#i also missed drawing this room specifically because i actually somewhat of a design for it but its just | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

lunar-wandering · 3 years

Text

reverse reverse

so, i wrote a one shot for my Uno Reverse Card Swap AU- and i’ve decided to put all my oneshots and drabbles for it in one fic on ao3.

...anyways though, boom, heres the fic, bon appetit-

Word Count: 1.4k

Read on Ao3

MK tossed the staff as hard as he could, his frustration at his lack of progress seeping into the move. Wukong briefly looked shocked for a split moment (a very rare sight to see), before he ducked down, letting the staff sail over him.

Having missed it's initial target, the staff crashed into the electric panel on the wall, loud enough to grab Mei and Red Son's attention, from where they had been training on their side of the room.

"....Uh." Red Son said, watching how the electric panel sparked and hissed. "That's probably not good."

And then the training room doors slammed closed.

"Ah. That's very not good." The fire demon holstered the water gun he'd been using, walking over to inspect the damage.

"I'm sorry!" MK said, running over and pulling the staff out of the electric panel. Surprisingly enough, he didn't get shocked, instinctively twirling the staff in a circle before sliding it into his pocket. "I'm- I'm really sorry, can you fix it??"

"...If we were on the other side, yes." Red Son poked the panel, pulling his hand back just before a stray spark could hit it. "As of right now...I'd say we're pretty much trapped."

"What if somebody needs Dragonmist or Spitfire though?" Mei asked, "We won't be able to help if we're stuck in here."

"..I'm sure Sandy or my parents could do the job just fine..." Red Son mumbled, barely paying any attention to what Mei was saying, as he turned on the electronic band on his arm, a holographic screen appearing in front of his face. "I think I can get the doors to open again if I can reactivate the system....But with all the changes I had to recently make to prevent a certain few hackers from getting in the system again it might take me a while."

That seemed to be all the incentive that Mei needed, and MK watched in confusion as she took a few steps back.

Said confusion changed to comprehension just seconds before Mei took off, running at the door at full speed.

...And slamming into said door, falling backwards and landing hard on her back. The loud clang made MK cover his ears, and startled Red Son out of his focus.

"You- did you just try to break through the door?" Red Son knelt beside Mei, poking her to check if she was still alive (which she was). "The door that I specifically designed to be unbreakable?"

Mei only groaned in response, accepting MK's help in lifting herself back up into a standing position. As MK steadied her, he looked over her shoulder, noticing how...quiet Wukong had been the whole time.

The Monkey King was just standing there, exactly where MK had left him, in fact, it didn't seem like his mentor had moved at all.

MK lightly tugged on both Red Son and Mei's jackets to draw their attention over to Wukong

Just in time for Wukong to let out a scream of frustration, taking the fake circlet off of his head and throwing it at the wall- karma immediately playing it's hand as the circlet bounced off the wall, flinging back to hit Wukong on the nose, before reverting back to being a strand of hair.

"Fuck." Wukong hissed, staring at the hair that now rested on the floor as though it had personally offended him.

"....Monkey King? Are.....you okay?" MK quietly asked, Red Son and Mei also looking at Wukong in concern.

"I'm fucking fine- Leave me alone!" Wukong glared at them, before turning around and sitting on the floor, cross-legged, his tail swishing back and forth in irritation. MK, Red Son, and Mei shared a worried look.

"...I'll get back to trying to unlock the doors?" Red Son said, "Also Mei, please do not try slamming yourself into the door again. It's not going to work, and I really don't know why you thought that was a good idea in the first place."

"I didn't think it was a good idea, I just thought we might as well try it." Mei shrugged, "I did think it might go faster than just you trying to hack your own system though."

MK tuned out the bickering between his two friends as he focused in on Wukong's back. The Monkey King's fur was all....bristly, standing on end, as though he'd been startled. In between that, his little outburst a few moments ago, how his tail was rapidly swishing from side to side, and the fact he was chewing on his thumbnail, well, MK could only conclude one thing.

Wukong was scared.

As for why he was scared, MK had a few guesses. Most of which pertained to mountains and furnaces.

MK wondered if he should give Wukong some of the advice Macaque had given to him during their last therapy session- but almost instantly dismissed the idea. Wukong would definitely pick up on the fact that MK was quoting Macaque, and the Monkey King simply refused to take any advice the shadow monkey handed out.

MK couldn't just walk over to Wukong and try to distract him either. For one, he had no idea how to even start that kind of conversation, not to mention that Wukong didn't look like he wanted to talk to anyone right now. He couldn't tell Wukong that he knew that the Monkey King was scared either, from what he'd manage to garner about Wukong's personality, that would surely just send Wukong down a path of denial and overcomplicate the whole situation.

Which only left one option. Waiting.

Many people didn't know this, because of how quiet and reserved MK tended to be, but he absolutely hated waiting.

"Hey, Red Son?" MK asked, interrupting Mei and Red Son's petty bickering. "...How long exactly will it take you to hack the doors back open?"

"Uh...." Red Son glances at the holographic numbers hovering over his arm. "...I think the shortest amount of time I could do it would by 15 minutes, at most about 2 hours."

Out of the corner of his eye, MK could see Wukong's back tense, and something tells MK that even 15 minutes would be just a bit too long.

...This was all his fault. If he'd been paying more attention, hadn't gotten so frustrated, they wouldn't even be in this mess.

MK pulled the staff out of his pocket, looking at how it lay small and innocent in his hand. He looked back over at Wukong, who was still resolutely facing away from the rest of them.

He took a step towards the control panel.

"...MK." Mei noted his movement. "MK, what are you doing?"

MK doesn't give a response, the staff extending in his hands.

This was his fault. He's going to fix it.

"Wh- hey, MK, you'll get yourself electrocuted you-" Red Son takes notice of MK's actions a moment too late.

MK shoved the staff into the electrical panel, ignoring the way the electricity made his arms go numb and his nerves tingle. He'd been forced to get used to the sensation a long time ago. Focusing as much as he could, he grabbed hold of the warm power that lay within him, channeling it through the staff and into the control panel.

He didn't stop until he heard the whoosh of the doors opening, and was certain that they would stay open.

He pulled the staff out of the control panel, setting it down as he rolled his shoulders, shaking the tingles out of his arms. He registered Mei and Red Son staring at him in concern, but purposefully ignored it.

A breeze went past him, and suddenly Wukong was standing on the outside of the room, rocking back and forth on the heels of his feet, wearing an obviously fake smile.

"So uh, MK, the next time you fight me-" (Wukong' refused to actively call it training, instead saying that MK was simply fighting him for real. Since he was actually somewhat teaching MK now, nobody dared to call him out on it.) "Try seeing if you can catch me off guard on Flower Fruit Mountain, yeah? Yep, okay, uh- fuck, I forgot something with the monkeys, should make sure they didn't fucking destroy it, so uh, bye!"

Wukong vanished, leaving behind no trace that he had even been there. MK blinked, processing the Monkey King's parting words.

Did.....did Wukong just invite him to Flower Fruit Mountain for the first time?

#Monkie Kid #Uno Reverse Card Swap AU #my writing

98 notes · View notes

twdmusicboxmystery · 3 years

Text

TWD 11x05: Out of the Ashes - Details

Okay, let's talk details of 11x05.

***As always, spoilers abound below for 11x05. Don’t read until you’ve watched!***

We start with Aaron's dream. First of all, there's the full moon. Remember that Still had a full moon at the beginning, and every time we saw Beta on the outside, such as singing or walking with walkers, it often showed a full moon. In Beta's case, it's probably because his nickname as a singer was Half Moon, but he also had a lot of Beth symbolism around him. I think it’s likely that the reason they gave the name Half Moon was to indicate Beth symbolism.

Then, Aaron says to Gracie, "we’re almost home." Part of the home theme, and also kind of showed me that this was a dream. There's absolutely no reason why Aaron would randomly be outside the walls with Gracie at night. I don't have a whole lot more to add to the scene than what I said yesterday. I do believe it's a foreshadow of something happening with Gracie, but it also may be a foreshadow of other things that are coming, including stuff with Beth.

This is kind of a funny detail, but I have to say that I love the Jerry bit at the beginning. We see him tiptoeing over people, trying not to wake them on his way to the bathroom. So, we have an entire sequence that can be summed up as, "Jerry pees.” ;D

The next thing we saw was the Commonwealth video. The really cheesy one with Lance Hornsby that we saw in the trailer. Some of the symbols we saw in that video were interesting. Such as a bunny cake (rabbit theme), someone playing a guitar (Beth played a guitar in 5x09),

ice cream (both Eugene and Stephanie talked about ice cream and it became sort of a Bethyl theme, especially because there were so much Bethyl symbolism around them during those conversations; also, Daryl had his “I never” about frozen yogurt in Still). We see a plaque that says, "The Great War,” (probably a reference to World War I, but also part of the Revolution/War theme).

There was also a blond, Beth-lookalike nurse in blue scrubs. 👀

I also noticed that the Commonwealth badge looks a lot like the UK flag. Not so much in its shape or design, but rather the colors. It's got the same red and blue shades as the United Kingdom flag. Remember that we saw the UK flag around Juliet Ormonde's character in the world beyond. So, we think it's a symbol of the war to come with the CRM.

When Yumiko goes into the bakery looking for her brother, there's a song playing called “Three Speed Girl.” It was just the three that caught my attention. (Look up lyrics). They all a lot of apples in the bakery. Not real apples but glass, decorative ones. Not only Apple theory, but specifically what apples represent.

I've theorized before that the apples could represent separation between loved ones. For example, in 6x14, we see Michonne and Rick wake up together in the room and they both eat an apple. I came to believe that was a foreshadow of Rick leaving in S9 and two of them being separated. @frangipanilove, however, explained it differently. She says that rather than them being separated, she thinks apples represent them coming back together. As then, a reunion after the separation.

I know that sounds like the opposite of what I explained, but really all amounts to the same thing. The kind of separation that I mentioned is what we see with Rick and Michonne being separated, Beth and Daryl being separated, perhaps even Carol and Zeke being separated (if he does, in fact, get a death fake out). And that's always going to result in a reunion down the road. So if we explain as a separation, it will always lead to a reunion. And if we explain as a reunion, it in order for reunion to take place, there must've been a separation first. See what I mean? You can explain it either way.

So, the apples make total sense in the scene. Yumiko has been separated from her brother for a long time. She said it's been years because the two of them were somewhat estranged, even before the apocalypse happened. And now, in this episode, we see a reunion. So, I think were spot on about the Apple symbolism.

As for Beth, we didn't actually see her eat an apple. I think that would've been too on-the-nose. But, given the Snow White symbolism, or template of her arm falling, remember that Snow White ate an apple, which was poisonous, just before we fell she fell and we saw her arm. So, if TWD is using the apple to represent separation, we didn't actually see Beth eat one, but her arm falling like that represents the Snow White template, and right after that, we see her separation from Daryl and the rest of TF. I think it lines up rather well.

When Eugene and Stephonie are walking around, we see a white horse drawing a mail truck. It's a combination of several very potent symbols. We talked about white horses before and how they represent Beth, and life. Then there's the mail or Communication theme. We've seen so many mailboxes on the show, and this was a horse drawing a mail truck. I’ll talk more about the mailbox theme in a few days. Just keep this in mind for now. They're very purposeful symbols and they do represent specific things in the show.

I also noticed that Stephonie is wearing red rimmed glasses. Remember how last week I talked about how Norman was wearing some funky glasses on TTD? Sorry to keep teasing but this is another thing I’ll post about later in the week. I was going to anyway, so seeing the glasses here jumped out at me. For now, just notice that Stephonie is wearing these and they’re red.

When Stephonie decides to help them talk on the radio, they go into the train station. Of course, there are no actual trains running, but the train is a very potent symbol. It's actually being used more as a civic building, and the group tries to be innocuous, though it's obvious they're up to something. Stephonie and Eugene walked calmly through the building while Princess and Zeke take up positions down in the common lobby area. Meanwhile, Mercer is watching them.

Princess tries to head him off and we have a humorous moment where she tries to flirt with him, and tells him he has beautiful eyelashes. It is not exactly the same thing as the eye theme, but I could almost see them going for the eye theme, but twisting it for the sake of humor, because, well, it's Princess. So, she goes with beautiful eyelashes.

Eugene does manage to get on the radio with Rosita, who tells him the Whisper War is over. They only talk for a moment or two before they lose the feed. Once again, I think that was very purposeful on Commonwealth's part. I think they allowed him to connect with Rosita, but only for a short time before interrupting the feed and bursting into arrest him.

Meanwhile, back in Alexandria, I noticed that Judith asks, "Is he gone?" I sat and thought about this line for a little bit. Obviously, it's the “gone” theme. Usually, the way TWD always uses someone being "gone" to mean that they have disappeared for short time but will return. Very often they are presumed dead. That's why Daryl's, "she's just gone" about Beth is so important. Also, her line to him, "you're going to miss me so bad when I'm gone."

In this case, I don't think either Judith or Rosita suspect that Eugene is actually dead. She just means did they lose him on the radio feed. And here's something that occurred to me what was thinking about this. It's actually very common when someone loses communication with someone else via radio or walkie-talkie to use the phrase, "get them back." So, something like, "see if you can get them back," or, "I'll get them back." In that context, it just means to raise them on the radio again and reestablish a connection so they can communicate.

The reason this is interesting is that Daryl has said this more than once about Beth or people who were kidnapped. In 5x06 when he was with Carol, he was talking about Beth and said they would observe Grady and then do whatever they needed to do to get her back. I know they also said something similar about Sasha when she was taken by the saviors, and Sasha had massive parallels to Beth during her death arc. So, that had never occurred to me before, but it's almost like they specifically took that line about “getting them back” from radio lingo and are applying it to Beth.

When talking about whether to go to Hilltop, Aaron mentioned that he didn't want to abandon ship. So, a water/ship reference, but it's also close to something Abraham said in 5x05 about going down with the ship.

When they get out Hilltop, I noticed that we have a shot of the water tower, which is now burnt. When they start questioning Keith, he says that Alpha is dead, and someone says that all that does is prove that “he has eyes.” Earlier in Alexandria, Aaron said, “Eyes open.” I know these are really small potatoes references, but there were a LOT of eye mentions in this episode.

A couple of things where Negan and Maggie are concerned. When they get to this house, the cars out front are really interesting. There's a red car out front, which reminded me a lot of the red car that was seen during the filming of the missing 17 days in season five. There are also just a lot of cars with doors or hatchbacks open, which represent the door being opened in 5x09, when Beth disappeared. The hatchback being open can represent the trunk being open. So, just kind of some interesting symbols.

I also thought it was cool that Judith is teaching other kids how to fight.

I think that’s it for Details. Anything I missed?

#beth greene #beth greene lives #beth is alive #beth is coming #td theory #td theories #team delusional #team defiance #beth is almost here #bethyl

16 notes · View notes

lucarioisinthevoid · 3 years

Note

Bonbon...just bonbon. Just bonbon stuck to his hand. And he has to make a choice to put up with bonbon, or cut off his own hand.

(Amazing idea that I cut short due to being so fucking tired and filled with writer’s anxiety to the MAX, smashing my head into the keyboard, but not wanting to keep abandoning the damn blog. Hope this is still fine though! I really need to cut back to shorter asks again, I should have considered that before making a “series” of this. At least it’s going to be done soon!)

Sometimes, your brain tells you to do stupid things. TRULY stupid things. Henry certainly was no stranger to it, not at all. Though usually he had a little bit more… of a reputation what to uphold. ‘What is the worst that could happen?’ That was the standard question to consider, the one thing to maintain at the forefront, while also eying the potential benefits of the risks. What was the worst that could happen? Usually death. That has prevented Henry from doing quite a few nonsensical actions, ranging from petty theft of objects he never needed, to making himself a name as a Serial Killer. Nonsensical ideas, with no rewards, and potentially risky chain reactions that could lead to the destruction of his entire work. It was for the better that they had gotten buried in his mind again, Henry would have been even more upset with himself now, looking back on his life, otherwise. Yet, now? Nothing was stopping him from the worst. Death? Never heard of ‘em. If you only wake up again in the same place as you were before, death lost its biting edge, it became old news, hardly worth a second thought. And this led to more and more bad ideas. However, today’s bad decision had taken the cake. Henry had sat down behind the desk just a moment ago, the night barely even started. Only few animatronics were roaming, thus it wasn’t anything to pay too much attention to. Maybe a few interesting conversations would come out of it- but that was it. So, instead he began picking apart the office. It wasn’t the common one, it was made out of steel and darker than the regular one, instead there were blinking lights shining- pizzas made out of plastic and glass, stage lights to the sides, and the eyes of two animatronics that were- probably not capable of coming to life. Probably. A shiny mask of Funtime Freddy’s and- The Puppet. The OTHER Puppet. God, when was it that he had designed and planned out THIS robot? It must have been when- … never mind that. Prying his attention away from the frozen machine, peacefully smiling, with its eyes glowing golden- Prying his attention AWAY, he turned to the table, where the small handpuppet of Bonnie was sitting. The panel to the side, filled with buttons and levers, was also interesting, but he would look at that later. The little machine seemed like a great opportunity to inspect if the animatronics were actually still working as they should have in reality… or if perhaps they were only plastic shells, filled with only the intent of the soul that created this place. He wasn’t sure what it would tell him about the maker… however more information was always useful. It was a light machine, in general. Its weight would still surprise anyone who wasn’t familiar with machines, but all in all? A lightweight, nothing to note. Peering into the opening, the Pink Guy noted that it was unnaturally dark inside of there. Even if he held it directly under a light, there seemed to be a void inside, swallowing all light, making it almost impossible to see any mechanisms that were in place. And that was when the terrible idea hit him. Usually there were a few criteria that thoughts of his had to pass before being translated into an action, like ‘why’ and ‘how’ and ‘what if’- due to his currently freedom of basically anything, it swiftly skipped past these hurdles. Before he knew what he really was doing, he put the little bunny onto his hand- Where it instantly clicked shut, grabbing his arm tightly from the inside. The lights flickered wildly, before the lighting changed to the usual “caught” atmosphere- Quite alarming. Now, there were two options- either a creature has come in from the outside while he was disracted, or BonBon was about to maul him. Seeing as the machine started twitching and booting up, the latter one seemed more likely, so Henry watched the creature with mild interest. What a funny way to kill him. The vengeful soul was rather creative, he had to admit that much. The bunny looked from the left to the right- Then up at Henry, who stared down at him somewhat unimpressed. For a moment both sides stared at each other in silence, then BonBon crossed his arms. “Put me down.” “Oh, I would if I could and in more sense than one. But you seem to be grabbing me.” “Where is Freddy!?” “On the wall, as far as I can see.” Looking at the mask, the bunny frowned for a moment, then swiped its claw over Henry’s eye and cheek, only barely missing the eye itself. Deep red scars were left on the cheek, blood slowly starting to drip down from it, a disgusting feeling in the Pink Guy’s opinion. “NOT FUNNY!” “DO NOT ATTACK ME.” “THEN STOP MESSING WITH ME! JUST BECAUSE I’M SMALL YOU THINK YOU CAN MESS WITH ME, HUH!?” Again he tried to attack, Henry only barely being able to hold him back. “I CAN EAT YOU. I CAN HURT YOU. AND I WILL IF YOU DON’T TELL ME WHERE MY FREDDY IS!” “I DO NOT KNOW.” “THEN FIND OUT!” “IF YOU STOP ATTEMPTING TO HARM ME, I MIGHT.” Finally, Henry was able to let go of the bunny, it wasn’t trying to rip him into pieces anymore. God, that little rat was a little stronger than he liked. “Last time I saw Funtime Freddy- or at least a thing somewhat resembling him- he was in the vents. Thus, the choice- do you want to let go of me and inspect them, or do you want to stay here and search the other rooms first?” BonBon- Benjamin, right? He thought he could remember him being called Benjamin before- looked at him angrily again, then his ears dropped. “I- don’t- I can’t! I don’t know how to! I think YOU did something to make me unable to let go, this isn’t my fault!” Finally, the aggression that had started to build up inside of him subsided, as he recognized this behavior easily. Benjamin was still a child, probably has not been very old when taken and not having been dead for more than a year or two. Raising his other hand, he tried to calm the boy down. “Alright, alright… I did not do anything, but if neither of us can separate from the other, we might have to look together. Would that be okay with you, Benjamin?” Wrong thing to say. “Wh-Who told you my name?! You don’t have a RIGHT to use my NAME-“ Something within Henry SNAPPED, the aggression returning, double as strong. “Please, CALM DOWN.” Finally, this seemed to shut him up. Perhaps it was the heightened aggression in his voice that helped- and while Henry didn’t enjoy trying to scare those weaker than him, this time it seemed to be necessary. This seemed to be the damn reason why that bear was borderline mad and always happy to throw this thing around. Looking at the little thing the man slowly shook his head, then took a deep breath. “Are you calm now, Bon? Good. Good. Amazing.” His tone had changed now, much sharper and colder than before. If it worked, it worked. “Let us have a nice walk now. A nice, long walk, you and I, both of us, maybe we will find Freddy, maybe we will not. And you know what, while we have this walk, we could also have a nice long talk about you. What brought you here, specifically.” “I- I don’t want to-“ Abruptly Henry moved his right hand, where Bonbon was located, almost smashing it into the wall. “Oh. I seem to have slipped. How CLUMSY of me. What were you saying?” It was a bluff. Of course it was. He wasn’t so pathetic as to try and harm a kid. But he also felt sick and tired of being in such a ridiculous situation. For a moment Bonbon stared at him nervously, his jaw slightly tremble, as he was caught between wanting to try and live with the situation, in hopes of it not getting worse, or if he should lash out, here and now, trying to kill the human he was attached to. “Only a little walking and a little talking and maybe we will find Freddy too. Do you not want that?” The easy way out. Old habits die hard. Most people preferred the devil that they knew. Including returning to familiar situations again and again, reenacting them, even if it had hurt before. The small machine pressed its ears against its body, clearly distress, but finally he nodded wordlessly, drawing a smile out of Henry, who was now more than willing to pretend he hadn’t very obviously threatened the kid before. “Fantastic! I am sure we will have a lot of fun. First and foremost, I would like to know, what is the last thing you remember from before waking up here…?” Maybe he would be able to make it up to the bunny a little while on the go. He did somewhat feel bad for him. They slipped outside the office. No animatronics in sight. And Henry for once was looking forward to a long night.

#henry miller #Henry in hell #BonBon

9 notes · View notes

autumnblogs · 3 years

Text

Day 11: Melodrama

WIth Act 4 over, we’ve finished setting up the pins on the Earth Side of this story. We are now roughly one quarter of the way through the full story - and Homestuck is set up more or less in four acts, rather than in six acts as its “official” structure would suggest.

Time to start setting up the pins on the other disc.

https://homestuck.com/story/1942

But first, some more of Andrew’s prose to detail the fallout of the Sovereign Slayer’s activity. He’s been a busy man.

Also, Rose goes off the rails, but we knew that already.

This is the part of the story where Rose becomes an antagonist, in my opinion. More on that later. More after the break.

https://homestuck.com/story/1955

A letter from another version of Earth.

One of the very first things that we learn about Jake is that one of his all time favorite movies is Weekend at Bernie’s, an association that is part of a long list of red-herrings that link Jake up with Lord English, but of which nothing ultimately comes. It’s an association mostly because Bernie is a corpse who is also a puppet (like Doc Scratch, for example).

All that has already been pointed out by a lot of people before me, so moving on.

https://homestuck.com/story/1957

Just missed her.

https://homestuck.com/story/1993

Act 5 off to a great start, and while Karkat is in many ways a parallel to John (via their shared interests), right away, this action compares Karkat to Dave. Their reaction to being misnamed by the command prompt is pretty much identical.

https://homestuck.com/story/1994

Like I said, Karkat is pretty much immediately compared to John in terms of their shared interests, what with his Terrible Taste in Movies and his Amateur Coding.

One thing that stands out as endearing to me that I’ve probably not thought so much about before is Karkat’s practicing with his Sickle in his room. It reminds me of lightsaber wielding kids on early youtube.

https://homestuck.com/story/1995

So let’s break this and the next few pages down. Viewing the narration through the same James-Joycesque lens of “Narration is more or less identical with the characters’ thought processes,” that we have been so far, Karkat seems pretty ambivalent about existing as a troll, going as far as to describe his bad dreams as *terrible.*

Do all Trolls have dreams as bad as Karkat does? Is it a chucklevoodoos thing? Maybe it’s specifically a Karkat thing.

https://homestuck.com/story/1996

Karkat gets distracted instantly by intrusive thoughts and does something else that’s very Johnlike.

https://homestuck.com/story/1998

Aw c’mon. Early Sandler isn’t even that bad. Then again, it’s been a while since I’ve watched this one, maybe it’s worse than I remember it.

https://homestuck.com/story/1999

This section of the story is even more time-agnostic than the rest of the story, and a lot of it is told in past tense prospective action, which says to me that what we’re experiencing here is the various trolls on the meteor at the End of Act 4 collectively remembering what has taken place in the past, while the parts of this segment that are narrated in the present tense are being relayed to us via the characters in the narrative present (which is to say, the events which are being relayed to us in the panel.)

https://homestuck.com/story/2008

I wonder if Troll Will Smith is a Troll Scientologist?

https://homestuck.com/story/2010

I didn’t like the Trolls very much originally. They’re so ornery and pissy with each other all the time, with the exception of Gamzee and Tavros, but on a reread, especially keeping the things in mind that I’m keeping in mind, all of these characters are a lot more tolerable.

Using the cipher that we’ve established from reading the characters as basically attempting to perform what is culturally expected of them in the first four acts, we can immediately decode what is going on between Karkat and his friends - they are trying to be the best trolls they can be, or at least, live up to certain ideals/stereotypes the way that Dave tries to live up to the stereotype of the coolguy, or John emulates the mangrit and fatherliness and so on of his father figures.

But something is way *way* more wrong with Alternia’s role models than Earth’s.

That’s all from a Watsonian perspective. From a Doylist perspective, there are very explicit stereotypes each of these characters is designed around - commonplace annoying internet people from the ‘00s (pronounce that as Naughts).

https://homestuck.com/story/2012

There’s a lot of early installment weirdness in the first bits of Troll Stuff we get where it’s clear that Andrew was riffing and trying to find clear definitions for their relationships - it’s somewhat poorly known these days, I think, but Andrew has said in the past that he hates worldbuilding, and it kind of shows. (Did I mention that Kanaya Sollux friendship back when those two were interacting not long ago? That’s another one of those bits of early installment weirdness).

Anyway, the actual bit of early installment weirdness that I’m drawing attention to is the fact that the Subjugglators are described as being an Obscure Cult here, but later Homestuck Media (and even stuff within Homestuck, honestly) will make them out to be basically the only major aspect of being a Purple Blood.

https://homestuck.com/story/2013

Gamzee’s ignorance and his bliss are pretty much immediately linked to one another.

That said, I’m not going to dive too deep into Gamzee’s inner life. Like a lot of the trolls, in spite of his great relevance, he’s a bit of a joke character, and the joke is on us - whatever is going on inside this lad’s head is a puzzle for most of the comic.

Gamzee has a Freudian excuse in the form of his absent Lusus, which incidentally, is a parallel to Jade - the Nurture is the same, but the Nature is very differently. Unfortunately, when God was handing out Natures, he gave Gamzee one of the really bad ones, so he’s a worthless goddamn piece of shit.

https://homestuck.com/story/2024

Already into the first few troll conversations, and we’re setting up some stuff for later. Gamzee and Terezi’s very first conversation demonstrates the terrible chemistry that the two have together - Gamzee legitimately unsettles Terezi, and there’s just nothing at all she can do to bother him.

https://homestuck.com/story/2025

Sollux is probably so handy with this coding language because of his ability to hear the voices of the imminently deceased - so he can write programs that will execute along a pretty reasonable time frame.

https://homestuck.com/story/2027

Leader is a phrase that ends up being used in conjunction with Karkat a lot, and the concept of leadership is another one of those things that Homestuck Talks About but not a thing that Homestuck Is About, at least in the sense that leadership as a role is part of the comic’s broader commentary on cultural reproduction, the same way that Homestuck’s conversation about gender is, or Homestuck’s conversation about Roles in general.

What do you want to be when you grow up? Karkat wants to be a leader.

As long as Sollux is making his first appearance as a character, I want to take a second to say that as a character, he’s always been pretty tough and enigmatic for me to write, especially in the sense that he‘s frequently referred to melodramatic and sensitive or similar terms by people around him, but he actually doesn’t really seem that way in most cases - he just seems like a guy who wants to his own devices, and is generally pretty non-reactive to other peoples’ bullshit. Maybe he’s melodramatic in the way that Dave is, hyping himself up as a coolguy who is the best there is, but then again, Sollux kind of lives up to his own hype, considering that up until the last possible moment, he wins pretty much every fight he’s in handily, adapts Sburb personally, and has more romantic success than just about everyone else in the comic.

Maybe Karkat’s just projecting.

https://homestuck.com/story/2031

Roleplaying - a concept that I’ve used frequently to refer to the way that John and his chums perform rituals in order to relate to their culture and parents - is made explicit through the language of Flarping, which for the Trolls, serves as a way for them to literally act out the adventures of their long-dead ancestors, although it strikes me that it’s probably a lot more gainful for highbloods like Terezi and Vriska than it is in general for lowbloods like Aradia and Tavros.

I’ll get this out of the way up front instead of commenting it on a drip feed throughout Terezi’s upcoming courtblock roleplay - Terezi is the kind of kid who aspires to be a Cop. Or a lawyer, anyway, which in Alternian Law, is the same thing as a cop. In the wake of 2020′s scads of police brutality, and in general, having grown up into a nasty commie, it’s kind of hard to look at Terezi the same way.

While it’s clear that Terezi is remorseful later on toward her earlier attitudes and behaviors, Terezi is at least ambivalent, and at worst a purely antagonistic force throughout a lot of early Homestuck because of her authoritarian tendencies and her honestly pretty psychopathic behavior. She plays games with her friends’ lives.

https://homestuck.com/story/2047

Terezi adores having power over other people and making them helpless. For Terezi, alienation takes the form of emotional distance from the people that she’s tormenting. It makes it so much easier for her to conceive of them as wicked people who need to die.

https://homestuck.com/story/2055

Nepeta is an adorable girl who deserves all the good things. All of them.

That said, as long as we’re commentating and not glurging, Nepeta’s internet troll stereotype is probably less familiar these days, and I say probably less, but I can’t say for sure - it’s like this really specific thing that existed during the late ‘00s, where you had this highly specific stereotype, which I’ll call the Furry Artist Roleplayer, and I really hope that I’m not talking out of my ass by generalizing anecodtal evidence, but I know people who were pretty much exactly the Nepeta stereotype around the time that Act 5 was being written! Roleplaying in IRCs or on specialty forums with other people, all drawing art of their anthro OCs and writing stories about each other’s characters. That sort of thing still probably exists these days, but if it does, I’m not really part of any communities anymore where it leaks into the mainstream.

https://homestuck.com/story/2058

Okay, yup, Karkat is 100% projecting “Melodrama” on all the people around him. In a literal sense, Melodrama refers to theatrics that are exaggerated and sensationalized in such a way as to appeal to the emotions, often prioritizing spectacle and physical action over deep characterization.

Actually, if we’re taking it in the literal sense of the word, just about every character in Homestuck is pretty melodramatic - I keep talking about the way that they roleplay rituals and associate with symbols even when they fail to structures of power and culture that those rituals and symbols point to - performative participation without any actual substance. That’s practically the definition of Melodrama.

But Karkat is, perhaps, the most Melodramatic of all.

https://homestuck.com/story/2065

Aradia is one of my favorite characters in Homestuck, and possibly my favorite, something I can be up front about.

Our introduction to her is brief, and right out of the gate one thing about her is apparent - her relationship with destruction is central to her characterization.

https://homestuck.com/story/2069

While I was going to wait for the Hemospectrum to come up explicitly, now’s as good a time as any to talk about the fact that Andrew uses Troll society to comment on hierarchy a lot - hierarchy of just all kinds. Ageism is one of those, and Gerontocracy in particular in Alternia. In Alternia, just one of the ways that the oppression of the Hemospectrum manifests is the way that the Empire systematically takes advantage of its children by basically leaving them completely to their own devices. Trolls don’t have family units normally, but the fact that Troll adults are all offworld is not a “natural” part of Troll Society, it’s a decision. And while it’s a decision made by the Empress, it’s still one that, to some extent, benefits adult trolls at the expense of the children, since they’re not around spending energy on raising kids who are expected to raise themselves from the word go.

It’s honestly pretty late, and I’m tuckered out because of the steroids that I’m on, and the cough medicine, so in spite of the comparatively pretty short amount of reading I’ve done tonight, I’m going to call it here.

Cam signing off, Alive and a little High.

#liveblogging #commentary #nurture #nature #trolls

6 notes · View notes

angelcorebabyowo · 3 years

Text

Title: Honeydew

Warnings: Brief mention of suicidal thoughts

Summary: Lydia, Johann and edward get ready for a party and it's all OOC because yeah

"I don't even want to go!" Johann complains adjusting his poet's shirt and flopping down into the window bench with a huff as Lydia just as quickly starts to brush through his unkempt hair, he even closed his eyes whenever the strokes got gentler. He typically didn't go to parties unless he was performing and he, sadly, wasn't invited to do that this time. Honestly, the only reason he agreed to go was that it was considered rude to ignore an invitation from the mayor so he felt as if there wasn't really even a choice. Maybe he should just fake sick to get out of it, that wouldn't be all that bad, just a simple little head cold.

He sighs softly and leans back into his sister so that he wasn't jerked around as much, he was a bit tender-headed so it made it easier on both of them now that he wasn't wincing every three seconds. "It'll be perfectly fine babes, don't stress so much. You'll get gray hairs if you do it too much." Lydia warned with a small grin, her unnaturally sharp canine teeth looking unnatural amongst the normal ones. A few years ago she dragged everyone into sharping them but she continues to do it every time they run down even slightly. It would be weird if she didn't make it look so damn good " Although I bet you'd love that, huh?"

"Oh, you better believe it" Johann joked sticking just the tip of his tongue out of his mouth by habit. That wasn't a lie, he always fantasized about the thought of having grayish-silver hair at a young age and everyone in the family knew it and would make fun of him at every chance they could. He knew it wouldn't be a good look or actually enjoy it but it still made him laugh every time so he didn't really think that far ahead on the subject. His dad had gone completely grey by the time he was 30 and Edward, his brother, was starting to already so signs of it at the ripe age of 16 so it was possible that he could develop early on as well. "Could you imagine me being completely grey by my 20th birthday? You'd have to start calling me sir in a sign of respect!"

"You get no respect, none" Lydia laughs and stops brushing Johann's hair for a quick second before starting to do the very loose twist with her fingers. It was one of the easiest hairstyles she knew that could be done in half an hour or less. "Put it in a bun or just leave it down? Either way, it's getting twisted because I've already started."

"Maybe in a bun? " He mumbles leaning more onto the window and looking out at the city the setting sun was hitting just perfect to cast a somewhat orange and pink glow on the tops of certain buildings. He assumed his apartment complex was one of them do to the height alone. He sometimes wanted to just sit on the ledge and watch the sunset that way, one false mood and he would plummet ten stories down before landing in the pool below. He wondered if he'd still be alive by that point.

"A buns always a safe option." She whispers interrupting his thoughts and gently putting his hair in a bun before taking a step back to look at her handiwork "Its a little high but I think you should be good. That way it's nearly a safe bet, not one person would recognize you."

"Do you think Avi would still recognize me though?" Johann questions as he looks into the vanity mirror and puts on a fix inspired mask. He forgot why he picked a fox, maybe do to their cunning abilities or something along those lines. He'd picked it out when he first got the invitation weeks ago so all memories seemed to just fade from him.

"Avi would recognize you even if you didn't have a face or hair, now stop being a love-stuck puppy and both of you finish getting ready. " Edward interrupts walking into the room. How no one heard him walking down the hall with the obnoxiously loud heels was beyond everyone. He was also wearing his mask already. A cream scaled one with a few black scales mixed into it as it added ' Flavor '

'Snake' was the first thing that came to Johann's mind whenever he first saw it all those weeks ago, and even today his mind couldn't stop from going to that place no matter how many times Edward insisted it was a dragon inspired one. Johann still wondered what kind of snake it would even be, maybe just a simple corn snake. Edward wasn't that mean, after all, he wouldn't pick something venomous after all.

"I am ready." Johann insists pointing to his outfit, the only thing he had to do was change into some dress pants and he'd be off to go.

"I was talking about both of you. More specifically Miss. "I'll do it later" over there," Edward says, he had a point after all. Lydia wasn't even remotely ready to go at that point. Her hair was pulled into an over-the-top and eye-drawing hairstyle and her nails were done to perfection, but other than that her clothes were just basic pajamas "go get dressed before we leave you at home."

Lydia smirks before patting Edward on the cheek in a taunting manner. "Talking mad shit for someone who got his license suspended."

"Johann can! Right, you can still drive?" Edward questions flopping down onto Johann's bed with a loud sigh as the bed creaks under the new weight. He winced at the sound but overall didn't say anything about it.

"I'm 15 years old and haven't even taken the exam yet"

"Didn't ask how old or if it was legal just asked if you knew how."

"I refuse to let either one of you drive my car," Lydia says before walking out of the room to actually go get ready knowing that the other two would actually leave her behind.

"Our car!" Edward calls before leaning over and closing the door fully and sighs loudly again before laying up against the headboard already messing up his golden capelet and neon blue shirt. He really couldn't stand not being the center of attention for a single second, he always dressed like that so it wasn't that far of a bet after all. "We have ten minutes before it starts but you know the saying-"

"Arriving fashionably late is better than arriving on time, shows how little you care." Both of them say at the same time although while Edward sounds cheerful Johann just sounds even more tired then he always does as if he was trying to drag it out for as much as he possibly could. Johann sat at the vanity trying to figure out how he was going to cover up the bags under his eyes that, even with the mask, were extremely prominent. he eventually just settled on leaving them there as it seemed to add character to the entire look. (He was going for a renaissance era poet who just lost his husband due to some mysterious illness. He seemed to actually be hitting all of the points except for the crying but no way was he going to cry in front of people.)

They sat in silence now, it wasn't awkward, in fact, it was more comfortable than anything. Edward was doing something on his phone and Johann was trying not to have a panic attack because he was actually going through with this while struggling to fit pants that were a little too tight on. Alright, so maybe it wasn't all that comfortable but it was close enough to it.

After about 20 minutes Lydia rushed in with a smile wearing bother her outfit and mask on. It was a multi-colored short yet puffy dress that fell off the shoulders and a mask that looked suspiciously like a peacock with the number of feathers that seemed to be hastily glued on. "All they had at the store was the plain ones so I had to glue the feathers and sequins on myself so now it looks as if a 3-year-old designed it!" she complained before going over to Edward and promptly laying down on top of him with an over the top sigh. "Woe is me."

"Well whose fault is that L? We offered you to come with us weeks ago but Noooo, you needed to wait till the last second like some sort of troublemaker," Edward says pushing her off and then promptly standing up and rubbing his eyes slightly and throws the keys he had been hiding in his pockets to Lydia with a pout.

"Off we go come along little children!" Lydia says before walking out the door again, the sound of her boots echoing through the mostly empty hall. The only thing in them was a few paintings of fruit painted in over the top and crazy colors and a single statue at the end of the hall that they won at an auction a few years ago for like a thousand dollars,

It wasn't worth it.

"We're the same age!" Johann argues running after her trying to put on some of his slip-on shoes as he walked. It didn't fit the look but no way was he also going to wear heels, that was pushing it too far for him at best.

"Stairs or Elevator?" Edward askes whenever all three make it out of their apartment building and into the main hallway "I'm taking the stair because no way am I getting Vored by an elevator"

"Stop being so mean to me!"Edward whines but gets in the elevator anyway with a pout and it started to go down, Lydia was babbling about how much fun tonight would be and her brothers both groaned in unison.

"That's baby talk. Grown-men take getting eaten like a champ." Lydia says with a small laugh before hitting the button to take them to the main lobby "Johann baby, what are you taking?"

"I'm already in pain so I'll just take the elevator, fuck walking down 10 flights of stairs. "Johann says pushing his way into the elevator and gently holds on to the railing. "Ed gets in here, I refuse to sit next to you if you walk down down disgusting!"

If this was going to happen all night then what a fun one it would be.

#yes their step siblings in this #thoight it would be fun #taz edward and lydia #taz johann #fanfic #originally on ao3 #taz balance #the adventure zone #the adventure zone balance

1 note · View note

avoutput · 4 years

Text

Final Fantasy VII Legacy || Remake Review

This is the 2nd out of 3 articles. Find the first here.

Enough with the flowery language. No more ancient memories of times passed. No more wasted passages on the origin of Final Fantasy VII. I am not some little kid sitting crossed-legged in front of a 13-inch tube TV, but a man sitting in a lightly used office chair he found by the apartment dumpster several years ago. I have grown. The gaming world has grown. And Final Fantasy has grown. But is it the kind of growth you imagined? Does this game shed the dead weight of its numbered younger siblings? Does it recreate an experience from your childhood? Is it an innovative gaming experience that redefines the RPG like its genesis? Is breathing life into one of the most provocative modern gaming death’s worth the exhumation? These are the questions swimming in my head while I waited for the release of Final Fantasy 7 Remake, a deeply marked touchstone in my life. And after having completed my run through the game, I had some thoughts I needed to organize and share. I need to decide: Is this a proper run, a proper update, a proper remake? Or is it just a repurposed chair found by the dumpster?

Let me clarify a few things. First, this is going to be a straight review of the game with little-to-no spoilers. Second, this is the 2nd in a series of 3 articles I decided to write, with the final article being a no-holds-barred, spoiler frenzy discussing the outcomes of this game and many other Final Fantasy’s. In this article, we are going to be looking at what the game did well, what it was mediocre at, and lastly, what was downright disappointing. Each section will bleed into each other a bit because the games components bleed into each other a bit, which feels a little odd for a JRPG, but this isn’t ye-old JRPG. Let’s get right to it.

RE-KWARK!-ABLE! I MEAN REMARKABLE.

Before we tear this game down, let’s spend some time building it up. The standout component of this game was very clearly the battle system. The transition is seamless and the frenzy begins almost immediately. What surprised me right off the bat is how easy it was to not only switch between characters, but how simply it was to tell them what to do. I thought slowing down the battle to issue commands was going to be a nuisance, but it really helped balance out the pace of the battle. You can assign 4 hotkeys that let you keep the battle going without slowing down to strike at an enemies weakness. I did find that it felt a little useless to assign anything other than your weapon skills, because spells take a little time to cast and most of the time you are going to want to pick a specific spell based on the enemies weakness, but that is totally up to your playstyle.

In the vein of the battle system, boss fights were engrossing and detailed. It felt like they spent a lot of time thinking about which moments in the Midgar timeline would make the best boss battles and how exactly they would design the bosses moveset and structure based not only on what the boss was, but where the boss was. In one chapter, you fight a boss that is nearby some train tracks. At a certain point in the battle, it will electrify the track, and if you are standing on it, you get major damage. Enemy types also had a pretty consistent set of weaknesses, so you didn’t have to go into the bestiary menu to determine what spell would most likely take it down. But on the other hand, the Assess ability is crucial in understanding some of the more minute methods to hitting the enemy weakness. It was actually a delight to try and fight both with and without it. Like everything else in the battle, the menu comes up with a single button press and no load time. It gives you time to read and strategize your attacks.

In some other reviews I had been reading, people had complained about a feature I loved. Using spells and abilities requires you to have your ATB gauge filled, which will fill with time, but fills much faster if you are attacking. The complaint was that the AI isn’t particularly good at attacking when you aren’t using them, and not only that, they don’t receive the ATB fill bonus from attacking, it simply takes them time. However, because transition between characters is instantaneous, I believe that the designers did this as an incentive to use each character as often as possible. This isn’t the only incentive for this either. Every weapon for each character has a single skill that can be learned from it. To learn it, you have to use a skill. Again, to use the skill the ATB gauge has to be filled. Most battles in the game go by quickly, especially once you know the enemies weakness, so you need to build ATB fast and activate the skill. Without telling you, the game basically created an environment where it's not only necessary to switch between characters and learn their playstyles, but almost necessary. What’s more, every character is somewhat unique, especially Barret and Aerith, and certain types of enemies (flying or distance based, ect) are much easier to handle with the right character. All around, the battle system is an absolute standout and easily the best part of the game.

Without giving anything away, another strong part of the game is the scenario design. I was driven to hear more, see more, and do more in this game. The characters a crisp and vibrant, even when they lack depth. They are undeniably “cool” or “cute” or whatever their main adjective should be for the given scenario. The voice acting in both the Japanese and English versions are great, though the Japanese version from time to time has a different take on some of the characters than the English, it's still a blast. Every moment that leads into a battle with a signature villain is thoroughly enjoyable. I don’t think you absolutely need to have played the original to enjoy these moments, but more on that later. What it really comes down to is this game has some pretty great pacing because even when it fumbles, it doesn’t stop you from wanting to play more. The battle system element just propels you forward and hearing what crazy thing is going to happen next is more than enough to make up for follies.

This is sad to say, but there really is only one more exceptional item to mention. The return of Nobuo Uematsu. The soundtrack of this game was already pretty well designed in the original. Coming back to it was more than just a nostalgic walk down memory lane. It was like coming home and realizing your parent’s upgraded your house to a mansion with room service, a full staff, and a kitchen that's open 24 hours a day stocked with everything you desire. And it isn’t just that the music was remastered, it flows in and out of the game with masterful timing. Multiple versions of each song were recorded so that movements in the song crescendo at the exact moment your Cloud lands a hit or Reno and Rude jump from a helicopter. It made every moment of the game feel like so much more than just an average confrontation. There are a few moments that even made me laugh. There is a hip-hop inspired Chocobo theme that made me smile both for how odd it was and how awful it should have been received, but somehow it just slaps. If you pay attention you might notice some of the music is more reminiscent of other entries in the series with two standouts in particular, one sounding like Final Fantasy XII and another like Final Fantasy XIII, two very different scores. But it felt right at home in this modernized version of Final Fantasy VII. There is also a music collection sidequest that is mostly made up of jazzy remakes of classic Final Fantasy VII songs. These are less remarkable, but still good for the most part. Part of the issue with these songs is it is played through some kind of fuzzy record player speaker overlay, which I found annoying and distorting.

MISSED THE KWARK! I MEAN MARK.

I would say that almost everything else in this game missed the mark in some way or another. Some are just shy of a home run, others are baseline grounders, and some are just straight fouls. Either way, they could have used more attention or a different direction in my opinion. And I want to start with something I almost never complain about in video games: the graphics. Talking about graphics is usually pointless. People who are after ridiculous levels of fidelity always seem to believe this either makes or breaks the game. In Remake, that might actually be true for once. I am not a graphics designer, but one thing I noticed and couldn’t stop noticing is that there were so many different levels of graphical fidelity all smashed into one place. In some scenes, there were gorgeous details, like the entirety of Aerith’s house area, but then you get to the flowers, it's like 1997 again. In other moments, like when looking down at the Midgar Slums from the upper plate, it is clearly a very flat and stretched image meant to look three-dimensional like the other things around you, but the image was just off. Doors on buildings would look like garbage compared to the floor or walls in the room. It was just very clear that a once over on all the different assets would have helped out quite a bit. The problem wasn’t that the graphics were good or bad, but that they were inconsistent. It was like looking at photo-realistic drawing with some Picasso in the middle. The character models were so well done, when the interacted with this space, it was just jarring. Again, not awful, just missed the mark.

With such a well maintained battle system, you would think the menu system would be equally flawless, but it wasn’t. The main UI where you would outfit your party was a bit of a mess. For one, there was no way to go from upgrading your weapon to equipping it or vice-versa. They had completely separate menus for both that didn’t lead to each other. Then there is the upgrade menu itself, wherein you select upgrades in a similar way to FFXIII crystal upgrade menu. When you choose the weapon, it takes you to a completely different screen and makes this loud noise and transition effect. It's annoying to read and to navigate. You can bypass this by having the computer choose your upgrades for you, but that really felt like I was missing out. It would have been a huge improvement just to list the abilities and have me choose from the same menu I chose everything else. It was unnecessarily fancy and kind of an eyesore. Equipping materia got a small upgrade from the original game, wherein you can press a button to see and switch out materia with everyone, but this should have just been THE menu, not an extra button press. They also should have categorized the materia, letting you choose which type you wanted to look at instead of having to scroll through line after line. The menu also doesn’t give you simple information in places where you could use it, like what chapter you are in. To know, you have to go to the save menu. It could have simply been listed next to the playtime in the bottom corner.

There are even certain materia that are hard to understand, specifically the Enemy Skill materia. In the old game it would list which skills you had obtained. This one didn’t give you any idea what you had obtained and what exactly was obtainable. After a while I figured out that in the bestiary, although it would tell you which monster had a skill you could get, it wouldn’t exactly say if you had it. Turns out that if the skill was highlighted green on the enemy skills screen (another button press away), you didn’t have it, if it was blue, you did. Then, to see which skills you had in total, you had to go to the party screen and it would be listed under your abilities if they were wearing the materia. Not only that, the skill would have a different name than the skill the enemy used, the naming convention wasn’t 1-to-1. Add to this, materia sometimes have very obscure instructions or descriptions. The battles can go by so fast, it's hard to even notice the effect of them if something isn’t exploding or outwardly obvious. In fact, many of the instructions are weird in the game. If you die in a series of fights where they are linked, it will ask if you want to go back to the first fight or the last fight. Choosing the first actually sends you back to before you started the series and you can adjust your equipment, which is fine, but in a normal fight, if you die, you can only go back to the fight and it doesn’t let you modify your equipment. It's a simple inconsistency but the text and cursor placement also make it hard to understand exactly what is going to happen.

Finally, all the smaller issues. There are too many places where the game has you “walk” for no particular reason. You just slow down. I thought it might be due to loading, but it happens in places where no story or anything appears to be happening next. Summon materia is already maxed and it doesn’t feel like it helps all that much, even when the enemy is weak to them. The game design is set up so that whichever character you are currently playing as the only thing enemies are interested in attacking, especially if someone isn’t using provoke. So, your summon simply attacks, and to do it's better attacks, you have to sacrifice ATB. Mostly this is fine, it creates balance, but i’d prefer they came and left like in the original. In fact, I have hated all summon mechanics since FFX. They need to come, do damage, and be gone. But I have to admit, this is the best marriage of the two versions. Next, the choices you make that alter certain outcomes in the game are so far away from the thing you are altering, and at times not clear. This could have been more fun had they given you a bit more of control or some kind of gauge to show you what was going on, but in a way, it was true to its roots, which isn’t necessarily a good thing. Lastly, having to aim the camera to interact with items that are just outside of its view is just annoying. That coupled with the random moments you have to hold “triangle” for a series of switches always rubbed me the wrong way.

DOWNRIGHT DISAPPOINTING… uh.. kwark.

Final Fantasy VII Remake obviously has a great foundation and pretty great framework. The music is great, it's a blast to play, and the characters really resonate. But there are still some aspects of this game that make it feel a little less than game of the year. These complaints might be less of an issue than I am making it. The game is what it is, and I am easily going to clock in at about 90 hours for both regular and hard modes. Still. STILL. There are just a few things that were completely disappointing, and not just from an old fan, but as a current gen gamer.

My biggest complaint is married together and baked into the design of the game, namely Midgar and Chapters. Final Fantasy has always felt like it was about exploring not just a story, but the world it exists in. In the first 9 entries to the series, this was done by giving the player a chance to get lost on its world map, looking for towns, roaming through forests. You had to use your imagination to fill the gaps, but that wasn’t a bad thing. As the entries iterated, the worlds got bigger, and so did their stories. They had lore and depth. With the release of 10, this all changed. In the 10th game, the story was suddenly on rails, the only direction you could move in was forward. It took all of the exploration away in favor of level design and pacing. I remember thinking that this was the beginning of the end for a series I loved. With the release of 12, it felt a little better, but mostly it was just an offline version of the massively popular MMORPG formula. It felt more rote and less like exploration. With the 13th entry, it was back to the rails. It began to feel like the creators sought only to make an experience where the characters and story where the vehicle, and the world was just the background. In 15, this would change somewhat, but it was also an experiment for them that ended in failure. They tried to give us an open world governed by a chapter system. But, despite their best efforts, they couldn’t breathe life into the world of 15. They tried to spread the world and its characters across too many dimensions. There was an anime series, a full length movie prequel, missing chapters introduced as DLC, and even a mobile game. A broken chimera. I think the success of 10 and their failure to create a modern, open world game is what ended up making 7 Remake what it is. A game on rails.

Before the games release, the game designers touted that Midgar was now a place that could be fully experienced. For me, this couldn’t have been further from the truth. It was just a series of narrow hallways masquerading as a city. The people in the background make noise and act like they live there, but they don’t move, goto work on a schedule, ride the trains, or even run stores. You can’t interact with them. They are just mouthpieces. Because the game runs by chapters, you have almost no ability to explore anything that doesn’t have to do with the immediate story. The characters will chide you for going the “wrong direction” and the game will outright stop you from wandering too far. “No no, you fool, the GAME is over HERE”. In the original game, Midgar is partially just an introduction to the world, characters, and battle system. But really, it was the beating heart of the entire game world and story just as much as the characters that live in it and run Shinra. The remake seems to have forsaken that in favor of story beats. Outside of a few distinct places, most of Midgar just feels like window dressing. Wall Market is obviously a delight, but the entirety of Midgar should have been like Wall Market. You should be able to get lost in the back streets or take the wrong train. Shinra headquarters gives you little glimpse into the way people on the upper plates live and work, but yet again they are just mannequins.

Games today give you vibrant open worlds to explore. You can jump on rooftops and glide over large swaths of land. The way in which Midgar was designed leaves little to the imaginationa as compared to the original. The graphics are crisp and every pipe and air conditioner feels like they might actually do something, but you can’t follow that pipe anywhere or walk down alleyways and talk to vagrants. Old games got a pass on size and depth because their limitations were obvious, often baked into whatever the genre was. If it was a brawler, you walk down streets beating people up. In racer, you play the track. But RPG’s were one of the few where you would be expected to explore the edges of its world. With new generation games, the choice to stop exploration in a RPG feel less like a limitation of raw power and more like a design decision. I would have preferred a game in which Midgar was a place to see and explore and interact with. Where I could haggle with one vendor over something found in another. Where I could watch the day cycle send people back and forth work. But Midgar wasn’t their focus. Telling you a story was. And as fun as that was, it was so disappointing to find that the original game gave you more by letting your mind wander past its graphical limitations than the remake did do by making the decision to limit your ability to physically explore visible areas. Instead of letting a visible wall stop you from going somewhere, an invisible force just puts a stop to your antics and tells you to get back to work. Maybe it's just psychological, but it is maddening. The physical world of 7 was just as important as its story and characters, but the story got to lead the show, and to me this feels off balance and off brand.

THE TAKEAWAY

This is a good game. A well made game for the most part. It's rough in places, but not so rough that it really hurts the end result. Final Fantasy 7 Remake is actually a showcase of talent that comes out of Square-Enix and despite the fact that I feel like they either bite off more than they can chew or completely misunderstand their core fanbase, they are still great artists. I often question whether game designers at big companies are customer service machines that should give us the product we demand or artists that deserve to create in a space that we support. Remake reminds me why I am both supportive but vocal. They may never hear me, but I want to know I said something. Still, it ends up being more than the sum of its parts. The game hums along like a well made machine. It takes time to remind fans of key moments, interjects tons of surprises that don’t entirely offend its base, and ultimately is never boring. What more could you ask from a game? Well, as it turns out, a lot. And I have so much more to say about the actual story content of this game and of Final Fantasy as a whole. If I didn’t mention some aspect here, it's probably because I want to discuss it in a way that may ruin the story, so look for the 3rd and final entry next week.

#Articles #Final Fantasy 7 #Final Fantasy VII #Final Fantasy 7 Remake #Final Fantasy #Nobuo Uematsu #FF7 #Review #JRPG #Voice Acting #Tifa #Cloud #Aerith #Barret #Jessie

2 notes · View notes

thesportssoundoff · 5 years

Text

What Happens When You Take A Bad Idea And Make It Worse? LET’S TALK ABOUT THE BRAWL FOR ALL!

Joey

March 11th

The Mother Fucking Brawl For All.

Never in my wildest dreams did I ever think I'd actually get around to this but there are miracles around us and what better time than now? The Brawl For All is generally regarded as one of the worst ideas of all time in a business with an entire genre dedicated to grown men and women smashing each other with fluorescent light tubes and slamming one another on beds of nails and thumbtacks. In a business that up until the mid 80s featured nazis goose stepping around and up until 2003 or so regularly and routinely featured women wrestling in their bloomers, the Brawl For All is the one idea that every human being unanimously believes was a disastrous failure. It's the one unanimous tire fire that not even it's most ardent supporter can put out. Not even WCW's junkyard battle royale which featured multiple injuries due to WCW not gimmicking the cars and just having guys taking bumps onto cars and through glass windshields is hated this much. The Brawl 4 All is one of those things people can't even sum up with "It was bad!" and move on. You have to go through layers and layers and levels of badness. You have to view it almost as an affront to your sensibilities, as a personal attack on you as a fan. Hell not just as a fan but as a human being!

Vince McMahon and company have failed in previous ventures before and ventures after. The XFL, the World Bodybuilding Federation, the ECW relaunch, 65% of the undercard Attitude Era angles, their really expensive WWE Films attempts. Some could even argue that the brand split originally was a failure in some respects given that Smackdown never really got going on its own and Raw declined sharply from the brand split onward. That said those failures at least had SOME inkling and morsels of promise behind them. Not the Brawl For All. It was a bad idea from the start, a bad idea during and made even worse by what happened afterwards. Also? The Brawl For All is one of those things that every wrestling fan and every wrestling personality has a hard opinion on, the kind of shit that lends itself to so much gossip, rumor and conversation. Over the next few weeks, I want to discuss the Brawl 4 All a bit more. I want to delve into it because it's as close as we'll ever get to a universal no hope no spin failure by the WWE and because...well...it's one of my favorite fuck ups of all time. It's always been something that fascinated me from watching it live as a casual fan to laughing at it as a smart fan when I stumble across it to making a near yearly pilgrimage to youtube to watch every single fight of it I can find before it got yanked. It's one of those wrestling stinkers that like December 2 Dismember or the Heroes Of Wrestling card that I'm magnetically attracted to. Every wrestling fan FEELS for the Brawl For All even if those feelings are utter disdain for everyone involved with it.

The Concept And How Fucked It Was From Jump

To get why this even happened, you have to go back in a time capsule. Despite catching fire in 1998, the WWF (for the purpose of being as thorough as possible here, we're gonna call 'em as they were when this happened) is still struggling to keep track with WCW Nitro. They're in the midst of an 83 week long ass eating from Ted Turner's Atlanta based wrestling promotion and "good ideas" are running dry. Understand that at this point the WWF has the single hottest property in the business but that sole property isn't enough to get over the hump vs the NWO, the cruiserweights, an ascending Bill Goldberg, Bret Hart, the return of Sting and what was genuinely just a better overall card. Even if Wrestlemania 14 gave birth to so many great stories going forward (Austin vs McMahon, the hard reboot of DX as a faction, Kane vs Undertaker's first match), WCW is in the midst of its highest grossing year ever. Vince McMahon has James Harden putting up 50 points a night and winning on his back but he's still looking up to the Golden State Warriors. Making matters worse, both companies are in the pro wrestling equivalent of an arms race. Remember how when the UFC and Bellator in 2014 and 2015 signed anybody with a pulse because they were trying to fill up two insanely bloated schedules? It's a bit like that. Anybody who is good (and not a walking flag factory so to speak) is either in WWE or WCW at this point which means if you ONLY have two hours of content, you've got a lot of guys doing nothing.

The Brawl For All on its surface and without malice seems like an awful idea to try and remedy that. Pit sixteen dudes in a shoot tournament and let them go at it with set rules in place. It gets guys on TV, gives them something to do and at the end, in theory, the winner doesn't just get a big financial prize but come out in the end as a star. It's a chance to do something with a section of guys who are doing absolutely nothing at all. Sounds good, riiiiight? Well now let's break into some sexy rumor mongering about what this really was about:

-We can start with the mastermind! Vince Russo is the man who apparently concocted this concept which should be somewhat redeemable if what I laid out above was entirely 100% accurate. It's not entirely the case, even according to Russo's own words. Per Vince Russo, a large reason the Brawl For All came to be was that he had a beef with one of the wrestlers (Bradshaw aka John Bradshaw Layfield aka that guy who got flattened by ring announcer Joey Styles) consistently bloviating that he was the toughest guy in the locker room. Right off the jump, any sort of noble designs are whittled away. Now often in pro wrestling, there's 100 different stories to the same single event often shared by people IN the same room. Imagine how pronounced it is that a) everybody agrees that it was Russo's idea, b) everybody is under the impression that it was over a tiff with a pro wrestling with no shoot fighting experience and c) EVERYBODY agrees it was one of the worst concepts imaginable. The Brawl For All's entire seed was planted not so much out of a design to get guys work and on TV but out of wanting to see a loud dude get punched up. That's insanity out the gate.

-The Brawl For All was by invitation only and depending on who you believe, the process to select wrestlers was rather...exclusive. Bruce Prichard discusses in his podcast with Conrad Thompson that he was the guy who had to round up the talent to fill enough spots in the tournament. Prichard says he had to play to the egos of wrestlers and in a separate interview, Bart Gunn talks about how he got recruited basically by another member of the writing team as well. The name Bart Gunn will become pretty important down the line so jot that down in your notebooks real quick. Wrestlers were recruited with what seems like a pretty easy enough pitch and one I'd imagine that the UFC uses today with their fighters; basically a "I mean don't you believe you're the toughest dude here?!" and a "We'll pay you!" and we're off to the races. Despite this, the Brawl For All struggled to get people to fill in the spots in no small part due to the fact that no star is going to partake in an absolutely stupid concept like this when they can just make their money being a star. The Brawl For All isn't even a TUF; it's a PFL tournament where all the dudes nobody else wants are lumped into a tournament format with the golden carrot of a $100,000 prize at the end of it.

-Perhaps worth more than the $100,000 prize was the either legit or illegitimate golden carrot of the winner getting to work a program with "Stone Cold" Steve Austin. Understand that no one single act was as hot and drawing as much money at this time as Steve Austin was. He was the it guy, the biggest star in the business and noway near close to peaking as a talent either. The Brawl For All $100,000 prize? That's cool and all plus that was basically the downside guarantee for a year's worth of work. The opportunity to work with Stone Cold on a pay per view? That's the big money ticket. That's the opportunity to be a made man like how working with Hogan in the 80s was. For top guys, that opportunity may come along at any given point. Again going back a bit to TUF and the PFL, imagine if the UFC offered eight of its guys the chance to compete in a tournament for $100,000. Enticing! Now imagine the winner gets to fight Conor McGregor on a PPV. Tell me if it doesn't get every guy not named Khabib and Tony Ferguson jumping into it. That would be a great no doubt can't miss opportunity!

EXCEPT

-It was probably a lie. Scratch that. We can factually tell that any sort of Austin match for the winner was a lie since every person involved (sans one) says it was real and the winner never actually got said shot. Imagine if the tournament wasn't build on anything truthful but instead on a "The winner will be in the mix" from Dana White. While Bruce Prichard says there was no official plan for the winner to face Steve Austin, everybody else involved from talent to wrestling guru Jim Cornette seems to suggest there WAS a plan in place for the winner to win. That is, assuming of course, the winner was the guy they thought was going to win all along. More on that in the future but just know that the Brawl For All's fighters were flirted with a hush hush unofficial promise of facing Steve Austin that was probably never going to be fulfilled unless won by a specific party. Bart Gunn says he was told the winner would face Stone Cold and well....more on that at another time. Let's just say sports entertainment and combat sports have a long storied history of perhaps listening to the matchmakers a bit too closely.

-The rules for the Brawl For All? Well those were a mess. According to Bruce Prichard, the rules were still being worked out the week of. According to Steve Blackman (a dude who Bob Holly admits would've won the whole thing), there were plans to allow leg kicks and those rules just happened to get yanked the week of. The glove size seems to change depending on who you ask as the WWF says they were 16 ounce gloves but Bart Gunn argues repeatedly they were 22 ounce gloves. Some of the guys admittedly didn't even think it was a shoot fight either and at least one fighter fought thinking it was a work. According to Bart Gunn, even halfway through the tournament he kept expecting it to be a work suddenly. The "official" Brawl For All rules had points for takedowns, points for a knockdown and points for more punches thrown across three one minute rounds. The scorecard part doesn't even matter at this point. To be honest, it didn't even matter then.

So let's talk about the big problem here

So imagine putting together a tournament designed around the concept of "Who's the toughest guy!" in a show where the audience is conditioned to believe that the toughest guy is the world champion or if the champion is a heel, the toughest guy is the babyface chasing said champion. We already in theory know who the toughest guy is or at least we're willing to suspend our disbelief. Also if we're to believe that the winner of the tournament is the toughest guy in the company, why aren't the big name tough guys we've been told are the tough guys competing in it? The concept falls flat right there on its own but the hole isn't deep enough. We gotta go from six feet to nine feet so now imagine that you've come up with this concept that pees on the first rule of your product. Make it worse. Make it so that the audience is being told to believe that what they see HERE AND ONLY HERE is legitimate. NOTHING is as frustrating in pro wrestling as "a shoot." For those not addicted to sports entertainment meth, a shoot is something on the program that the audience is led to believe is real. Now for something to be "real" on a show that's already "real" then that in turn means what we're seeing is fake, right? So a "real fight" on pro wrestling ultimately means that what we're seeing is fake. Now most wrestling fans since the 70s and 80s have probably believed wrestling in some form or fashion is/was not real. We accept it as entertainment and as Jerry Jarrett once lovingly put it "theater of the illiterate." The key is to not remind us that what we're seeing is clearly fake (a problem wrestling fans seem to be having right now with Ronda Rousey). Reminding the audience that what they're saying is predetermined scripted fakeness and then asking them to invest into the REAL portion of the product that breaks their illusion only works if a star is doing it. It doesn't work if a bunch of random dudes and mid carders are doing it. Imagine if in the middle of one of those UFC Embedded gimmicks, we saw Conor McGregor rehearsing the press conference lines and then he went out to try and sell his beef with Cowboy Cerrone as legitimate. You've already hurt the audience's feelings and the Brawl For All actively did that at a time where all WWF fans wanted was to watch Stone Cold kick ass and DX make inappropriate jokes. You've brought DOWN the segment.

So now we're nine feel into the hole. Let's go sixteen feet deep. Nope! Let's go from here to fuckin' middle earth on this bad boy; pro wrestling is a TEAM effort. It requires two or more able bodied people to work together to create a magnificent fake fight spectacle that tells a story and ends with you becoming emotionally invested in its finish and what's to come. That requires participation. Now come up with a tournament where guys are going to beat the holy shit out of one another FOR REAL and then have to go back to participating with one another as if nothing happened! Every single wrestler involved in the Brawl For All has spoken about the bad blood and residual effects the Brawl For All had. Also remember these are not trained fighters either. Some of these guys are amateur wrestlers who probably haven't done that for years. Some dudes dabbled in kickboxing or BJJ on their spare time or in years outside of wrestling had some formal combat sports . Some of these guys were bodybuilders by trade and some of these dudes were just pro wrestlers who happened to have a few "So and so cleaned out a bar room with one hand and six beers!" type magical fishing trip stories. So you're taking a bunch of ego driven (some chemically enhanced) guys and sending them out there to beat each other up on a Monday or a Tuesday and then magically get over it in time to make the house show loop where they're going to team together. We've officially come out the other end through China, folks.

And yet despite all of this very obvious right in front of our faces warning signs, the Brawl For All existed.

Next time we'll talk about who was in it a bit more---and why IF the Brawl For All had a true tertiary motive designed to elevate one guy to superstardom, it was an even bigger failure than humanly possible.

#MMA #WWF #WWE #The Fuckin' Brawl For All

20 notes · View notes

hasty-touch · 5 years

Text

Southern* Eorzea NPC count

After making an exhaustive count of all Ishgardian NPCs in FFXIV for my Ishgard lore compilation, I started counting NPCs in the other city-states of Eorzea too, just for fun. Here’s my findings as of February 2019.

(* This count currently excludes Ishgard for reasons I’ll get to in a moment.)

“Methods”, such as they are

This is a count and analysis of “targetable NPCs” -- NPC mobs -- in Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn and expansions.

As I play, I go through zones and add every NPC I can find to a spreadsheet, noting the race, clan and gender they use for their model, plus their national affiliation and their profession (if I’m able to judge what these are). I can easily include all the NPCs that are always present in a zone just by going from one end of the zone to the other. I also add NPCs who only appear during quests, duties, and FATEs as I see that content.

Unselectable NPCs who appear in the background as flavor aren’t included. NPCs given generic names (e.g. “Chocobokeep”) were counted. Infinitely respawning NPCs from FATEs and duties aren’t included (since it’s hard to judge how many “there really are”). Speaking-role NPCs who only appear in cutscenes are included. Really important, named historical figures who don’t appear in-game were included in the Ishgard count, so they’ll probably be included here too, but I haven’t entered any yet.

This count currently includes 1247 NPCs of Gridanian, Ul’dahn, Lominsan, and Ala Mhigan nationality. The first three city-states have about 350 NPCs each, and Ala Mhigo about 200.

Ishgard is currently excluded because my Ishgardian count included 650+ NPCs, and the unique demographics of Ishgard would throw off the totals. When/if I reach 500+ NPCs for the main three city states, I’ll add the Ishgard count to this spreadsheet.

Currently, independent or semi-independent tribes within Eorzea -- such as the U tribe in Southern Thanalan -- are not included in this count, but I’d like to add them soon.

Limitations

Because NPCs are hand-counted, you should keep in mind that there’s a possibility of selection bias. For the total numbers, I’ve tried to mitigate this as much as possible by entering all NPCs of a zone or quest at the same time.

Selection bias is potentially even more of a problem when I assign nationalities and professions to NPCs. I feel I do a pretty accurate job judging NPCs by their dialogue and outfits, but it’s possible for me to have missed characters or incorrectly assigned them.

And, of course, these are not exhaustive, unlike the Ishgard count. It’s possible that as I count more NPCs, the trends will change. But, when I went from about 150 NPCs per nation to the current 350 NPCs, the ratios really didn’t change much, so I’m fairly confident we can call these numbers representative.

For the gender analysis, I put all characters with “female” models and/or she/her pronouns into “female”, and all characters with “male” models and/or he/him pronouns into “male” (and characters with ambiguous models and unspecified pronouns into “other”). This is a capitulation to the limitations of the game, which uses unisex models for “beast tribes” and two binary gender models for PC races. In “reality”, just as there must certainly be mixed-clan and mixed-race Eorzeans, there must also be a varied spectrum of genders among Eorzeans -- but this can’t be easily represented with the models available in the game. So what I’m analyzing here is “what the game shows us”.

All that out of the way, let’s look at some nation-specific numbers!

Gridania

Encyclopedia Eorzea vol. 1 numbers: 40% Midlander Hyur, 30% Wildwood Elezen, 10% Duskwight Elezen, 10% Keeper of the Moon Miqo’te, 10% Other

I did include the adventurers at Buscarron’s Druthers in this count, since they seem to live semi-permanently in an area under Gridanian sovereignty, but I’m not totally sure about that call.

Not shown here: of the 26 conjurers I've counted so far, 61.5% use female models. “Conjurers” is one of the few professional categories where female model characters outnumber male ones. The other categories are “arcanist”, “culinarian”, “server”, and “skywatcher”.

Ul’dah

Encyclopedia Eorzea vol. 1 numbers: 30% Midlander Hyur, 10% Highlander Hyur, 40% Dunesfolk Lalafell, 10% Hellsguard Roegadyn, 10% Other

EE1 does not include [Ala Mhigan] refugees. I did include refugees living in the capital -- some of them have been living in Ul’dah for more than 20 years -- though Little Ala Mhigo’s residents (not Blades/Flames) I put in the Ala Mhigan category.

As mentioned, I did not include independent tribes in the region, such as the U.

In the count, Ul’dah’s military tends more male than any other Eorzean city-state other than Ishgard (which is currently sitting at 79.6% male). Some of the missing women are in Longhaft’s unit and appear in the Attack on Highbridge FATE chain -- I didn’t count them because they’re infinitely respawning.

Limsa Lominsa

Encyclopedia Eorzea vol. 1 numbers: 40% Sea Wolf Roegadyn, 20% Plainsfolk Lalafell, 20% Seeker of the Sun Miqo’te, 10% Midlander Hyur, 10% Other

Limsa Lominsa is the most racially diverse nation in the count. It also comes the closest to equal gender representation -- my theory is that this is because the high number of Miqo’te (almost all female model) balances out the other races, where male-model NPCs predominate.

Most of the “other” gender slice there are Qiqirn of gender indeterminate to me.

Ala Mhigo

Encyclopedia Eorzea vol. 1 numbers (repeated in vol. 2 with no change): 60% Highlander Hyur, 10% Hellsguard Roegadyn, 10% Midlander Hyur, 10% Seeker of the Sun Miqo’te, 10% Other

Something that I find interesting is that the gender ratios are really close for both overall and the Resistance specifically (at the moment, the Resistance is even slightly nearer equal!) I thought that this was because so many of the Ala Mhigans we meet are part of the Resistance, but it’s actually “just” 44%.

I didn’t count the M, Qalyana, or Vira.

Discussion

While the race numbers are interesting, I think the gender numbers really draw your eye. Like I rambled in my last post, there are a couple different reasons male-model NPCs might outnumber female-model NPCs.

Perhaps it is unintentional -- that is, the devs intend to be adding male and female NPCs in roughly equal numbers, but for some reason, they haven’t. If this is the case, I’d guess the most likely culprit is the tendency for people (especially men) to perceive a mixed-gender group as “equal” when men substantially outnumber the women and as “female-dominated” when the actual numbers begin to approach equality. In an interview with NPR, Geena Davis said she read a study that found "if there's 17 percent women, the men in the group think it's 50-50. And if there's 33 percent women, the men perceive that as there being more women in the room than men." I haven't been able to figure out what study this is (I REALLY WANNA READ IT! -- but in the meantime this and this also talk about the phenomenon) but if we consider its assertion reasonable, you can totally imagine the zone designers looking at a 1:3 female:male ratio and think “we’re doing GREAT!”

And I mean, I don’t have competitor games’ numbers in front of me, but I’d bet that FFXIV is a lot closer to equal gender representation than most of them. Under-representation of women in video game worlds is by FAR the norm.

But it could very well be that the FFXIV devs are intentionally putting more male NPCs into the world. One possibility is that Eorzean culture is somewhat patriarchal (and that this is more or less pronounced depending on the particular nation-state). Public-facing roles, such as those of merchant, tradesman, and especially warrior, more frequently belong to men than women, while women are more frequently in roles that the Warrior of Light doesn’t encounter in-game (housewives, farmers, etc.). Male dominance of these roles may at times be overtly enforced, but subtle enforcement seems more likely to me, in the form of stereotyping, discouragement, covert discrimination, etc. And the devs/writers are communicating this aspect of the world to us through the NPCs they choose to show us. I feel you can find evidence of Eorzean patriarchy elsewhere in the writing, too -- and it’s not portrayed positively, though there’s room to criticize how skillfully or unskillfully the writers/localizers have handled these themes.

And of course, both these things could be true at the same time: the devs could be intentionally trying to convey something about Eorzean patriarchy to us while simultaneously underestimating how much their own biases, inherited from real-world patriarchy, might affect their perception and choices.

And there could well be other explanations, too.

If you’re interested in Ishgard, the most recent numbers are available in my lore compilation -- if you like the pie charts for visualization, you can take a peek at this older post.

#ffxiv #npc headcounts

25 notes · View notes

yourmajestysworld-blog · 5 years

Text

After 5 App Design

After Five Cleaning – Introduction

After Five cleaning is a cleaning company whom do cleaning services for inside houses. They offer various types of different services and are available via their website. They needed an app designed that would allow them to add and edit the questionnaire that they would send their users to fill out when they want to request their services. This project differed in a sense from the websites and game UI that I normally designed. This was something considerably smaller, but because of that this also mean there was far less room for error. Simply put, I needed to throw a jab, but only a jab. This mean I can practice this to the maximum

After Five Cleaning – Mobile first design (Identifying the needs)

The first thing that was to be noted, that it was a questionnaire. This sounds pretty simple, but because of the application (to book appointments), and the fact that the app was actually very in depth, this needed to be laid out visually, in a way that made booking as smooth as possible. The one problem that I can easily encounter, is that with all of the questions that are required, is that it can get overwhelming. Imagine sitting for an hour, just answering monotonous questions, it may be necessary, but it isn’t exactly a good experience. Normally in UX design, you would want to identify the common pain points that someone using an app or a site would experience, but this sadly couldn’t be the case here, as there wasn’t any real previous reference to go off of. This presented a unique challenge for me, and meant that instead of simply “improving” off of what had already been done, I needed to effectively “shoot in the dark” (as at this stage I am still quite inexperienced)

After Five Cleaning – Wireframe layout

So, the first thing I did was pull out my pen and paper and got to drawing. I wanted to design something that can take advantage of the one key advantage mobiles have. Hand gestures, make things that would require scrolling on a computer or doing certain actions (such as closing or changing page) incredibly swift and easy. This is one of the main draws. My first worry, was making the app be a chore to scroll down, as you added more and more questions. The Sketch was just a good idea of what to do before the colour scheme was to be decided

After Five Cleaning – Colour Scheme

This was the likely the easiest part of the entire project. Because the company colours was green/white for their website, they wanted this to be used with the app to keep it consistent. This was perfectly fine by me, my work load was reduced. For me the only real choices that needed to be made was where the colour was to be placed. Green, especially dark racing green, can be a very overwhelming colour when used too often, whereas white, can be very “boring” when done

After Five Cleaning – Mobile Version V1

The sketch for the mobile version was quite a ways different from what the final product ended up becoming. If you’ve seen my portfolio at coroflot. You can immediately see that the sketch you’re looking at looks a lot more “phone” like, for lack of a better word. What I mean by this is that I have designed the interface to be able to take advantage phone specific features (in this case, swiping). This was where I learned about user testing. Once I designed the application (I could quickly mock it up with colours, as these had effectively been decided for me) I immediately received the following question;

“what would I do if I wanted to edit a question I already submitted”

And right there the design fell apart. Effectively, I had no real answer for this. So, immediately it was back to the drawing board.

After Five Cleaning – Mobile Version V2

So, it was effectively. Back to the drawing board. For the next one, I looked towards different inspirations for the layout of the mobile version of the app. This time instead of trying to design what I “think” would work, I instead wanted to go and see what similar apps there was on the market place that was currently being used.

Survey Monkey

The app layout of this was pretty solid, it was easy to use familiar, and it actually reminded me quite a bit of google forms. The only problem was. One of the key requirements was that each question was to have “sub questions”, as due to the layout of the question, there also needed to be sub questions related to it, to them determine what sort of equipment would be used (e.g. if you have a room with windows, how many windows?). So this presented a different problem. This effectively meant that I needed a way to “group” a question for ease of use for the employees. The reason for this was that the cost, hours and equipment they would visit the house with, was determined by what answers were given.

Google Forms

This is partly what the first version was based on, as this is software that I use often, So I decided to take another look at the layout and analyse it once again to see where I went wrong. As you can see, the similarities between that two, is that there is a “panel”. This is where the idea to have employee’s “swipe” left and right came from (this is a desktop screenshot). The problem that I encountered here (again) was simple How does one keep track of all of the questions they have added? And how do you make this straight forward to view and modify?

Tree List Layout

This was something I actually found upon by accident. The tree list layout is when you have a parent and child relationship layout. The parent is the main object on the screen, and the child are the things that are related to it. This sort of structure is used often in the programming space, as someone who has done computer science in the past, I am very used to using it conceptually whilst doing object oriented programming

As a result. I decided to try out this layout for an interface. Instead of making question a “question”, it becomes an “Object”, the sub questions merely become the “child” of the “parent”, this isn’t UX related per say, but this is programming related. This effectively describes how the programmer would need to implement this method, which is important because I was actually working side by side with a programmer as I was implementing the interface (he was the one that asked the question) This line of thinking, resulted in the following sketch

Low Fidelity Sketch

High Fidelity Sketch

This is the result of the sketch. The idea was to have one main menu which allowed you to add “parents” (questions) which automatically gave you answers (the child). This structure would then be delved upon via the sub-questions. Which lets you do the same thing (add a sub question). The one problem that could still be present with a view like this is overwhelming amounts of information, or having to constantly scroll through layers upon layers of information (especially when the questionnaire gets large) To somewhat resolve this, I put in a collapse all or expand all button, something which is fairly common when working with folders in applications.

Things to improve upon

One of the key things that I actually missed out, was a search button. As it stands, even with everything “collapsed” there would still be a fairly large amount of questions to look through. This can easily be cut through if the user can manually search the question itself that they are looking for. The thing to remember is that the main user base will have upward of thirty to forty questions at a time, each with their own sub questions. I also intend to make the each “object” numbered. Where you can see the “type your question here” section, should have a “1.” annotation, to let the user know. I consider this a mere quality of life change, but an important one nonetheless

But even with that particular problem, the UX of the app, is something that is

#ux #ui #app #design #after #five #work #adobe #xd

1 note · View note

aion-rsa · 4 years

Text

Why The Batman's Grave Could Become a Modern Classic

https://ift.tt/2NlQLK8

Bryan Hitch, Warren Ellis and Alex Sinclair keep bringing the goods in the latest issue.

facebook

twitter

tumblr

It's amazing how alike Warren Ellis and Bryan Hitch's The Batman's Grave is to their modern classic, The Authority. Ellis and Hitch are two of the most important comics creators in the history of the medium - their work on The Authority is one of the brightest dividers between comic book eras there is, like Showcase #4* -- the introduction of Barry Allen that marked the line between the Golden and Silver ages. And they bring that same energy to their new Batman story.

The big, sweeping, epic scenes that made The Authority such a big deal are all there in The Batman's Grave, along with wit so dry it's mummified. That's because of the talent of the creative team working on the book, Hitch tells us in an interview.

"Warren is one of the rare writers who can think visually and write the beats with enough clarity that, if you followed them exactly it would work just fine…but also with enough room that you can move in your own space as a visual storyteller," Hitch says. "He deserves to be recognized as a key architect of modern comic books but also as modern master, a genius."

The team excels with the camera pulled way back, but the most surprising part of the book is how good it is up close. This story is the detective Batman story that nobody realized they were missing until they had it, and to pull it off and make it that good, Hitch and colorist Alex Sinclair get right into Batman's mind as he follows clues and leads, and use that color work as an anchor for fight sequences.

In short, Sinclair is doing as much storytelling work as anyone else on the creative team. That's by design. Hitch tells us, "Alex is a joy to work with. He knows his gear so unless you have a very specific need or note, he’ll give a great job regardless. When we started this one though, we exchanged a few mails and talked about mood and tone and he got it totally…so again, unless I have a very specific note, he has the art and script and goes his own way and surprises me with how good it is each and every issue."

A surprising part of the success of The Batman's Grave is how funny it is. Ellis and Hitch aren't necessarily known for jokes, but "habitually ripped to the gills on very fine cocaine" Alfred is both the funniest a Batman comic has been in years and the best Alfred in a decade.

Hitch tells us it's important to trust one's instincts on comic delivery like this: "I have been tempted to redraw Alfred’s face a bit but only because it’s come out more David Niven-y that I’d planned on. I’ve found actually that, as far as expressions go, less is always more. Over dramatize and you lose the emotion so, given the dialogue I get, I try to do as little as possible with the faces and hint at emotion and expression."

Of course, tone and scale aside, this is still a Batman comic, and drawing Batman and Gotham comes with certain perks.

"I’ve wanted to do a proper Batman book since childhood so all the tropes from Batmobile, Batcave, to Wayne Manor have been developing in my mind for decades," Hitch says. "I’ve drawn Batman in Justice League which was nice but getting to fully play with his world has been as ‘Batmanny’ as I could have hoped for."

Spoilers: the book is exceptionally Batmanny. Right out of the gate in issue 4, we get shots of what is for all intents and purposes the locker room of the Batcave with some suit designs that belong on action figures immediately, and one of the best Batmobiles in recent memory.

Overall, The Batman's Grave has started incredibly strong, and if it keeps up like this, it might turn out to be an all-time classic. Here's what DC has to say about the next issue:

THE BATMAN’S GRAVE #4

written by WARREN ELLIS art and cover by BRYAN HITCH variant cover by JEEHYUNG LEE

Why did a blackmailer become a murderer? How does the Batman survive an opponent who can kill him with his own mind? Find out all this and more in the latest chapter of the 12-issue series from writer Warren Ellis and artist Bryan Hitch!

And here are these beautiful preview pages. Take a look!

*I can't let this go without arguing with myself even further. The divider between the Silver and Bronze ages is equal parts DC chasing Marvel's everyman success with books like "Hard Travellin Heroes" in Green Lantern/Green Arrow and the Marvel folks pumping Jim Starlin full of acid and letting him run wild in space, so that line is somewhat diffuse. The same goes for the line between the Bronze and Speculator ages - it's Watchmen, sure, but it's also The Dark Knight Returns and Secret Wars and Crisis on Infinite Earths. Showcase, however, is the point where the corpse of the Golden Age comes back to life, and The Authority launched the Widescreen Era that gave us the comics that are all getting turned into movies now, and remains such a singular accomplishment that it's more or less untranslatable. Fight me in the comments.

Read and download the Den of Geek Lost In Space Special Edition Magazine right here!

facebook

twitter

tumblr

Feature Jim Dandy

Jan 13, 2020

DC Entertainment

Batman

Warren Ellis

Bryan Hitch

from Books https://ift.tt/30fHOXO

#aion-rsa #Books

0 notes

askshalvanic · 7 years

Text

Yume Nikki rant/thoughts

Ahh, Yume Nikki, one of the most renowned RPG games in history. While certainly not as nearly as popular as Undertale, it does have its spot within the RPG community, and some people like the game, hell, there’s some who find it inspirational or even life changing. Now, the problem is… I don’t really share this opinion or thoughts on it. In fact I don’t like the game very much. I didn’t really enjoy it, and to be honest, I immediately uninstalled it and wanted to forget about it the moment I was done playing it. The reason for this was that it was mostly a negative experience. I did have a few moments that I enjoyed here and there, so it wasn’t all that negative, but about 80% or so of it did make me think “can’t wait for this piece of shit to be over”. Now, I know this might be an unpopular opinion, but I really, REALLY don’t like Yume Nikki.

I may draw some comparisons to Bioshock Infinite in the sense that this masterpiece of a game that almost everyone and their grandmother consider worthy of a TEN OUT OF FUCKING TEN doesn’t really bode well with me either (I say this mostly because I feel that I’m in the minority when it comes to the people that have played this game and not loved it), and I honestly consider these two the games that I am not willing to play ever again in my life. But this ain’t about Biocunt Integrate, it’s about the dreadful world of Yume Nikki.

Also, I guess as a fair warning, SPOILERS AHEAD IN CASE YOU HAVEN’T FINISHED IT. This was more than anything meant to be a self reflection on what I thought was wrong with the game, and thus ended up mentioning a lot of spoilers, so if you want to play it blindly, go ahead before reading this, you might take a while though.

I’ll start with the things that personally I liked or made me have some form of respect for the game because it’s easier to list those reasons given there are very few positives, and because I want to get that out of the way first. I guess the positives would be that I liked the atmosphere the game had. It was unnerving, and scarier than most games that claim themselves to be horror games and only rely on cheap and predictable jumpscares and nothing else. And Yume Nikki literally just has some fucking sprites and dark rooms, and yet it’s one of the most disturbing and honestly creepy things I’ve seen. The soundtrack’s just a bunch of looped sounds that doesn’t last too long, but it still adds something to the feel of each world that makes it different from the others. The world designs too are amazing (except for Hell) and each of them looks interesting in their own way. The fact that each effect had its own little details whenever you used them was also pretty cool. The lack of a conventional way to tell a story and just leaving things for you to interpret was an interesting choice from the dev, and the fact that Gast- I mean, Uboa, which is one of the most interesting things about the game isn’t central to the story or you don’t even have to see it to beat the game is actually really cool. Overall I guess it is safe to say it is a pretty unique and well thought out game in general, and I respect it from an artistic point of view.

Now, for the obviously much bigger list of negatives. See, my first problem with the game is how overly complex some things in it are. Several of the events are RNG based, so you basically have to get lucky for some of the most intriguing or interesting moments in the game. Then there’s also the fact that not only events, which are completely optional so there’s not too much of a problem, but also one of the fucking effects that you need to get is tied to an RNG, meaning that you better get lucky and get it at the first try because otherwise it’s gonna be waking up, going to hell, go through the previous world before that one and then get to the actual world again, hoping you get the right one this time. I get it for events that you don’t even need to see to finish the game, BUT FOR ONE OF THE STEPS TO GET TO AN EFFECT TO BE RNG? I sincerely find that pretty bullshit and unnecessary. But that’s a minor issue I had.

The bigger issues are more or less tied to the existence of Hell itself. I mean, it does justice to its name, its a fucking torture to go through it, not only because if you take the wrong turn at any point or don’t have any reference of where you are going or are constantly looking at a fucking map you WILL get lost, but also because it’s so stupidly bright red that after a while of being there your eyes will scream for mercy, and you will more than likely spend a long time in that place, if not because you got lost, then because you essentially need to go through it more than once if you want to actually beat the game. Some people may think it adds to feeling of adventure and danger and excitement, but I simply find it annoying and a nuisance. Essentially, this game isn’t for overly impatient people. You complain about loading screens? Boy, get ready to meet HELL. Admittedly, you do get to do a lot more during the travel from point A to hell to point B, and there is danger there, but I would rather sit through a few moments of a loading screen than have to deal with the bright as the sun red tone in the background designed to either drive you insane or to completely fuck up your eyes, and once you get the stop light effect, the toriningen becomes kind of irrelevant at the price of walking at a normal pace. It can be fixed by just looking at a map but even then it’s still an eye sore and even with the map you can get lost, which happened to me a lot, and the fact that you NEED to go through hell in order to get to other worlds for their respective effects makes it all the more annoying and sigh inducing whenever you see the multi-shaped little shit portal that takes you there.

Another major issue is perhaps the fact that if it wasn’t because a wiki exists or because I had help through most of the game, I would have never figured out where to even get the effects, which ones I was missing, how did they look like or how to get to neat little events that were honestly quite interesting and well made. I know that’s what some people might find charming or the whole point of the game really, to find it out by yourself, but to be honest I would have given up eventually after being unable to find any more stuff because it is all so hidden. I can appreciate when a game goes out of its way to be mysterious, when there’s stuff to find, when it is challenging, but honestly, most of the stuff in this game is far too convoluted for me to give it a pass on that. Aside from the instructions, you are pretty much on your own and therefore entirely fucked. Hell, I would have thought the minigame with the console was somehow important or it would give me something interesting at the end, but reading “nah it’s just a jumpscare” made me realize a lot of this game would be confusing or I’d believe something would be important when really its not. And having somewhat of a trolly person as your guide doesn’t help much either.

Speaking of which, my guide and friend also took part in what makes me not want to play or hear anything about this game ever again. Because of the way he hyped up the ending, even when I started to hate the game a part of me thought “the ending will probably be worth it” to keep going on. The ending, do it for the ending. I’ll talk about the ending later, but needless to say that part of me was wrong, and the ending was somewhat overhyped him. This was a minor inconvenience however when compared to the one thing that even made me stop mid stream and say “I’m done” and then close the game out of the blue. The god damn insistence on me having to play the game one way, as opposed to how I want to play it. Yes, I might have missed some events that were interesting, but given the fact that he tends to trick me into thinking something when really something else is going on already had me mistrust his guidance to a certain degree, and had me looking up shit on my own to confirm if he was saying the truth. I honestly felt after a while that I was being forced to do things one way instead of doing them by myself and the way I wanted to do it, that is why it was more of a chore than a game, I felt like I was doing some sort of homework that I had to finish at some point, I felt obligated to do it and that made me hate more than anything, the fact that I felt like I HAD to finish it as opposed to wanting to finish it. Feeling forced to do something makes you not want to do it, especially when someone keeps banging over your head “DO IT THIS WAY, DO THIS BECAUSE YES EVEN THOUGH ITS NOT IMPORTANT, DO IT MY WAY NOT YOURS” was a tad overwhelming and made me feel like I was being manipulated and like I needed to do it one single way. Feeling like that sincerely made me want to rush to game, to be done with it, to not have anything to do with it again, and so I did. I started regarding it less like a cool but fucked up game and more like one fucked up homework that I had to do because I had no choice in the matter (sorry if you see this, but you did influence my views in this game a lot).

And this takes me to my final point as to why I dislike this game so much, and this is where I start comparing it to Biodrug Ultimate and its the ending. See, both games have this feeling to me that for some reason if you miss anything or if you don’t do something in specific you will get a bad ending out of however many there could be, because being games that look so creative and unique they probably have more than one ending, right? Well, that is a lie for both of them, but unlike Bioterrorist Influence I didn’t have my expectations high for Yume Nikki. I was already expecting the worst, without much hope for anything because I had Hyoko to tell me at least that there was one and only one ending. And even then the ending still fucked me up, because I didn’t know what, out of all the horrible things that could happen, to expect. And while it was leagues better than the shit show Biodunked Ontimate had to offer for one of the most disappointing endings I’ve ever seen, it doesn’t make it any less depressing or empty. By the time I had finished the game I felt like absolutely nothing that I had done was worth it, like the journey to get here had been void and meaningless. This wasn’t disappointing because I was already expecting nothing from the start, but it did upset me because I had learned nothing and I left with nothing but a bitter taste. Yes some events were pretty cool, same with most of the worlds, it was an interesting concept of visiting a girl’s consciousness through her dreams, and since most dreams tend to be fucked up it would make sense for hers to be pretty bizarre as well. But what was about the effects and about her dreams that drove her to suicide? What did she feel like after exploring all over her own mind and dreams that would make her do that? Why? WHY?! To top it off, I actually felt like it was me the one that drove her to it. Digging so far deep into her consciousness that she felt the only way to deal with her problems was to end with her own life, and that I was the one that pushed her off. I don’t care that she doesn’t actually exist, I don’t care that this all a videogame that I ended up hating, it’s still all so fucked up and it feels awful that with the press of one key I was the one that made her jump into the abyss, never to return again or dream again. I felt empty, sad, upset, thinking about why did things have to turn this way. I hesitated for a while to even make her go up those stairs, but I feel like in the end my own desire to be done with it all, to close the loop, to never come back to this game again made me do it, because I know this is a game, I know many others before me and many more after will press that key to send Madotsuki crashing against the pavement down below, but that doesn’t make it any less horrifying or fucked up that I sent a little girl to her own death. I never did the Genocide Route in Undertale because I felt that after having establishing a bond with such lovable and interesting characters I’d be guilty of not only betraying their trust for my own amusement but that I would also take away that feeling of uniqueness and of having such well thought out and caring characters that sincerely made me cry at the end of the Pacifist Route and turning it all into dust, into void, only to get to that one boss battle that everyone keeps praising and that turned Sans into the actual joke that he’s become now within the Undertale Fandom. But that is a rant for another day. The point is, I didn’t do it because to me Undertale is much more than just an RPG, more than just a game, it meant a lot to me and I cared deeply about the characters, to the point of not wanting to murder them, even though I know its a game and it won’t matter either way in the real world, I feel like not caring would make me even more of a twat, and even though I didn’t enjoy Yume Nikki, that still doesn’t mean I wanted Madotsuki to die. Even when I sent her forward I had hoped for there to be something that saved her or for her to actually not jump out of the balcony even if I told her to. Fuck me for having nice thoughts I guess. Oh I also did make the choice to be a nice Madotsuki that didn’t murder anything even though my friend was insisting that I should be the exact opposite of that but whatever.

In the end, I guess the bad things do overweight the good things for me as far as this game goes, and I still feel this sense of emptiness when I think about it. If there is a message, I am unclear about what it is. The world of dreams is incomprehensible? If you dig too far into your unconscious you won’t like what you’ll find out? No matter what you do the outcome of things is inevitable? That death is the true ending for everything? Life and dreams are meaningless? The more I think about it the more it feels like I’m straying away from whatever meaning there is because it all felt so pointless and just not worth it that I can’t find a meaning to all of it. Like, what was the point of driving Madotsuki to suicide? What was the whole point of gathering the effects if she was going to end up dead anyway? Would anything have changed if I hadn’t looked for the things? Nothing changes no matter what you do in the game, so then what does it matter? Did it happen because she was on a quest to find herself and who she is within these dreams and was unable to find it so she then killed herself? I just don’t really know what the point of it all is, and this is exactly my problem with Bioshock 3: The Electric Boogaloo too, after all I did, and all I went through it seems as if thought it was pointless, like I shouldn’t even have bothered if I wasn’t going to be able to change anything for better or for worse.

#Yume Nikki #Rant #Not quite a review #Bioshock Infinite #thoughts

3 notes · View notes

almostarchaeology · 7 years

Text

A Lesson Plan for Videogame Archaeology in the Museum

By Adrián Maldonado

I didn’t wake up that morning thinking I’d be playing an original Street Fighter II Championship Edition arcade console in just a few hours. It turned out to be a very good day.

So I was on Long Island recently for our annual, far-too-short family visit to America. It was also my daughter’s second birthday but it was raining and we needed an indoor activity. She loves planes, trucks and trains, and we were assured that the Cradle of Aviation Museum in Garden City has all that plus good hands-on activities and a toddler room. We were not disappointed on any of those fronts.

But unbeknownst to us, the Cradle of Aviation Museum also has a major videogame history exhibition on at the moment. And this was no ordinary rinky-dink travelling exhibit. I’m talking all the consoles, or at least 60 different ones, all playable, alongside some 30 original arcade cabinets. Whose birthday was it again?

It’s been a minute since my last post, so get ready for a nerd onslaught. This post will attempt three things: a straightforward review of a videogame history exhibit; some sense of the wider context within videogame museums I’ve been to recently; and finally, something a bit different: a lesson plan for teaching kids about videogames in the museum. I should probably change the blog title to Things No One Asked For, Ever, but in the meantime, do enjoy the blatant work avoidance.

Capsule review

This exhibit is actually a sequel. It began life as a temporary event called The Arcade Age in December 2015, which focused on recreating the experience of arcade gaming using some 50 playable cabinets. The recreated arcade was only accessible in three daily 90-minute sessions. The layout showed the influence of superhero arcadologist Raiford Guins, who was consulted for this exhibit, in its attention toward recreating the dark, cramped, noisy ambiance of an arcade. Judging by photos of the original exhibit, it also had a cool sideline on related material culture like Street Fighter II action figures and Pac-Man lunchboxes. It originally ran through April 2016, and was then extended to September 2016.

After its success, it was redesigned as a more comprehensive exhibition, From the Arcade to the Living Room: A Video Game Retrospective 1972-1999 in November 2016, now including a full history of home gaming consoles alongside a reduced but still impressive list of arcade cabinets. The website doesn’t say whether this will become a permanent exhibit, but they are selling season tickets for hardcore gamers until December 2017. It was this exhibition I stumbled upon one fateful day in June.

Wall of ancestors

The games are laid out in roughly chronological order, beginning with the carcass of a Computer Space cabinet from 1971 at the start. Curator Seamus Keane has been damn near exhaustive, going beyond the usual focus on ‘Golden Age’ arcade games and providing real working examples of lesser-performing systems like the Neo-Geo and the Atari Jaguar. Fulfilling the dream of a 90s indoor kid, it was perhaps the first and last time I’ll ever play a CD-I and a 3DO (note to me 25 years ago: neither was worth the wait).

Besides the snippets of information provided next to each console, historical context was a bit light and there was no clear aim or agenda for the exhibition. Media surrounding the opening fleshed it out a little more, but not much: for curator Keane, it was “a concept I had in my head of telling what I felt was somewhat of a lost history about the social culture and the popular culture, as well as the technological history of the arcade game itself and of the arcade as a social setting.” Hope you caught all that between rounds of Marvel Vs Capcom.

There were only a few thematic displays but they worked well – a wall of ephemera included a Nintendo Power Pad, several strategy guides and a Game Genie (!). A wall display on the Great Video Game Crash of 1983 included a screen playing the documentary Atari: Game Over (2014) next to an Atari 2600 with an ET cartridge you could load yourself, a crucial part of the home gaming experience you rarely get to experience in a museum setting. A cabinet of dead peripherals was also eye-opening in an unexpected way; the juxtaposition of Sega 3D Glasses and a Sega Dreamcast mouse from a decade apart made me think of how Sega was so often ahead of its time, and yet somehow lost the console wars. In the tech world, it doesn’t always pay to be first.

Videogames in the Museum

Touch the artefacts

I’ve been to several videogame museum exhibitions now (and even some videogame museums!) and can confidently say that this was one of the most fun. There was a wall of NES games and a wall of Atari games, but the core of the arcade was in a long, low-ceilinged dark hall. There, the half-assed display cards dwindled to a minimum and the game was the thing. Original cabinets, many of them with fucked-up decals from years of play, were ready to rock, no MAME here. Aside from the usual Golden Age of Arcade stuff, there were plenty of classic 90s cabinets from my era, and even some left-field entrants like Michael Jackson’s Moonwalker, which I thought was a masterpiece when I first played it in 1990 and has accrued tremendous baggage since then.

Best of all was the chronological row of home gaming consoles buried deep in the bunker-like arcade hall. Here in glowing cubicles of glass but not out of reach were the venerated SNES and Genesis games of my formative years, alongside the also-rans like the Sega Saturn. I showed my 2 year-old daughter her first game of Super Smash Bros for the N64. She picked up the control and held it up to her ear like a phone. I have never loved her more.

The ragtag army of 90s CRT veterans

Each console was hooked up to a full-on CRT TV, no messing about with flatscreens, as I’ve groaned about previously. As the exhibition website puts it, they are “all on old school TV tubes!” Each TV was different from the next one, as they had clearly been scavenged piecemeal from various Long Island attics. Some had flatter screens, some bulged out lewdly, but all were hard-bitten survivors from the 90s. They are the real heroes here.

How does this rate? While the Computerspielemuseum in Berlin clearly wins out in almost every way in terms of playability, historical context and design, there was something about the scale of the recreated arcade and lack of interpretation here that charmed me. As Guins has pointed out, the material presence of the cabinets and the consoles are part of the gameplay; they are designed to draw you in and beg you to grab them, and whatever their flaws, their physical interfaces shape how the game is played.

Beyond Retro-Nostalgia: A Lesson Plan

Ready player one

At one point I was able to play technician: I was able to revive a blank TV screen by switching it to channel 3. I felt like a wise elder. I also may have felt very old because I was surrounded by schoolkids. It was a weekday, and we shared the exhibit with a group of fifth-graders (Year 6 for UK readers). For once, it was genuinely interesting to share a museum with a school trip. There have always been children in the videogame exhibitions I’ve visited previously, but they’re always there with their aging nerd parents (of which I am now very much a number). It is certainly worth recording the stories told to a new generation about their cultural heritage. But it was enlightening in a different way to hear what kids said to one another when playing these games.

What I heard blew my mind. I was playing the Double Dragon (1987) arcade cabinet (I’d only ever played the NES version, so this was very exciting indeed), when two boys walked behind me – one of them said to the other, “Double Dragon! I love that game!” How did he know? What else did he know? Has the Internet already made everyone like Wade from Ready Player One? Other kids swapped stories about the games they’d tried, and I felt almost compelled to start writing these candid observations down. They were like little archaeologists unearthing the artefacts of my past and puzzling over what they might mean – but also making more interesting connections with recent games than I could with my nostalgia specs on.

On my way out I ran into one of the schoolteachers and thanked her for taking the kids here, and congratulated her on how well-behaved they all seemed to be even though they were surrounded by a hundred flashing screens. I asked whether this was part of a specific class, and she said no, they usually take the kids to the Cradle of Aviation Museum because science and whatnot, but they dropped into the arcade exhibition because it was there. I asked if they would follow it up in class at all, and she said no.

The Atari Jaguar: and alternate future of 64-bit gaming

That struck me as a bit of a missed opportunity. Here were a few dozen kids having a great time in a museum, handling the technological ancestors of their favourite devices and games. The kids I heard were knowledgeable about videogames, native to them. For all the action in teaching history through videogames, there are no easily accessible resources out there to teach videogames as rare artefacts of a meaningful past. In what other museum exhibition are you allowed to handle, let alone grab and generally get all up in, the archaeology? What better way to learn than by playing?

Don’t get me wrong – museums with videogame exhibitions often provide their own series of educational resources and programmes for school visits, but a quick and very unscientific search shows little coherent agenda for dealing with the historicity of videogame and the material cultures of gaming. As more videogames end up in museums, we do the next generations a real disservice if the whole message is just about how videogames used to be pixellated and now they’re not. The game is not just the visual but the physical, and every console and medium enabled and constrained ways of playing, creating cultures of gaming. To get beyond nostalgia, we need to draw out the untold stories which will engage kids who are playing these objects for the first time.

There’s at least a PhD thesis in here

Digital archaeology guru Jeremy Huggett recently reminded us about the need to deal with the historicity of technology: as the workings of our gadgets inexorably disappear into smaller and more efficient packages, we know less about how our devices work, and think little about why they are built the way they are. So break open a few controllers and cartridges to teach the history of computing. We assume a linear progression from worse to better technology on the basis that the invisible hand of the market chose the best products over time. So tell the story of the Sega Dreamcast, recognised for its merits only long after its demise. The market of ideas is always in conflict with the actual market, and real innovation is always pitted against the chance for real profit. Teach the Great Video Game Crash and its mountain of destroyed cartridges; debate the value of excavating the recent past, and what else of theirs will remain to be excavated.

It’s not all about the tech, either. You don’t have to wait for Assassin’s Creed: Cuban Missile Crisis to teach kids about the Cold War and why we’re (still) not playing nice with Russia. You can start with games like Contra and Missile Command and talk about ways in which war found its way even into children’s bedrooms in the 1980s. Maybe have a frank discussion about all those Battlefield games they’re playing now. Play the first ten seconds of Double Dragon to introduce the term ‘toxic masculinity’.

There’s a million ways to sneak learning into a trip to the arcade. Teach the kids how to critically read the artefacts; what could be more archaeological?

More photos here.

#Cradle of Aviation #video games #museum #review #education

3 notes · View notes

rubixa-seraph · 7 years

Text

OC Questionnaire Answered

1. What’s their full name? If they’re an alien and their name is in their native planet’s language, have you thought about what it means? Roy Evans King. Don’t ask me why his middle name is like that. It’s complicated both in story and in actual explanation.

2. Say your OC made a playlist on Spotify. What bands would be on that playlist? Any specific genres? He’s a bit moody in many different ways and has several playlists to suit his tastes for the moment…feeling competitive? EDM and bouts of rock. Feeling calm? Calm classical or ballads. Feeling forlorn? Anything soothing and somewhat emotional, usually music from games, anime, or TV shows. Feeling driven or remotely angry? Power music, either Classical or soundtracks of epic proportions. Inspired? He’ll queue up specific things for the inspiration. Not sure? Play the entire “Like” section and hit skip about a hundred million times if it plays things he doesn’t care about at the moment. High maintenance? Yeah. That’s why he has a subscription to Spotify.

3. What kind of video games would they play? Any specific titles? Strategy and RPG, sometimes puzzle games. First person shooters tend to piss him off when multiplayer is involved but he’ll play them anyway. Will only play fighting games if cool weapons are involved, but greatly prefers flashy 8-way-run over 2D-scroll. Plays one too many freemium games on his phone. Stays as far away as he can from harem/dating sim games but you *will* catch him eyeing them once in a while in tempting curiosity. Notable game titles he likes? Typically mainstream stuff: Zelda series, Soul Calibur, Halo, Destiny, Overwatch, Fire Emblem, and a good chunk of anything else that falls under the categories above. (Sorry, my repertoire of game knowledge is pretty lacking.) on his phone he specifically plays Fluttr and it’s moth-content counterpart. He likes to collect bugs, even if they are virtual. Yet he’s not a big fan of your generic monster collecting games.

4. What would their favorite cartoons be, and why? What would their favorite characters be? He was never quite fond of your typical cartoons, but he’s watched every Disney Princess related movie for the sake of some “typical princess fashion inspiration.” Anime of various action and supernatural genres interest him, but half of the time he plays them in the background while he’s tailoring and miss half of the plot because he’s concentrating on his work. But what really gets his attention aren’t cartoons or anime. Sit him down in front of anything Kamen Rider, and he wouldn't want to be interrupted.

5. What’s their favorite type of weather? Do they like to do anything specific on days when the weather is how they like it? He hates windy days, and also doesn’t like to be under the sun…because he likes to wear black on most occasions. Loves the rain but only if he can stay out of it with a nice cup of tea or the likes. After the rain, he would enjoy a nice walk outside. The air tends to be nicer.

6. If they’re a fan of Hot Chocolate, Tea, or Coffee, how do they like either of those drinks prepared? He favors coffee, enjoys tea, and sparingly partaken in hot chocolate. He is definitely a fan of warm drinks. The coffee habit, he got from an “uncle” who was a family friend. Drinks it every morning…or whatever his equivalent of morning would be. Takes it with a bit of cream, no sugar. Tea, he has at least once a day also, if not twice. Black tea is his preference, milk and sugar. Not a fan of green tea, oolong, or chai, contrary to his Asian heritage, but the English influence from his Birthplace of Hong Kong shows through more. He tends to stay away from hot chocolate, finding it too sweet and also a “lazy” hot drink option. (Clearly he’s not familiar with the concept of gourmet hot chocolate.)

7. What kind of animals would they like as a pet? What names would they give their pets if they got any? If they already have pet’s what are their names? He’s partial to travel so he doesn’t keep pets. He’s partial to dogs of loyal and obedient breeds, but he can’t get over the fact the fur and his tailoring profession means more trouble than it’s worth. If he had his way he’d keep a pet snake or scorpion, but those are pretty costly pets in their own ways. He’s pretty bad at naming things outside of his creative endeavors, so chances are he’d be asking for lots of suggestions before picking.

8. How does your OC keep track of time? Do they have a planner? A calendar? Despite how much he loves the latest technology, he’s oddly old fashioned in some circumstances. Appointments, he’d use his phone calendar in order to automatically have reminder alerts set. But commission details and things like address information and the likes? A traditional planner. He wears an analog watch to keep track of time, though the phone is not far from reach when he needs it.

9. How do they write? Do they write in cursive? How do they dot their i’s and j’s? Do they have specific ways that they write certain letters? He really likes his capital letters and they all have a bit of flourish at the beginning or end of his strikes. He avoids writing in cursive to avoid mis-recording information, and writes in neat formation. His handwriting is somewhat geometric when capital letters aren’t involved, but he does dot his letters when needed.

10. What’s their favorite time of day? He has no real preference to the time of day…mostly because inspiration doesn’t care what time of day it is to strike. And he’s prone to an inconsistent sleep schedule.

11. What kinds of foods and drinks do they like? Do they like certain foods to be fried? Do they prefer certain foods to be prepared hot/cold? He’s not a fan of cold foods, and is picky about his fried foods. Dim sum is his favorite kind of food but not what you could call a feasible thing to have every day. He favors soups, and in general would prefer Asian dishes. But a fancy western meal isn’t something he’d turn away from either.

12. If they were an actual character in an animated film or TV series, who would they be voiced by? Do they have a certain accent that the person would need to perfect? Oh god this is a question I’d have a hard time answering. I don’t watch a lot of things with English voices, and I’m not very good at paying attention to actors. My darlin’ said he imagined for Sam Regal to be a fitting voice, so I guess that’s my best answer. Being from Hong Kong, Roy’s accent is somewhat British, but he lived a good amount of years in the U.S. also, so he’s control over the accent varies depending on the circumstances. (He’s found that his native accent garners a bit more positive reaction, though.)

13. If you are an artist, and if your OC can draw as well, could you replicate what their artstyle looks like? Or, if you can’t, could you describe it? I don’t quite have the time to draw right now, but Roy’s drawing skills are limited to patterns and concept art for clothing design and planning. Most of his artistic skill goes into tailoring, whether it be fashion, formal wear, or cosplay.

14. If your OC owned a Tumblr blog, what kind of content would they post? Two different blogs: his tailoring work, and then a blog about bugs.

15. How do they type? Do they use emojis? Do abbreviate and shorten words? He’s a fast typist and will type out every word. No emojis, but he certainly likes his punctuation. And will often narrate his action or mood in some sort of brackets or asterisks quotation…apparently body language matters to him in face-to-face conversation and it bothers him when it can’t be conveyed in text.

16. If your OC was a film director, what kind of movies would they make? If he must, it’ll probably be action scifi fantasy. But please…he’d rather be the costume designer.

17. If your OC was a musical artist, what genres would they do? He may enjoy many types of music, but his old music lessons left him for a bias towards playing classical. That aside, he’d still rather pursue clothing design.

18. What type of singing voice does your OC have? He’s a bit on the tenor side, but he doesn’t really care to sing. He will hum or sing along with his favorite songs like any music lover would, and his sister tells him his voice and musical talent is wasted, but he doesn’t care.

19. Does your OC like to collect things? What kind of things do they collect? Oh boy…other than cloth, ribbons, threads and the likes? Things to do with bugs, but not actual bugs because he doesn’t have that much room to display things like that.

20. Was your OC inspired by anything? Another character? A person? Ah…okay. I hate having to explain this one because it’s very complicated and full of a lot of personal loss and conflict with myself and my family. The best way I can describe it would be…he’s an accumulation of what I have yearned for, lost, and come to terms with. A personification of regrets that I will also put to use for stress relief, and on some levels, a familiar mask to put on in the realm of fiction in order to indulge in pretending life isn’t stressful. His concept seems very depressing, but rest assured, Roy and his fictional escapades are probably a healthier coping mechanism compared to the self harm I could have done. Ah! Please don’t worry about me! With him as part of my conscience and with my new family, I’m doing a lot better. And Roy can actually see some light in some more balance RP and story settings now.

#rubixa-seraph #OC

3 notes · View notes

mothershipresidencies · 7 years

Text

Chloe Alice Hayes

It began with the first conversation I had had with an artist in a very long time. Of course many of my friends are artists/ photographers or work in the art industry however, because they are my friends and because we rarely get to see each other we don’t tend to fill our discussions with intellectual or philosophical talk. It came on one very wet and foggy night in the middle of the Dorset countryside after a rather long drive to my first real artist residency. Anna Best, the artist running the residency ran up to my car window dragging a very wet Curly Wurly, the residency Labradoodle behind her telling me where to park and inviting me in for a much needed and appreciated cup of tea. I stumbled in to her hectic kitchen cluttered with books, papers, teapots and plants, thinking it looked like my dream house and sat down with the cat and the tea to meet the woman who granted me this opportunity.

Firstly, she wanted to know about my recent travels and how brave she thought I was and envious that I had gone, probably not nearly as envious as I was over her purpose built studio, to die for land complete with flowing stream and incredible veg patch with her own categorised compost bins, yes I am that sad. Then we got on to what I wanted to achieve during the residency and what it was that I was thinking about looking into. She immediately lit up at the mention of me wanting to look into the local buses and how recent cuts have affected local residents. She herself had become somewhat of an activist around this area after finding that her girl’s school bus would be cut purely because of where they lived. She said she could introduce me to a local activist bus group and gave me suggestions about how to go about it and the politics behind such an issue.

My second idea was to look into the unseen, and furthering the exposure and documenting the concealed, the unacknowledged tasks of parenting. I told her that I was specifically thinking of focusing it onto rural parenting as I felt that was a less exposed area and I wanted to utilise the very rural community in which I was staying. Through discussing this Anna suggested looking specifically into the role of the woman, having seen much on the published rural man throughout history, but not of women. She had also recently skimmed over an article on womens labour and thought it might be helpful in the development of my idea. She felt the thought of looking into the mothers side of the parenting, specifically a rural mother would be very interesting and a so far an unexamined and niche issue. I drained my cup and went to my studio to settle in for the night, allowing these ideas to stew.

The next morning I began the research on the rural mothers project, having received an email with the essay from Anna attached. It was entitled Labours of Love: Women’s Labour as the Culture Sector’s Invisible Dark Matter by Macushla Robinson. It was rather in depth for a short piece and in some ways going off topic to my project, however made a lot of sense and I wanted to knit it in as much as possible as it drew broader intellectual ideas into my work, many I had never dealt with before. I had never focused on feminism for any of my previous projects and most of my post-university pieces had come from fact-based research of a place or history as opposed to theories or questions. I actually hadn’t worked from a piece such as this since writing my dissertation, which sounds awful being a practising ‘artist’, however my photography usually stems from a site-specific or current interest I have. When reading, although I felt inspired an intellectually stimulated, I have to say I felt a little bit daunted about addressing my proposal to an audience in a few days, Anna had organized a talk for me at Bridport Arts Centre. I always feel slightly worried about talking about something when I don’t fully know all the facts, concerned for being caught out or contradicted and rightly so if I am not fully knowledgeable on the subject matter.

The piece enlightened and stimulated me so much however, that I was determined to not only use it as inspiration but to directly apply it to the project itself. So I wrote my talk focusing on the proposal of the two projects I wanted to initiate whilst on the residency, already knowing my initial methods but most certainly prepared for feedback and suggestions. Debate and theological discussion amongst artists and groups of people is important in a world of verbal propositions and direct challenges. Art- Language was first published in May 1969, developed by ‘possibly the most misunderstood and controversial artists of all’ (Cork, 2016, pg. 76). Terry Atkinson, Michael Baldwin, David Bainbridge and Harold Hurrell were unified in an analytical action and published the journal with essays employing ‘the weapons of philosophical debate to substantiate their belief that art theory could itself be considered as a work of conceptual art’ (Cork, 2016, pg. 76). The artists disputed the idea that art was just a visual medium and ‘as a result, contemporary art was liberated in so many ways, and this exhilarating freedom continues to stimulate the most adventurous practitioners today’ (Cork, 2016, pg. 76).

The time came for the talk on a chilly Tuesday evening in the cosy cafe area of the arts centre. The turn out was much better than I had expected, interestingly all women regardless of the fact that the content of my talk was not advertised and so I began my spiel about both projects apologising for my lack of improvisation when public speaking, sticking religiously to my script. The atmosphere was relaxed and I welcomed questions at any point. During and at the end, I had a lot of interesting comments.

These soon evolved into a full discussion about my work and before I knew it I had so many suggestions and insights into research for it. Many were questioning what the word ‘rural’ actually meant and where the boundaries lie within it, I hadn’t realised how many times I had actually used it until that moment. A few challenged the fact that only men where documented in rural history and told me where I could see images of women’s labour in local museums and archives, this I must say I agree with and were glad that they didn’t feel they had to just accept what I said. A few commented on the issue of the exposure of the women and children that I had given the cameras to and then the discussion moved on to the rural buses project. Some were concerned how I could really make a difference with an art project, some gave me their experiences of the bus system and their concerns for other users. I told them about some of the anecdotes that the people on the bus had told me during my research in the daytime and Anna went on to tell her story of her anarchist friends having theories that it is the governments way of pushing people out of villages and forcing them into towns where it is easier to control them. Which in actual fact does make a bit of sense I have to say. The conversation evolved and got deeper the more we went on, I found myself really enjoying the critique of my ideas and work.

This is when I realised how much I truly missed university. The value of having a room full of impartial, varied feedback about proposals of potential projects is incredibly important and so rare once you leave education. Artist Roy Ascott describes his own experience in education and the inspiration from his teachers in Tate Etc. Spring 2016. Ascott, taught by both Victor Pasmore and Richard Hamilton at King’s College, Newcastle was imparted a mix of ‘radically constructve, poetic, process based and conceptually rich aspects of art.’ (Ascott, 2016, pg. 22). Ascott considered his own experimental and influential Groundcourse at Ealing in the 1960’s to be a rejection of Basic Design Formalism and was actually in some ways ‘an extension of the very ‘developing process’ that Pasmore and Hamilton initiated, although more radically investigative into identity, behaviour and environment.’ (Ascott, 2016, pg. 23). Ascott said that ‘It is clear to me that the teaching I have received, from many sources in many cultures, has enriched my own contribution to the field.’ (Ascott, 2016, pg. 23).

Within a week I had conceived two project ideas, discussed them, developed them, began to work on them, wrote about them, severely doubted myself, had creative block, presented them, found inspiration and found confidence both in my ideas and executing them. The importance of discussion and conversation between artists is paramount to the work created. It not only challenges artists about their own and others works, but allows the artist to successfully draw inspiration from others and observe deeper thoughts and connotations within their own practice. Being an artist is being part of a global community that shares, interacts and asks questions like no other group and will continue to communicate in such a way in order to continue to ask the important questions, spark discussion among viewers and inspire.

— Chloe Alice Hayes, Mothershipper 6th- 13th January 2017

#artist residencies artist photographer art residencies themothership annabest chloealicehayes creative ruralbuses documentaryphoto

1 note · View note