Devil May Rant

Star Wars KOTOR II Playthrough Pt 3 - Starting Dantooine, Nar Shaddaa, Subquests

noreply@blogger.com (Mirai) — Thu, 01 May 2014 15:13:00 +0000

After messing around in Dantooine, I decided to try another planet out, Nar Shaddaa, and ran into the Visas Marr recruitment plot. I forgot how weird she is. Obsidian games often have that weird Blood Omen/Soul Reaver thing where you look into another character or subplot and find yourself looking into a Bizarro-Home mirror of your own perspective. Pick up enough characters and do enough subplots and you end up in a Hall of Mirrors.

Visas and Darth Nihilius have a Force Bond based upon a trauma inflicted upon the younger of the two. You and Kreia have a Force Bond based upon trauma inflicted upon the younger of the two. Her experience with the other side of the Force caused her to reconsider black-and-white morality. You had an experience with the other side of the Force that caused you to reconsider black-and-white morality. Mass murder of a clan, blindness, warfare, allegiances, the whole bit. And with Visas' redemption (again, presuming canon light side), more is added to the sense of oddness to how so plot-important the Exile is, and more questions are raised as to what exactly the Jedi Order did, and why.

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I don't need to tell you about the famous bug that allows you to skip almost all combat in Fallout by activating combat then turning it off before the end of your turn. I've found KOTOR has similar jankiness in its combat when I got to the Visas Mar fight - I used the menu and Cancel Combat to glitch her into not attacking me, long enough to use every stimpack, shield, and buff I had in my arsenal to win. It was doubly funny since she acted astonished by my skill with a weapon just afterwards, not as though I had cheated like crazy.

It's not as though pre-combat boosters haven't been a funny part of DND games for a while but it's pretty goofy to see it done in Star Wars.

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Atton's storyline doesn't take too long to get through, mostly cause he's the first character you get to interact with, so you can pretty quickly shoot up the Influence chain. It's not bad - in fact I quite like that Kreia tags him as a murderer so you know he's not what he seems right up front - but it gets pretty silly at the end.

The good parts are good. I dig that in a game that presents Jedi warriors and dudes with vibroblades and smugglers with guns and some butch lady with a staff as equals, they actually give you reasons that it should be the case within relative 'power levels,' to use a term I hate. I'll talk about this later. Atton's resilience and his ability to kill Jedi by creating impassable walls of emotions, which are Echani combat methods - something Kreia, interestingly enough, had no problem bypassing - helps give you logical connectivity to how he can be so skilled.

And, in his case, it also sent him down this extremely fucked up path where he was burying himself deeper and deeper in murdering/capturing Jedi to be broken and turned into Sith soldiers. And because of that experience, he's a powerful ally (if not entirely trustworthy). You get all the fun Han Solo-isms with a backstory of how he's a trained Jedi assassin, thus facilitating how he's got backstab scores in-game, and out of game explaining how he's so helpful to your cause. The game and the story work harmoniously together to show you who Atton is, and it's great.

The downside of this is that the end of his story arc is pretty...goofy. Like, I understand the intent - a woman Jedi tried to save his life by showing him the Force, and he responded with violence and murder because he understood nothing else, and that choice he made hurt him so badly it sent him down a path of self-loathing and depression that gave him his false bravado you see as his Han Solo wit. But man, every time I try to get through it, the weird structure and delivery on "I thought I would love to kill her, but in the end, I killed her because I loved her."

It does make sense when you think about it, since only afterwards could he realize he loved someone and his reaction was based in fear, but man it took me a while to unfold that from the line itself. It just sounds really silly.

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You know how the perspective on Superman and DC heroes vs Marvel heroes always has this really weird concept of how characters are 'too powerful' for a story, and how bullshit it is? One thing that Star Wars manages to do - within context of the films, of course - is present the Jedi as special, but not Gods. They can be killed just like anyone else, it's just way harder, if not borderline impossible.

The problem with tackling this sort of subject in a video game is that you have to go in picking which it is for balance's sake - are Jedi juggernauts of combat, or are they just like anyone else? The pen-and-paper RPG set aside the varying classes with their own specializations that work within context, whereas most other games like Force Unleashed and Battlefront present them as combat machines. So you have Jedi Guardians who are skilled melee fighters, Sentinels who are non-combat focused trained, and Consulars who are spellcasters through and through.

But then you have Soldiers who are tougher and, unlike the Jedi, use armor and guns, Scoundrels who get sneak attack bonuses and can stealth with camo gear, and Scouts which were so pointless they added Tech Specialist so they'd keep the combat/skills/support trifecta alive. To compare to DND, Soldiers and Scoundrels fall on a Warrior/Rogue sliding scale, whereas Jedi Guardians and Consulars are more Monk/Wizard. Armorless, specialized combatants with superpowers vs normal guys who are really good at their chosen profession.

KOTOR II continues that by going to great lengths to address why your party members are special, both in the world they have balanced among Jedi and in gameplay. This is what I was talking about at with regards to Atton above. So Handmaiden has powerful Echani fighting disciplines but also Force sensitivity, Kreia has one lopped off hand but also a Force Bond with the Exile, Atton has a past of being a Jedi assassin, Bao-Dur has his electrical field arm, and so on. The game reflects on the characters, and back again - especially when they start class-changing.

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I've always wanted to like Handmaiden. Maybe it's the soft spot I have for unnaturally colored short hair, or tough-ass ladies who are no nonsense, or the fact that she's got an exceptionally great voice actress, Grey DeLisle, aka fucking Azula, from Avatar: The Last Airbender. Which, from her hilarious Wikipedia photo, is kind of funny since she looks more like Mai.

I haven't finished the game yet but I don't remember feeling too strongly about her romantic subplot, despite liking her character a lot. I don't remember what her big secret is at the end of her Influence path, so for now I'm passively curious about the pretty front-liner I've got in my party. And, can I just say how immensely relieving it is to finally have a proper soldier in the front lines? I remember my friend talking about how he got his Consular to endgame of KOTOR II, as Light Side, and would walk into every room and spam Force Storm until everything died, but god the early game is such a slog without a Guardian.

I honestly feel like you're supposed to be a woman, and Atton is supposed to be your romantic interest. Handmaiden's a little too 'tragic past only the hero can fix,' despite all the positive takes when you first meet her. I don't remember anything about Disciple. Bastila, despite the goofy ass romance, was always fantastic. She's funny, tough, smart, and has a lot more going for her, most of which is Jen Hale's terrific Hurley-like British voice. Male Revan felt at home with Bastila - Male Exile is such a weird place to be, where the romantic interest feels token instead of on purpose. This game really wanted you to play a lady.

Meanwhile, earlygame, Atton gets all the best dialogue with FemExile. It's just that perfect level of "I'm really not sure if you're flirting or actually hate each other." And given Chris Avelone's writing history, it feels so much more natural to gravitate towards him. He's got the higher highs and the lower lows - he's funnier, more charming, expresses more overt interest, and meanwhile he's got the darkest of dark pasts and could not be worse for you.

One weird thing about this game - as a guy, he's practically invisible. There's no real connection between the maleExile and Atton beyond teammates forced together. He doesn't carry that same Garrus/manShep bromance that made ME2 and 3 so endearing. I don't know if this is part of the rushed content that never got to polish, but it would not surprise me. KOTOR II could really have used some attention to the finer points.

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Man, getting a lightsaber in KOTOR I was a totally weak experience. The quest tried to be heavy but it felt less like a trial you have to go through and more like a checklist of themes to go across. I don't think even the construction itself made much sense. And worse yet, when you go to Tattooine (I think it's the first planet), you get attacked by Sith assassins, and you go, "Hey, cool, lightsabers!" So now a group of Jedi on Tattooine are running around in Sith robes and wielding red lightsabers, and nobody goes, "Wait, what?" There's no real personal investment into it, nothing you - the player - have to do to, it's just Q+A and then pick a color.

I can't help but remember that dumb scene in Episode II where Yoda is training kids wielding lightsabers to deflect blaster bolts, even though it's been established that getting a lightsaber is not only a big deal, it's the equivalent of samurai gempukku. You have to make it yourself, and it means you're ready to start carrying one. There's a ton of symbolism involved in it as well as the Padawan braid severing that's completely lost the minute eight year olds are toying with plastic tubes and Industrial Light and Morons colors in a green beam coming out of it.

I might feel differently if I tried it again, but I don't remember liking it. There's no real integration to gameplay - it feels like a foregone conclusion that you're going to get one, not so much teased as delayed.

Obsidian took something given little thought put into it and made an entire subquest out of it. You don't just get a lightsaber. You don't even know where to start. You have to get Bao-Dur, who knows how to build one since he's your tech guy. Then you need three components, one of which you get from the Czerka/Ithorian quest on the first planet. The second is through the Visas Marr fight after you try to leave a planet the first time. Another is buried in any number of subquests on Nar Shaddaa. And, from what I understand, it's perfectly possible to ignore most of them and pick it up in another planet. You could, quite conceivably, spend most of the game building up to it, or rush through to get to it early.

The personal investment of how you get the quest - through helping/screwing over the Ithorians, sneaking into a Hutt's personal safe, fighting off a Sith Assassin sent to kill you, and/or meeting a Jedi Master in hiding. These are all the struggles a Jedi has to deal with on a regular basis. Thematically, it's what makes a Jedi become one. And since you are returning to what you once were, you have to build it back, piece by piece.

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Quests are too boring to talk about, so we'll bring that up next time.

Star Wars KOTOR II Playthrough Pt 2 - Exiting Peragus, Telos, Hidden Academy

noreply@blogger.com (Mirai) — Thu, 12 Dec 2013 03:58:00 +0000

Bao-Dur is probably my favorite character in the grand scheme of KOTOR II's companions. Being Obsidian, the relationship isn't perfect and both are reflective upon each other. Both of you are veterans of the Mandalorian War, and while you went off to be exiled from your order, Bao-Dur put himself in exile at Telos trying to fix its completely screwed over ecosystem with his tech knowledge. He buries all of his pain and guilt deep beneath his lucid, calm demeanor, and tries to do something that will save lives instead of ending them.

The Exile and he both have a great relationship - it's not happy, but their camaraderie is tight from the getgo. Atton basically fell into your lap (canonically, I think he literally does by the end), Kreia was in the wrong place at the wrong time and now can't leave you, T3 is a loyal servant, and Handmaiden is sent to spy on you. Bao is the one who you feel actually close to, even though you don't remember him at the start. He is a loyal friend.

If you go Light Side, the Exile is just as tortured by what he did as anyone, even though it was for a good cause. Their pain makes them closer. There's no gallows humor, just a lot of despair and unity in how they both feel like horrible murderers and are doing what they can to make the world better. It's a very unique relationship.
Bao-Dur's revulsion at Dark Side actions is some of the most damning in the game.

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The section section in Tutorial Planet Telos is where the game stops being nice, yet it offers you only Bao-Dur to accompany you, another tech guy. This game really wanted you to play Guardian. I now have two tech guys (T3), a rogue, and a cleric.

Bao-Dur might not be the toughest warrior, but until Handmaiden shows up to bludgeon things to shit with her telescoping pole like the future version of Donatello (it was a real thing in Archie, look it up), he's the best I've got (which is not great). 14 strength is something.

Due to the sheer volume of mercenaries and robots I had to fight to get out of that area and to the Hidden Academy run by Atris, I ended up dropping the difficulty to get through some of the tougher fights, and I blame this entirely on my not choosing Guardian. I worry the game resents me for it - as though the warning at the start of the game wasn't trying to advise new players, but instead refusing was the game giving me the silent treatment and passive-aggressively glaring at me the whole game.

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I like how the game seems to subvert the player's knowledge of Star Wars as a whole. Much of the figures from the first film are in place, such as the wise mentor Jedi, the scrappy rogue, and the villain, but it throws everything into reverse. Kreia is the complete reverse of Obi-Wan's mystery - you literally do not know if she's good or bad. She lands solidly neutral on the character screen and much of her actions seem to imply neutrality is the best path, and she's bitterly cynical of your actions at every turn. Yet, unlike South Park, she always knows where she's going and feels like she has real reasons behind being this way, even if she doesn't say it to you. Meanwhile, Atton's own secret slips to light and he begs Kreia not to tell, calling him a murderer. Han Solo dashing-rogue-with-a-heart-of-gold, he ain't.

From the getgo, Chris Avellone and the Obsidian team make you know this is by them. Kreia's not-malicious-but-not-altruistic outlook is a incredibly hard to get a handle on, and you start to wonder if this is this game's Ravel Puzzlewall; a curious, enigmatic old woman who communicates the game's prevailing themes without you knowing (and spoiler warning, this is pretty much the case). And yet, instead of dying in conflict with him to create a connection to the hero, her hand is cut off, awakening you to a connection that already exists.

Even this early on the writing still fascinates me in how good it is. Characters talk like real people, with Star Wars slang and lingo slipped in. Everyone is a character and feel real, not just a cliche the game felt like it needed to land on (in retrospect, maybe I was a bit unkind to KOTOR, maybe it was shooting to fit in the shoes of Star Wars IV). Even T3, once you get talking to him, has enough of an independent personality to stand alone. He even ends up fleshing out exactly why it is you're running around with the Ebon Hawk, something that, written by lesser talent, would be like the Millennium Falcon showing up in other areas. Even the dumb subquests have gravity and meaning.

People stick to you for a reason, like Bao-Dur's -camaraderie, Kreia's bond that...er, 'Forces' you to stay with her, and T3's direct order given by Bastila herself. The only one who seems to not really state why is not revealed other than some vague mention of your presence and maybe the sorta-friendship he has with you, which (in true Obsidian fashion) I seem to remember being mostly bullshit. Everyone has their reason for what they do. There's no dumb shrug and "guess I'll hang with you now, got nothin' better to do."

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The dialogue in this game is superb, seriously. I think the main reason I feel more kind to KOTOR II is because it doesn't insult your intelligence - I recall picking a Soldier in the first game and the tutorial character calling you "a powerful warrior," which not only shatters the concept of this game trying to be serious, but breaks the fourth wall a bit too. Seriously, who says "powerful" in terms of "fighting"? It breaches even the concepts of fantasy-in-space and makes the whole thing an episode of Dragon Ball Z, where power levels are discussed and measured as a fast-track way to set the stakes.

Meanwhile, in KOTOR II, characters exchange dialogue about The Force, the Dark Side, the Sith, and stuff like it much in the same way characters in Rokugan would discuss bushido, honor, and in-world politics.* It might come off a bit heavy-handed, but this is the universe these characters live in - thinking about the comparison between the two reminds me of when The Dark Knight landed at the theaters and movie critics insisted it was genuinely like any crime drama, such as the film Heat (because, at that time, people needed to be told that in a comic book film). Obsidian writes characters in their world with respect of what that world means for people that would exist in it, and it's so, so nice.**

Take the argument with Atris, a Jedi Master who was present for your exile. She hates you for turning your back on the Jedi Order and running off to fight in a war against their orders. You can (I think, I didn't re-play the segment) either confirm her suspicions of falling to the Dark Side and repulse her utterly, or point out - quite rightfully - you went to war for perfectly valid reasons and neither she nor the Jedi Order have a fucking right to tell you what you did was wrong just because the men in charge were Sith.

And, much like the rest of the game, the dialogue is perfect. You can feel Atris' emotions of hatred and fascination at you and your righteous defiance, in direct conflict with the cleanly good/evil axis of Jedi and Sith that she is indoctrinated in for her whole life, twisted through years of letting these conflicting emotions just sit and boil. I'm not positive, but it feels like a Hunchback of Notre Dame situation - everything Esmerelda (Exile) does, Frollo (Atris) was raised and told that he should hate and be repulsed by, and yet they can't help themself to be both attracted and fascinated by it. Esmerelda's "disgusting" sexual display and publicly calling him out repulses him in ways that make his pants feel funny.

The Exile went to fight in a war rashly based on what she believed the right thing, siding with Sith Lords (Revan and Malak) for the purposes of saving lives by stopping the Mandalorians. This concept, fighting in a war led by evil to stop other evil, completely undoes Atris' black-and-white view of morality and the Sith and Jedi. Inside, she's forced either to reconsider her understanding of it all, or take her aggression out on the person who created this paradox. I wonder which she's going to pick!

The difference being that while Frollo just thought about it really hard, then convinced himself that it was okay because he was a devout Catholic and he'd just burn her alive if she didn't fuck him and it's alright, Atris...well, I've still got my fanfiction, but I don't think it's going to turn into a Jedi lightsaber duel that ends with lesbian makeouts (or in my case, straight ones).

*Rokugan being the fantasy world based on Japan, Korea, China, and the like. It might sound like a fetishized asian wank-sock, and the concept of Bushido doesn't help, but it's actually a very fully realized fantasy world that I like quite a bit.

**Holy shit I just made myself think of Chris Avellone and the Obsidian team working on a Rokugan wRPG and I think I need to clean myself off now.

Screenshots are taken from Google Image Search, I'm still working on a widescreen hack and haven't started taking screens yet.

Star Wars KOTOR II Playthrough Pt 1 - Tutorial and Peragus

noreply@blogger.com (Mirai) — Mon, 09 Dec 2013 05:11:00 +0000

I ended up going Jedi Consular, male, for my first character, mostly because - despite that I know that lady Exile is canon - I really remember liking Handmaiden, and I want to see about pursuing a romance with her. Atton's great and all, but I'll leave that to future playthroughs. Besides, I've always liked playing 'myself' in these games, or at least as close as I can ever be to myself, IE the reactions I am drawn to first.

I'm a sucker for en media res, through and through. So when the game starts and you control T3, the astromech from the first game, on board the Ebon Hawk which has been completely wrecked, with Kreia (seen only as an unnamed old woman) and your character in the medbay, I'm already going, "Oh this is going to be good."

Anyone who's playing this game for the first time is already blown away, but the fact that it features iconic details from the last game here makes it even more confusing for returning players. How did the Ebon Hawk get here? Did T3 steal it? Where did they come from? How long is this after KOTOR, anyway? Is Revan around? Are you Revan again? Where's Bastila? Is Carth far enough away you can't hear him?

It's an effective tutorial too. T3 has a lot of charm I don't remember him having in the first game, and his determined work to saving the day is enjoyable. There's no tension and panic, of course, but there's enough questions that it doesn't matter.

The first game I remember tried something similar, with a sequence featuring you as a soldier on a ship transporting Jedi Bastila Shan, before getting wrecked and crashing on Taris with someone nobody cares about. However, the first game's lack of urgency on Taris compounded with Carth's irritating character to make the whole intro so obnoxious as to be a chore. It, among the corny writing, is one of the reasons I'm not too compelled into playing it first. Don't get me wrong, getting the sexy voice of Jennifer-Hale-as-Elizabeth-Hurley super flustered at me through flirting was a treat, but there's little beyond her. You know, it's just archetypes like Mission as the scrappy teenager, Carth as the dignified soldier, Jolee as three-days-from-retirement, and HK-47 as....well, okay, HK was a bright spot too, but he's in this one, so he doesn't count.

One thing I always thought was a nice touch, as someone who played D20 Star Wars, was the hybridization in the first game. You started off on the first world as one of the three non-Jedi classes - Scout, Soldier, or Scoundrel, and through the game become a Jedi and hybridize the classes. It sounds silly, but since each one get perks to keep pace with Jedi (because Star Wars never cared about realism, so you shouldn't either), Soldiers get natural defenses, Scoundrels get sneak attack bonuses, and the like. Meshing a class for optimization was a ton of fun, even though Jedi were so strong you'd end up intentionally finishing the game at a lower level to get more Jedi levels. Here, the whole system replaced with Jedi prestige classes, which serves the same purpose (picking between sneak attacks, combat bonuses, more Jedi powers, etc) while still initiating the whole "Exiled Jedi" thing.

I quickly was starting to regret my choice for Consular. Having played the games enough, I figured I could figure out how to make the game work for me, but I forgot that the D20 system is entirely based upon Dungeons and Dragons party lineup. Your warrior, your support, your rogue, your mage. With me being the support-class Consular and Atton running Scoundrel with double-pistols, I found myself getting my shit kicked in every fight. The addition of T3 later didn't help, and Kreia herself is just a Consular anyway, so I have a party lineup consisting of two White Mages and two Thiefs. Shortest straw drawn has to wear armor and throw away all their best abilities, and yes it was me.

I know it's old hat by this point but if there was ever any doubt as to how Star Wars as a whole - not just this game series, but the entire franchise - is not sci-fi, I hope this game and the SW D20 system both cement it. Instead of picking locked doors, it's slicing doors. Instead of journals, it's datapads. Instead of winches and gears that control the bridge, it's a computer console that opens the bay doors. Instead of stealing a horse or a sea ship, it's a star cruiser or shuttle.

The components of the first movie were heavily drenched in cliche to draw sharp contrast - the whole point of seeing Obi-Wan guide Luke to defeat the evil Vader with a scoundrel with a heart of gold named Han was not to see how it ended. It's that a wizard fighting an evil wizard with his apprentice of magic and the princess and the dashing rogue isn't in Not Medieval Europe, but in space, was the reason to go. It wasn't until the later films and the expanded universe let this concept breathe into its own vibrant universe.

Seeing this pen and paper game engine created for Tolkien the RPG, put to Star Wars, then translated into a computer RPG along the vein of Baldur's Gate, is such a harmonious coming-together I can't believe it took Lucasarts so long to let Bioware have the license.

Star Wars KOTOR II Playthrough Pt 0 - Preface

noreply@blogger.com (Mirai) — Mon, 09 Dec 2013 01:57:00 +0000

Not sure why I decided to do this, but what the hell, I've recently acquired KOTOR II in a Steam sale since I've had a huge lust for Star Wars lately. And, with that, I found I have a lot to say about the creation and substance of KOTOR I and KOTOR II, so I'm going to embark on a long, segmented chronicle of my journey playing through it.

This is Part 0 because it's not really a chronicle of the experience as much as a few short words to detail my experience and what I'm going in with.

For starters, it's one of the internet's most common knowledge that there were huge chunks of this game completely gutted for a last-minute rush to the Christmas deadline. For more, I turn to you with a Kotaku article:

Although KOTOR II was released in December 2004, it was never quite finished. Deadline restrictions forced Obsidian to remove a great deal of content—planets, scenes, and plot points were all left on the cutting room floor. Crafty modders would later find and restore this content, as Obsidian left it in the game's source code, but back in 2004, it was all just scrapped.

So why was it all cut?

"What happened was—and as a lot of these things happen, no one means anything nefarious, no one means anything badly or anything like that—what happened was we were on the track to get done for Christmas, and the game was looking really good," Urquhart told me. "I think there was some surprise within LucasArts that we were doing as good a job as we were. I think there were some parts of LucasArts that were worried that ‘Oh, this new developer and they're gonna fuck it up like all new developers fuck everything up.'

"And so in early 2004 they took a look and they were like, ‘Wow!' Their QA was playing it, and they were like, ‘This has a lot of potential: let's move it out, let's give it time.' So they moved it out to the next year."

Urquhart was perfectly fine with that decision, and he changed the project's schedule to reflect that new 2005 release date. But he forgot the cardinal rule of dealing with executives: make sure everything's in writing.

"On our side we didn't make sure that we had the contract changed," Urquhart said. "And then post-E3 I think financially something happened—I don't know what it was. And we got the call and they said it has to be done for Christmas... Again, I don't think this is anything nefarious, it just happened. Some of the onus is on us: we didn't get the contract changed. So we had to make this decision: get in trouble or get it done."

Yeesh, talk about hindsight. It kills me thinking what this game could have had in it if Obsidian got to do whatever they wanted. And so, according with what the game was Supposed To Be, I'm going pretty barebones with minor exception of The Sith Lords Restored Content Mod, a few texture packs, a Widescreen mod, and a mod that makes the lightsabers light flicker look like the one from the old movies (I'm a purist).

EDIT: A complete list of mods that work with TSLRCM can be located here. The lightsaber mod I mentioned I believe I found here. (It's hard to remember).

Additionally, now is a good time to talk about the original KOTOR - to be honest, it's not great. The amount of critical acclaim it received might have been overwhelming at the time, but Attack of the Stupid Name had come out just one year before, and, well, beggars can't be choosers. This phenomenon would be repeated a few years later with Revenge of the Sith being not offensively terrible and therefore gaining 80% on Rotten Tomatoes, despite the terrible dialogue and being directed by George Lucas.

I can't speak for certain but maybe the writers at Bioware had been conditioned on some kind of volunteer Clockwork Orange procedure and thought that campy, corny dialogue was some sort of Star Wars staple. Sure, Han Solo yelling about "the way you feel about me" wasn't romantic gold, but at least it didn't involve Clark-Gable-written-by-idiots lines like, "Shut up and kiss me, you babbling fool!" Tycho of Penny Arcade (yes, I know, but listen first) once called it "a bad game with one really great plot twist," which I feel is an accurate assessment of what the game is today. The combat animations are choppy and break, the combat's kind of boring, the plot is kind of silly, the dialogue is corny, there's no real 'life' to the game beyond watching talking heads, but overall it was just a good game that didn't age especially well.

Age was one of the main things that made me not want to play this game - a game I thought looked okay on the original Xbox, even if I downscale my expectations and go into a decade in the past, is going to look like garbage today. And what kind of old-game bullshit is it going to pull? I still remember getting frustrated and quitting Bioware games only a few years old for a lack of appropriate autosave.

Speaking of which, my experience with this game is limited. I remember a few bits and details, but I never finished my original Xbox version when it first came out due to, well, fairly obvious reasons - not only was the game horrendously buggy and kept crashing and breaking on me, the game's frustrating missing content was agonizing. Watching quests literally just end for no reason and doors that are supposed to be open go "nope!" was the most frustrating thing, and between the two I just dropped off after a few hours.

I'm still familiar with a decent chunk of the plot, but it's all foggy and I'm kind of excited to play this game for the first time - or at least enough of a 'first time' that I will be surprised by sequences.

And, lastly, if you haven't yet, the first two volumes of the Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic comic are completely fantastic, at least before they completely changed creative teams and the series underwent a dramatic shift for no reason. It, as well as this, are the main reasons I love the KOTOR universe. It's a universe where huge chunks of it have nothing happening, and there's infinite canvas to paint upon.

Bioshock Infinite Sorta-Review

noreply@blogger.com (Mirai) — Tue, 09 Apr 2013 08:26:00 +0000

Bioshock Infinite is a good game. I'm just going to say that because I feel like if I don't hang that disclaimer up, I'm going to have rocks thrown through my windows by the time this hits publish. Because as much as it's a good game, as much as it has a lot of really interesting ideas and tends to snowball you with a lot of sights and sounds, I am really, really let down by it.

At first I felt like I had the issue of overfamiliarity. Instead of being in an underwater city full of magic powers and gunplay where the protagonist, bad guy, and support character are not quite what they seem, I was in a skyborn city full of magic powers and gunplay where the protagonist, bad guy, and support character are not quite what they seem. But let's be slightly more fair to it and Ken Levine – we are, after all, not playing Space Marine Wacky Adventures. Bioshock is in the title, and perhaps these things all come with the territory of being a Bioshock game, in the same way that Tomb Raider is inevitably about Lara Croft climbing and shooting.

But even then, Bioshock was a landmark because everything just worked. Anything that was in the game had a reason – the science-softening microwave in the form of ADAM allowed the rest of the game room to work, and everything that surrounded it tied into the central theme. Ryan's objectivism built a house in which genetic modification could flourish, but it inevitably collapsed as the abuse ran rampant, and Big Daddies served as both an ADAM tool in-game, a service in the game's world, and a metaphor for the downfall of Rapture.

Meanwhile, the equivalent to the Big Daddies in Infinite are giant clockwork robots with gatling guns that spout patriot mantra. Subtlety? Bioshock Infinite seems to say, What's that? If you didn't like our robot soldiers, try our blue-robed racist KKK knockoffs who worship John Wilkes Booth as though he were a golden idol for his work assassinating Lincoln.

It's like the creators never even played Bioshock – all sense of subtlety and world building feels like it's been dropped in favor of more gunplay and big dramatic events. Elizabeth's powers don't even really have much of an explanation that feels in line with Bioshock, almost as though they weren't sure how to explain it, so they just gave up. The presence of ADAM in Bio allowed for the existence of Plasmids. And in Infinite, there are Vigors, which allows the same effect. Now, how did Vigors get created? Well, good question, one that seems more an afterthought than anything, like they saw Elizabeth's powers that they didn't explain thoroughly and went, “YES! A loophole!”

Being fair, maybe the lack of subtlety was the point. After all, Rapture was about the power of the individual rising above, and that probably sounds pretty good if you're fourteen years old, so I can understand how it would come about there. But Colombia draws a sharp contrast by being upfront about its horribleness and how completely awful the entire two-thirds and slavery laws were. For that, in fact, I have to commend it – the barbaric way I ripped a man's throat out, after the drawn out intro of colorful utopia, honestly surprised me, and being shocked by Bioshock turning horrifically violent is like being surprised when Superman saves Lois Lane. It's no shocker this trauma only happens after you're asked to, well, stone an interracial couple to death. It is, no joke, one of the best moments in the game, and it's the first hour of gameplay.

And yet, when you get down underneath the polished presentation, the game feels a bit erratic in its focus. Bioshock, at its core, was about the folly of Randian objectivism. What is Infinite about? American exceptionalism, sure, but you don't have to dig very deep to find out that racism is bad, and then the black lady rebel leader turns out to be completely insane and homicidal (which tends to be a pretty significant issue), in which case so much for that. Is it about power corrupting? I can't tell, because after that the entire political conflict is dropped and it hopes you forget in the rush to find out what's behind all the mysteries. The end story is wrapped up well, but I find myself wondering what I was supposed to take from it. Was the theme of the story just set dressing, not really meant to be played with conceptually?

Daniel Joseph says that it's all about extremes at war, and how the middle – the working class – don't care about the conflict because they want stability, but (and I say that with full respects to Joseph) I don't agree because it feels more of a biproduct of the game's creation than its real point. Levine said from the beginning he was inspired by the Occupy protests and the Tea Party, but politically neither of them are as mercilessly evil like Comstock, nor are they as psychotic and bloodthirsty as Daisy Fitzroy. What, precisely, is Infinite's stance on this political agenda?

In the end, all I see Infinite telling me is, “Both sides are wrong.” I saw the post-rebellion civillians of Colombia evacuating for about ten seconds, and Booker mentioned offhandedly they were going “anywhere the Vox aren't,” and after that, the game barely mentions it, not even when the civil war has torn the city apart.

There are buckets of issues with making jingoism, xenophobia, and religion the focus of a villain. There are two sets of buckets of making the lady of color and revolutionary just as crazy and psychotic as the villain. But to introduce that everyone and everything sucks, then simply drop the issue and speak no more of it? A lesson or moral that 'Everything sucks, the end' is a shitty, lazy message, and I really expected more from the brain behind Bioshock, especially going in when he promised that he saw inspiration from hot-button topics of the period. Racism and oppression of the underprivileged are issues today, not just in 1915.

On the bright side, the game probably steals all of the awards ever for Elizabeth, who is probably one of the best sidekicks in gaming in recent memory, and not for the reasons you figure. Sure, she can summon objects as per her realitywarp powers, she tosses you fully loaded guns (so long as we're on about gameplay, that's a nice perk), and that's all well and good, but at her best, she's just a fun character.

At first glance, she seems to be set up to be a quirky maniac-pixie dream girl, replacing romance with a touch of parental care on the part of Booker, and while that turned out to be entirely the case, Elizabeth is everything I ask for in noncombat lady characters – she's determined, complex, shows surprising strength, independent, a lot of fun, and imaginative. There's none of the dainty frailness of a princess in a castle, Elizabeth is a fully realized character, and every moment of ambiguous morals, flaws, aspirations, talents, trappings, and growth all fit to her personality. When she sobs into her hands and lures Booker close enough to club him in the head with a wrench to commandeer the vessel, it makes her genuine moments of vulnerability (with Songbird, or when she attacks Fitzroy) so much more vibrant. Her moments of naiivity early on are endearing, but when her one ally (Booker) turns on her, she becomes cynical and distrustful. She's a complete character, top to bottom.

For what it's worth, the combat of Infinite is just fine for a shooter. The problem is, much like the rest of the game, I genuinely wonder how we got a Bioshock game that plays like this. Scavenging has been a core component since System Shock 2, but now it's been cut down to streamline everything into more gunfights. I feel like there's a bit of a chicken-or-egg situation here; did the lowering of stat adjustments on food render the Take button obsolete, or did they find the game more fun to just Take All at every turn so they lowered the food penalties to make it less frustrating? I can only imagine the next Bioshock game removes food entirely and just has you running over bodies to retrieve ammo.

It seems obvious at first to remove all the side content to Bioshock – like the hacking minigame, among others – to turn everything into either powers or gunplay, but the contrast of doing six different things at once made the hectic and panicky gameplay and dense atmosphere totally enjoyable. Walk through tunnels hearing 60s tunes, see a wandering Big Daddy and Little Sister, get into a gunfight with a group of Splicers, barely scrape your way through, hack a vending machine for lowered prices, get into a conversation with a crazy person.

Instead, Infinite is just a conga line of gunfights cut up with interesting story segments, and the spice has all left. There's optional quests that involve finding keys and going back to the last area and using it on a door you couldn't enter, but it feels like an afterthought, like the sandboxy world from Bio is just gone. Colombia never felt like a big city – it felt like Afghanistan in the clouds, a string of shooter setpieces I adventured to with some nice setdressing. It's just gunfights and magic powers and gun upgrades. Bioshock is now the Bioshock knockoff, in that way, like Singularity before it, even in the specific way it uses puppet shows in place of the drive-in movie advertisements.

The gun-upgrading is still there, but since you're only allowed two guns at a time and have to constantly swap out weapons, each upgrade loses meaning as you frequently have to discard your six-upgrades machine gun and shotgun after running out of ammo. You're never allowed to prefer a gun because of how frantically you have to keep swapping weapons. And there's such a ridiculous amount of guns, the upgrades feel vestigal at best. Remember when the hectic and panicky combat of Bioshock demanded upgrades to keep any level of edge over your opponents? Where is that now?

Why is the hostility of the environment not creating a sense of oppression and terror rather than just making the game into a shooting gallery where I sometimes summon turrets or possess turrets or shoot fireballs? Why is a Bioshock game repeating half of the core mechanics then applying them to a new system? The skyline is there, sure, but in a different game the entire mechanic would have had the whole game built around it.

Are we just doomed to cut down every aspect of an interesting RPG/action game in favor of streamlining the gunplay and turning every game into Call of Duty? Is this really what we want, deleting features instead of adding or improving to them?

It's kind of relieving to see the reception first overwhelmingly positive then, after a spell, collect their thoughts and step away. It's important to try to go in unbiased, and I can understand the difficulty of doing that with a game carrying the Bioshock torch. And I'm really glad. Because as great as the game is - and it is great - the seams where one game became another are showing. And I really want to see the other game more.

I Really Don't Like The Adventure Time Game

noreply@blogger.com (Mirai) — Sat, 29 Dec 2012 07:10:00 +0000

WayForward, you have let me down.

The Adventure Time game, on first glance, practically screamed things I would appreciate. I felt like the last fan of Zelda II in the world, and here was one that was embraced by hands-down my favorite cartoon ever, Adventure Time. How could this go wrong? Beautifully drawn sprites, kickin' music, and a plot that would crack me up.

I don't think it did any of these right.

Core combat felt annoying from the get go, by forcing me to use bareknuckles to fight with. With an absurdly short range, I slipped frequently into enemies, taking more damage and occasionally knocking me into the too-frequent pits scattered everywhere about. Thank god, I finally got Scarlett, Finn's sword, which gave me bonus range, but only provided I had more than one heart (four hits). Which makes a lot of sense, right? Only after you take a lot of damage do you lose your ability to attack from safety.

The annoyance of the clunky and frustrating combat is assuaged by a plentiful amount of healing items, but they're dropped at an absurd rate. After a few combats, you've got more apples than a produce store, and the less-useless powerups go unused as you tank-and-potion your way through. There's a pseudo Earthbound-like aspect of combining condiments with food, but neither is especially useful, convenient, or interesting. Earthbound did the same thing over a decade ago, and it was automatic and fit with the RPG system. AT does neither of these things.

I could forgive annoying combat with a stronger compilation of features, but HIKWYSOG borrows all of the worst aspects of Zelda II and removes all of the compelling points. There's overworld random encounters, but you can't run from them, there is no experience or level progression to grind, and all they do is give you more items, clogging your inventory with a needless amount. Every important landmark has a small level between it, but the quests in this game are aimed almost entirely at the 'fetch' variety.

In every zone you have to run errands before you can enter the dungeon, and not in a fun way, but in an obnoxious way. Collect three of something by talking to famous Adventure Time cast members, then run around and talk to someone they tell you to talk to. Talk to Lemongrab, talk to the three people in the area, talk to the Gravedigger, talk to the Nut King, talk to Mr. Bank...by the time you're done, you've given up on genuinely fighting the enemies before you instead of jumping over them or running past. There is no fast travel at all. You have to run everywhere. There's a map, but it tells you only that there are landmarks there, not what they are or even where travel locations are.

With the 2d combat, the dungeons had a lot of things they could play with, but there's practically nothing there. Most of the dungeons can be cleared in about ten minutes, none of the bosses are especially creative, and it's not so much a 'puzzle' as it is 'hit button, return to previous room.'

Again, all of these things could be forgiven for being a huge chore, but the writing just is...lacking. Not only does it feel oddly out of place compared to Adventure Time, there's no writing charm either. None of the gags made me crack up laughing like the show frequently does, instead most of them are just kind of cute. They also have this odd habit of making a storyline reason for Jake to learn a power, but Finn learns something like the downthrust (Zelda II, again) out of opening a chest. The consistency from the show vanished.

Additionally, the lengths the game goes to put characters into the game starts to have serious dissonance with the show to anyone, not just the hardcore. The most egregious example of this is Earl of Lemongrab - in the show, there's no episode where he shows up that people like him. He only takes over after Princess Bubblegum no longer can be the Princess. So then why does she offhandedly mention that Lemongrab is running the investigation? And further, the bad guy is the Ice King, but he's been in the same category as Bowser as 'humorous once-bad guy turned mild annoyance,' so how am I expected to take him seriously as a villain? And why are Finn and Jake trying to fight him about their garbage? They handwave it as 'It's Adventure Time', but it feels out of place with the writing really missing the AT justifications. I don't understand how Pendelton Ward could have participated in this when they're so haphazard with the canon.

The game just feels so soulless, in every way. The visuals are nice, even if many events happen with a fade-out-fade-in rather than an animation, and the music is great, but everything else just misses the mark. The combat is boring, the dungeons are brainless, the writing can't even make you smile, the plot is threadbare, and the tenuous connections to the show barely exist.

It feels like this was not a labor of love from WayFoward, but instead from their publisher at Cartoon Network Interactive. As though the game was a product that a machine turned out after the entire series and a cartridge of Zelda II was dumped into it - wearing a mask, waving its wobbly arms, spouting "butts" and "mathematical!", begging you to mistake it for the real thing. No love was put into the game, and it shows horribly. I was hoping something with this much potential would be impressive, but it fails in every way it can.

Killing is Harmless Pseudo-Review

noreply@blogger.com (Mirai) — Sun, 02 Dec 2012 01:59:00 +0000

When Fight Club landed in 1999, it was glanced over, dismissed by reviewers, and overall mostly ignored as a confusing mess of a movie. But it resonated with a very large group of moviegoers - since then, it's become a cornerstone of that time period, something that touched a very raw nerve with the men of the 90s. It dealt with a lot of very touchy issues and, perhaps more importantly, never specifically said if they were right or wrong, just that some people handled it in different ways. Many critics who hated the movie called it 'facist', among other things, critically missing the point (in my opinion anyway, as one of those people who was strongly affected by the film).

The videogame industry has been riding the coattails of the immensely successful modern military shooter for what feels like forever. What is about five years in game industry years? It feels like twice that. And now, when all but the diehards have just about gotten exhausted of the genre, we have the video game industry's Fight Club. An intense, uncomfortable, shocking, raw, disruptive game that doesn't gut the tropes we have gotten used to, as much as it exposes them, asks questions, then walks away and leaves them to you.

And, similarly, there is a strong negativity to the game - calling it hypocritical for its dissonant 'a shooter that hates the genre,' or even just dismissing it as 'just a shooter'. With the utmost respect, I can't describe how much I disagree. Spec Ops, to me, is a very important game (the details of my experience I still have yet to publish here). It's a game that speaks to me as someone who liked all the Modern Warfare games, who has grown a bit tired of the military shooters, and puts a very scary, humanizing spin on it. It's not just the big moment that everyone gets surprised by - it's the hallucinations, the disorienting amount of plot shifts, the constant sensation of 'this is wrong,' the fact that by the end, you hate Walker for everything he made you do. For me, it's not even a shooter - it's a horror game, one that suckers you into thinking it's a Call of Duty clone before yanking the mask off.

So what would happen if you had someone who was strongly affected by the game sit down and analyze literally everything in it? You get Killing is Harmless, by Brendan Keogh.

I'm going to just warn from the getgo that this is not the book for everyone. In fact, if you don't know what Spec Ops even is, and are uninterested from the description I just gave you, I don't even think you'll get anything out of it. But, if you played and were as deeply shaken by it as I was, or even just are curious why so many people were so strongly affected, this is worth your $3.

The strengths are obvious - Brendan is a talented writer, and he was deeply shaken by Spec Ops. It's a match made in heaven to have him write a novel-length analysis about everything that is this game. And he's not the kind of person like Yahtzee who has a long, deep-seated hatred of military shooters. Brendan speaks as someone who gleefully loved Modern Warfare 3, even when (in his own words) he had no idea why. His turn of phrase is always entertaining and engaging, and he breaks up the reading of Spec Ops with frequent (but very relevant) asides and comments on similar events, or notes how infrequently other games have events such as the primary characters cracking under pressure and begin infighting.

He occasionally resorts to over-repetition when returning to advancing the game ("Moving on," "We approach..." "We continue..." "We enter..."), but these are minor nitpicks. His writing style is always entertaining and stays focused enough to get the important message home without tiring you of the topic. Almost all of Chapter Eight is discussion about the white phosphorous strike, but it is smartly structured and never feels over long.

Brendan's book is to 'analyze everything' in Spec Ops, and 'analyze everything' he does, even a stop sign at the very beginning and Walker's own name are both foreboding and ominous. That is, honestly, the thing that will drive some people away from Killing is Harmless. Extra Credits said, in their two-parter, that some of the plot structure, fourth wall breaking, and psychological aspects will pull many people out of Spec Ops, as their suspension of disbelief is broken. Brendan, however, seems to revel in it, even when he otherwise shouldn't. Darius Kazemi's review most strongly criticizes this, with a moment where Radioman blames all the violence on video games, and Brendan admits it's unfunny and forced, yet approves of it for being right.

And yet, it's very difficult to feel like the book is worse off for it. Sure, I don't agree that the crows are symbolic, I don't agree that the stop sign is that important, and there's plenty of times where I thought to myself, "You're overreading a bit here, Brendan." But I can't bring myself to dislike the book. It is, at its core, an analysis both on the game, and the man Brendan himself. It's even in the foreward - "Ultimately, this is an act of interpretation." He wants you to understand what he has interpreted from Spec Ops.

I would not consider a reading of Fight Club bad if it makes a lot of statements and suggests things about the movie I do not disagree with. Even the director said in the commentary, "You'll notice how Tyler says the same thing as the therapist earlier in the movie, 'I look around and I see a lot of men...', etc." I didn't think there was anything to that, except maybe that a script/screenplay writer's style of speech coming through. Would I like the movie less now knowing that? Or any of the actors? Or any other writer? Not at all. Fight Club asked a lot of questions, and gave you very little answers. It played with the concepts of nihilism and anti-consumerism, then simply ended the movie. Was Tyler evil? Was the narrator? Maybe, but maybe not. Similarly, Spec Ops is not interested in telling you the answer - it wants to ask you questions it does not have an answer for. Killing is Harmless is Brendan's book about his answers, not everyone's.

Killing is Harmless had a goal of critcally reading Spec Ops, top to bottom. And that's what it did - even when I disagree, it helped me (as it may help you) to understand the game itself more. Even when the book is overreaching or wrong in whatever he has conceived, even when it misses things I believe (such as how Extra Credits says it used the aged gunplay to give the player a sense of 'wrongness' early on), even when the book is probably just objectively wrong, and you will find these moments....Brendan was successful in his goal.

Short Thing On #1reasonwhy

noreply@blogger.com (Mirai) — Thu, 29 Nov 2012 06:24:00 +0000

Have you seen this woman?

This is Jade Raymond, and during 2006-2007, she was everywhere, promoting Assassin's Creed, of which she was a producer at Ubisoft. At the time, she was 32, a grown woman, a graduate of Marianopolis College and McGill University's computer science program, a veteran from Sony Online's first R+D group, a producer on The Sims Online, and an enthusiastic gamer and game developer.

Jade is very devoted to her work, and any interview you find from that time will usually feature her talking about Assassin's Creed, but not just in terms of play, but AI, world building, historical accuracy, and the like. Did Ubisoft put her out there because she is a very attractive lady, or because she knew the most about their product? Was it because Assassin's Creed was her creation or idea? Or was it because she was the best PR face they had on hand? Nobody really knows. But she was always there, doing interviews, giving presentations, sneak peeks, hands-on demos.

But the games press five years ago was even more stupid than it can be today. A rumor started of her posing for Maxim magazine. Kotaku's own Mike Fahey wrote a post about "Jade Smells Pretty at London Games Fest." And then Dave Cheung, creator of the now-dead webcomic Chugworth Academy, made a short comic that reduces her to little more than a ditzy, ineloquent, booth babe, while she sexually services nerds in the text of "buy my game." It's not a hard comic to find if you must, but be warned it's extremely gross, not work safe, and incredibly fucked up in every way.

It's horrifying enough, but I don't need to talk about how bad it is. Five years ago, several feminist outlets that were on the case made the point strongly enough why all these incredibly stupid things are bullshit. But today Jade Raymond is working on Splinter Cell: Blacklist as producer at Ubisoft Toronto - in the same role she was while working on Assassin's Creed.

She has not been in a single interview. There are no "the team" shots with her at the front, like you could easily find for AC. The most appearances she's made recently is the announcement that her team was doing the game in the first place, and the occasional DICE talk. Many of the images I found were from 2007, when she was mid-development of the first AC. It's like she just vanished - like she no longer felt welcome or safe in the public eye.

So, have you seen this woman?

Ruby Gloom Review Thing

noreply@blogger.com (Mirai) — Sat, 03 Nov 2012 07:29:00 +0000

Mirai talking about shows for little girls, right?

Ruby Gloom is odd because, for the most part, I could easily have overlooked it as generic goth Hot Topic junk. In fact, I really did, because Ruby Gloom was initially goth apparel sold at Hot Topic, so that would make sense. But after a few years and after I stumbled across it on Netflix, I was surprised to find it is quite good.

Which won't be as surprising since the show has been over for close to four years, but it really is. Somehow they found a way to merge The Nightmare Before Christmas-esque pseudo-horror elements like skeletons, cursed luck, monsters, and 17th century Gothic visuals with the cuteness of a show aimed primarily at little girls, and it all comes without being overbearing or obnoxious. Really, it's kind of a marvel at how it sounds like a guaranteed recipe for an obnoxious plead for TNBC fans' money while having none of the charm, nor of the charm of a show like MLP:FIM, but it actually successfully nails all of it.

Really, if I were to compare it to anything, it'd be most similar in structure to Homestar Runner. A small team of characters, numbering no more than seven or so, plus a few recurring background characters, make a surprisingly wide spectrum of events happen without breaking any of those characters' established personalities or aspirations. Once you know the main cast (with one exception), there's little that breaks their archetypes or makes them less endearing.

Ruby Gloom: The titular character, Ruby is a young girl (about ten/twelve or so), who resides in a small house in Gloomsville with her friends. She is cheerful, pleasant, intelligent, hard working, and essentially the straight man around which the show revolves.

Ordinarily, that would be a surefire way to make her obnoxious and oblivious, but Ruby is surprisingly flawed. Most of the time, she endures her goofy/dumb friends' antics with a smile and a shrug, but not always. She occasionally is frustrated, upset, depressed, or annoyed. It warms me up to her more to not see her be unbreakable, but to be human. I truly like her when she is unbothered, because it is not her only state of being.

Misery: Misery's name is fitting as she, as with all of her family, has been cursed with awful luck. Her voice is dry and raspy, her eyes endlessly streaming tears, and her reaction to everything around her always is nothing more than exhausted and dulled acknowledgment. And, because of it, she easily has some of the best gags in the series.

Misery's one gimmick thankfully doesn't define her, as she occasionally is granted bouts of happiness, humor, and playfulness. But even if it was all she had, her presence gives the show its much needed laughing aloud, comic relief moments. Misery fades into the background frequently enough you forget about her, and then she shows up again. Her dry talk of illness, injury, and death is a cute way of adding it to the show without really letting it sink in what she means when she talks about her ancestors' horrible demises.

Frank and Lem: A zombie-like two-headed beast, Frank and Lem are brothers stitched together at the side, with an affection for heavy metal. Their dumb-and-dumber double-act is an entertaining trait, with Frank as the Harry and Lem as Lloyd, and they add some more of the harder-edged heavy metal theme to the show. As with most of the cast, they both have great lines, and play off each other and everyone well.

Scaredy Bat: A play on the term "scaredy cat," Scaredy Bat is afraid of everything and anything. His introductory episode is displaying his fear of flying, something that should ideally come naturally to him. Similar to Misery, this sounds like a one-note gag that runs out in a matter of a few episodes, but Scaredy is similar to Ruby in that the show lets him break out with occasional acts of bravery, selflessness, and quick thinking. These moments warm you to him, especially when he remembers to be afraid a moment later and faints in horror.

Iris: If this show managed to make every character endearing without being overbearing, Iris must have been a heatsink for this because she is about as lovable and endearing as a rabid badger the size of a dog. Iris' personality is defined as fun-loving and adventurous, but she somehow lost that moment of breaking past her one attribute the rest of the cast did.

Her one role is to act like this show's version of Ethan from the (terrible) comic Control Alt Delete, which is to say be a comedic klutz that runs around and creates disasters for the rest of the cast to fix. You know how Rainbow Dash in Friendship is Magic can be characterized as brave and adventurous, but is also oddly lazy? Or how her bravery also comes with pride and arrogance, which are frequently her downfall? Or how Pinkie Pie is fun loving and silly, but still has a heart of gold and knows when to stop? Iris is like that, but without any of the important parts I mentioned.

Ideally her fun-loving antics would one day send her straight into a volcano, because she is irredeemable as a character. Virtually every episode she's in she is just annoying, including her shrill voice and laugh. I can only think of one episode where she's not irritating, and it's basically because she doesn't exude any of her core attributes (Because they suck, I hope).

Poe: A play on words, with his two roommates/friends Edgar and Allen, off of the infamous poet Edgar Allen Poe, Poe is a raven with a crisp British accent and a love of luxury, food, talking, and intellectualism. Frequently a prim and proper gentleman, Poe can be a bit annoying, but his traits never stay irritating for more than a few gags here and there. He's not very interesting, but his contrast to the others allows comedy to be spun almost effortlessly.

Skullboy: Imagine Jack Skellington combined with a jack-of-all-trades, and you basically have who Skullboy is. He's the Master of Disguise of the cast, constantly trying to discover who he really is and coming up with ridiculous gimmicks to do it, such as turning into a couch-surfing layabout, an action hero, a Shakespearean actor, an ice sculptor, a magician, a British General, a mechanic, and a million more. Along with his excellent voice - which perfectly nails the attitude and tone of each of his roles - Skullboy melds easily into every episode's needs.

The show's tone shifts with his. When he's a private eye, his voice begins a smooth narration, and the music turns into film noir detective easy tunes. As a layabout, his slouchy demeanor comes with bongos and percussion, and his voice slows and drips with apathy and dismissal. When he becomes an action movie hero, his voice swells and bellows like a lion, and he is acrobatic, inventive, and daring, with the background themes swelling into a triumphant overture. Were the music and animation not so excellent, this would be jarring, but each scenario adds to his likability.

Without going into detail, the show manages to do a lot with a very small cast (I'm skipping characters like Mr. White and Mr. White, or Boo Boo, or Iris' pet, etc.). Some of the best goofiness moments come from simple setups. My favorite example is when Misery leaves and, with it, the cloudy weather they were used to goes, forcing them to flee the hot sun. Ruby and Skullboy go off to find her, using the underground tunnels, while Poe, Scaredy, Frank, and Lem stay under the house. Inspiration strikes them, so they don Misery's raincoats and go back outside, all three pretending to be Misery to an imaginary audience. Scaredy, with his tiny Indian voice, shouting out that he is in fact, her, and he truly dislikes his luck, only to be followed up by Poe's soliloquy in his crisp British accent, "Forsooth! For I, Misery, am cursed with the most in-fortuitous luck!"

It's also delightful on the senses - the animation is smooth and gorgeous, relying on very little outlines but strongly contrasting colors such as Ruby's hair, her skin, and her dress/Wynona Ryder Beetlejuice-era stockings. The music manages to juggle an unbelievable amount of different styles. The main theme gives vibes of TNBC, as I've said, with the eerie and addicting theme song, but it branches out with themes reminiscent of The Incredible Bongo Band, Manowar, John Williams' Indiana Jones, military drum marches, Edvard Greig's Hall of the Mountain King, and more. It's not to say the themes are that good, but the simple background melodies add to the ever-shifting tone Skullboy adds to the theme.

Aside from Iris, the show doesn't skate by so easily without mistakes. Despite being very strong early, it felt like towards the end it just lost its way and ran out of material, and rather than resolving long-running plot threads like having an adorable relationship start between Skullboy and Ruby, something teased in the first few episodes, they just ran the third season out until the contract ended, did a final episode, and called it a day. It's very underwhelming that a show so strong didn't even have some semblance of closure. Even if it was cut off early, that's no excuse - Sat AM Sonic the Hedgehog managed to close up some plot threads even with its long-hanging cliffhanger of Snively taking over.

In short - it's very, very good. Very cute, and incredibly funny.

Fall of Cyberton Review Thing

noreply@blogger.com (Mirai) — Thu, 06 Sep 2012 00:32:00 +0000

I liked War for Cybertron, but even I was not immune to a lot of its problems. The gunmetal grey scenery for 90% of the game. The endless corridor gunplay ad nauseum. The lack of a compulsive story. No Grimlock. I liked it at the time, but I even acknowledged it was fueled by nostalgia for a favorite franchise of mine, a nostalgia constantly tickled by references. The fixes done in Fall of Cybertron go above and beyond clouding mistakes and frustrating segments with in-jokes – it's great. Actually, legitimately, great.

I think the best example of the improvement is in the first level, where (and I didn't like this initially) you are treated to a Bumblebee-centric tutorial, midway through the Nemesis' jacking and boarding of the Ark. Right off the bat it's obvious that High Moon has gotten a better idea for dynamic action sequences. Bumblebee gains control of his functions one by one in the tutorial, and wades through the war-torn battlezone, stopped by bad guys, and forcing you get to Optimus in time.

It's explosive. It's completely insane. It's perfect. High Moon has learned – or maybe just had the time and money to make – that the best way to convey war is to make things happen that are far bigger than you. Transformers named and nameless will die through the course of the game, because Cybertron is becoming a big mess of despair, death, and pain.

Let me apply context and say that no, Transformers has not jumped the shark and tried to convey war-is-hell drama through embarrassingly awful plot deaths. Nor has it tried to convey a serious story through characterization and development. Which seems like an odd departure since the trailers were setting up to do exactly that, but we can ignore the advertising for the moment, even if it was kind of awesome. It is, on the whole, still a cartoon about big robots.

But the story and presentation has grown up significantly – the characters are better fleshed out, all of their backstories and personalities make sense, and best of all, everyone has their own actions happening simultaneously while the story takes place. It's like a well put-together movie, worth a trillion more than Michael Bay's obnoxious military hardware wank-fest with teenagers running around acting relevant.

It's not like War for Cybertron, where you take control of one unit doing a thing while everyone else does fuck all. The intro chapter establishes that the Ark is under constant Decepticon assault, and it was put at risk by Grimlock's mysterious abandonment of his defense post. With Prime occupied, Jazz and Cliffjumper take off to investigate. Then, later, when Grimlock shows up, it explains everything, including how he got his dinosaur form on a planet with no dinosaurs, where he's been all that time, and the like.

The plot is incredibly cohesive in how it swaps between factions and characters, but you're never left wondering what the hell they're doing. It's established firmly why this new character is in control, and after some snappy dialogue, you get a strong sense of understanding of Cliffjumper and Jazz's relationship and personalities. And that's just what I can give you that doesn't spoil lategame events.

It's a testament to this that I say High Moon has really understood changes of pace. From the explosive tutorial, you control Prime as he rushes to keep the Ark safe from Decepticon assaults, and awakens Metroxplex, a transformer the size of a city. After one of the most satisfying sequences of melee attacks in action game history, the game downshifts, and you play as the duo investigating a Decepticon outpost. Cliffjumper cloaks and is small enough to fit into hidey-hole shafts, creating a new stealth sequence.

It's hard to put into words just how great it feels to go from an explosive action sequence, with Optimus Prime barreling through Decepticons by the truckloads, only to later quietly creep from baddie to baddie, executing City of Rust guards with a tap of the button, Tenchu: Stealth Assassins style. Once they start including rocket-launcher armed 'Cons with stealth-tracking scanners, it actually gets hard, too.

And just after that, Cliffjumper gets himself into a pickle and you swap off to Jazz, who is a mechanical Spider-Man with his wrist-mounted tether. After a few action sequences, the game opens up into a multi-tiered shootout platformer sequence and lets you zip from ledge to ledge, unloading sniper rifle rounds into enemies. And that's just the first few levels – Fall of Cybertron keeps shifting gears, giving you new people to play with and building towards something bigger. And by the time the ending comes, they've trained you how to do everything in the game thus far, which makes it all the more satisfying as it hops from objective to objective.

The presentation and music is what sets it the most apart – swelling orchestral pieces with bombastic drums, a reverbing bass, and intense latin chorus sets you up for exactly what you are in for.

The big issue with War for Cybertron's vehicle modes was, aside from the occasional moment, that there was no real reason to transform other than to move faster. Ordinarily, the inclusion of a sprint mode would kill any reason to change your mode, aside from having a different gun to fire. But Fall of Cybertron surprised me again by, instead of changing the game mechanics, just put you into different environments.

Cliffjumper, as mentioned, can go to car mode to slip into small tunnels. But when it's a Decepticon mission to sabotage a large carrier, you take control of first Vortex, who's working to destroy the bridge ahead of the carrier, and Swindle, who assaults the ground forces to destroy the tank's wheels. Vortex has to zip around from the air then to the ground and destroy defensive outposts. Then, Swindle fights Autobots, while constantly swapping between vehicle and robot mode to keep pace with the huge moving vehicle.

I'm not a fan of forgiving games just for having a good sequel, but it's really amazing that the developers learned so well how to present and deliver a game. Not just a generic shooter, but one that capitalizes on the strengths it has and stands apart due to the experience it delivers.

That's not even to mention how they managed to make the game look great. Cybertron, war ravaged and torn apart, shines and glows like a city with its dingy parts sticking out terribly. Cliffjumper and Jazz's exploration into the Sea of Rust evokes memories of the desert level from every shooter before it, but is mercifully short. And, after that, an organic squishy level takes place when they stumble on some of Shockwave's organic experiments in underground caves. Each level – and multiplayer map – is colorful and varied, with all sorts of red, blue, green, and purple. Even from the few screens I've collected here you can see how bright everything is.

There's a lot of good here, and even stuff I never touched on – there's more ammo, each gun feels more distinct and useful, and all the upgrades make the guns feel stronger in their attributes rather than just +10 damage. I've found the SMG and Megatron's cannon are some of the more destructive guns in the game, and limiting you to one conventional gun and one heavy means you need to be more careful on the shots you take with bigger guns. Sure, Megatron can one-shot half the baddies in the game, and the unique upgrade for it is amazing, but if you're a terrible shot, what gun are you going to switch to, your RPG? Your chaingun?

Further, the online is actually great. Multiplayer suffered from lack of balance, lack of customization, and the crummy health system. Most of those have been fixed, and the maps expanded, meaning everyone has a place. A Scientist jet has the advantage of a heal, air control, sentry turrets, pseudo-radar, and homing rockets, but their health is extremely low, and they only start with a few crummy guns. Infiltrators are basically spies, with absurd speeds, cloaking, and sniper rifles. Destroyers are Prime and Megatron wreckers with a hover ability and a ground slam, a force field, and big guns. Titans, as the name implies, are big, slow brutalizers with the whirlwind spin attack. Each class is exploitable. And, best yet, you can redeco any of them to be your favorite Transformer, or mod them to be weird Frankenstein versions of them combined with others. That's not even touching on Escalation.

It's not a perfect game. As I mentioned, there's not a lot of character development, which is unfortunate as I was hoping for a political fallout from the new Prime's controversial decision to leave their home. Further, some of the nicer touches from WfC are gone. The hard, mechanical way the Bots and Cons transformed into the turrets is sorely missed. The game also has an annoying habit of sticking you with a fragile Scientist character like Starscream or Vortex and send three shotgun-bearing Bulkhead-lookalike Autobots your way, sending you back to the loading screen once more.

But as far as video games? I can recommend it not just to fans of the franchise, not just to fans of shooters, but even to those who disliked War for Cybertron. It's not breaking any ground with story, but it's competently told and masterfully directed, and that's all I really needed from a robot shooter.

Yes, It's A Mass Effect 3 Post, Part 2

noreply@blogger.com (Mirai) — Sat, 31 Mar 2012 21:12:00 +0000

More spoilers while I talk about this to myself more than anyone.

WHAT DIDN'T WORK

Completely and absolutely everything else. The more I look at it, the ending is riddled with a lack of testing, editing, and peer review.

Let's start with the big picture and point out that, for the purposes of this game, the purpose of ME3 was to assemble the Crucible, because it would do something. The fact that it wasn't a weapon, or a big switch with a sign on it saying "REAPERS", was just fine and I will defend the idea of there being a plot twist. But the plot twist was a deus ex machinae. Literally - the plot was to assemble a computer, and inside of the computer they found a God who can fix everything.

But, on the whole, I could accept this, were it continued in the traditional Mass Effect way. But instead everything is tossed aside. The Catalyst says that the cycle has to continue, but since Shepard is here, that means there must be a change, whatever it is. And Shepard just takes this.

I could see acceptance of this from certain Shepards, but I had played straight Paragon through the whole game. My Shep didn't believe in inevitability or impossibility. There's always a way, and he would find it. But no, instead, he sits there and listens, accepts that the computer will never understand, and picks one of his three options. The fact that we are not even given a choice is the greatest slap in the face of all.

And I understand the futility of it all thematically, but when you start to implement game mechanics around grinding, it begins to feel like a chore, and we wish to be rewarded for our efforts. The fact that it is a yes or no option (Did you get 100% completion? If yes, secret ending. If no, you get nothing.) makes the entire effort of trying to save humanity feel like a waste of time. And not in the cool way, where you realize it was all for naught. It's the irritating sense that, after three games of your choice and work mattering, somewhere a game developer is about to pop out from behind a wall with Ashton Kutcher and yell, "You got punked!"

The reward doesn't even need to be that substantial - just different levels of how screwed the planet is after the fight. If you assembled enough manpower, Earth is saved! If not, organic life is extinct, but hey at least you got those Reapers, right?

But then we get to the part that completely befuddles me, where it cuts to the Normandy in hyperspace (?) where it crash-lands on a jungle planet (??) along with Garrus and Ashley and sometimes EDI (???) and makes some kind of finalized wrap-up, with them starting a new life on the planet (?????).

I mean, primarily, I thought the Normandy and Joker were in on the final fight? How did he get out when we spent so much effort getting *in*. And you can't say that the Reapers died because of your actions, because it all happens at once and there's no way he would be able to Relay jump before the Relay sent the self-destruct signal!

And secondly, what jungle planet, and how did they crash? Where is this jungle planet? I thought most of the universe was explored due to the Mass Relays - wouldn't we know where it is? Wouldn't everyone? And how did the beam destroy all technology in the Red ending, but Joker landed the ship on planet?

And how did my team get onto the Normandy, anyway? The last effort I had Ash and Garrus with me, charging the beam, and everyone but me and Anderson were liquefied by Harbinger's beam. How did they not only survive, but get onto the Normandy before it took off? They don't even have Cortez's shuttle! It makes absolutely no sense!

Even if it DID make sense, did anyone think about what it means? Turians and Quarians can't eat our food. If tech is destroyed, they can't get any more of it anywhere, let alone on Earth or the jungle planet because they can't get home. Hundreds of aliens are stranded on foreign planets, looking at decades of interstellar travel if they survive the initial waves of starvation and panic? It isn't a happy ending that Garrus didn't die on Earth - it's more horrifying that he starved to death on a foreign planet away from his loved ones after his best friend or lover died.

The ending, in short, is completely unsatisfying. While the themes and nature of the story is there, it misses everything else. Narrative consistency. Player agency. Character consistency. Closure in outstanding questions. Shepard bold-facedly absorbs everything told to him, makes a choice that makes the last eight hours meaningless, a god in a box does it all for him, and then we see nothing else of the world we left behind or how our choice affected them. ME3 asks that we allow it to close with it asking more questions than it answers, instead of leaving it ambiguous.

And I say, "Fuck that."

To me, the game is over after Anderson dies. From that point on, Shepard barely hears Hackett hailing him on the radio distantly before he closes his eyes and dies, his mission complete. What does the Crucible do? What happens? Is Earth saved? I dunno, maybe. Let's let forums discuss it, much like the indoctrination theory going on right now.

Yes, It's A Mass Effect 3 Post, Part 1

noreply@blogger.com (Mirai) — Sat, 31 Mar 2012 18:42:00 +0000

Okay so this has been going on for a while and I think I'm at the point of where I can talk about Mass Effect 3. This will be Part 1, spoilers, etc.

WHAT WORKED

The crushing inevitability of losing, of course.

Mass Effect 3 is unique in that it completely hit full reverse to the tone of the rest of the games. The first two were triumphant and all about combating the threat of the Reapers one way or another. Each time, you were victorious. Mass Effect 3 is not about victory. The Reapers are here, in full force, and they have gone to each planet and are spending their incredible power crushing them. Shepard is now tasked with unifying a force to stop them, using the blueprints for a really big thing - maybe it's a gun - he found that will, hopefully, somehow help.

Every race needs to be convinced they should drop the defense of their planets and help on the Crucible, but none of them are eager and ready. Nobody knows what it does, or how it will help, even if it does anything. And all the while, as you run these errands, death racks up constantly. Legion sacrifices himself to give the geth sentience. Mordin is killed when he cures the Krogan genophage. For me, Miranda died, because I didn't warn her about Kai Leng.

And the dying all ties it closely into what happens - you don't win. You just can't. All of the effort is just a desperate last struggle before you die. The Reapers are stopped, but billions of people have died, many of them your friends. The one who's been with you the whole time, Anderson, lies bleeding next to you in his final moments, bleakly joking before falling silent.

And, of course, the Catalyst isn't a weapon. It's just the hivemind, with a computer older than God in it that controls everything. No matter what choice you make when it offers them, it is a bad one. People will die. Those that have died sacrificed themselves practically in vain. The Mass Relays are no more, meaning entire colonies are separated from their homeworld, such as Garrus and Tali. It's not even bittersweet - it's just bitter. It sucks.

And that's the end of Shepard's story (or at least it should be - I hate the idea that they're secretly alive). They die, and that's all, folks.

And the Crucible/Catalyst twist works. You spent the entire game not knowing what you were even building, only hoping it would help. The Prothean even doesn't know what it really does, and it was assumed that they built it. The Citadel has already been previously established to have an ancient and mysterious purpose to allow the Reapers in, and it was built with the Relays. They are all connected, somehow. And the Catalyst is how - it built them.

Throughout all of Mass Effect, but especially ME3, the presence of cycles is a constant theme. The Geth and the Quarians. The Krogan and the Salarians. Whatever happens, the races are both in a rush to change things in hopes to stop the inevitable, and the inevitable is said to happen anyways. The Catalyst says that a new cycle must happen, because it is an impossibly old computer program with a broken subroutine.

The times when death has shown up in the past has been extremely safe and controllable. Sure, you could screw up at ME2's suicide mission, but it was always possible to keep everyone alive. ME1's choice was outright A or B - which one were you going to have sex with, essentially? The rules were clear cut, and it set up the expectation that it would continue.

And that's how ME3 dashes your hopes away. People will die. And you can't stop it.

Mass Effect 3 is about loss, death, inevitability, and the extinction of life. It's about someone with the fate of everything resting on their shoulders, and how it finally wears them down as they try to keep the galaxy safe against a threat that constantly reminds them that they are one man. It's not a happy game. And it can't be.

Adventure Time Review Post Thing

noreply@blogger.com (Mirai) — Sun, 12 Feb 2012 12:29:00 +0000

DISCLAIMER – I am not responsible for spoilers you read towards the end of this.

Serialized cartoons are one of those things that, in context of society, never really has secured an especially good foothold, except by the rose-tinted glasses of nostalgia that everyone in the Goddamned universe has. While I have fond memories of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Transformers, they weren't especially story-driven cartoons, and usually ended in wacky hijinks with a non-ending that did little besides maintain the status quo. Shredder and Megatron ended half of their episodes pointing off with a cry of, “Decepticons, retreat!” as if to whisk away before anybody died permanently.

My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic has its own charms, but aside from the season premiers, never ascends to much more beyond simply being cute and fun. Not that it's a bad thing – that's what it's comfortable with, and I like it as it is. There's been a chain of successful cartoons that can carry excellent story, most notably in absolutely Goddamn anything Bruce Timm comes up with, or my personal favorite, Beast Wars, but they frequently lack the ability to be as funny or charming as the former. Up until Adventure Time, I didn't think it was possible to combine the two into a single cartoon. I have been proven wrong.

Season 1 felt like any other ordinary cartoon, at least at first. I've seen plenty of cartoons that were equally as wacky, though lacked in the imagination department, and if nothing else the constant introducing of bizarre elements was what kept me going, such as the Knife Storm (where it rains downward-pointing knives). But after about twenty episodes I was starting to note that, as goofy as this show could be, the established world rules from previous episodes carried on without so much as a hiccup.

In one episode, Jake the Dog and his girlfriend Lady Rainicorn are spending a romantic evening, and while he plays the violin his girlfriend turns all sort of buildings and objects random colors (non AT fans - just go with it, this sort of thing is normalized after a while). It started off as a one off joke, but when Jake has to meet Lady's parents and he acts like a rainicorn to impress them, they suggest playing traditional rainicorn games, which turn out to be changing the color of things nearby.

It's only one example, too. Lady Rainicorn only speaks Korean through the first season, but the in later episodes not only does Jake write letters to the rainicorns in Korean, but once he even cooks Korean food and said, "My girlfriend taught me how to make this."

The resulting fusion of a gag-driven, zany show with a world built with such well-established continuity, while simultaneously making all appearances of just making shit up on the spot and rolling with it, is something that I have honestly never seen before. The only thing that strikes me as anything close is MS Paint Adventure's ludicrously huge webcomic/adventure game...thing, Homestuck. But even that feels like an ill-fitted comparison, since Homestuck doesn't occasionally end with a non-sequitur fart, and the idea that he's really planning it is a dubious one at best.

The sight gags cement this even more soundly. Frequently, one-off gags are tossed out, such as skeletons tucked into the corner of Princess Bubblegum's study. They appear and are gone before you even have a chance to react, and always cement the kind of absurd goofiness. That's not even to mention half of the jokes that I cannot believe they get away with. “This'll be easy as...hm. Dunno what it'll be like, but it'll be easy!” “Yeah, as easy as childbirth!”

I think the main thing that attracts me so much to Adventure Time is surprising amount of wordless storytelling. I've spoken at length on this subject before, most notably at the triumph of Deus Ex: Human Revolution's, so it comes as no surprise. From the intro to simple scenery art to entire episodes, it makes it clear – Adventure Time is post-apocalypse. Ruined 20^th century objects litter the scenery everywhere, and even Jake makes mention of it in one episode when they sit to watch a movie. “These are all from before the Mushroom War!”

The most standout episode is when Finn leads a pack of mutants to their homeland in a deep sewer, and he ends up in a desolate city block, with shops and houses in aged disrepair. It's both eerie and beautiful. The Fallout games have all been really good about this kind of scenery construction, and yet Adventure Time has not officially stated post-apocalypse to be the case once. Nor do they plan to.

Were this all, it would already be a noteworthy cartoon in building a world full of candy people, witches, farts, an Ice King villain, and a post-apocalyptic world, all while keeping a focus on swashbuckling adventure and comedy. But it feels like, about halfway through making Season 2, the writers were all sitting around a table, and all at once just threw up their hands and said, "Out of jokes! Time to work on story and characters," and gave a great heaving sigh, “I guess.”

Season 2 hit a sudden and incredible shift of providing miles and miles of fascinating characterization, fleshing out their motivations, vices, and aspirations. Finn has always been referred to as "Finn the Human," but we never saw any humans in the show; this was tapped in one episode where he believes he found more people like him, and tries to integrate them into the world so he wouldn't be the only one. Jake, despite his laziness and absentmindedness, caves easily to peer pressure and can be easily swayed to push himself, as discovered when he pushes his stretch powers to his limit and nearly dies for it.

The curious relationship between Princess Bubblegum and Finn is often left at a one-way crush, but it's given surprising depth when she's turned into a thirteen year old and she really likes Finn. It's not just that their young, adorable romance is well written* – it's that too – but instead it comes off as bittersweet and tragic for the plucky kid when she has to become eighteen again. In a vain hope, he asks if she wants to do stuff together, and she laughs good naturedly, calling him a “silly boy,” leaving him on the balcony by himself. It's the entire subplot of 'we can never be together', but in all of ten minutes.

I think the most mind-blowing part of it is when the Ice King, a longstanding comedic relief/villain hybrid along the lines of Black Mage from 8bit Theater, is given a backstory. For three whole seasons he has been the weird, mad king of the frozen north, with a bizarre obsession with his penguins, being friends with Finn and Jake, kidnapping princesses, and possessing a magic crown that gives him his powers. Half of the time he's not even nefarious – he just shows up and tries to spend some fun time with the duo.

And then Finn and Jake discover a tape he kept from before the Mushroom War – he was an antique collector who came under the possession of a magic crown that gave him horrifying visions, driving his wife away, twisting his mind, and making him immortal. The bare parts of his sanity he kept were warped, explaining his fixation on princesses (a nickname for his wife) and his sociopathic behavior.

A evil and wacky comic relief character is given a backstory tragic enough to make you feel sorrow for him. And the next joke is made all the more both hilarious and terrible, as the Ice King covers his face with his hands. “Oh no! Now you know my secret! I used to...wear glasses!”

In Saint's Row 2, there was one mission that stuck out to me, where a budding gangster named Carlos screws up, and for his mistake he gets chained to the back of a truck and dragged around, and you have to save him. But by the time you get there, it's too late, and you only have enough time to grip him by the hand, as if in apology, before you mercy kill him. The whole game was as wacky and goofy as it could possibly be, and this one moment stuck out so hard because of that.

Similarly, Adventure Time's one moment of immense tragedy and sorrow sticks out all the more powerfully when you have not just one but several episodes that end with someone farting before cutting to black. The Ice King, tragic victim of mind control and a power he could not understand**, had stopped in the middle of an episode to rock back and forth on his butt, grabbing his feet and muttering, “I'm a banana.”

This is why I'm becoming so obsessed with this show, now. I have never seen a cartoon operate on a level that Adventure Time does. What was initially a silly pilot about a boy and his talking/stretching dog saving a princess from an evil king of the Ice has moved onto a level I cannot fathom in a way I never predicted. It has depth of character while noodle arms wiggle in a fancy dance, world-consistency when they literally make up all-new monsters and creatures any time they need it, and sorrow and tragedy next to the wacky and wild.

I can do little but applaud Pendelton Ward for making this show as brilliant as it is.

* Comments suggesting that a romance with thirteen year olds is creepy will be shot

** This is the kind of thing that makes my brain want to work on new fiction so I can create villains a quarter as brilliant as this.

The Topic of Abortion in Christian Schools

noreply@blogger.com (Mirai) — Sun, 24 Apr 2011 08:54:00 +0000

Something that was on my mind lately.

One thing I don't know if people understand is that, when you go to a Christian school, the subject of abortion isn't really something that's up to debate. It's never discussed. You don't get to have conversations about the subject of abortion and why it's wrong. It just is. It's taken at face value. There's the obvious stuff like how all the science textbooks specifically go out of their way to refer to it as a 'baby' instead of a fetus, but one thing sticks out in my mind.

I had a brief stint in acting, the usual small-scale stuff like being in the school play of A Midsummer Night's Dream. But we spent much of our time practicing with other such affiliations like monologues. And one of the things that was given to us - and I mean like, of the potential ten, seven of them were done like this - monologues from the perspective of a fetus.

So, literally, we were given scripts of a child, scared of dying, who wants nothing more than to go to their parents and say, "Mom, dad, I love you," and have them reply back, "We love you too," but they won't get the chance to say it because they will be killed before they're even born. We are literally given scripts about a child scared of a car ride with their mom, and how they're afraid of needles, and hearing about how the doctors are talking about chopping him up, and then their mom does a brave thing and leaves, and a few months later they're born.

In retrospect, I've come to realize how underhanded it is. It really is completely dodging the concept of abortion not being wrong. It slips the idea of a fetus which cannot feel or think having conscious thoughts of worry, and fear of mortality and pain, and that it is a person, even though none of these things are true.

Just had that on my mind and realized it might be worth mentioning.

"MLP: Dog and Pony Show is sexist!"

noreply@blogger.com (Mirai) — Sat, 23 Apr 2011 03:43:00 +0000

If the Diamond Dogs episode is sexist because Rarity whines and cries (tricking the Diamond Dogs to let her go) to get gems (for her costume (For a customer)), then I suggest by that logic Rarity is a sexist stereotype of a woman cause her special talent is finding gems.

Clearing something up

noreply@blogger.com (Mirai) — Sun, 17 Apr 2011 09:04:00 +0000

Maverynthia was, up until a while back, a friend. She and I got along fine and she was even in support of Gamepad Dojo, called me on times when I slipped up in feminism, and even offered comment on some of the reviews in language that was crude ("Pussy" if I remember right).

Her and I had a large, drawn out argument based on the term 'Brony,' as an ironic nickname tagged to male My Little Pony fans, where she argued that it reinforced 'bro' culture even ironically and therefore was sexist. I disagreed, saying that it was not sexist in nature by its very definition but was instead an attached implication based on what 'dudebros' do and say rather than the culture itself.

The argument spiraled out until she was rolling out constant insults ("Mr. Privilege" among them, which I think should never be an insult) and demanding that I was oppressing her. I told her the complaints about "Bronies" was silly considering there was nothing fundamentally sexist about the name, and even if there was, rolling out insults and playing some kind of oppression game (in calling me privileged and therefore I was in no position to talk on issues of "bro" culture, despite that when I'm on her side I'm an ally and no longer is my privilege in question) was just pointless infighting.

At one point Mav even specifically told someone else that "Bronies" wanted more male ponies in the show which...isn't true, at all.

Cuppy/Tami asked us to stop, which I agreed to, but Mav refused. I was willing to ignore it and move on, but she instead blocked me and refused to talk anymore, even after other people agreed that there was nothing sexist about it. She still talks to these people.

After this happened, I didn't mind anymore, and I was willing to let it go. But then the Gamepad Dojo twitter account (which in this instance was not me) replied to something Mav said about My Little Pony. I don't know what it was about - my best guess are the Sapphire Shores/Sapphire stereotype (which makes no sense and is only connected via the black voice actress and the name) or the Diamond Dogs episode where Rarity cries and whines to manipulate her captors into letting her go and giving her gems (which I can kind of see, but personally A - Rarity was using the gems to make a dress, B - she's the only ladylike one of the entire mane cast of MLP, and C - the entire moral of the episode was that a ladylike character isn't weak, especially if she's smart and thinks quickly).

But somehow, it ended up with an argument, and then this.

I really can't stand for this. I wasn't originally going to make this post but this is absurd. We "deny our privilege like WTF", "telling me how I should be respectful otherwise you just shut down and not listen", "you can't see bro culture because you're over there embracing it", "get with the feminist program or get the fuck out thinking you're some kind of feminist ally", "all you tell me is "you're making a huge deal out of something silly" whenever I bring up the fact that something is bro-culture-ized", and "You guys need to STFU when women are talking".

So let me just clear some things up.

"deny our privilege like WTF" - Gamepad Dojo has an Anti-Bigotry policy that "We guys" implemented specifically to combat exclusion.

"telling me how I should be respectful otherwise you just shut down and not listen" - we have no reason to be respectful to a friend if they are not respectful to us, regardless of positions of privilege.

"you can't see bro culture because you're over there embracing it" - by disagreeing that an ironic nickname is sexist or that a character is a stereotype, we embrace bro-culture, again steamrolling everything we've ever done to be inclusive on our website and in the way we speak/talk.

"all you tell me is "you're making a huge deal out of something silly" whenever I bring up the fact that something is bro-culture-ized" - I said that once, yet it becomes "All you tell me". It is a nickname. It is for a children's cartoon aimed at girls. I think arguing about it is ridiculous, just like I think Sapphire Shores being a racist stereotype is silly, or Glenn Beck's caliphate conspiracy - it's stretched to the point of ridiculous. Again, something is not 'bro cultured' because of a name.

"get with the feminist program or get the fuck out thinking you're some kind of feminist ally" - Last time I checked feminist allies were allowed to have opinions. I don't see how disagreeing is the line that must be drawn in the sand.

"You guys need to STFU when women are talking" - we do, frequently. I have spent many many incidents having to swallow my pride and admitting when I'm wrong. It's not easy and I do it. Again, the anti-bigotry policy puts everything we've ever written or made with a clear marker that says, 'please tell me if this offends you.' We listen. We work.

"YOU AREN'T. YOU ARE THE PROBLEM." - last time I checked I thought that people objectifying women, dismissing their opinions, gender roles, inequality, and the enablers were the problem. But okay, people who think MLP fans' nickname is funny is the problem.

This is not my privilege denying or condescension. This is Mav throwing these labels on us because we disagreed. Because I strongly disagreed "Bronies" isn't sexist, I am a privilege denying asshat who "always tells her to STFU" and refuses to listen to reason and tells her to shut up and deal with bros. Always is important - this is a one time thing that, to her, became ALL THE TIME. Because I feel that "Bronies" cannot possibly be important enough to be worth being insulted and demeaned over, I am the problem and I enforce bro culture.

I am not doing this to smear Mav's name - I am trying to make the points as obvious as possible that Mav is completely unreasonable. I was pulled into an argument I had no stake in based on an exchange that wasn't even really me and, once again, my best friend and I are labeled as "part of the problem" and "enemies" because we disagree. Mav takes the opportunity to dig up old graves, shake them around, and point out how unfair and mean and cruel we are despite several months of a perfectly fine friendship where we were allies.

But not anymore. Because we disagreed, we are now privilege denying. We are privilege denying and Mav is not, I am assuming, while she gets into a fight on the internet on her computer about a kid's show she gets to watch for free.

Mav, if you are reading this I will tell you this; grow up. I initially made this post to clear up the facts, but I'm feeling less generous now that I've gone over it a few times. Is the fact that I try to be feminist and work for it and listen about 99% of the issues that are brought up not enough? Is the fact that I even fight the fight just not okay? Must I align with your opinion on everything to qualify as feminist? Since when is your feminist interpretations the only ones? Does it not occur to you that the only person taking issue with me and Noncon and GPD is you? Must I be This Feminist to qualify? What does my privilege have to do with anything? Can I not interpret a fucking kid's show to be not sexist/racist/homophobic without having to revoke my Feminism card?

I don't expect an answer.

Why I Like Humanified My Little Pony Characters

noreply@blogger.com (Mirai) — Sat, 09 Apr 2011 08:02:00 +0000

I'm going to put up a disclaimer here because I'm just pinning down why it is I like MLP:FiM characters turned into humans. And the reason just occurred to me.

Visually, Friendship is Magic is a terrific cartoon, and I love the design, but there's not a whole lot to do in the way of fanart. Much of the main cast is just entirely based upon their coat color, and how their mane is styled and colored, such as Rainbow Dash's blue and rainbow, or Pinkie Pie's curly mane and pink. You can do some more stylized stuff, but for the most part it'll still be the same build with some artistic differences, such as stronger shading and higher detail on hair.

Humans, however, are extremely different, which is why fanart is such a draw. Rainbow Dash, for example, can be a pale-skinned punk rocker, a cheerful-if-pushy, thin teenager, a colored buzz-cut teen, as a giddy teenager in a blue jumpsuit, or even posing as Rosie the Riveter.

But it's not because I like taking away that it's about ponies (an inherently 'girly' thing), or trying to find some kind of roundabout way to be 'attracted' to these characters, it's because I like Rainbow Dash. Rainbow Dash could be a Goddamn frog for all I care. I love her for her character - the brash, sometimes insensitive, ferocious, wonderful ball of awesome she is. Humanized Dash is just another way for me to celebrate one of my favorite characters with all sorts of different artistic directions.

The fact that there's really hot, hot Dash/Rarity action is just a wonderful bonus.

One of those things that makes you go, "Jesus Christ,"

noreply@blogger.com (Mirai) — Thu, 24 Feb 2011 20:02:00 +0000

http://www.salon.com/news/the_labor_movement/index.html?story=/politics/war_room/2011/02/24/union_thug_video

"Because these people are completely fucking shameless, the woman from the video has compared herself to Lara Logan. I am not making that up. I wish I was making that up. But I would actually not make that up, because it would seem beyond the pale to accuse conservative activists of being so horrible, so desperate to play the victim, so morally depraved, so deep into their persecution fantasies that they've lost all perspective on the rest of the world."

Republican policy is not fundamentally evil - fundamentally wrong, yes, but not evil - but as of late all Republicans have become is petty, morally depraved greedy children who are desperate to play any fiddle that makes them look like nothing but the horrible victims of unions, the recession, gay marriage, or whatever else they can get their hands on.

Equating someone defensively pushing your camera away with the survivor of a brutal rape is exactly the kind of petty unreal false equivalence conservatives have been playing up lately and I am unable to believe it. And yet, there it is.

EDIT: Changed title and added a few things for clarification.

In response to death

noreply@blogger.com (Mirai) — Tue, 15 Feb 2011 20:19:00 +0000

It's kind of alarming to see someone, who is the most two-fisted, loudest, angriest person in the world, a person so driven to comedy and anger that they run an entire site about it, suddenly turn morose and poetic. It's strange that I could not know this person well enough to form any kind of real friendship, hell we've even had the occasional spat with each other over really fundamental issues, but be struck so dumb by how drastic the change is in their personality. Especially seeing them post on their personal site with a blank, shocked post, even filing under their rarely-used real name vs online pseudonym.

It's one of those reminders that, as tough and independent that we are, everyone is still human, and when it comes to death, it strikes us hard, and seeing people struck hard hurts us in turn.

Polly I can't imagine the kind of unbearable agony you're in right now but I'm thinking about you and hoping you are quickly recovered from this incredibly difficult time.

A thought on Zelda's writing

noreply@blogger.com (Mirai) — Fri, 24 Dec 2010 06:49:00 +0000

One of the main reasons I've noticed that Majora's Mask is way, way darker is because it doesn't have the need to cherry-coat everything. When the girl from the farm gets abducted by aliens, she's broken mentally, completely shattered. When Kafei vanishes, she's devastated. People die, and everyone seems really upset about it.

Meanwhile you look at Ocarina of Time, such as when the Gorons have been herded up to be fed to Volvagia, and they all cower in the prisons. "Please...don't...eat...me..." they whimper, not looking up to realize that you're trying to save them. "If you eat me you'll get a stomachache, and you'll be sorry!"

I understand we're making this an E for Everyone game and I don't take issue with what they did, but it does strike me as one of those surprising moves that Majora's Mask was not doled equally with heaping spoonfuls of sugar. Majora's Mask was really miraculous in several ways, the most specific being that we even got the game as it exists now at all.

Me RE: Assange in custody

noreply@blogger.com (Mirai) — Tue, 07 Dec 2010 20:39:00 +0000

I'm not going to act as though this whole thing isn't largely suspicious since only after he became one of the most wanted men in America - be that good or bad - did the rape accusation take full-on force and he was actually issued a warrant. It is very suspicious. You'd have to be a lobotomized ignorant douche not to find it a little suspicious.

But please, please, do not act as though he should be let off scott free just because the case was dropped then picked up. This sort of thing has happened, is happening, and will happen again to people who are not connected to Wikileaks. If a rape accusation was taken center-stage by a public figure like a celebrity and authorities were coerced by public pressure to prosecute him, things would be no different.

Claiming that Julian Assange should be let off of his accused rape purely based on the grounds that he runs Wikileaks is an equal crime to saying he should be killed or imprisoned purely on the grounds that he runs Wikileaks.

I'm very okay with a public figure being tried and imprisoned for raping someone - at this point, it is still just an accusation, and acting as though he is either a rapist or an innocent victim is just as not fair. A man on trial for murder is neither a murderer or an innocent; he is being tried. He will be found guilty or not guilty based on the circumstances.

But please, do not assume for even a second that he's being treated fairly. His Swiss bank account has been suspended, and he was refused bail.

THIS IS NOT FAIR. He must be tried fairly on the crime. The special treatment he is given is bullshit. No celebrity gets special treatment in prison or trial based on being an actor or musician. Likewise, unfair treatment by the law system based on his unofficial 'criminal' status is wrong.

If he gets deported to the US I am going to go nuclear I swear to fucking God.

UPDATE: In the third paragraph, a person can make judgments based on the facts presented to them. I should clarify that my post is referring to it as far as law is concerned. A convicted rapist or an innocent victim.

Just to keep it around.

noreply@blogger.com (Mirai) — Fri, 12 Nov 2010 16:30:00 +0000

Friend on Facebook Alecia G said she got tickets to "Harry Potter 7.1" and the whole thing just came to me.

HARRY POTTER 7.1 PATCH NOTES
- reduced range of Expelliarmus
- fixed clipping errors on the Gryffindor Robes
- rebalanced damage dropoff of Stupefy
- reduced Protego's duration
- increased health of conjured snakes with Serpentsortia
- fixed a glitch that prevented characters from counterspelling
- reduced likelihood of Game Not Found errors on matchmaking
- Accio should now target correctly

- fixed the way Diffinido renders blood
- increased health restored by Episkey
- increased radar range on Homenum Revelio
- REMOVED AVADA KEDAVARA FROM MULTIPLAY DUE TO BALANCE ISSUES okay I'm done now seriously

Kids Murder Someone - Instant Messengers To Blame

noreply@blogger.com (Mirai) — Sun, 31 Oct 2010 15:54:00 +0000

Its pretty fucking hilarious if you imagine this entire article takes out anything to do with World of Warcraft. All you would need to do is replace it like this:

After Proctor's murder, the boys told a friend on AOL Instant Messenger what they had done. One of the teens admitted that the murder didn't feel like he thought it would. Those messages were collected by police and used by prosecutors.
...
Bonnie Leadbeater, a psychology professor at the University of Victoria, says some kids have trouble knowing that what's acceptable in an internet chatroom may not be in real life.

"You don't know which aggressive kid is going to take the fantasies of instant messengers and try them out in reality. You just can't predict those very rare occurrences," she said.

And it's instant comedy gold.

Everyone knows at this point that violent games don't even have anything to do with murders other than namedropping or a videogame being in the room. But in this instance a bunch of twats at CTV News saw a videogame somewhat related to it and decided to make the connection. The connection, in this instance, is online communication.

That's it. There is no talk of what they trained to do, any measure of practice, or some kind of educational murdersimulator horseshit you usually hear, maybe like about Manhunt or GTA or something. It is just a fucking chatroom.

I guarantee you if Kotaku didn't exist we wouldn't have heard a fucking word about this horseshit schlock journalism. I'm not sure if that's a good thing in this instance or not.

Basically you should read Glenn Grenwald regardless, but...

noreply@blogger.com (Mirai) — Thu, 28 Oct 2010 18:53:00 +0000

This is worth reading for a point I want to talk about today.

This kind of character smear ("he's not in his right mind," pronounced a 25-year-old who sort of knows him) is reserved for people who don't matter in the world of establishment journalists -- i.e., people without power or standing in Washington and, especially, those whom American Government authorities scorn. In official Washington, Assange is a contemptible loser -- the Pentagon hates him and wants him destroyed, and therefore the "reporters" who rely on, admire and identify with Pentagon officials immediately adopt that perspective -- and that's why he was the target of this type of attack. After I wrote my criticism of this article on Monday, I was contacted by Burns' co-writer, Ravi Somaiya, who defended this article from my criticisms. I agreed to keep the exchange off-the-record at his insistence -- and I will do so -- but that was the question I kept asking: point to any instance where the NYT ever subjected Someone Who Matters in Washington to this kind of personality and mental health trashing based on the gossip and condemnation of associates. It does not exist.

If you had read the long-ass bullshit piece, it detailed all of his ways that Julian Assange - an enemy and target of the US Government's butthurt defensive stance via all those leaks Assange Wiki'd - is crazy and dangerously paranoid. Of the government. Who hates him. For leaking government documents. And he's crazy for thinking this way. Aaaaaaaaaaaaahyup.

This seriously isn't the New York Times' only stint of pulling this kind of ridiculous bullshit. I recall - admidst tears of laughter and holding my sides - the time when New York Times (though strangely not Burns) had a wonderful, tear-jerking ten page narrative about what a nice guy Glenn Beck is.

In person, Beck is sheepish and approachable, betraying none of the grandiosity or bluster you might expect from a man who predicted “the next Great Awakening” to a few hundred thousand people in late August at the Lincoln Memorial or who declared last year that the president has a “deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture.” He wore a blue dress shirt tucked into jeans and brown loafers, which he kicked off as soon as he sat down. He showed little interest in the results from primary elections held the day before — upsets in Delaware and New York for Tea Party candidates whose followers often invoke Beck and Palin as spiritual leaders and even promote them as a prospective presidential ticket in 2012.

You can tell the writer in this instance is trying as hard as he can to be nice to Glenn Beck, but it comes off as needlessly neutral. Glenn Beck is the same guy who has no concept of how fair use works and insinuates outright that Disney just doesn't care about it. This is the same guy who blames everything he can on immigrants, be it blacks or latinos. This is the same guy who had his rally to restore racism on the same day as MLK's speech, and even though it was sheer apathy, he called it 'divine providence' and touted that God wished it to be so.

Being nice to Glenn Beck is not the same as trying to make Julian Assange look like a nut, but this is the kind of thing the New York Times has had prior experience with. Painting people who are outright full of shit like they're nice, approachable, decent people despite all that awful stuff you hear in their own radio show that they own that comes out of their mouth is right up the same alley as painting a ballsy, honest rebel like a nut.

"I got bullied too, but I pulled myself up by my bootstraps"

noreply@blogger.com (Mirai) — Sat, 09 Oct 2010 03:04:00 +0000

Trigger warning - rape, homophobia, hate crimes, and violence.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/09/nyregion/09bias.html?hp

He was told there was a party at a brick house on Osborne Place, a quiet block set on a steep hill in the Bronx. He showed up last Sunday night as instructed, with plenty of cans of malt liquor. What he walked into on the other side of the door was not a party at all, but a night of torture — he was sodomized, burned and whipped.

All punishment, the police said Friday, for being gay.

There were nine attackers, ranging from 16 to 23 years old and calling themselves the Latin King Goonies, the police said. Before setting upon their 30-year-old victim, they had snatched up two teenage boys whom they beat, the police said, until the boys — one of whom was sodomized with a plunger — admitted to having had sex with the man.

The attackers forced the man to strip to his underwear and tied him to a chair, the police said. One of the teenage victims was still there, and the “Goonies” ordered him to attack the man. The teenager hit him in the face and burned him with a cigarette on his nipple and penis as the others jeered and shouted gay slurs, the police said. Then the attackers whipped the man with a chain and sodomized him with a small baseball bat.

The beatings and robberies went on for hours. They were followed by a remarkably thorough attempt to sanitize the house — including pouring bleach down drains, the police said, as little by little word of the attacks trickled to the police. A crucial clue to the attackers was provided by someone who slipped a note to a police officer outside the crime scene, at 1910 Osborne Place.

What I'm wondering is if this is some kind of 'sweeping hatecrime madness' that's taking over all across the states, or (more likely) this is the same old homophobic hatecrimes that are already happening but ever since those kids killed themselves now they're suddenly getting more PR because the news figures it'll generate more hits.