Welcome to Sparky's Update, the happiest little whorehouse this side of Texas! Yeeeeeeehaw! Wait... I did a "yeehaw" bit a few blogs ago. And probably a few blogs before that. Eh, screw it. How about a joke about me being a pimp? No? Did that roughly a dozen times? I, uh, I got nothing, folks. Let's just pretend I said something witty, have ourselves a little giggle, and get started with this damn thing.

I've been mostly playing Dragon's Dogma: Dark Arisen as well as trying to polish off Omerta, but I feel like I've covered those games plenty. I finally found a few of those fancy shmancy teleportation stones in Dragon's Dogma and am having a much easier go of it. Folks, if you're going to start playing that game, let me give you a little advice - go out of your way to find the southeastern shops in the capital, and keep an eye out for rings of stone wherever you travel. It will make life much, much easier for you. As for Omerta, I think I'm pretty much done with it. The last mission is just brutally difficult, to the point where I just threw my hands up and said enough. Someone who could read the mini-map would have a much easier time with it, but me, I'm done. Great game, love the combat, love the setting, love the absurdity of it all. Definitely one of my favorite games of the year so far.

Other than that, I did start both Fez and Trials Evolution. Both were purchases in one of the recent mega-XBLA sales, and while I regret buying neither, I do have some misgivings about both. I'm also going to be discussing something non-gaming related (gasp!) in my recent subscription to Marvel Unlimited, their e-reader service for comics older than six months. Spoiler - I friggin' love it.

Trials Same-olution

I'm not great at Trials. I'll admit that freely. But I respect and like the formula. I played tons of those stupid little Trials-esque Flash games back in the day (read: when I was supposed to be working), and I occasionally buy some knockoff or another on the iPad. I'll even say this - Trials Evolution is a good game and probably well worth your dolla dolla bills. However, I can't help thinking that the whole thing feels pretty bare-boned, particularly for an XBL sequel.

Say what you will about the travesty that is Joe Danger 2 - at least it tried some new things with its established formula. But Trials Evolution stubbornly sticks to the formula set forth by its predecessor, adding only a few tweks in its presentation and the (admittedly awesome) user-created tracks. Sequels this generation have proven you can play it safe, recycle the basics of a game, and still make something marvelous out of it (see: Fallout New Vegas, Super Mario Galaxy 2, Uncharted 3, and inFamous 2). At no point did I really feel like Trials Evolution was trying for anything approaching marvelous.

I'm sure it was rushed into production by business departments and given a very tight schedule. That's understandable, I guess - MS loves nothing so much as keeping their cash cows makin' the milk, and who can really blame 'em?. But it doesn't make for a very exciting game. Sure, the new backgrounds are pretty awesome (I love the WW2-esque "storming the beach" background in particular). But this game's sole bit of greatness really is dependent upon the people who aren't even getting paid for their incredible work - the gamers.

The Fezmanian Devil

...All right, that one sucks. But every good Fez joke has been done a thousand times before.

I'm going to ignore the recent Phil Fish controversy, mostly because I just don't give two shits. Internet drama, ya'll. Instead, I'm going to be focusing my thoughts on the game itself. Now, I'm admittedly only a few hours into Fez, but I've come up with a good chunk of the game's cubes and I feel like I've got enough of a handle on it to sump up my feelings in a profound, verbose manner. Ready?

Ehhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

Ok, look - I've got pretty mixed feelings on the current-gen 2D platformer craze. On the one hand, I love the return of the Metroidvanias (and yes, I like that term and labelling things in general, so seeeeeeyuuuuuuuuuck it, hipsters), particularly stuff like Dust and Shadow Complex, and more traditional platformers like Donkey Kong Country Returns and Rayman (which I couldn't play on the console due to vision stuff but absolutely friggin' love on the iPad - seriously, go buy that game NOW). On the other hand, I've become super tired of douchey 2D platformers, particularly those with retro-styled graphics or masochistic gameplay. I can't stand Super Meat Boy. I can't stand Braid. Actually, I loathe Braid. It tries to be so damned clever, but in the end, it's just another platformer crippled by writing that thinks it's smarter than it actually is.

I guess I came into Fez holding my nose a bit, expecting the sort of sleazy coating of something like Braid. Maybe that's unfair, but it's not entirely unjustified, and truth be told, it's not a feeling I've shaken entirely in the hours I've played it. Sure, the writing's a lot less uptight and there's more of a sense of playfulness in its design and structure that I like, but I can't help feeling kind of bored with it. Once I figured out the first couple of cubes, finding the rest started to feel like a dull cadence. Bits of cube, bits of cube, bits of cube, treasure chest, door, rinse, wash, repeat. Now, I've heard there's more under the surface, and I'm really itching to get into that. But for now, Fez just isn't holding my attention.

The Rest - Marvel Unlimited

Up until June, I hadn't read a comic in nearly twenty years. It's kind of incredible to write that. I jumped out of comics as a necessity, not by choice. We moved from a large city to a tiny, remote area where the few books to be found were solely in the libraries.

I figure I stopped reading around '93 or '94. Spider-Man's family was back from the dead, War Machine was becoming a thing after Tony Stark's death, and... well, that's about all I can remember, save for an awesome Daredevil cover of him holding up his cane behind the image of the Kingpin on his knees. Damn, comic book artwork is kind of awesome, isn't it?

Anyways, I've been interested in getting back into comics ever since, but I've always been afraid of becoming that thirty-something guy who has stacks of comics next to his action figures. And since I do already have action figures, well, I just couldn't allow myself to go whole hog on the nerdiness thing. So for years, I've been reading up on Comic Vine's wiki, slowly reacquainting myself with the craziness of Marvel comics. Oh, and as for DC? I refer you to my prior comment of, "Eh."

Skip forward to June of this year. I was looking for some new way to entertain myself that didn't involve deviant sexual acts or underground fight clubs. I don't remember precisely what it was that drew me to look up Marvel Unlimited, but I found the app on the iPad, and thought it'd be fun to read a few of the demo pages for the comics in there. So I downloaded the app, and quickly realized that the first three pages (which you can read free of charge if you don't have a subscription) were filler and backstory pages. Well, I did some research, and I found out that the Unlimited app adds comics that are six months or older. I didn't really see the date of the comics as being a problem (still don't), so I decided to throw monetary caution to the wind and invest in a year's subscription.

Folks, I kid you not - it's amazing. "New" comics are added every week, usually including whatever was released six months ago (there are some gaps there, which I'l get to in a second) as well as a seemingly random selection of older comics from various dates in Marvel's long history. At this point, they're about to the second or third comics in the Marvel NOW program, which was their sort of mini-reboot on a lot of minor characters and storylines.

If there's a flaw, it's that the publishing is kind of uneven. One of my favorite newer comics, Scarlet Spider, saw its first few issues released with no clues given as to when the next might be put out on the service. It'd be nice to have some sort of "Coming Soon" feature or a tentative schedule. I know adding them to the app must be a chore, but it'd be nice to have some sort of regularity, particularly for the less-popular comics. The service also has a disturbing lack of Annex, one of my favorite up-and-comers-who-up-and-disappeared-apparently from the early nineties, and as of today, I've yet to find a single Superpro or Slapstick. That's just wrong.

But other than those hiccups, it's fantastic. I'm burrowing into the Deadpool character, going through his earlier solo comic as well as his Cable team-up (Cable's one of my all-time favorites, next to Captain America and Spider-Man). I wrapped up the latest X-Force comics, and found the levity and characters to be superb - Fantomex is an incredible "new" character and I've always enjoyed Psylocke. Yes, I'm a monster for enjoying scantily-clad but well-written women.

It's funny how some of my childhood dislikes remain the same, too. Fantastic Four has two comics - the Fantastic Four and the FF, which stands for Future Foundation or some such. The Fantastic Four comic is pretty much a bore, but the FF is a riot. Johnny Storm picks a regular woman to be the Thing's replacement, complete with a Thing bodysuit. It's kind of awesome. And "kind of awesome" pretty much is all the description Marvel Unlimited really needs.

Too much damn Wolverine, though. I like the guy, but come on. He doesn't have to be in everything.

I suppose that's about it for this week. Join me again next week for cocktails and small talk, why don'tcha?