Which Spider Man Movie Is Better?

 My wife and I loaded up another movie to watch as she’s on the mend from a brutal cold.  This time we watched the new Amazing Spider-Man reboot.  I never saw it in the theaters, mostly because I just don’t make it out to see that many movies these days.  I wasn’t too keen on the idea that we would have a reboot of Spider-Man so soon after the original Tobey Maguire ones finished, but hearing the issues with the contract, it made sense.  Plus, with the mess of the third movie and the fact they weren’t able to get everyone back for another one, a new look at the story worked fine in my eyes.

I’m not going to get into a huge review of the movie.  Suffice it to say I enjoyed it, and I look forward to the next one.

The big question in my mind after the movie finished was whether I liked the original Spider-Man or the new Amazing Spider-Man better.  I had heard friends of mine offer their opinions both ways.  Once the final credits were rolling I sat back to answer that question.  And I finally came up with: I don’t know.  I don’t know which one I like better.  The Tobey Maguire one was one of my favorite comicbook movies when it was released, and remains one of the better ones out there.  The new one improved on it in some ways, but in other ways it fell short.

So I figured I’d do a comparison of the two movies, talking about where I thought Amazing Spider-Man beat out its predecessor, and where that doe-eyed Tobey Maguire took the prize.

First, who was the better Peter Parker?

Tobey Maguire was hard to top.  Andrew Garfield was going to have his work cut out for him to beat him out.  There are a few things to consider.  First, who had the better look?  For this, I had to give it to Andrew Garfield, hands down.  He had the skinny nerd-look far better than Maguire.  However, Maguire played the nerd angle far better than Garfield.  Garfield’s Peter Parker felt like a normal teenager – awkward around girls, but not really nerdy other than being smart.  Maguire really felt like the outcast in high school.  I think in the end, I’d have to give Maguire the edge here – he just felt more genuine as a nerdy character.

Second, Mary Jane Watson or Gwen Stacy

For me, this was no contest.  Gwen Stacy was far more interesting than Mary Jane Watson.  Much of this likely comes from the fact that I like Emma Stone as an actress more.  Gwen Stacy had her own share of issues.   Parker had almost no issue with landing Gwen Stacy.  It was far too easy for him to do so when he’s supposed to be the nerdy, every-man character.

The other thing in Gwen’s corner is that I am glad to see her in the movies.  I felt she had such an important part in the development of Peter Parker and Spider-Man (the comic series Blue is one of my favorite Spider-Man stories).  That this new series is taking the time to explore that angle is fantastic.  I’m actually hoping that Mary Jane Watson makes her debut in the next movie alongside Gwen Stacy.

Third, which film had the better Spider-Man

This one doesn’t come across as much of a contest for me either.  The new Spider-Man was done far better than the first one.  He does a lot more of the Spider-Man banter that’s such a draw to his character.  And when he’s in action, he feels far more athletic and aerobic.  More than the first movie, Amazing Spider-Man felt like they were going with the Todd Mcfarlane version of Spider-Man, which I still think is some of the best-drawn Spider-Man stuff out there.

Fourth, web-shooters or wrist-webbing-things

I’m going to have to go with web-shooters.  I’m a purist I guess.  I wasn’t really upset when they had them part of his mutations, but having the webshooters helps to accent how smart a guy Peter Parker really is.

Fifth, which film had the better villain

Oh, now this is a hard one.  I love the Green Goblin.  I think it’s impossible to beat Willam Defoe’s performance as the Green Goblin when you’re working with the Lizard.  Though the Lizard did look about a thousand times better than the stupid armored Green Goblin.

Here’s the thing, though.  I think by taking the time to set up the story in a movie or two before introducing the Green Goblin, they’re going to make a Green Goblin that’s even better in the new line of movies.  Still, when simply comparing these two movies, I’ll give the edge to the Green Goblin.

Sixth, the backstory of the Parkers

Okay, I didn’t like this.  I don’t like that Richard and Mary Parker have this old super-secret backstory as spies or scientists or whatever they are.  It detracted from my feeling of Peter as an every-man kind of guy.  It’s like he was destined to do all this stuff because his father and mother developed it all.  It’s too clean and neat a package.  I liked it better when the spider bite was essentially just an accident that happened to him.  Not that his parents were involved in it somehow.

Seventh, the better Uncle Ben and Aunt May

I’m going to split on this one.  Uncle Ben was better in this movie.  Aunt May was better in the original one.  I never got the close feeling with the new Aunt May I did with the original one.  And the flip-side is that I felt more like the new Uncle Ben.  His “with great power comes great responsibility” speech was better, and the way he met his end was more powerful.

Eighth, why does he keep taking off his mask

Yeah, really?  This kinda pissed me off.  By the end of the movie, at least three people knew Peter Parker was Spider-Man because he told them, and then a dozen or so others knew it because HE KEPT TAKING OFF HIS MASK!  Why?  It makes no sense and it just frustrated me.

Ninth, what about the supporting characters

Where was Harry Osborne?  He was as big a part of Peter’s growing up as Gwen was.  On the other hand, I think this version of Flash Thompson was far better than the previous one.  He and Peter Parker did hang around in the same circles, though Flash did make fun of Peter a lot.  Seeing Flash wearing the Spider-Man shirt at the end of the movie was great – I liked that touch of how much Flash respects Spider-Man.

So overall which one did I like better?  Unfortunately this exercise did not help me at all.  I’m still left without a clear-cut favorite.  I see more potential with the new series than the old series had, given that they are building more relationships over time, and are holding the best Spider-Man villain until later.  But it’s not a movie without its faults.

What about you guys?  Any of you have strong opinions one way or the other?

Movie Review: Brave

My wife has been battling a nagging cold for a while.  She finally fought it off only to have it return again this weekend.  We canceled our weekly roleplaying and I went out and bought Brave for her to watch so we could have a quiet evening in.

I wanted to see the movie a while back but never got out to the theater to do so.  We’re both big fans of Pixar movies, so we had high expectations.  The movie hit everything we wanted.

The plot is pretty straight forward (as most children’s movies are).  A young girl wants to rebel against her overbearing mother and forge her own path rather than doing what her mother wants.  Being a child, though, she is constantly overruled.  As the daughter of the king, she has come of age to be betrothed, and the local clan leaders all bring their sons to fight for her hand in marriage.  She is furious about this and enters the contest to win her own hand, defeating the boys and nearly driving the clans to war against her father.

Her mother tries to mend situations as her daughter fights harder to get away from her.  Neither one sees the value in the other.  Finally, the girl flees the castle to try to find a magical way to change her destiny.  From there, things go awry and the mother and daughter have to learn to respect the differences in each other, and both grow as a result.  (I won’t get into the details in case you want to see it yourselves).

I have to say, overall I enjoyed the first half of the movie a bit more than the second.  Once the princess heads out to carve out her own destiny, the story moves out of the realm of having her solve her problems in a normal, relate-able way and into the realm of magic and mystery.  Not altogether bad, but I was much more interested in seeing the conflict between the mother and daughter resolve with some basis in reality rather than through the help of a grand adventure.

Overall, it was a lot of fun.  A very cute movie (the three younger brothers are fantastic) with a good, original story.  Even with its faults, I did enjoy the movie thoroughly and would not mind seeing it again.  I can already see myself enjoying it with my nieces and nephews.

Improving My Craft as a GM

I have played roleplaying games for almost two decades at this point.  Strange to realize that I have been roleplaying longer in my life than I was not roleplaying.  My preference between running games as the GM or playing them as a character has always tended towards running games.  Maybe I’m just a control freak.  I’m sure my players will attest to that.  But as most games have 4-5 players for every GM at the table, I need to make sure I can offer the best game I can.  Otherwise if I offer to GM a game, I’ll just be overruled by the rest of the group and we’ll go in a different direction.

Over the past few years, I’ve taken a much more deliberate approach to being a GM.  I have always enjoyed doing it, and I feel like I’ve learned a lot from running games, but over the past five years or so, I have been much more focused in trying to hone my GM-ing skills.  Sometimes I’m successful in my attempts, and other times I find I still have a lot to learn.  I thought it might be interesting to look back at some of the things I’ve tried to learn.

The Ice World – Dungeons and Dragons (4E)

I ran this story back in college with Dungeons and Dragons 3.0, and then decided to revive it when the Fourth Edition of the game came around.  It was our first long-term 4E campaign so I wanted to go with a more familiar storyline.

The setting was a world that had been dominated by an ice age ever since the Frost Dragon (one of four siblings) had been slain, unleashing his cold upon the world.  The other dragons fled, leaving their world to slowly decay.  Now the three dragons were returning, but in the form of eggs, and forces around the world were trying to gather them for their own plans.  The players had to nurture the eggs, then hide and train the newborn dragons, then lead them in a war against the other forces that were trying to claim them.

As a GM, I had a couple of goals for this campaign.  Primarily, I wanted to finish a long-term campaign.  So often I would start a campaign, get really excited about it, and then have my interest wane halfway through.  It sounds like a simple goal – just to finish a campaign – but it certainly was something I had to work at.  Knowing I would run the campaign through to the end helped me learn how to keep grasp on a growing storyline.  I used to keep expanding and expanding storylines until I could no longer keep a hold on them, and then I’d give up on the campaign and start anew.  Knowing that I would have to end the game eventually taught me how to be tighter in my storytelling.

The other thing I incidentally started doing was being more flexible in my GMing.  This is something I had been working on in the past, but I decided to push it farther this time.  When a player told me what they were doing, I tried to move away from figuring out why what they were going to do would not work and towards trying to figure out how it would work.  As a result, several parts of the story were vastly different than I anticipated.  One of the players killed off the historian who had a lot of knowledge early on just because he was a goblin.  Later, a daring escape was led down an ice mountain by one player using a second as a sled.

I actually had a harder time with the second part (being more improv-friendly) than with the first.  Running the campaign to completion was difficult at times, but I always knew that I could get it done because I was in control of the whole situation.  It would only really fail if I let it fail.  Being more flexible with players was harder because I had to always be on my toes and suppress my instinct to find the fault in plans.

The Fairy Tale World – Grimm

Grimm was a system I had wanted to run for a long time, but it took me a while to track down the book for it.  The premise was that everyone was a kid, and that the things from Grimm’s Fairy Tales were real.  This was well before the television show of the same name, so if you’re thinking it’s going to be like that, you’re a bit off.

The idea of the world is that the characters all fall into the Fairy Tale world for whatever reason and play completely in that world.  I wanted to mix things up a little and try a different type of story.  I’ve always loved time travel and the paradoxes that can come from it, so I decided to craft a story working with that as a premise.

The idea was that the characters would travel back and forth between the real world and the fairy tale world.  Every time they returned to the real world, things would have changed as a result of what happened in the fairy tale world.  Slowly the group figured out why that was happening and by the end of the game, they were able to control the changes and set the world back to normal.

In the mix with all of this was a group of adults who were trying to harvest this ability the children seemed to have to reshape the world.  And one of those people managed to get himself caught in the fairy tale world, and was able to start pushing the players around in the real world, dropping them through time.

Sound complicated?  It was.  Having gone through and finished a full campaign, I decided this time to try to test the limits of how intricate a plot I could create and still reach the goal of finishing the campaign.  I ended up with unusual situations of having the players roleplay through the results of actions they had not even set into motion yet, and then having to backtrack in future sessions and get the situations to line up with what had already been done.

My initial storyline proved far too ambitious.  After going through a few fairy tale worlds, I decided for my own sanity I had to cut the story in half and toss whole pieces out the window because, as usual, I had created far too much to work with.  I slipped into one of the hardest campaigns I’ve run where I really had to force myself to keep going.  It started to feel a bit more like a chore than like something to do for fun.  Thankfully my players were encouraging and I cut a few pieces out, restrung the plot together, and we managed to get through to the end.

Lesson learned, though.  I had to be a lot more realistic about my plots knowing that I would eventually have to tie them all down in the end.

The Four Horsemen – Alpha / Omega (and other systems)

I have never really been a fan of gaming systems.  When it comes down to it, I just don’t really care about the system we’re using.  That was never more clear than when I ran one of my gaming groups through a game of Alpha/Omega.  We had seen the game at GenCon one year, and the art for it was gorgeous.  So we decided we had to play it.

Of course, I am the worst at dealing with gaming systems.  So I told my players to read what they felt they needed to know, and we’d go from there.  Shortly after, I got fed up with the crunch-heavy system and we adopted a different system.  That one lasted longer, but we ended up piecing one together that worked by the end of the campaign.

My goal as a GM for this one, beyond playing the game to an end, was to play a modern-ish (really more like a Blade Runner style world) game.  I love modern settings.  Supernatural, Buffy, etc. are all shows I love.  But there’s a problem when I try to translate those to roleplaying.  I suck at running modern games.  I feel stupid when I’m trying to justify a group of people infiltrating an office building and killing a businessman and then escaping because… well… what kind of sense does that make in this world?

This was an attempt to get that monkey off my back and run a modern game where the players could do outrageous things.  Because let’s face it, they do outrageous things in every genre.  It’s just easier to hide them in other genres.

The other thing I wanted to do with this game was try my hand at running a series of shorter stories.  One session “crimes” to solve with a vague overlying plot.

I managed to succeed at running the full game in a modern setting with a Supernatural bend to it, but outside of two or three sessions sprinkled here and there, I did not succeed at a “monster of the week” type campaign.  My tendency to want a large inter-woven story took over and I started piecing together parts of the small stories until they all became one large plot.

The Gods – Scion

Having proven that I could run a modern game, I wanted to return to see if I could run it a second time.  I was trying to run a superhero game, but instead I went with Scion and gave it a more mythological bend.  The premise of Scion is that the characters are literally the children of gods of a certain pantheon.  In this case, the Greeks.  But I wanted the players to go through a bit of uncertainty and exploration of who they were.

The plot here involved government conspiracies, the old Greek gods, other Scions of the Greeks, other nations and their Scions, and the Titans of old.  I tied the story of the world back as far as WWII with the allies and axis utilizing different strains of genetic manipulation to try to create super-soldiers, of which the characters were the third generation of the American version.

After Alpha/Omega, I decided I was going to pick a single system and stick with it all the way through, even if I didn’t end up liking it completely.  Also, after having a couple of great scenes from Alpha/Omega involving the back-stories of a couple of characters, I decided this time I would make sure to tie every character’s background into the plot one way or another.

I was able to achieve this with varying degrees of success.  Interestingly (though not surprisingly), the characters who were tied in more tended to enjoy the game more.  One character in particular I struggled and struggled to get involved in the game.  In the end, his was the least involved character, and I think he was fine seeing the campaign end.  Even still, the other characters got pretty well involved and enjoyed the game.

Legend of the Five Rings

This is the campaign I am currently running.  I had a few goals when I started planning this one, and time will tell if I manage to hit any of them.  A lot of my goals are based on refining previous goals, or continuing my more successful plans through to this campaign.

Foremost, I am building a campaign that hopefully does not favor one style of character over any other.  Specific sessions may favor one over the other, but I am trying to make sure every character type has equal time to shine.  In the midst of a battle to save a city, for example, the courtiers were able to negotiate treaties with other clans present to get assistance to have direct impact on the battle.

I am also taking my plans from Scion to incorporate every backstory.  Since I consider myself having failed at that last time around, I am endeavoring to put more effort into it this time around.

Finally, I am trying to plan for the long term a bit better.  Every session I create I have a list of things I am trying to accomplish beyond moving the plot of the game forward.  One session may have the following notes on my page: make sure the characters meet X and don’t like him, make sure they learn about Y event happening elsewhere, and make sure that Z happens near the characters.  I may not have devised exactly how those things are going to happen in the session yet, but keeping those in front of me helps to make sure my long-term plans actually work out well.

To achieve all of this, I have had to be far more organized than I have been before.  I am writing out all my sessions, recapping them afterwards to make sure I don’t forget what happened, and writing notes to myself for what I want to happen in the future.

While not a goal, one interesting thing about this campaign is that for the first time in a long time, I will actually know the system better than the people playing it.  I have found this is very advantageous.  Often in the past I have favored story over the crunch that goes along with it.  It might just be my point of view, but I feel like I have a lot more internal consistency this time around because the system of the world is consistent and something I understand.

I like to consider myself a good GM.  My players tend to enjoy the games I run.  We still tell stories about different sessions or scenes that we remember.  But the same as any skill out there, becoming a better GM requires one to put in the effort.  Not all of my campaigns have high responses from others, but the more I run, and the more I vary my style each time, the better I get and the more I enjoy it.

Comic: Supergod

I had an opportunity to stop by a comic store earlier this week and I picked up one of the new Walking Dead paperbacks I hadn’t read yet.  While I was there, I spotted another book called Supergod.  I’m a big fan of self-contained superhero stories, so I figured I’d give this one a try.

The premise for the book is that the nuclear arms race in our world was replaced by a superhero arms race.  Each nation raced to get a powerful superhero of their own to deter others from attacking them.  Each one is created differently and has vastly different abilities and powers, but one thing they all share in common is a detachment from humanity.  These aren’t your Spiderman or Batman type heroes.  These are more like Superman, except without any attachment to humans.  They are on a level entirely beyond humanity and tend to value humanity as we value ants.

The story unfolds as one of the superheroes is accidentally unleashed and begins his own goals and methods, which slowly become clear over time.  Other superheroes are crafted and eventually some battle against others and humanity is left in the wake.  Watching how some of them behave is startling, and the battles are interesting if short.

Actually, I would have to say that’s the biggest problem with the book: it’s short.  It’s roughly five issues all told, and spans decades of development and warfare.  Had this book been three or four times its size and actually had the chance to go through a lot of the progression of the story, I think it would have been much better.  As it is, some of the superheroes are only given a few pages of development, and then their battles take a single page or two.

The story is told from a person alive during the aftermath of everything dictating the rise of these superheroes and the subsequent fall of humanity.  From the very beginning you see him sitting in a ruined city talking about what happened and where things went wrong.  There is very little actual dialogue apart from his narration, which gives the reader the a detached feeling that mirrors what the superheroes feel.

Overall, it felt like a great series of ideas that could have been fleshed out more.  If anything, it felt like I was reading a skeleton outline to a great story.

Would I recommend reading it?  If you can get the chance to read it without buying it, I certainly would.  Outside of that, it’s a pretty bizarre novel.  If you enjoy things like Empire or A God Somewhere, this is in the same vein as those ones, though it’s not quite as good as them.