We’ve all got our favourite franchises, whether that’s Marvel, Game of Thrones, or Star Wars, but one Toronto comic is making a splash by turning them into comedy roast shows – where comedians dress as characters that brutally pick holes in one another, typically at Comedy Bar on Bloor Street West.

Early years

From his schoolyears, Sebastian Fazio was obsessed with the historic Second City, which features training programmes and live theatres in Toronto, as well as Chicago and Los Angeles.

Between 17 and 22 he wanted to follow in the footsteps of famed improviser Tina Fey by becoming a regular performer for Second City, so he took a series of training courses, including improv and writing.
However standup turned out to be his calling.

When working as an usher at the Absolute Comedy club, Ryan Muglunob, a booker and comic, told Fazio he was going to perform on a pro-am night in the New Year.

“I rehearsed all the jokes I’d been writing since I was 18,” Fazio says. “It went well! The audience knew it was my first time so they were super supportive.

“I’ve wanted to do comedy ever since.”

Fazio then honed his craft, taking on the style of various other comics until he found his own voice.

First there was the deadpan Demetri Martin, whom Fazio calls his favourite comedian to this day. Then Hannibal Buress and dark US comic Anthony Jeselnik became big influences.

Becoming the Roastmaster

As a producer ‘The Roast of Sebastian Fazio’ was his first show, but Fazio knew he wasn’t a well-known enough figure to sell out venues.

Then the idea hit him.

“I started getting into Marvel comics that year and the year before, so I thought ‘what if I do a roast battle show of Marvel vs DC?’,” he remembers.

“There’s such a storied rivalry and I have a passion for both sides.”

The show would initially pitch one costumed Toronto comic versus another, though the format has now changed so the comics perform jokes about a number of other characters, who all remain on stage.

After the growing success of Marvel vs DC others themed roast shows followed at Comedy Bar, some of which have sold out the mainstage.

To date we’ve seen characters from Harry Potter, Friends, Seinfeld, The Office, Game of Thrones, Gilmore Girls, Star Wars and Nintendo verbally kick lumps out of each other for audiences’ entertainment.

Keeping it mean

Jokes at these shows can often be dark in nature, similar to a regular roast show.

“You might be able to go slightly further with fictional characters – the person is not real.” Fazio says. “But it’s undoubtedly meaner in a real roast because the stakes are higher.”

Fazio has upset others with harsh jokes at roast shows, though he says he has a thick skin when others are roasting him.

“I’ve never been upset by what someone’s said, even if it’s the worst thing,” he explains.

“My dog died and I told people they could joke about it.

“I’ve only been upset by things off stage.

“When performing the intentions are different – you’re trying to hurt me but it’s for entertainment.”

Expos

Following their success these themed roast battles have entertained bigger crowds outside of Comedy Bar.

For example Marvel vs DC appeared at Fan Expo, while the roasters have also entertained Ottawa Comicon.

“Audiences laugh even harder at expos,” Fazio says. “At Comicon everyone is there for superheroes, so the passion is a lot more evident.”

At Comicon Fazio was advised to keep the content to a PG13, but the crowd were having none of it.

“They kept encouraging us to go darker,” he remembers. “I had a bunch of jokes I wasn’t sure would fly and everyone was shouting ‘do it’ – and when I did the whole room applauded.”

Upcoming performances

At the time of writing the next roast show is Star Trek themed on February 5th, followed by Thunderbolt vs Suicide Squad on February 19th, and then a Roast of the 2000s on March 1st.

In 2023 we’re also likely to see a Pixar-themed roast, while Fazio is considering themed shows for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and James Bond.

Aside from these shows, Fazio wants to record a comedy special where he takes on some of the best roast comedians in Canada – in particular he’d love to battle K. Trevor Wilson.

The aim is to record the show by the fall of 2023.

“I want to challenge people at the top of the mountain to prove to myself and the comedy community as a whole that I’ve got what it takes to stand with the best of them,” he says.

The post Sebastian Fazio, the brains behind Marvel vs DC appeared first on Toronto Guardian.

WHAT IS IT?

A Marvel deck-building video game, but not that Marvel deck-building video game.

IS IT GOOD?

Given its pedigree, it’s little surprise that Midnight Suns is a thoroughly enjoying tactical experience… even if it does drag at times.

WHO SHOULD PLAY IT?

Fans of Brian K. Vaughan’s excellent, woefully overlooked Runaways series. Also, Mister Doctor.

CRACKLE, POP…

I glance down at my newly-drawn hand of cards. Do I play Captain America, who can powerup nearby allies? Or do I go for Magik, whose mystical sword can slice straight through reality and into the pocket dimension of “Limbo”? Do I even have enough energy to play all the cards I need?  I do some quick math: this card has zero cost and adds one energy; that card will cost 2 but can double my attack power. I make my choice: deploying the Captain Marvel card, I score a swift couple of points; it winds up being just enough to eke out a win on the final turn. Satisfied, I grin at my accomplishment and gear up for the next battle.

But enough about Marvel Snap. We’re here to talk Midnight Suns.

CARDS ON THE TABLE

Poor Midnight Suns. A spruced up deck-building video game infused with the Marvel license, its arrival hot on the heels of the mobile game phenomenon of the season, also a deck-building video game infused with the Marvel license, means that Midnight Suns was pretty well doomed from the start. Not that anyone could have predicted this. Plenty of Marvel free-to-play games have come and gone, and I doubt very much that the developers at Firaxis were worried about some random mobile app from a rookie studio made up of ex-Hearthstone devs. Still, here we are: everyone is playing Marvel Snap, with its addictive, turn-based gameplay, rewarding level progression system, and, just as importantly, $0.00 entry fee. The $79.99 Midnight Suns is unfortunately going to be a tough sell.

Which is too bad, because Midnight Suns is quite fun! Snap might carry the Hearthstone legacy, but Suns is from the folks who gave us XCOM: Enemy Unknown. Which, as gamers may recall, is one of the best turn-based tactics games ever made. Midnight Suns is not XCOM, but it has a fairly meaty story, a great use of the Marvel licence and in particular its more mystical elements, and interesting gameplay in which you send a group of superheroes into battle, their actions governed by a deck of virtual cards.

Cards are divided into three categories: Attack, Skill, and Heroic. Attack and Skill cards make up the bulk of each deck: these cards all cost zero energy – here called “Heroism” – and playing them always triggers both a given ability (either an attack or a skill) and grants you Heroism points. Those points can then be used to play the game’s special Heroic cards, though they can also be used in certain instances for environmental attacks or other moves not requiring a card.

Let’s say you’ve deployed a team of Magik, Wolverine, and Blade. Each character comes with a customizable set of 8 cards, for a deck total of 24 cards. Drawing a random six cards at the start of each turn, you’ll find yourself with a mix of Wolverine-, Blade-, and Magik-specific cards of varying abilities. As with the best deck-building games, the cards are thematically relevant, capturing the flavour of a particular hero while also winking at an audience which knows them from the comics or movies. For example, Wolverine, the mutant famous for his berserker rage and healing factor, has cards which allow him to regenerate health or brutally attack multiple enemies at once.

The witchy Magik, on the other hand, brings cards like “Limbo Portal”, “Soulslash”, and “Reinforcement”. The first two are basic cards with which you can knock enemies through portals, in the process gaining Heroism points. The third card, Reinforcement, is a Heroic card which costs Heroism points and allows you to summon an extra hero to temporarily join the battle. Over the course of the game, you’ll unlock new cards as well as the ability to upgrade existing ones. The text written on the cards is still too damn small (not everyone is playing on a 100″ TV, Firaxis!) but eventually you’ll get a handle on which cards you like best, and which ones have the best synergies with others.

CARD SHARP

As has become the rule with Marvel games, the story in Midnight Suns is a rather perfunctory “Big Bad wants to rule the world”, which mostly serves as an excuse to bring together digital versions of several MCU-familiar characters. That MCU adjacency pays off in some respects – Lyrica Okano returns as Nico Minoru from the Runaways TV series! – while failing in others – here’s yet another Robert Downey Jr. soundalike as Iron Man. While fans will inevitably wish that certain characters had been swapped out – Marvel’s insistence on pushing the ridiculous Dodge Charger Ghost Rider instead of the O.G. motorcycle-riding Ghost Rider is beyond me – there’s a decent selection of favourites to choose from. Given the mystical theme, there’s a (welcome) emphasis on magical types like Doctor Strange and Scarlet Witch. That said, Marvel can’t resist the temptation to put Spider-Man, Wolverine, and Deadpool in everything, so they’re here too. Oh, and there’s a brand-new character created for this game, “The Hunter”, a player surrogate whose boring name doesn’t even come close to capturing how boring this character is.

Which brings me to the other half of Midnight Suns. Perhaps recognizing that (some) players might demand more than a series of card battles, Firaxis grafted onto this game a whole other relationship-building mechanic to kill time between battles. These sequences are… okay, better even than expected, but also painfully obvious padding. Ever wonder what it would be like to kick back on the sofa and watch a movie with Tony Stark? Well, better steel yourself for some intermittently funny choice-based dialogue while you watch a series of static images of cowboys, or aliens, or whatever else is playing on the in-game TV. The lack of interactivity in these hangouts gets increasingly annoying as the game progresses, with invitations to play cards (no, there is no poker minigame), video games (there is no arcade minigame), or forage mushrooms (there is no gardening minigame). Look, if you’re really invested in these off-brand MCU characters, you might get some mileage out of this, but all this side stuff winds up feeling like just that: a distraction from the main activity, i.e. actually saving the world.

HOUSE OF CARDS

Midnight Suns is further hamstrung by a litany of sloppy design elements, some of which appear to be conscious choices, while others are clearly just the result of inattentiveness. Why is the font size so tiny in a game entirely built around reading card descriptions? Why can’t I turn off the subtitles? Why can’t I pause during cutscenes?

Some aspects of combat are also confusing: it’s not always clear how long a mission is supposed to last, or the limit (if any) on enemy reinforcements at any given time. It’s also not always clear why some tactics, like environmental attacks, aren’t always available. This adds the wrong kind of randomness to battles, where you’re often left wondering if you’ve got five or thirty minutes to go, or whether you can pull off that sweet combo you were planning.

None of these issues would be as conspicuous if it weren’t for the ready availability of another Marvel-brand card battler currently all the rage. Admittedly, there’s a certain apples and oranges to it all, with Marvel Snap quite literally a game of laying down cards against a static screen (I cannot wait for the inevitable physical release), while Midnight Suns aspires to something properly video game-y, with next-gen graphics and characters who maneuver around a 3D battlefield.

I actually quite like Midnight Suns, and I’ve been having a lot of fun with its epic battles and my ever-shifting roster of magic-infused heroes. Still, I can’t help but feel sorry for Firaxis: in the choice between Marvel Snap‘s six-minute battles and 200-character collectible roster, against Midnight Suns‘s 60+ hour campaign and Discount MCU sensibilities, I fear most players are going to land on the former.

***

Final score: 8/10 Winds Of Watoomb.

Visit the official website for Midnight Suns here.

The post Marvel’s Midnight Suns (PS5) Review: Oh Snap, It’s Magic Time appeared first on Toronto Guardian.

WHAT IS IT?

It’s either a brief and entertaining single-player campaign through a Marvel Cinematic-like Universe, or it’s a grind- and microtransaction-heavy loot fest with a needlessly complicated online metagame.

IS IT GOOD?

The Avengers part is fun. The multiplayer grinding for skill upgrades and costume variants is at best a fun diversion and at worst an obvious ploy to bleed gamers of their hard-earned dollars.

WHO SHOULD PLAY IT?

Comic book nerds. People who liked Endgame but wished it had more scenes of the Hulk distracted by loot crates.

AVENGE, ER…

I’ve long had mixed feelings about Kamala Khan, a.k.a. Ms. Marvel, the nominal star of this year’s new Avengers video game. On the one hand, she’s so obviously an audience surrogate – a comic book geek who gains superpowers and proceeds to fangirl all over the heroes she teams up with – that she can be grating. On the other hand, her awe over hanging out with Thor is believable, and there’s something refreshing about an audience surrogate who’s both a young woman and Muslim. (Plus, anything that will upset the #SnyderCut types is fine by me.)

I mention all this about Kamala because Marvel’s Avengers very much wants players to be “like Kamala.” Not only via its Kamala-centric single-player campaign, which sees her trying to re-form the Avengers in the wake of a terrible Endgame-type disaster, but also in the way it expects you to be as obsessive about collecting as she is. And I’m not just talking comic books, but also gear, random loot, skills, costumes, and a confusing ecosystem of upgrade material that can be purchased for real world dollars.

That metagame can be ignored if you so choose, but then you’d be missing out on the majority of the game, which takes place in a persistent online co-op world. The idea: blast through the single-player campaign, then drop in every few days for an online mission to grind out some more loot.

As for the implementation…

OF GODS AND MINIFIGS

At its admittedly solid core, Marvel’s Avengers is a classic action-adventure game only slightly more sophisticated than a button-masher. In its single-player campaign, you’ll happily fly and smash and hammer and shield your way through a dozen or so levels ranging from forests to S.H.I.E.L.D. helicarriers to space stations. It’s almost admirably old school: you’ll need to smash crates for health pickups, and defeat seemingly endless waves of generic enemies before getting to the vastly more fun boss fights. And, just like Marvel Superheroes War of the Gems or Marvel: Ultimate Alliance before it, the game artificially (and absurdly) balances things by assigning every character the same basic stats: from the Hulk on down to Black Widow, it only takes a few hits to be knocked unconscious. This also leads to some annoying difficulty spikes, where the game overwhelms you, and your PS4 – this game can get seriously laggy, both online and off – with too many on-screen foes.

Looked at from a certain angle, Marvel’s Avengers reminds me of the best Avengers games ever made, namely the three LEGO Marvel titles. For all their kid-friendly aesthetic and easy gameplay, those games understand too well the comic book or gaming nerd’s obsessive drive for collecting, rewarding players at every turn with a new obscure hero (hi Darkhawk!), a LEGOfied recreation of some iconic locale like Dr. Strange’s Sanctum Santorum, even letting you hang out with Stan Lee (voiced by The Man himself!). In merging the best superhero universe (sorry, Distinguished Competition) with the LEGO joy of collecting and building, the LEGO Marvel games hit that sweet spot where there’s always just one more hour, one more level, one more character or costume to unlock.

That drive to collect is present in Marvel’s Avengers, but malformed. Instead of a new character around every corner, you’re restricted to the core and by now too familiar MCU roster plus Kamala Khan. And when you do get to grinding, your rewards boil down to slightly higher punching power and maybe a cool costume or two. There’s potential here – Spider-Man and two Hawkeyes are already on the way as DLC, along with a lengthy list of leaked MCU characters – but for now your only real reward for levelling up is the opportunity to level up more.

INHUMAN CONDITION

For years, Marvel has been trying to make the Inhumans a “thing”. From the start, it was a cheap and obvious ploy to find a marketable alternative to the X-Men, whose film franchise rights were owned by Fox. On TV, Marvel’s Agents of Shield was forced to sub in the Inhumans as a race of superpowered humans persecuted because they were “born different”. There were plans for an Inhumans movie, later downgraded to a (dreadful) TV serial. Heck, Marvel even cancelled X-Men comics and replaced them with series featuring the Inhumans. The ploy never worked – the Inhumans were never as compelling a concept, not to mention brand name, as the X-Men – and in the end it didn’t matter. In 2019, Disney bought Fox, bringing the X-Men and mutants back into the Marvel licensing fold.

It’s easy to see the influence of those pre-merger corporate shenanigans on Marvel’s Avengers, development of which began prior to the Fox/X-Men acquisition. For one, the main plot is shamelessly lifted from the classic X-Men storyline “the mutant cure”, right down to the presence of purple robots hunting down Inhumans with the backing of the U.S. government. Similarly, the heroic Inhumans, like Kamala Khan, are here because they have “sworn to protect a world that hates and fears them.” Speaking of Kamala, you can also thank Marvel corporate for the fact that she has Mr. Fantastic’s powers – when she debuted in the comics, the Fantastic Four rights were still tied up at Fox, and on the receiving end of even worse treatment by Marvel.

The game is a product of the corporate hivemind in other ways, some amusing, some annoying. Annoying: the game’s MCU-like universe featuring discount/off-brand versions of Robert Downey Jr.’s Iron Man, Scarlett Johansson’s Black Widow, etc. Amusing: that the game differentiates the male heroes from their cinematic counterparts by giving every one of them a sexy, sexy beard – yes, even the Incredible Hulk. Annoying: the way Marvel’s Avengers retreads a lot of the S.H.I.E.L.D.-centric mythology that was never so important in the print comics, even recreating scenes and scenarios straight out of the movies (see: Hulk manipulated by a prisoner on board the Helicarrier). And though it’s a small thing (pun intended), the game also repeats the MCU’s mistake of relegating Hank “Ant-Man” Pym to a supporting/non-superpowered role. The man was a founding Avenger, dammit! Let him avenge!

HULK GRIND!

Annoying as that corporate influence is, it’s nothing compared to the game’s reliance on “ISO-8”, “Uru”, “Norn Stones”, and other microtransaction currencies drawn from Marvel’s mobile freemium games like Future Fight and Contest of Champions. In those games, the mix of oddly-named upgrade materials serves primarily to confuse gamers trying to save up enough loot to acquire a beloved superhero. Here, they’re a core part of the microtransaction-heavy online metagame that is undoubtedly the weakest part of the experience.

So far, the online “Avengers Initiative” mode is not worth the price of admission. Aside from the deplorable microtransactions – the game actively invites you to drop $130 for upgrade materials, on top of the $80 it costs to buy Avengers in the first place – there’s not much to see. Missions boil down to “kill X enemies” or “hold capture point for Y minutes”, and can’t compare with the epic set pieces of the single-player campaign. Plus, all characters can be unlocked through the main game (or, less palatably, as console exclusive DLC), so your only real reason to grind is for costumes or stat upgrades – that’s simply not enough, given the time/monetary commitment asked of you. That said, there’s always the looming threat publisher Square-Enix will start hiding the best and most interesting characters behind paywalls or extensive grind quests. Blech.

Online matchmaking is also an exercise in frustration: even though you’re tasked with pursuing set quest lines, the only way to reliably get online is with the “Quick Match” option. This strips your ability to hand-pick missions, and throws you some place random: sometimes it’s where you need to be; other times it’s one of the incredibly bland “fend off 10 waves of enemies” challenges. The launch was also notoriously plagued by bugs, only some of which have been ironed out in post-release patches.

ASSEMBLY LINE

Marvel’s Avengers, the game, is a mostly fun single-player adventure largely focused on getting the gang back together; Assembling, if you will, a team to take on a threat more powerful than any one hero could face alone. Marvel’s Avengers, the metagame, is a mildly diverting exercise in assembling bits and pieces (gear, costumes) over the course of hundreds of hours or – Marvel’s preference – a quick-and-dirty $130 microtransaction or two. While this game has been billed as Marvel’s answer to loot- and grind-heavy games like Destiny or Borderlands, it’s really more akin to the deplorable gacha mechanics found in the Marvel mobile games I mentioned earlier. (Seriously, $130 for an upgrade! That should be criminal!)

At its core, Marvel’s Avengers is a game that dares to reimagine our beloved heroes as a quasi-interchangeable collective of punch-happy brutes who can be knocked out by the weakest A.I.M. soldier. Heroes who are happy to abandon their world-saving quests for the mundane task of opening loot crates. Heroes who sort of look and sort of sound like famous actors, but not quite.

Trapped in a metagame that asks players to grind for dozens of hours to buy a cool Hulk costume or a stronger Iron Man gauntlet, their famous rallying cry, “Avengers Assemble!” is here reduced to “Avengers… must assemble six Uru shards and twelve IS0-8 crystals to power up their Defence Rating.”

Hulk disappoint!

***

Final score: 6/10 ISO-8 crystals, whatever the heck that means.

Visit the official page for Marvel’s Avengers here.

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