The animation and movement is crisp. The fighting looks good, once you get the controls down. I would imagine I'm a middling player at best, and a lot of times I'm just moving the thumbstick in a general direction and hitting a button to see what results, but the game's responsive.

It's a 3 vs. 3 fighting game, ala the Marvel vs. Capcom series. Not my favorite style of fighting game, but it works OK. There are certain super-move combo attacks that get their own animation because you're using two particular characters, which I imagine is designed to make you try a lot of different combinations.

There's a story mode, with a vague plot about another Red Ribbon Army scientist unleashing a bunch of clones of different fighters, while at the same time a machine is suppressing everyone's powers. I feel like that was to eliminate power level differences between the characters, probably to prevent people ditching about their Super Saiyan Blue Vegeta losing to Yamcha.

It didn't work, of course. Nothing short of death will silence those people.

No one can fight unless they merge with a soul. So really, you're the soul, and the other characters acknowledge you and will sometimes speak to you in brief cut scenes where you can pick between a couple of dialogue options. I don't think which option you choose really changes anything. It's not that kind of game. But it can be fun to annoy Frieza by telling him that, no, you're not interested in killing people.

Each level is a map of locations, connected by lines. You have to follow the lines to get from place-to-place, and win the boss fight within a certain number of moves. You can take the most direct route, or meander through, making sure to fight every other battle available if you want. Since the fights provide experience to level up fighters, it pays to use those other fights to grind a bit.

That said, it boils down to round after round of just fighting palette-shifted versions of your characters. There's usually some vague goal to it - finding and rescuing your other allies, depriving the ultimate threat of a source of power - but it definitely feels like you're on a hamster wheel.

There are sometimes custom scenes before the fight, depending on which characters you're using, or which you're fighting. Cell might be annoyed to see another version of himself, or he might goad the Gohan he's fighting alongside. Or Tien gets annoyed at the Ginyu Force and their stupid poses. Or Goku acknowledges that Krillin's too busy to spar because he's got a wife and child of his own.

Ummm, that's one way of putting it.

There's actually three versions of the story. Listed in terms of escalating difficulty, one with Goku and his friends as the focus, another where it's Frieza and the other villains, and one focused on the Androids. That last one is where the repetitive nature really drags because for a long time, you only have Androids 18 and 16 to use. Not only are you almost always outnumbered 3-to-2, but you can't even mix and match to find a team that suits your play style. (Big, slow characters like Android 16 or Majin Buu don't tend to work well for me.)

That said, there are actually a lot of nice moments for Krillin and Android 18 throughout the story mode. Each of them being protective of the other. Krillin being angry that Cell's hurt 18, or 18 having to beat Krillin up to protect him from Android 21. Then Krillin later reveals he knew 18 must have had some sort of a plan because he could tell she wasn't really trying to hurt him. Some of the conversations each character has with you involve them praising the other, or talking about how lucky they are to have them.

It's all very sweet, and I enjoyed it as a fan of that pairing. Especially given how much undeserved crap the pairing (mostly Krillin) takes among the brainless fuckwits that make up a big chunk of the DBZ fandom.

There are a few other game modes. Online play is of no interest to me. There's a training mode, but that seems to quickly turn into trying to string together 8-10 distinct commands and I either couldn't get the timing right, or I wasn't positioning my character properly. But I beat all the story modes, so I don't think that stuff is critical.

There's also an Arcade mode, which is the thing where your team fights a succession of several other trios, from 3 to 7 depending on which course you pick. Thankfully, it's not the type where your characters' health doesn't return after each round. One nice touch, your specific course will vary depending on how well your performance is graded. So if you win your first fight with an A or S grade, you'll fight one trio for your second match. B or C grades send you down a different path, and D or F still another. But if you get a D on the first fight, then an A on the second, you could still jump to a higher path. In that sense, there's at least some potential variety, even though you're probably trying to get the best scores all the time.

Like I said, the game looks very nice. The fighting's very smooth, though probably pushing the limits of what I can be any good at. The cut scenes are often funny or clever. I do prefer the more individualized story mode of Budokai 3, where the playable characters could each have their own story to a certain extent, and you could fly around the world in more of a free-roaming mode. But those were usually just alternate takes on preexisting stories (the Frieza Saga, the Cell Saga), while FighterZ is trying to build on those past stories to create a newer one. Making a unique story for all the playable characters would probably be a lot.

Kansas City Confidential (1952)

A guy gathers himself a small crew to rob an armored car. He's got everything mapped out perfectly, right down to the florist who always arrives at the same time as the armored car. Wait for the florist to drive off, pull up immediately in an identical van, ambush the guards, speed off. Hide the van in a big truck while leaving the state and then make the crew scatter until it's safe to split up the dough.

So at first glance, it seems like a heist movie, but the heist itself was done within 10 minutes. Then it seems like it'll be the rest of the crew that blow it. There's a degenerate gambler with bad nerves (Jack Elam), a would-be Lothario (Lee van Cleef, weird to see him in a bright-colored hat), and a silent guy prone to violence. They always wore masks around each other, so only the mastermind knows exactly who's involved, but it seems like their flaws could tear it apart.

But that's not what this is, either. Because the driver (John Payne) of the real florist van took the fall, at least long enough to get repeatedly roughed up by the cops while in custody. The movie doesn't actually show the cops beating a person we know is innocent - probably violates the Hays Code - but we see Payne having to be helped along back to his cell and basically collapsing on the cot.

Eventually they find the other van (though of course one meathead cop insists he could still be involved), but the damage is done. Payne lost his job, his picture is front and center in the papers as an ex-con (something related to gambling) linked to a $1.2 million heist.

He gets a line on Elam's character via the brother of a war buddy, coincidentally about the point when the mastermind's calling everyone together. Elam doesn't survive the trip through customs, so Payne tries to pass himself off as Elam. So it becomes cat-and-mouse, as van Cleef and the other guy think Payne may be the other guy, but think there's something funny about him. The mastermind knows Payne isn't, but none of the three ex-cons know who he is.

The movie even adds another twist as to the mastermind's true goal in the last quarter of the movie. It mostly works, better than the mastermind's last-second change of heart, which is probably the only thing that keeps Payne out of the electric chair.

What I Bought 4/18/2024

My dad's dog is getting better behaved. It certainly helps to not be constantly having to tell her to get off me. Though she still doesn't do great at sitting still when you try to pet her. Hard to pet her when she chases her hand around with her mouth.

Black Widow and Hawkeye #2, by Stephanie Phillips (writer), Paolo Villanelli (artist), Matta Iacono (color artist), Joe Sabino (letterer) - What is it with people in the Marvel Universe getting a symbiote and letting it near fire? Did no one give them the "how to care for your alien slime friend" pamphlet?

Clint tells the Natasha to leave, she refuses. He insists he killed the foreign minister (who he was tailing on some covert job), both she and the symbiote know he's lying. The symbiote attacks him, Natasha reels it in. Hawkeye acts like he doesn't recognize a symbiote when he sees one, but also comments that it seems jealous he knew Natasha first. Well, Phillips has the "cocky and kinda dim" aspects of his character down.

Hawkeye gets hit with a poison dart by someone in an old helmet. The shooter escapes because Natasha makes the symbiote deal with the poison, which may or may not have worked, but offers a chance for a trip down memory lane. This flashback actually started last issue, when someone sent Snapdragon after Natasha not long after she defected, and Hawkeye got smacked around trying to protect her.

I don't know who the mastermind villain controlling (and killing as a precautionary measure) the shooter. Name is vaguely familiar, but I guess he's another ghost from the Black Widow's past. What a shocker.

Villanelli softened his lines a lot for this issue. Definitely compared to the Captain Marvel mini-series he drew last year, but even compared to the first issue, the faces of the characters look a lot softer, less sharply defined. Maybe Villanelli didn't ink himself as strongly, so Iacono's colors are overwhelming the lines? It gives things a bit of an unfinished, smudged look.

I could argue it works for all the murkiness in the plot, between Clint's insistence on his guilt and the awkwardness of their past history with the added mess of the symbiote. But if that were the case, I think the flashback's art should be more distinct, sharper defined as a time when things were clearer between Nat and Clint, which isn't the case.

Blow Away #1, by Zac Thompson (writer), Nicola Izzo (artist), Francesco Segala and Gloria Martinelli (colorists), DC Hopkins (letterer) - You're not supposed to go out on the ice. A very annoying woman at a park once berated me about that.

Brynne's on assignment in the Baffin Islands, trying to capture photographic proof of a pair of nesting endangered bird. 6 weeks in, she's got a lot of pictures of snow and a few of a hunter. Then the mountain climbers show up. We don't know why they're there, because what we see is always through Brynne's camera, and it's set up for long shots. When she does zoom in on the photos, they're blurry and there's no audio, so it's all conjecture on her part that "Blue" looks frightened at one point, or that they started fighting at the summit.

There's also some sort of messy business in Brynne's backstory, involving something called "Arson Media" and blood splatter. She also seems to have some self-worth issues that are hinging on her getting these photos of the endangered birds. How that's going to factor in going forward, I don't know. I also don't know if the person watching Brynne through a sniper scope at the end of the issue is the same hunter as early, or some new problem.

Izzo keeps us at a distance from everything, even Brynne. There are very few close-ups on her, and when there are, she's usually outside with her face covered. Inside her base camp, there are a lot of panels looking over her shoulder the shots the cameras got. If the focus is on her, Brynne is usually looking off to one side, and our view is from at least a few feet away. Nothing close, nothing that's being said directly. Everything's inference and conjecture, which probably contrasts with her trying to get this definitive proof the birds nesting. That has to be a sure thing or it won't be accepted.

Sunday Splash Page #319

 

"Rabbit's Footrace," in Longshot #1, by Ann Nocenti (writer), Arthur Adams (penciler), Whilce Portacio and Brent Anderson (inkers), Christie Scheele (colorist), Joe Rosen (letterer)

In 1985, Ann Nocenti and Art Adams brought Longshot into the Marvel Universe. A young man with a power that makes things work in his favor, hunted by strange monster-men. Longshot doesn't know anything about Earth. Doesn't know where he came from, how he got these powers, why he's being hunted.

Longshot lacking any idea who he is or what he's supposed to be doing allows Nocenti to have him drift into a variety of situations. He falls into a job as a stuntman for a reckless director, alongside a stuntwoman called Ricochet Rita. When that nearly kills him, Longshot tries to help a man frustrated with his life by stealing a lot of diamonds. Except actually having the wealth doesn't make the man happy, so he goes back to his family.

He runs afoul of both She-Hulk and Spider-Man, meets the kids that Nocenti used in her Daredevil run, has a mysterious "friend" he met early on, a talking, furry creature that keeps growing larger and more monstrous, turn against him. He meets someone with a power the opposite of his, creating bad luck for its wielder rather than good.

Then Mojo and Spiral show up.

Two things Nocenti introduces, that it feels like most writers subsequently ignored or forgot, is that one, his power only works when his motives are "pure". Trying to jiggle the odds to make himself some bank, or just to show off a little, won't work. The other is, if Longshot's getting unnaturally, unfeasibly lucky, isn't someone else getting equally unlucky? This, more than lack of knowledge of his past, or really even Mojo, is Longshot's challenge. How can he be sure that when he acts, it's for the "right" reasons? Is he fighting Fang to protect others, or because he's mad his friend turned on him? And if his luck being good, so that he's someplace else when Mojo arrives, ends with Rita being tortured and driven nearly comatose, then does he can have business using his power at all?

Mojo's later appearances typically present him as some parody of a TV or movie producer. Chasing whatever cheap concepts will provide quick ratings, as that conveys power in his world. Hence things like "X-babies." Nocenti's original version of Mojo is just as egotistical, and suffers from just as much if not more of an attention span deficit, but he's more delusional, and always cruel, whether unwittingly or not.

Mojo may order everyone to wear masks of his face, then panic two pages later that everyone is stealing his face. He claims the sun, then assumes Longshot is trying to steal it when he arrives on a hang-glider. His very presence brings death, draining the life away from anything around him, making him poison from the moment he arrives on Earth. Adams draws a lot of panels that are close-ups of Mojo's face and head, letting him dominate the field of view, while also showing the wild swings in emotion.

In contrast, Spiral, who hates Longshot and regards Mojo with equal parts contempt and dependence, is usually kept at a distance. Even when she's in the foreground on panels, her face and expressions are usually obscured. The focus is on her actions, the "dance" that allows them to bridge dimensions, or the flashing of her swords as she tries to kill Longshot for reasons he doesn't understand. On a rare occasion we do get a close-up of her face, Scheele colors the entire eye yellow, with just shading to define the retina and pupil, the same as Mojo and Quark, the modified ram with bad luck ability. Longshot's the exception, marking his origin as something separate and outside Mojo's control.

The mini-series ends with Longshot determined to fight Mojo in their home dimension and free all the slaves there. A battle he's seemingly repeated through endless cycles of success, failure, mind-wiping repeat for the last 40 years. Except Claremont almost immediately hauled Spiral and Longshot both into the main X-Books, with Longshot seemingly still none the wiser for what Spiral's beef was with him. Also, any progress he'd made in his naivete over the course of this mini-series seemed undone. Those mind wipes come fast I guess.

Fabian Nicieza's the one who decided Spiral was actually Rita from some point the future, captured and modified by Mojo, then sent back in time to serve his earlier self. Meaning her hatred towards Longshot is that he didn't save her. Doesn't really jibe with Longshot having no sense of his connection to Spiral here, even once he regains his memories, not to mention that seems like too much of a long-term plan for Mojo to undertake. He'd be too jealous of his past self benefiting from all his hard work.

Saturday Splash Page #121

 

"A Winter Murderland", in Step by Bloody Step #1, by Si Spurrier (writer), Matias Bergara (artist), Matheus Lopes (colorist)

A 4-issue mini-series from 2022 about an armored giant who guides a young girl on a circuit of the world. It's a silent mini-series, because while there are sporadic dialogue balloons, they're filled with pictographs, and there's no translation. Bergara's art is expressive and clear enough that the reader can grasp the notion of what's going on.

The silence also keeps the page free for Bergara's beautifully detailed landscapes. The variety sells just how far the duo are traveling. Sometimes we see a gradual transition, the snowy forest thinning into a vast plain. At others, they reach a cliff and things have simply changed. The plain overlooks a wide stretch of narrow pools and swamps, or they've reached the ocean.

With no dialogue or expository captions, the only sense of how long all this takes is via the changes we see in the girl's appearance. From a scrawny, awkward child to a sullen teenager, to a determined, clever young woman. The giant is silent and stern, always pushing her forward, but not unfeeling. It won't let her go back, not one step, but it will go back and pluck a flower for her.

But with no explanation for why any of this is happening, we see distance grow between the two. At the same time, other powers have become aware of the giant with incredible destructive power and the young girl with blood that promotes incredible plant growth it escorts. There is a war of some sort going on, the clean human-looking types spending at least some of their time in vast airship city-castles, while the green, goblin or orc creatures live on the ground below. The precise causes or motives are unclear, beyond the airship-dwellers are quite content to use others to destroy their enemies.

Lopes' colors are more subdued than what Bergara used for his work on Coda. Still rich and varied, but no searingly bright neon bursts of magic or force. While there is certainly something magic about the girl and the giant, this is otherwise not a world of that sort of thing. The people here aren't scrabbling for the last shreds of a once-commonplace power.

The threats the giant defends the girl from are often simply animals that are hungry and see easy prey, illustrated in a wide variety by Bergara. Were-creatures, flame spitting mollusks, giant bugs. Or it's the cold, the rain, the danger of crossing the ocean. The general/prince that attempts to use the girl may recognize there is power there, but his motives are more simple and base. If he didn't have the girl, he would just use guns and the lives of those he can command or coerce.

Random Back Issues #126 - Power Company #2

Hey, it's a rough economy out there. The superhero market is flooded with folks trying to either make enough to get out or make a big enough name to avoid dying in a big event.

The Power Company's first mission is to keep a group of high-tech mercs called the Strike Force from stealing a mysterious stone ring with a big pretty gem from a museum. The gem got hit by an energy blast and out popped a green guy with a staff, riding a dragon.

He calls himself the Imperial Dragoneer and asks what world that the "Dread Master" can add to his dominions. When no one has any clue what he's talking about, he decides they're thieves in the temple and it's time to get to killing.

The team is completely disorganized and getting their butts kicked until Skyrocket - who hadn't even accepted the offer to join - takes command and gets them sort of working together. At which point the mercs re-enter the fray, the brief moment of cohesion is over, and the Power Company get the humiliated.

At least the mercs didn't make off with the "stone doughnut," as their boss puts it. That's sort of a success! Except they stuck a tracker on the dragon, so they'll find it sooner or later, even if their employer - a Dr. Cyber - is kind of a dick. It seems like a time to cut your losses, but you stiff one mad scientist type and so you're blackballed. It's a rough job market for merc teams.

In the aftermath, Witchfire - a musician who uses real magic in her shows - is already looking into music videos and movie deals in case this falls through. Bork's worried he's going to lose his job because he stopped keeping the dragon in a choke hold and got smacked halfway across the city, and Manhunter vanished as soon as the fight ended. As for Skyrocket, she figures they ought to be more worried about the Dragoneer's claims his master would take over the world.

On the plus side, Striker Z's buddy, who used to work for S.T.A.R. Labs before turning to movie special effects, upgraded Skyrocket's flight and power harness. Her parents built it, but they're dead and she doesn't really know how to fix it.

Manhunter checks in. Turns out he didn't bail, he was just busy tracking the Dragoneer his own way: following a big dragon flying around in the daytime. He tracked it to Alcatraz, where the Dragoneer's got the ring set up on a pile of trash. I picture the dragon thinking like a Flinstones' appliance: 'Sigh, it's a living.' Again, rough economy.

The Dragoneer waves his wand and makes a magic sign and says what this world needs is - well, he says a lot of stuff about sin and darkness and a doubled moon, a piece of ice-blue shadow. Doesn't really lend itself to a parody of "Love Potion No. 9." The Power Company's hiding in a fog bank Witchfire conjured up, ready to attack, but Strike Force is on the ground, ready to swoop in once the heroes do all the hard work.

Bold of them to assume the heroes will actually succeed.

In other developments, a woman in a hotel sees Manhunter on TV and is very distressed by it, putting in a call to Japan. And a cop hassles a teen sleeping on a bench in a train station, but the teen's intrigued by a for-hire super-team. She'll end up being the last member of the team, whose introduction we covered 4 years ago.

{8th longbox, 80th comic. Power Company #2, by Kurt Busiek (writer), Tom Grummett (penciler), Christian Alamy (inker), Alex Sinclair (colorist), Comicraft (letterer)}

One-Shot Harry - Gary Phillips

Set in 1963, One-Shot Harry is about a black photojournalist trying to uncover the truth behind the death of a wartime friend of his.

At least, that's what the book is about some of the time. Phillips spends a lot of pages fleshing out Harry Ingram's life, the day-to-day realities of making a living taking photos of ugly deaths, of dealing with white cops who wouldn't hesitate to hit Harry with a nightstick even if he wasn't taking photographs. Additionally, there's a subplot involving a member of a local councilman's campaign that Harry starts dating. Anita's parents are pretty far to the left politically, and a diary with the names of several of their friends has gone missing.

So Harry's theoretically looking for that, on top of investigating his friend's death, trying to finagle work, dealing with the long-term scars of fighting in the Korean War, dealing with the difficulties of his side-gig as a process server, and questioning his career choices. Looming over all that is a visit to Los Angeles by Martin Luther King.

I'm not sure Phillips manages to keep all threads together. Or the plates spinning, depending on which metaphor your prefer. There's a long stretch of the book after he agrees to search for the diary for Anita where it isn't mentioned at all. And that subplot sort of sputters out at the end. But the mystery of his friend's death doesn't really lead to any real conclusion. Harry knows the death wasn't accidental, and he may have killed the two guys personally responsible, but they're just mooks. The mind behind it remains untouchable.

That part is by design, as Phillips often has Harry's internal monologue focused on just how far he can go, even defending himself, when the people trying to harm him are white. Harry isn't of a mind to go a suicide run for revenge, so there's only so far he can go in the society in which he lives. It might also be that Phillips has further stories starring Harry Ingram in mind, and there's further plot development in mind down the line.

There's a trick to adding history of a place without making it feel too much like an infodump, and Phillips mostly manages it. Having Harry as a photog and process server, where he both has to know his way around town, and know what sorts of neighborhoods he's going into ahead of time, helps. I don't know how historically accurate those parts of the book are, but Phillips writes in such a way that it feels like real history.

The only reason I question it at all is that late in the book, there's a bit about Ingram and a childhood friend having dreams of building their own submarine after reading 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Ingram says they would have named it the Fantastic, after the Fantastic Four. Except Ingram's a Korean War vet, so his childhood would have been the 1940s, not the 1960s. It's just a little detail, and I was reading an "advance uncopyedited edition" that turned up at a book sale, so maybe that was caught and fixed subsequently.

'There were two nicks from bullets grooved in its casing and Ingram rubbed one of them for luck, as he always did. He'd brought the camera home from the war. Fleeting was the notion of photographing normal people doing normal things. Where was the kick in that? Melancholy moments like the one he'd had last night he invariably washed away with booze.'