Last updated on November 24, 2013
Hearthstone – Man, Hearthstone is pretty great!
To let you in on a little of my trading card game background, I played a bit of Magic: The Gathering here and there, along with collecting far too many Pokemon and Digimon cards (heck, I can see foil rares of the Digimon card game right in front of me on my desk – they need to go somewhere). Still, I always found the basic concept of a TCG quite intimidating, at least from a monetary perspective. Good cards cost good money, and playing without said good cards put you at a decisive disadvantage. I’m sure a genuine fan of MTG would call this a blatant generalization (as in draft play), but let’s be honest: the system exists for you to buy cards, then buy more cards, then find as many rares with powerful abilities as possible by which to build a 60 card deck around.
Hearthstone avoids many of these pitfalls. For one, it’s a free-to-play online game; that sounds shady, but money merely speeds up the card gathering process rather than “paying to win”. A thirty card deck means only trying for two cards of any one type, and boosters do not (as far as I’ve gone) give you many duplicates. Hearthstone removes many of the strange complications for resource management (no land in decks!) and simplifies the rules to their core essentials. Card advantage still comes into play, but that’s true of just about every card game ever made. The goal, as you might expect, is to reduce your opponent’s life total to 30 (up from twenty).
The fun comes in building a deck with a specific strategy based on the special abilities of your class. Based on World of WarCraft’s class system, your character can attack, perform special abilities, and use cards exclusive to that class. Warrior, my preferred type so far, relies less on defense (though he can add armor points) and more on hard-hitting strikes at the blink of an eye. Many Warrior minion cards have Charge, which means they can attack the moment they come into play, so you can totally surprise an opponent not looking for devastation. Most classes go for a different form of minion destruction, board control, or some combination thereof using different ways and means. All equally pose strategic depth, and all of them last for approximately 15-20 minutes.
As I am not an expert on this genre, I can only say whether the game’s fun from the first time you play. I would argue that a game that isn’t intuitively fun at some level straight from the first time you play (hello DoTA and LoL) contains some fundamental design flaw. In that way, Hearthstone does not fail the test. It simplifies TCG tropes while trying to retain their strategic aspects, and certainly succeeds at low levels of play. One wonders whether it will hold up to competitive scrutiny, though. Time will prove me wrong, I imagine.
Unfortunately, the game itself remains in closed beta, but it’s obviously close to completion in every sense of the word. Just wait a month!
Oz the Great and Powerful – Simple summary: entertaining. Funny. Interesting, I guess.
Honestly, I hold almost no nostalgic, warm, nor fuzzy feelings of The Wizard of Oz in either film nor book form. I would guess that generational gaps caused this, but I remember more Disney films than I do a color movie from 1939 with Judy Garland singing about rainbows. So, when I go into this film, I do not become so angry at so-called “inaccuracies” or “events that aren’t true to the spirit of the original”. Rather, all I can ask is: does it entertain me?
Yes, it does.And by that rubric, James Franco succeeds at making me laugh at kid jokes. The Wizard isn’t anything more than a conman who’s really good at wooing the ladies (and witches, to horrible consequence). I would call this rather dark and violent for a child’s film, but standards change. Still, the inhabitants of Oz aren’t allowed to do violent things, so there’s just scary moments rather than actual on-screen death (or do my eyes deceive me). It progresses well, and somehow keeps a light sense of humor amid the really serious “messiah” mentality happening to, you guessed it, a fish-out-of-water story. No surprises here; that sort of “origin film” crops up in just about every single film franchises currently on tap, and it’s even happening to classic literature now!
But even though it’s totally competent and wonderful to look at these computer generated vistas, there’s nothing in the whole film to which I’m going to distinguish in my mind among the hundreds of other films that I’ve seen in my lifetime. Am I going to prefer Oz the Great and Powerful over, say, the original Wizard of Oz? Honestly, I don’t think people will be saying “you must watch the prequel (and its myriad sequels) to get the true experience!” It reminds me a little of George Lucas’ Star Wars “prequel” trilogy. All of them were perfectly competent and entertaining (bar fanboy whining about how they were older now and didn’t expect Lucas to appeal to children), but they’re simply not as memorable as the original source material. Inherited fandom’s a tricky thing with properties that have existed for so long, and Oz the Great and Powerful falls under a very, very large shadow in American pop culture. At the least, we’ll get a sequel, so we’ll see if they can mess it up and make more people angry.
I’m sure none of this in any way seems remotely accurate to L. Frank Baum’s original novels, as there’s no prequel that he wrote (a modern invention!). Still, it’s just a simple tale of good versus evil, or good people versus those with misunderstood intentions? I’m not sure, that part with all the witches felt really unclear to me. And Mila Kunis, you’re just not a good witch. I’m sorry, it’s weird and I know the cackle isn’t real.
