#i was also trying out a different art program and ive never drawn on an ipad before so it all felt a little unfamiliar to me.

[my-beloved-lakes]

Eliot and the stray cat he said they weren't keeping. (Click for better quality)

(Ficlet below the cut)

Eliot glanced up from his book when he heard Parker come in, then did a double take.

She was standing in the doorway, holding a cat. It was scrawny and wet and covered in mud.

"Look what I found in the alley." She said, her voice was sad and sympathetic, but underneath that there was a hint of excitement. "She needs a home."

Oh no. Eliot thought.

"We are not keeping the cat, Parker." He said firmly.

"Woah, who put you in charge?" Hardison asked indignantly.

"We can't have a cat running around here." Eliot insisted. “Not with how often we’re out of town.”

Parker looked disappointed.

"We'd Give the damn thing abandonment issues." Eliot muttered under his breath

"Well, we can at least give her a bath and some food." Hardison said.

Eliot's expression softened.

"It can spend the night. We'll give it a blanket to sleep on and leave it in the bathroom where it can't get into anything." Eliot said. "I'll take it to the shelter tomorrow."

"Shelter's closed over the weekend. Won't open again till Monday." Hardison pointed out.

Eliot groaned. "So we're stuck with it for the next 3 days?"

"Yup." Hardison said smugly.

"What should we call her?" Parker asked.

"No. No. We're not naming it. It'll just make it harder to say goodbye when the time comes."

"Aww, come on, can't we keep her? She needs a home and family to love her." Parker insisted. "And just look how cute she is!"

"They'll find it a good home at the shelter." Eliot said.

"Well, I guess I better go to the store and get some cat chow so she can have something to eat while she's here." Hardison said. "You two can handle giving her a bath while I'm gone."

Eliot rolled his eyes and got up to help Parker clean the cat off.

"Get a wet washcloth." He said. "I'll hold it still while you get as much of the mud off as you can."

Parker gently handed the cat to Eliot and ran to the other room. The cat let out a quiet broken meow that was barely more than a squeak as she passed it to Eliot. It clung to Eliot's arm with its claws, and he could feel the thing trembling. He wondered if it was cold or just scared.

Parker came back a minute later with a washcloth soaked in warm water. Eliot held the cat out so Parker could wipe away  all the mud but after a while Eliot realized the washcloth wasn't going to be enough to get the cat clean. He sighed.

"It's gonna need a real bath." He said. “We’ll take it to the bathroom and do it in the tub.”

"She's not gonna like that." Parker pointed out.

The cat didn't mind nearly as much as Eliot expected. Or at least she didn't show it, maybe she was too exhausted or too scared to struggle. Her ears were pinned back in discomfort but she didn't put up a fight. She just sat in the tub, still clinging to Eliot's arm with her front paws as Parker rubbed soap into her fur. When Parker was done lathering the cat with soap Eliot helped rinse all the soap off, running his free hand over the cat's whole body as Parker poured warm water over it.

As Eliot ran his fingers through the cat's wet fur, he could feel scars. Most were old and long since healed up, but a few were more recent, still scabbed with blood.

"She's had a hard life, hasn't she." Parker said. "No family to love her, having to fight to survive."

"Yeah, seems like she has." Eliot said.

She's trying to guilt me into keeping it.

"She's old too." Parker pointed out. "Older animals are less likely to get adopted, you know."

Eliot sighed and shook his head.

I'm not going to let her guilt me into this. He told himself.

She was right though. The cat was old. Now that all the mud was gone, he could see that her face was covered in gray hairs.  The rest of her was a dusty brown color with tabby stripes. She was a cute cat, he had to admit. She reminded him of the cat he had as a kid.

Eliot shook his head.

Can't let myself get attached. He reminded himself.

He grabbed a dry towel and gently rubbed as much of the water off as he could. Then he set the cat down on the ground.

"Do we really have to lock her in here?" Parker asked.

"She can wander around the back rooms until we go to bed." Eliot said reluctantly. "As long as we keep an eye on her to make sure she doesn't get into anything."

Parker's face lit up and she opened the bathroom door. No sooner had she done so, the cat scampered out of the bathroom into the livingroom and darted under the couch.

***

When Hardison got home, he found the cat wandering around, cautiously smelling everything. Parker was watching the cat intently and Eliot had his face in a book, paying no attention to the cat whatsoever, or at least pretending not to pay any attention. 

"So I see the cat isn't actually staying in the bathroom then." Hardison said with a sly smile. 

"She'll be put in there when we go to bed." Eliot said. "She's just hanging out out here while we can keep an eye on her."

Hardison smiled and poured a little food into the new bowl he had bought for the cat and when he looked up, he caught a dirty look from Eliot.

"What?"

"You bought the cat a new food bowl?"

"Yeah." Hardison shrugged.

"Damnit Hardison."

"She needs a dish!"

"The cat is not staying." Eliot insisted.

Hardison just rolled his eyes and set the bowl on the ground next to his feet.

The cat snuck cautiously up, but didn't come close enough to eat.

"Oops, excuse me little lady." Hardison said and backed away from the food bowl.

As soon as the cat decided Hardison was a safe distance away, she darted forward and began scarfing down the food, making happy little meows as she ate.

Parker and Hardison both chuckled at the muffled meows coming from the cat.

"I don't think I've ever heard a cat do that." Hardison mused.

I have. Once. Eliot thought, then quickly dismissed the thought.

As soon as the cat was done eating Parker tried to creep closer to pet her, but the cat darted away and sat down, wrapped her tail around her feet and stared at Parker.

"Aww it's okay little kitty." Parker promised. "I'm not gonna hurt you."

Parker sat down on the ground and scooted closer, but the cat moved away again.

"Parker, leave the cat alone." Eliot said without glancing up from his book. "She'll come to you when she's ready."

Parker reluctantly got up and settled herself on the couch between Eliot and Hardison.

***

Hardison stretched and yawned.

"Welp, I think it's time for me to get to bed." He said and got up from the couch. "Want me to put the cat up?" 

"Nah, I got it." Eliot shrugged.

"Okay, night night." Hardison said and made his way up the stairs.

Parker got up to follow him.

"Good night, Eliot." She said.

"G'night."

"I really want to keep the cat." Parker said as she climbed into bed next to Hardison.

"Oh babe, we're keeping the cat." Hardison said definitely.

"But Eliot was very clear that he doesn't want to keep her. I know he's not the boss of us, but I feel like we should respect his opinion, right?"

Hardison wrapped his arms around Parker and pulled her close.

"Parker let me let you in on a little secret that Eliot would probably kill me for telling you. He'd never admit it, but he loves that cat already. He's growing more and more attached to her every second. We just have to pretend like we don't notice it for a while, let him think he’s got us fooled. Before ya know it, he’ll cave and let us keep her."

Parker smiled and snuggled in closer to Hardison.

“I think we should call her Snickers.” Parker said

“I like Snickers.” hardison mumbled sleepily. “But don’t tell Eliot till he’s agreed to keep her.”

***

Parker woke up again in the middle of the night and wondered if Eliot was still awake. She carefully slipped out of Hardison’s arm and crept down the stairs. She found Eliot curled up, sound asleep on the couch. The cat was curled up in the curve of Eliot's stomach, nestled into a pile of blankets, purring loudly. 

So the cat’s not staying in the bathroom after all.

She smiled and crept back to the bedroom, nudged Hardison awake and motioned for him to follow her. Together they crept back to the living room.

Hardison chuckled quietly to himself when he saw Eliot asleep with the cat.

"What'd I tell you? He's in love with the cat already."

***

Monday rolled around, but Eliot didn’t seem to be in any hurry to take the cat to the shelter.

"Ya gonna take the cat today?" Hardison asked. 

He already knew the answer was no. Eliot was completely and thoroughly attached.

"If I find the time." Eliot shrugged. "Kinda busy today, though."

Hardison and Parker shot each other knowing smiles.

"Well, I can take her if you want." Hardison offered, knowing full well Eliot wouldn't accept it.

"No, I'll do it as soon as I'm not busy."

***

When evening rolled around the cat was still wandering around the back rooms of the brewpub, but Eliot's day had proven to be much less busy than he said. He had worked out a little, gone over the brewpub menu to make a few revisions and taken one client meeting, but all of that took less than half the day.

There should have been plenty of time to take the cat to the shelter. Hardison noted smugly to himself. But he doesn't want to say goodbye.

***

Tuesday really was a busy day. They spent the whole day planning, and executing a heist and by the time they got home, the shelter was closed for the evening.

Eliot grabbed an ice pack from the freezer and pressed it to his aching shoulder. Then he slumped down onto the couch with a sigh and leaned his head against the back, closing his eyes.

The fight he had with the security guards hadn't been particularly rough, but one of them had managed to wrench his shoulder pretty bad. he had popped a couple painkillers on the way home, but it was still aching.

He looked up when he heard a tiny squeak from the cat as she jumped onto the opposite end of the couch and made her way over to him.

The cat never seemed to meow properly. It always came out more like a raspy squeak, as if she had lost her voice. He was reminded once again of the cat he had as a kid, the only other cat he had ever known who had a meow like that.

She rubbed her head against his leg and walked in circles across his lap a few times before laying down and curling up on his lap, purring softly. Eliot scratched behind her ears, and she started purring louder.

Damnit. He thought. She's not going anywhere, is she? We're stuck with her now.

***

Wednesday morning, Eliot woke to find the cat wasn't asleep next to him like she had been when he fell asleep. He got up and wandered into the next room where he  found Parker, but the cat wasn't there. Neither was Hardison.

"Where's Hardison?" Eliot asked.

"Oh, He figured since we’re keeping the cat, it was probably time to take her to the vet and get her checked up. Ya know, make sure she doesn't have any illnesses or anything we need to know about. The only available time they had was first thing in the morning."

"Woah, we never agreed to keep..." Eliot trailed off and gave in, shaking his head. "Well make sure he knows to get a litter box while he's out."

Parker smiled and nodded.

"Damn cat." Eliot muttered fondly to himself as he set to work making breakfast.

“Also, we’re calling her Snickers.” Parker added.

Eliot smiled. He liked that name, mostly because Parker was the one who came up with it, but he liked it all the same.

#leverage #eliot spencer #parker #alec hardison #Snickers the cat #leverage fanart #Leverage fanfic #Leverage fluff #my art #it's been a while since I've done any digital art and boy did it feel nice to start again! #i was also trying out a different art program and ive never drawn on an ipad before so it all felt a little unfamiliar to me. #but i think it turned out okay #it took me a while to actually be satisfied with all this but i think im finally satisfied enough to post it.

[torchsart]

yippee carnival flicker!! ive been rotating them in my mind for a while now so im glad to have them drawn properly :D tumblr killed the quality tho so click on the image pretty please

i think i did good as bossifying her design! sm-baby (who made the au btw) had boss design notes that rlly helped!! i focused a lot on adding more details to differentiate carnival flicker from canon flicker (i also tweaked the colors a lil teehee)!

no-box art, doodles, & info dump below!!

About Their Game:

Pop Goes The Weasel plays in its entirety on the first round, with Flicker jumping out on the "Pop!" signaling the player to stop. In later rounds, the music cuts out at different points and the player must time the cue themself.

Their AI was adaptive, able to adjust each round's difficulty to the player's performance. Now they can control their game's difficulty manually, occasionally helping struggling players by moving platforms closer or humming when their music cue cuts out.

There's a hard mode of the level where the player has 1 HP, the platforms move around, and Flicker's music cue plays at varying speeds each time, on top of cutting out at random.

Ice makes platforms slippery, harder to land on & jump from. It's also harder to stop before a red light.

Electrified platforms can be landed on, but drain health the longer you stay on them.

Spikey platforms require careful timing to land on & jump off safely, taking a significant chunk of health if impaled.

Platforms with glue are harder to jump from, you won't have as much momentum.

Lose conditions: Falling into the void below the platforms, losing all HP, moving during a red light, failing to reach Flicker in time.

Fun Facts:

Due to a bug, players will always have spring-shoes equipped in Flicker's room, even in visiting mode.

Flicker's box has collision but no physics, & can no longer be interacted with after she broke off the crank. It's her ultimate safe space.

Prior to the broken crank, players could wind up Flicker's box in visiting mode & have them pop out on cue to start a conversation.

Non-sentient Flicker's AI would make references to their crush on Kinger. Sentient Flicker tends to stay quiet about it, almost never brings it up themself.

Gangle is the only other character who would reference Flicker's crush when non-sentient, even if Flicker wasn't present. She likes to tease them about it, casting Flicker & Kinger in romantic-leaning roles.

Flicker will put herself in increasingly more painful and embarrassing situations to entertain The King. She likes his laugh. Making him happy, even at her expense, is like a secondary purpose to her.

Believes Pomni's love is "real" because she developed it after becoming sentient, opposed to their own "fake" feelings that they were programmed with. Will need a lot of talks with Pomni before they consider their feelings for Kinger to be as real & valid as Pomni's feelings for Caine.

Has a lot of questions for the humans that made her, primarily about the reason for her existence and why she was given a crush on a married man (Made arguably worse by the fact said man is now a widower).

Flicker's room is one of the safest to be in since they aren't actively hostile toward humans. In fact, they'd go out of their way to protect a player actively participating in their game.

Since her game is all she feels she has, she may try to extend it indefinitely, adding more & more rounds with fluctuating difficulties. She doesn't want the moment to end. You'd have to promise to come back & play again before she finally lets you win.

Flicker's game, being adaptive & more forgiving, places them fairly early in the boss order, either before Ragatha or between her & Gangle. Being an early boss puts them in the mindset that no one will revisit them or their game since there's no progress to be made doing so.

Flicker's AI was made to shout words of encouragement & praise to the player depending on their performance & progress through the level each time she popped up. If her AI recognized the player was idling, she would remind them of the controls. If they weren't making it very far between green lights, she would encourage them to keep trying.

Sentient Flicker still does something similar, if only to get the player to keep playing & finish her game despite the danger. To quit partway through would be worse than to not play at all!

They can get snappy if you don't progress for a while though, shouting that it's not that hard, asking if you're even trying. They apologize quickly, not wanting to put you off from playing with their attitude, and will even offer to make the level easier if it'll keep you going.

#hi guys. theres a lot of text i love making flicker lore #i am Not good at drawing caine but i needed flicker to be existential at him bc he worked on the game #ik digital carnival is meant 2 be a vr game in universe But we can pretend they hva the tech to imitate jumping & platforming ok? #tadc carnival au #tadc #the amazing digital carnival #carnival au #carnival kinger #sona: flicker #sona: flicker (carnival) #man i wish there was a tag for like. au ocs. would love to see more ppls ocs auwauhh #my ocs #torchs art #jan 2024 #id in alt text

[musubiki]

im ngl noww that you say that you do art as a hobby, im just intrigued by how you are so confident and are able to have the free time to do it as a hobby...

i hope i didnt make a mistake taking art college ;; IM ROOTING FOR YOU TOO! its so luckily nowdays to have a job youre at least okay with but also have some really fun hobby on the side too

to one broke college student to another do u have any advice for future years? i ltrly just started college like 3 weeks ago

aaaa as far as time for the hobby goes, i actually only have that kinda time very recently (like over the summer and this semester).....if you noticed, i kinda dropped off for a year where i mustve only drawn like 10 things??? which is because last year was such a busy year for me in terms of work and courses...but this semester is better because im only in 3 classes: one doesnt have any exams and another im retaking (cuz i didnt pass the summer comp exam for it lol) so its all content ive seen before!! so this semester is a little easier and i can draw a bit more when i dont have homework or on the weekends!!!

as far as advice goes, (im not sure how art school works? or if youre in a normal university just majoring in art?) id say: take a lot of different classes to see what you like! explore different areas, and i think it might also be good to have like.....a contingency plan so to speak. like in my undergrad i got a minor in anthropology and almost got a certificate in accounting just so i had a little more options post-undergrad if the math major didnt work out!! so doing something like that is never a bad idea!!! (my undergrad program had a requirement to fulfill a certain amount of credits outside your major courses, so i used those to explore different things)

also dont be afraid to change if you feel you dont like your current path.....like i mentioned i was an astronomy major in undergrad first, and had wanted to go into astronomy since i was a kid, but found eventually it wasnt for me (i couldnt cut it in physics) and switched to something i wasnt SUPER passionate about, but i was good at it!! which was a huge decision for me and lowkey pretty risky (the fuck do you do with a math major?? everyone i asked they just replied "Oh you can do lots of things!" and never gave me an actual job title)

try to do summer internships if you can! as long as its financially feasible for you, itll make your resume a lot beefier when you graduate if employers/grad school see that you already have several experiences under your belt (and experience compounds on itself-- the more you have the more likely you are to get more!! for example here in my program, if you have more stats and coding experience coming in youre more likely to get more stats/coding assistantships, so you gain even more experience over the person who had no stats/coding experience prior and as a result got sent to be a TA or something. so the person who already had experience gets more experience and the person who didnt falls even further behind :') (me) )

networking is also important!!! since youre just in undergrad, i would recommend starting by talking to professors when you can. doesnt need to be like, going out of your way to go to their office hours and talk stories, but maybe chat a bit before/after class!! ask them how their weekend went, ask a dumb clarifying question!! i got to my current grad program because my professor came to me before class one day and said "I have a friend from [my current program] coming to recruit, you should go meet him." so be friendly with your professors so they get to know you and will pass on opportunities when they hear about them!!

a lot of professors get emails from all kinds of jobs/programs to the effect of "[place] is looking to recuit/hire" and they can pass those your way if youre on their radar!! and lastly work hard!!

(anyway this is advice i have based on my own experiences and what worked for me, it will most likely be different for you!! stay on top of your studies, but also force yourself to rest every so often!! I personally do not do any work on saterdays and try not to on sundays!! so i feel okay working hard the other nights of the week so i have two full days of rest....sacrifice your work-week free time for grades :') sometimes the best thing for your mental health is just getting the thing you dont wanna do out of the way!! good luck in uni!!!)

#college for everyone else is gonna be a little different than college for me #i was fortunate enough to get a lot of locally-based scholarships that took care of me so i didnt need to work while studying #but i know a lot of people do and thats fucking tough #i also wasnt in a lot of clubs etc #because my scholarship program would organize a lot of our events #and besides studying i didnt have time for any of that lol #stay on top of your studies for real..... #put down that pokemon game and go re-read the lecture content you learned today (pro tip) #yeah dont work 24/7 without rest if you can avoid it #burnout isnt fun and honestly i still havent figured out a way to avoid it #sometimes its inevitable and you just gotta push through #punch studies in the face

[meanderings0ul]

Philinda & Timelines

I wrote most of this in a more disorganized form a few months back, but now I’ve fleshed it out and done some more calculations. I hope it might be interesting to fans of these characters or useful for those who write fic for them. I personally like to have some dates and characterization timelines to look at when writing fics set in a “real world” type show, so I generally keep some notes for myself in word docs. Here I just kinda dove into it. 

I don’t go into plot timeline details here because I just don’t care. Marvel does an incredibly shit job of taking travel time and medical times into account. They can try and convince me something happened in two weeks, but I’m always going to ignore it. This uses info from the show itself and from an online date calculator. I am mostly not pulling from the various wikis. The wikis are great for trivia, but they are massively self-contradictory due to tie-in comics, stuff said in various interviews, etc. It’s Marvel. [Edited 03/20 to finally include workable theories for Captain Marvel]

*

Phil Coulson was born July 8, 1964. This makes his sun sign Cancer and his Chinese zodiac year the Dragon. He was an active and outgoing kid who wished he had a brother to play with. His dad died or was killed in 1973. Coulson was only 9 years old. They’d either finished restoring Lola together earlier that year or in 1972. It is implied in season 2 that he and his mother moved after the death, either to a different part of the town or somewhere else entirely as he did not attend the high school his father worked at. Coulson finished high school and went to college to study history, both because that was the subject his dad taught and because he was always a giant history nerd. He worked as a lifeguard as a teenager. We do not know anything about his mother’s work or their relationship when she was alive. A research project into the S.S.R. brought him to Shield’s attention. He was recruited from college by Nick Fury, an agent at the time.

Melinda May was born November 20, 1965 (a reference from the scanned back-page of a tie-in comic I cannot find again - Fury’s Secret Files from somewhere I think). Obviously, they’ve just used Ming’s birthday with a different year to parallel the actors. Her birth location is always listed as classified, so it’s possible her mother was involved with something for the CIA at the time. Her sun sign is Scorpio and her birth year in the Chinese zodiac is the snake. May always picked up new physical activities quickly according to her dad in S3. She started ice-skating at 7 and quickly began skating competitively. At 12 she switched from skating to martial arts. May has a trusting relationship with both her parents. We don’t know anything about when they seemingly separated, decided to live separately for Reasons, or got divorced. There is around a year unaccounted for between when she most likely graduated high school and when she likely joined Shield. She might have joined against her mother’s wishes. We know nothing of how she was recruited.

Star Wars Episode IV came out in May of 1977. Coulson was 12 and May was 10. This is totally relevant information.

These dates mean May is just shy of two years younger than Coulson. More precisely, Coulson is 17 months older.

We know they were at the Academy together (Comms and Ops shared some classes and electives) and graduated at the same time because of 2x4. Comms and Ops would have been in different facilities, though reasonably close together for logistics purposes. There would be a significant amount of overlap for field agent hopefulls. They probably wouldn’t have seen each other every day. They probably usually saw each other multiple times a week, depending on their classes.

They also shared classes with future Agent Blake and Agent Garrett. (It’s important to remember that Agents Hand, Hartley, Sitwell, and Hill are younger in the MCU and did not attend the Academy until the previous four Agents had already left.)

From common practices in American educational law, Coulson very likely started school (kindergarten) in the fall of 1969 (at 5). He would have graduated in 1982 and started college that fall. It is also possible he started school in 1970 (at 6) and graduated in 1983. May likely started school in 1971 at 5 and would have graduated in spring 1984 at 18 or she possibly started school at 1970 at 4 and graduated in 1983 at 17. (At the time, starting kindergarten at 4 years old was common if you would be turning 5 soon. Start ages were lower in the 70s.)

Here’s where a couple different things could have happened.

I’m going to move forward here with the (imo) more likely graduation ages for them both. These aren’t official. These events could have happened a year earlier or a year later, but anything more than that would be very unlikely.

It’s spring 1984. Coulson just finished his sophomore year of college and is about to turn 21. May just graduated high school at 18.

We know the Shield Academies at this point were legitimate in the eyes of the U.S. Government, though mostly under the radar. There was enough of a structured curriculum schedule in place we know they had a yearbook (as of season 5). Taking on recruits under 18 generally requires parental permission, as Shield is still paramilitary.

Option 1 - Coulson’s research has already drawn Shield’s attention and he is approached by Fury. Someone recruits May or she becomes aware of Shield some other way. They start at the Shield academies fall of 1984. They are 21 and 18 when they join.

Option 2 - Coulson continues through his junior year of college. His research into the S.S.R. draws Shield’s attention. Fury goes to recruit him. May spends a year doing any number of things. Her mother might want her to pursue the CIA. May picks Shield. They start at the Shield academies fall of 1985. They are 22 and 19 when they join.

Option 3 - Coulson is about to finish college when he draws the attention of Shield and is recruited by Fury. May is an unknown for two years. They start at the Shield academies fall of 1986. They are 23 and 20 when they join.

Star Trek IV (the whale movie) came out in November of 1986. Coulson was 23 and May was just 21. This is also totally relevant information.

Let’s say MCU Shield’s training program lasted 3-4 years. (Fitzsimmons strongly implied in season 1 Seeds that Scitech usually took about four years.)

The absolute earliest (3 years) May and Coulson (and Garrett) should have been in the field was 1987/1988/1989. Their most likely brand-new Level 1 Agent year was 1988/1989/1990.

Coulson and May were most likely Level 1 agents at 23 and 21/24 and 22/25 and 23.  

The Sausalito mission mentioned in episode 2x4 probably happened later in 1988/1989/1990.

John Garrett, who they were trained with, was injured in Sarajevo and became a Project Deathlok subject in 1990. He probably was only Level 2. He’d only been an agent 2-3 years maximum.

We knew from season 1 that Coulson’s mom Julie was long gone. The wiki puts her death as September 22, 1992, exactly 19 years after her husband’s death. Coulson was only 28.  

This is where I take issue with one of the semi-official dates. Big issue.

We got a flashback to a younger Agent Coulson and Agent May in season 4. May was a Level 3 specialist and Coulson was recently Level 4. We know they knew each other pretty well at that point, enjoyed each other’s company, and also frequently went weeks or months without seeing each other. They worked on missions separately and together and kept track of each other through company gossip. It’s at this point in their lives that a little, badly-kept-secret, mutual crush is going on that is ultimately not pursued for multiple reasons. They stay close friends and work partners for the next 10-15 ish years.

Parts of the wiki claims this flashback was to 2003. However, this is basically a retcon and in my oh so professional and classy-sounding opinion is just dumber than fuck. (Also, that date was never used in the episode.)

The absolute latest Coulson and May started as field agents was 1990. So *13 years* later they’re still Level 3? I don’t think so. Level 1 is your entry level. Anyone who is performing well is only going to stay there 1-3 years max. Level 2 is your no longer a noob level. If you’re doing great work let’s say people stay there 2-5 years. Agents would stay longer in Levels 3/4/5 than Levels 1 and 2.

Let’s be generous and give them 5 years at Levels 1 and 2. It could have easily been 4, maybe even 3 depending on how fast they got their groove after the whole “in the bay for five hours” thing. Coulson and May logically made it to Level 3 anywhere around 1993/1994/1995.

The Captain Marvel movie makes dubious use of existing aos canon, but if we use the perspective that Phil is a brand new Level 3 field agent instead of one fresh out of the Academy (which is completely incompatible with aos’s timeline) than we can say Phil and May were new level 3 agents sometime early in 1995. 

A sensible placement for the Russian 0-8-4 mission would be anywhere from late 1995-1997. With Phil having recently made Level 4 (strongly implied the the flashback), I would suggest 1996 or 1997 as the most likely placement. 

From the tie-in comics, MCU Agent Barton is recruited by Nick Fury around this same time, Agent Romanoff “recruited’ by him a few years later.

By 2003, both Coulson and May should have advanced a Level again and be taking on more complex missions. Strike Team Delta is part of Shield now. Fury is Director.

The Bahrain mission happened in 2008. Coulson was likely a Level 6 operative and May would be Level 5. Coulson took a lot of orders from a lot of people in episode 2x17. I highly doubt he was Level 7 at that point. The agent in charge of the operation, Agent Hart, was one of the ones Katya took over. Big Shield headquarters forbade Coulson from sending May into the building. He gave her the clear to go anyway and covered for her. May was 42. Coulson was 43 or 44.

May worked on administration for mostly Level 3s in the basement of the Triskelion for the next 4.5 years. This does not mean she became a lower ranking agent; you would likely want a higher-than-3 managing your level 3s.

Coulson is sent to make contact with Tony Stark later in 2008. At some point he advances to Level 7 then 8. Given Shield viewed the Bahrain rescue as a legendary success, not knowing how it unfolded, it is reasonable to think Coulson was promoted to 7 shortly afterwards. 

Coulson died on the Helicarrier on May 4th, 2012 during The Incident. He was 47. May was 46 when she found out he was dead.

When we met them in season 1, Coulson was recently 49 (technically…) and May was 47. May is a Level 7 agent and Coulson remains Level 8.

After season 5 they are on a beach in Tahiti. Coulson is 54 and May is 52. They’ve known each other 34/33/32 years.

*

Now, I’ve tried to structure this whole thing in a way that should you want to change their school-dates and use any of the three options you should be able to go through and add/subtract from the existing numbers pretty easily. So I hope that’s useful if you’ve been trying to math and write fic or if there’s just been general confusion.

I greatly prefer to write from the Option 2 set, with adjustments made for Captain Marvel. That just makes the most sense to me as far as events we know about from season one and the other life events for these characters. So if you’ve read any of my stuff, this is generally where I’m coming from.

I really hope this was useful and interesting. I spent far too much time on it.

#agents of shield #aos meta #philinda #phil coulson #melinda may #john garrett #loooong damn meta #omfg #why did i do this to myself #nevermind #i know why #and i will never admit how much of this i was able to write from memory #though I've double checked everything since #and #only a year later than planned #i've finally updated it for captain marvel tie in info lol #pinned now because i think this'll stay relevant for s7

[prolapsarian]

Conversation with David Panos about The Searchers

The Searchers by David Panos is at Hollybush Gardens, 1-2 Warner Yard London EC1R 5EY, 12 January – 9 February 2019

There is something chattering. Alongside a triptych a small screen displays the rhythmic loop of hands typing, contorting, touching, holding. A movement in which the artifice strains between shuddering and juddering. Machinic GIFs seem to frame an event which may or may not have taken place. Their motions appear to combine an endless neurotic repetition and a totally adrenal pumped and pumping tension, anticipating confrontation. 

JBR: How do the heavily stylised triptych of screens in ‘The Searchers’ relate to the GIF-like loops created out of conventionally-shot street footage? DP: I think of the three screens as something like the ‘unconscious’ of these nervous gestures. I’m interested in how video compositing can conjure up impossible or interior spaces, perhaps in a way similar to painting. Perhaps these semi-abstract images can somehow evoke how bodies are shot through with subterranean currents—the strange world of exchange and desire that lies under the surface of reality or physical experience. Of course abstractions don't really ‘inhabit’ bodies and you can’t depict metaphysics, but Paul Klee had this idea about an aesthetic ‘interworld’, that painting could somehow reveal invisible aspects of reality through poetic distortion. Digital video and especially 3D graphics tend to be the opposite of painting—highly regimented and sat within a very preset Euclidean space. I guess I’ve been trying to wrestle with how these programs can be misused to produce interesting images—how images of figures can be abstracted by them but retain some of their twitchy aliveness. JBR: This raises a question about the difference between the control of your media and the situation of total control in contemporary cinematic image making. DP: Under the new regimes of video making, the software often feels like it controls you. Early analogue video art was a sensuous space of flows and currents, and artists like the Vasulkas were able to build their own video cameras and mixers to allow them to create whole new images—in effect new ways of seeing. Today that kind of utopian or avant-garde idea that video can make surprising new orders of images is dead—it’s almost impossible for artists to open up a complex program like Cinema 4D and make it do something else. Those softwares were produced through huge capital investment funding hundreds of developers. But I’m still interested in engaging with digital and 3D video, trying to wrestle with it to try and get it to do something interesting—I guess because the way that it pictures the world says something about the world at the moment—and somehow it feels that one needs to work in relation to the heightened state of commodification and abstraction these programs represent. So I try and misuse the software or do things by hand as much as possible, and rather than programming and rendering I manipulate things in real time. JBR: So in some way the collective and divided labour that goes into producing the latest cinematic commodities also has a doubled effect: firstly technique is revealed as the opposite of some kind of freedom, and at the same time this has an effect both on how the cinematic object is treated and how it appears. To be represented objects have to be surrounded by the new 3D capture technology, and at the same time it laminates the images in a reflected glossiness that bespeaks both the technology and the disappearance of the labour that has gone into creating it. DP: I’m definitely interested in the images produced by the newest image technologies—especially as they go beyond lens-based capture. One of the screens in the triptych uses volumetric capturing— basically 3D scanning for moving image. The ‘camera’ perspective we experience as the viewer is non-existent, and as we travel into these virtual, impossible perspectives it creates the effect of these hollowed out, corroded bodies. This connects to a recurring motif of ‘hollowing out’ that appears in the video and sculpture I’ve been making recently. And I have a recurring obsession with the hollowing out of reality caused by the new regime of commodities whose production has become cut to the bone, so emptied of their material integrity that they’re almost just symbols of themselves. So in my show ‘The Dark Pool’ (Hollybush Gardens, 2014) I made sculptural assemblages with Ikea tables and shelves, which when you cut them open are hollow and papery. Or in ‘Time Crystals’ (Pumphouse Gallery, 2017) I worked with clothes made in the image of the past from Primark and H&M that are so low-grade that they can barely stand washing. We are increasingly surrounded by objects, all of which have—through contemporary processes of hyper-rationalisation and production—been slowly emptied of material quality. Yet they have the resemblance of luxury or historical goods. This is a real kind of spectral reality we inhabit.  I wonder to myself about how the unconscious might haunt us in these days when commodities have become hollow. Might it be like Benjamin’s notion of the optical unconscious, in which through the photographic still the everyday is brought into a new focus, not in order to see what is behind the veil of semblance, but to see—and reclaim for art—the veiling in a newly-won clarity. DP: Yes, I see these new technologies as similar, but am interested in how they don't just change impact perception but also movement. The veiled moving figures in ‘The Searchers' are a strange byproduct of digital video compositing. I was looking to produce highly abstract linear depictions of bodies reduced to fleshy lines, similar to those in the show and I discovered that the best way to create these abstract images was to cover the face and hands of performers when you film them to hide the obvious silhouettes of hands and faces. But asking performers to do this inadvertently produced a very peculiar movement—the strange veiled choreography that you see in the show. I found this footage of the covered performers (which was supposed to be a stepping stone to a more digitally mediated image, and never actually seen) really suggestive— the dancers seem to be seeking out different temporary forms and they have a curious classical or religious quality or sometimes evoke a contemporary state of emergency. Or they just look like absurd ghosts. JBR: In the last hundred years, when people have talked about ghosts the one thing they don’t want to think about is how children consider ghosts, as figures covered in a white sheet, in a stupid tangible way. Ghosts—as traumatic memories—have become more serious and less playful. Ghosts mean dwelling on the unfinished business of the past, or apprehending some shard of history left unredeemed that now revisits us. Not only has no one been allowed to be a child with regard to ghosts, but also ghosts are not for materialists either. All the white sheets are banished. One of the things about Marx when he talks about phantoms—or at least phantasmagorias—is much closer to thinking about, well, pieces of linen and how you clothe someone, and what happens with a coat worked up out of once living, now dead labour that seems more animate than the human who wears it.  DP: Yes, I’ve been very interested in Marx’s phantasmagorias. I reprinted Keston Sutherland’s brilliant essay on how Marx uses the term ‘Gallerte’ or ‘gelatine’ to describe abstract labour for a recent show. Sutherland highlights a vitalism in Marx’s metaphysics that I’m very drawn to. For the last few years I’ve been working primarily with dancers and physical performers and trying to somehow make work about the weird fleshy world of objects and how they’re shot through with frozen labour. I love how he describes the ‘wooden brain’ of the table as commodity and how he describes it ‘dancing’—I always wanted to make an animatronic dancing table.  JBR: There is also a sort of joyfulness about that. The phantasmagoria isn’t just scary but childish. Of course you are haunted by commodities, of course they are terrifying, of course they are worked up out of the suffering and collective labour of a billion bodies working both in concert and yet alienated from each other. People’s worked up death is made into value, and they all have unfinished business. But commodities are also funny and they bumble around; you find them in your house and play with them.  DP: Well my last body of work was all about dancing and how fashion commodities are bound up with joy and memory, but this show has come out much bleaker. It’s about how bodies are searching out something else in a time of crisis. It’s ended up reflecting a sense of lack and longing and general feeling of anxiety in the air. That said I am always drawn to images that are quite bright, colourful and ‘pop’ and maybe a bit banal—everyday moments of dead time and secret gestures.  JBR: Yes, but they are not so banal. In dealing with tangible everyday things we are close to time and motion studies, but not just in terms of the stupid questions they ask of how people work efficiently. Rather this raises questions of what sort of material should be used so that something slips or doesn’t slip—or how things move with each other or against each other—what we end up doing with our bodies or what we end up putting on our bodies. Your view into this is very sympathetic: much art dealing in cut-up bodies appears more violent, whereas the ruins of your abstractions in the stylised triptych seem almost caring.  DP: Well I’m glad you say that. Although this show is quite dark I also have a bit of a problem with a strain of nihilist melancholy that pervades a lot of art at the moment. It gives off a sense of being subsumed by capitalism and modern technology and seeing no way out. I hope my work always has a certain tension or energy that points to another possible world. But I’m not interested in making academic statements with the work about theory or politics. I want it to gesture in a much more intuitive, rhythmic, formal way like music. I had always made music and a few years back started to realise that I needed to make video with the same sense of formal freedom. The big change in my practice was to move from making images using cinematic language to working with simultaneous registers of images on multiple screens that produce rhythmic or affective structures and can propose without text or language.  JBR: The presentation of these works relies on an intervention into the time of the video. If there is a haunting here its power appears in the doubled domain of repetition, which points both backwards towards a past that must be compulsively revisited, and forwards in convulsive anticipatory energy. The presentation of the show troubles cinematic time, in which not only is linear time replaced by cycles, but also new types of simultaneity within the cinematic reality can be established between loops of different velocities.  DP: Film theorists talk about the way ‘post-cinematic’ contemporary blockbusters are made from images knitted together out of a mixture of live action, green-screen work, and 3D animation. I’ve been thinking how my recent work tries to explode that—keep each element separate but simultaneous. So I use ‘live’ images, green-screened compositing and CGI across a show but never brought together into a naturalised image—sort of like a Brechtian approach to post-cinema. The show is somehow an exploded frame of a contemporary film with each layer somehow indicating different levels of lived abstractions, each abstraction peeling back the surface further.  JBR: This raises crucial questions of order, and the notion that abstraction is something that ‘comes after’ reality, or is applied to reality, rather than being primary to its production.  DP: Yes good point. I think that’s why I’m interested in multiple screens visible simultaneously. The linear time of conventional editing is always about unveiling whereas in the show everything is available at the same time on the same level to some extent. This kind of multi-screen, multi-layered approach to me is an attempt at contemporary ‘realism’ in our times of high abstraction. That said it’s strange to me that so many artworks and games using CGI these days end up echoing a kind of ‘naturalist’ realist pictorialism from the early 19th Century—because that’s what is given in the software engines and in the gaming-post-cinema complex they’re trying to reference. Everything is perfectly in perspective and figures and landscapes are designed to be at least pseudo ‘realistic’. I guess that’s why you hear people talking about the digital sublime or see art that explores the Romanticism of these ‘gaming’ images.  JBR: But the effort to make a naturalistic picture is—as it was in the 19th century—already not the same as realism. Realism should never just mean realistic representation, but instead the incursion of reality into the work. For the realists of the mid-19th century that meant a preoccupation with motivations and material forces. But today it is even more clear that any type of naturalism in the work can only serve to mask similar preoccupations, allowing work to screen itself off from reality.  DP: In terms of an anti-naturalism I’m also interested in the pictorial space of medieval painting that breaks the laws of perspective or post-war painting that hovered between figuration and abstraction. I recently returned to Francis Bacon who I was the first artist I was into when I was a teenage goth and who I’d written off as an adolescent obsession. But revisiting Bacon I realised that my work is highly influenced by him, and reflects the same desire to capture human energy in a concentrated, abstracted way. I want to use ‘cold’ digital abstraction to create a heightened sense of the physical but not in the same way as motion capture which always seems to smooth off and denature movement. So the graph-like image in the centre of the triptych (Les Fantômes) in this show twitches with the physicality of a human body in a very subtle but palpable way. It looks like CGI but isn’t and has this concentrated human life force rippling through it. 

If in this space and time of loops of the exploded unstill still, we find ourselves again stuck in this shuddering and juddering, I can’t help but ask what its gesture really is. How does the past it holds gesture towards the future? And what does this mean for our reality and interventions into it. JBR: The green-screen video is very cold. The ruined 3D version is very tender. DP: That's funny you say that. People always associate ‘dirty’ or ‘poor’ images with warmth and find my green-screen images very cold. But in the green-screened video these bodies are performing a very tender dance—searching out each other, trying to connect, but also trying to become objects, or having to constantly reconfigure themselves and never settling. JBR: And yet with this you have a certain conceit built into the drapes you use: one that is in a totally reflective drape, and one in a drape that is slightly too close to the colour of the greenscreen background. Even within these thin props there seems to be something like a psychological description or diagnosis. And as much as there is an attempt to conjoin two bodies in a mutual darkness, each seems thrown back by its own especially modern stigma. The two figures seem to portray the incompatibility of the two poles established by veiled forms of the world of commodities: one is hidden by a veil that only reflects back to the viewer, disappearing behind what can only be the viewer’s own narcissism and their gratification in themselves, which they have mistaken for interest in an object or a person, while the other clumsily shows itself at the very moment that it might want to seem camouflaged against a background that is already designed to disappear. It forces you to recognise the object or person that seems to want to become inconspicuous. And stashed in that incompatibility of how we find ourselves cloaked or clothed is a certain unhappiness. This is not a happy show. Or at least it is a gesturally unsettled and unsettling one. DP: I was consciously thinking of the theories of gesture that emerged during the crisis years of the early 20th century. The impact of the economic and political on bodies. And I wanted the work to reflect this sense of crisis. But a lot of the melancholy in the show is personal. It's been a hard year. But to be honest I’m not that aligned to those who feel that the current moment is the worst of all possible times. There’s a left/liberal hysteria about the current moment (perhaps the same hysteria that is fuelling the rise of right-wing populist ideas) that somehow nothing could be worse than now, that everything is simply terrible. But I feel that this moment is a moment of contestation, which is tough but at least means having arguments about the way the world should be, which seems better than the strange technocratic slumber of the past 25 years. Austerity has been horrifying and I realise that I’ve been relatively shielded from its effects, but the sight of the post-political elites being ejected from the stage of history is hopeful to me, and people seem to forget that the feeling of the rise of the right has been also met with a much broader audience for the left or more left-wing ideas than have been previously allowed to impact public discussion. That said, I do think we’re experiencing the dog-end of a long-term economic decline and this sense of emptying out is producing phantasms and horrors and creating a sense of palpable dread. I started to feel that the images I was making for ‘The Searchers’ engaged with this. David Panos (b. 1971 in Athens, Greece) lives and works in London, UK. A selection of solo and group exhibitions include Pumphouse Gallery, Wandsworth, London, 2017 (solo); Sculpture on Screen. The Very Impress of the Object, Gulbenkian Museum, Lisbon, Portugal [Kirschner & Panos], 2017; Nemocentric, Charim Galerie, Vienna, 2016; Atlas [De Las Ruinas] De Europa, Centro Centro, Madrid, 2016; The Dark Pool, Albert Baronian, Brussels, (solo), 2015; The Dark Pool, Galeria Marta Cervera, Madrid, 2015; Whose Subject Am I?, Kunstverein Fur Die Rheinlande Und Westfalen, Düsseldorf, 2015; The Dark Pool, Hollybush Gardens, London, (solo), 2014; A Machine Needs Instructions as a Garden Needs Discipline, MARCO Vigo, 2014; Ultimate Substance, B3 Biennale des bewegten Blides, Nassauischer Kunstverein, Wiesbaden, (Kirschner & Panos solo), 2013; Ultimate Substance, CentrePasquArt, Biel, (Kirschner & Panos solo), 2013; Ultimate Substance, Extra City, Antwerp, (Kirschner & Panos solo), 2013; The Magic of the State, Lisson Gallery, London, 2013; HELL AS, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, 2013.

[ciathyzareposts]

The Seventh Link: Summary and Rating

The game manual featured some fairly modest hand-drawn art.

            The Seventh Link

Canada

Oblique Triad (developer and publisher)

Released 1989 for Tandy Color Computer 3 Date Started: 16 December 2018

Date Ended: 16 March 2019

Total Hours: 22

Difficulty: Medium-Hard (3.5/5)

Final Rating: (to come later)

Ranking at Time of Posting: (to come later)

       Summary:

Inspired graphically and thematically by the Ultima series, The Seventh Link is probably the most extensive and full-featured RPG for the TRS-80 Color Computer. A single starting character ultimately enlists a group of allies of different races and classes on a quest to save their planet from a black hole at its core, about to break its containment. Solving the quest will take the party through dozens of towns across multiple planets and through multiple large, multi-leveled dungeons. Although the game gets off to a slow, grindy start, character development is rewarding and the tactical combat system (drawn from Ultima III) is most advanced seen on this platform. The problem is that the game’s content is not up to its size, and not enough interesting stuff happens while exploring the enormous world.           

****

        I never like giving up on games, and I particularly don’t like when I know the author is reading (I’m frankly not sure it’s ever happened before). But in several months of trying, I simply haven’t been able to make any decent progress in The Seventh Link. That doesn’t necessarily mean I don’t like it. If I was a Tandy Color Computer 3 owner, I’m sure I’d prize the game and play to the very end. The problem is that as a blogger, I have to be able to justify my playing time with material. If I spend four hours in a dungeon and all I can say is I killed a bunch of enemies (showing the same combat screens I’ve shown before) and gathered some gold, it’s hard to countenance that time.

In some ways, The Seventh Link is the quintessential 1980s RPG. It offers a framing story with more detail than appears in the game itself, sticks the player in a large world that the player has to map if he’s to make any progress, and features a lot of combat. In mechanics, it’s as good as any of the early Wizardries or Ultimas.

Unfortunately, Link was the last game I encountered before leaving the 1980s, and I’d just spent a decade mapping featureless dungeon corridors. It’s not its fault that it’s last; that’s just the way it happened. And by the time I got to Link, I just couldn’t do it anymore. I couldn’t–I can’t–play a game that’s just a few dozen 20 x 20 dungeon levels full of combats. The Bard’s Tale and its derivatives drained that battery.           

I never figured out anything to do with the pillars.

         This is the 90s, and gamers are demanding more interesting content in their game worlds. We want NPCs, special encounters, puzzles, and other features in those dungeons, at regular intervals. We’ve decimated forests in our consumption of graph paper; we’re ready for automaps. Ones that don’t require us to find a spell first. 

Despite investing a fair number of hours into the game, I really didn’t accomplish much. I explored the surface of Elira, visited each of its towns to assemble a party, and mapped 4 of 13 levels of one dungeon. There were at least 9 more dungeon entrances on Elira alone, some of which would have taken me to teleporters to three other planets and their own towns and dungeons. I would have found a final party member, a female ranger named Starwind, on the planet Dulfin. Others dungeons would have led me to power packs and the places where I needed to install them to save the planet. I still don’t know where I was to find the other spells. From hints in an old disk magazine, I learned that the maximum character level is 25 (my main character reached 8) and that one of the planets has a store where you can buy potions that increase attributes, serving in the role of Ambrosia from Ultima III.            

One of the few lines from an NPC. Alas, I will probably never explore Selenia.

        My GIMLET is naturally based on an incomplete picture of the game:          

4 points for the game world. The sci-fi origin story is fairly original, and well-told in epistolatory fashion, although it fails to explain a number of aspects of the world (e.g., why are there settlements on other planets). While the player’s role is somewhat clear, it’s less clear where he came from, how he got started on this path, and whether he understands his role.

3 points for character creation and development. The selection of races and classes is familiar but not entirely derivative. There’s nothing special about character creation or the development and leveling process, but they’re reasonably rewarding. I don’t know if the level cap would have caused any issues or if you finish the game well before reaching it.

3 points for NPC interaction. The game has a better system than it uses. You learn a few things from NPCs, but there are hardly any NPCs that say anything to you. Expanding that number would have resulted in a richer, more engaging world. I do like the Ultima IV approach to assembling your party by finding members in the towns.

2 points for encounters and foes. The monsters are mostly derivative of other games (though I like the explanations for their names here: the ship that populated the planet had Tolkien fans on it), and I didn’t really experience other types of encounters.

4 points for magic and combat. The tactical combat screen is about as good as Ultima III, but with fewer spells.

           On Level 3 of the dungeon, I met an enemy called “Floating Stars.”

        3 points for equipment. You can get melee weapons, missile weapons, armor, and adventuring equipment like torches and keys. Various sites hint at more advanced items like rods and gems of seeing. The selection of stuff is a little paltry in the traditional Ultima style.

5 points for the economy. It lacks a certain complexity, but money is certainly valuable. You almost never have enough keys, for one thing. Healing, torches, equipment, and leveling up consume gold fast, and it sounds like the shop on Dulfan would have served as an endless money sink for any extra you could accumulate.

2 points for a main quest with no side-quests or quest options.

4 points for graphics, sound, and interface. Almost all of that is for the interface. It adopts the Ultima standard of one key per action, which ought to have been mandatory as far as I’m concerned. Graphics are functional but sound sparse.

           I never quite got used to the perspective. That lava square is only one square in front of me.

          2 points for gameplay. It gets a bit for nonlinearity and a bit more for the moderate-to-challenging difficulty. But it’s not very replayable and it’s way, way, way, way too big and too long.

             That gives is a final score of 32, which is hardly awful for the era. It’s actually the highest score that I’ve given to the platform. The only things that stop me from finishing it are the number of hours it will take and the number of other games on my list.

The Georgetown, Ontario-based Oblique Triad was a mail-order developer and publisher, co-founded by Jeff Noyle and Dave Triggerson. The name referred to the decorative bars on the top of a Color Computer. Mr. Noyle used to host a page (available now only on the Internet Archive) with links to their games, which included a pair of graphical adventures called Caladuril: Flame of Light (1987) and Caladuril 2: Weatherstone’s End (1988); a strategy game called Overlord (1990); an arcade game called Those Darn Marbles! (1990); and a sound recording and editing package called Studio Works.           

Caladuril, the company’s first game, is a decent-looking graphical adventure.

          With the Color Computer in serious decline by 1990, Oblique Triad shifted its focus to specializing in sound programming, and both Noyle and Triggerson have associated credits on Wizardry VI: Bane of the Cosmic Forge (1990) and Wizardry: Crusaders of the Dark Savant (1992). I haven’t been able to trace Triggerson from there, but Noyle got a job at Microsoft in 1995 working on Direct3D, DirectX, and DirectDraw and remains (at least according to his LinkedIn profile) there today. He also has a voice credit for a Skyrim mod called Enderal: The Shards of Order (2016).

Mr. Noyle was kind enough to not only comment on one of my entries, but to take the time to create overworld maps to speed things along. I’m sorry that it wasn’t quite enough, but every game that I abandon stands a chance of coming back when circumstances are different, and I’ll consider trying this one again when I feel like I’m making better progress through the 1990s.

source http://reposts.ciathyza.com/the-seventh-link-summary-and-rating/

#retro games #dos games #retro #crpg #adventure #amiga #oldcomputers #8bit #16bit #blog #repost

[themoneybuff-blog]

Passive income vs. passion income

Shares 167 When I was a younger man back before I founded Get Rich Slowly in 2006 I was intrigued by the idea of creating passive income. While passive income isnt exactly a get rich quick scheme (and boy was I intrigued boy those back then!), theres certainly some overlap. Both passive income and get rich quick schemes appeal to lazy people like my younger self, people looking for ways to make money for nothing. What Is Passive Income?

Passive income, as the term implies, is money you earn on a regular basis with little or no effort required to maintain the cash flow after the income stream has begun. Common examples of passive income include rental properties, royalties from books (and other published work), and profitable businesses that you own but in which you have little (or no) active involvement. My interest in passive income started early in life. When I was a boy, my father was drawn to the promise of easy money. (See? This is another example of how we inherit our money blueprints from our parents.) Dad was a serial entrepreneur, as Ive mentioned before, but he was also drawn to multi-level marketing schemes. Multi-level marketing schemes lure victims participants with the dream of big bucks for minimal effort. Sure, you have to set up your own operation by recruiting customers and a stable of salespeople, but once you do so the story goes you can sit back and relax as the money pours in! Like my father, I too was drawn to these schemes when I was younger. My first job out of college, for instance, was a multi-level marketing scheme disguised as an insurance company. On a daily basis, the job entailed going door to door trying to sell hospitalization insurance (that was essentially worthless), but the folks who really made money did so because they recruited salespeople who worked under them. The top managers made plenty of passive income because of the pyramid nature of the program. That said, passive income is not inherently slimy. In fact, its a terrific concept worth your attention. Note: My favorite legit book about passive income is The Incredible Secret Money Machine by Don Lancaster. (Heres my review.) My dad bought a copy of this book when it came out in 1978, and I read it several times as a kid. (I still have Dads old copy signed by Mr. Lancaster himself!) If youre at all interested in legitimate sources of passive income, you should read the updated version of this book, which is available for free at the authors website. The Power of Passive Income The truth is that if you can create multiple streams of income that operate without effort on your part, these streams can be terrific supplements to your regular job. Actually, the crossover point, an integral part of Financial Independence theory derived from the classic book Your Money or Your Life, is built around passive income: The Crossover Point provides us with our final definition of Financial Independence. At the Crossover Point, where monthly investment income exceeds your monthly expenses, you will be financially independent in the traditional sense of that term. You will have passive income from a source other than a job.

At the moment, I currently enjoy several small sources of passive income: Each month, I receive between $30 and $50 from sales of Your Money: The Missing Manual, the book I published in 2010. (I earn about a buck per book.)Similarly, I get about $100 to $200 each month from sales of the Get Rich Slowly course. My share of each sale ranges from $8 to $40 depending on a variety of factors.Im earning a tiny bit of revenue from a variety of websites that Ive abandoned or neglected.Kim is paying me $500 per month to vest into ownership of the house.My top source of passive income comes from interest and dividends on my investment portfolio. In the past, Ive also received passive income through other sources such as business loans. (I loaned money to my familys box factory, for example, so the company could purchase a piece of machinery. The interest on that loan was passive income.) There are folks who are under the impression that Get Rich Slowly itself is a source of passive income. Hahaha. Nope. Not even close. For one thing, theres nothing passive about running this site. Its a full-time job, especially if I want it to be good. Plus, while Get Rich Slowly is generating revenue right now, its operating at a loss and not a profit. (So, I guess you could say that GRS is a source of active expense rather than passive income. Ha.) What Is Passion Income? During my short summer break last week, I took a morning drive to visit some friends. Jillian and Adam from Montana Money Adventures were passing through Portland during their 10-week mini retirement. I spent a couple of hours eating breakfast with them and their five kids. Jillian was amused at how she kept burning the pancakes. (This isnt my usual pancake batter. Im used to Krusteaz, she said. So am I.)

After breakfast, Adam took their troop for a hike. Jillian and I sat by the campfire and recorded a video that shell use sometime in the future at her website. We chatted about travel (or course) and blogging (of course) and early retirement (of course). But then Jillian steered the conversation in an interesting direction. We were talking about how retirement isnt always what people expect it to be, whether they retire early or not. A lot of folks quit their jobs to find that theyre life is without purpose, that theyre bored. Thats why I encourage my readers and clients to pursue passion income, Jillian said. Passion income? Do you mean passive income? I asked. No, Jillian said. I mean passion income. Passive income is great, and if you can find a way to get some, you should do it. But passion income is something completely different. Passion income is money you generate by simply doing what you love. Thats interesting, I said. And passion income is different for everyone, Jillian said. For one person, their passion income might come from creating art. For another person, it might come from consulting. For another, it might involve doing carpentry on the weekend. For you, its Get Rich Slowly. The key, though, is that passion income combines what youre good at, what you like to do, and what matters to you. The Power of Passion Income I said good-bye to Jillian and her family, then headed home. But along the drive, I continued to think about the notion of passion income. Its an idea that Ive espoused for a while but never had a term for it. When I got back to the house, I dug through the archives at Montana Money Adventures to read more about the concept. So far, Jillian has three articles about passion income: Jillian says that passion income is derived from things that (a) are in your natural skill set or match your core competency, (b) you love the outcome and feel like youre making a difference, and (c) give space for other important things in your life. Shes created the following Venn diagram to show what she means:

While neither Jillian nor I would argue that you should do what you love and the money will follow, I think we both agree that in an ideal world youd make money by doing something you enjoy. This might be difficult if youre currently in the middle of a specific career trajectory, but its much easier after youve retired. After youve left the traditional workplace, you have the freedom to make choices more aligned with your self and your vision. Pursuing passion income whether its through art, a hobby, or work in your community can be an excellent way to take pressure off your retirement savings while also giving yourself a sense of purpose. Thinking about it, thats really why I bought back Get Rich Slowly. My hope is that this blog will be a source of passion income (not passive income). And once I get the monetization thing figured out, I think it will be. Combining Passive Income with Passion Income The great thing, Jillian says, is that you can pursue both passive income and passion income. That might mean doing something painting, writing a book that fits in both categories. Your work might fit in that passion income sweet spot, but then produce residual passive income in the future. Or, that might mean pursuing multiple sources of income, some out of passion and some that are passive. (She points out that the happiest retirees average eight streams of income. Im not sure the source of that stat, but its interesting. And it makes sense. When you have diverse income sources, theres less risk to you if one of them dries up.) Why even worry about passive income and passion income? Recently, I wrote about the struggle some people face to figure out how much to spend in retirement. While some people overspend, theres a sizable population that underspends. Theyre afraid to touch their nest egg. Passion income alleviates the pain of spending. You get to work at something you love while also earning some money. And spending this money isnt painful, unlike spending out of your investment accounts. Another benefit of passion income? If youre able to generate ongoing revenue with work that you love whether its part time or full time youre able to quit your career much sooner than you would on a traditional early retirement path. If you can earn $1000 per month by building picnic tables, for example, thats $300,000 less you need to save for retirement (given standard assumptions). As I near fifty, Im still intrigued by the idea of passive income. I probably always will be. But the older I get, the more vocal I am that people should consider creating sources of passion income. Finding a way to earn even a little bit of money by doing something you love can not only be fun, but it can also help you reach retirement sooner or make your current retirement less stressful. Shares 167 https://www.getrichslowly.org/passive-income-vs-passion-income/

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Extended Play: How Final Fantasy XII’s gambit created one of the most distinct RPGs ever

From Playstation Blog USA

At the time of its original release more than 10 years ago, Final Fantasy XII received critical acclaim. Boasting incredible visuals that pushed the PS2 hardware to its limits, a unique battle system, and a strong cast embodying the classic thrills of a Final Fantasy story, it left a distinct impression on players.

Despite coming in the wake of a number of hugely successful entries in the series, its developers decided to take sizable risks with the franchise formula, while simultaneously paying homage to Final Fantasy traditions. It represented a bold, daring new vision for the series.

This is not just the story behind that gamble, but of the building of the game’s huge world and the rebuilding of the game itself both in the International Version, which tinkered with the gameplay, and the upcoming PS4 remaster, The Zodiac Age, which launches on 11th July. It’s a chronicle told by developers Hiroaki Kato and Takashi Katano, both of whom not only worked on the PS2 original, but have headed up development of the remaster as Producer and Game Director respectively.

XII’s extended dawn

Final Fantasy XII’s development lasted around six years. An unusual gestation length that – for a time – saw the game hold the Guinness Book of Records title for the longest development period for a video game production. Hiroaki Kato was project manager on Final Fantasy XII, and he was running the whole schedule for the development and production of the game.

Hiroaki Kato: “I remember one of the main things I did was trying to hurry up Mr Sakimoto, the composer of the original game, telling him ‘we need the music now, you need to get it quicker!’”

“Working on a game for such a long time was a difficult thing to do. When we look back at it today, a few reasons come to mind as to why it lasted this long. One of the things about the Final Fantasy series as a whole is that we try new things every single episode: new worlds, new characters, new game systems… Developing all of this from scratch always takes a certain amount of time.

“However, on FFXII specifically we were trying something that had never been done before in the Final Fantasy franchise: we wanted to transition from the kind of old traditional JRPG format that we were used to – shifting from field exploration to battle with separate systems – into what’s basically a modern open world game with a seamless transition from exploration to battle.

“We put a lot of our efforts into transitioning to a seamless automatic battle setup and how to make that fun for players. It took us long time to work this out. In fact, this concept was very set through the course of development but it is rather the volume of content in the game that exploded over time. Getting this in a state where it could be played and all fit together took a lot more time than we thought it would.”

Programming the Gambit system

It is this seamless transition focus that would lead to the introduction of what is probably the most unique feature of Final Fantasy XII: the Gambit system, a customisable battle system that very closely resembles programming code.

Thanks to the Gambit system, players can set up a list of commands for each character which they will perform automatically under the specific conditions they apply to. Setting up these commands and prioritising them with inventiveness is key to defeating many of the game’s encounters.

Hiroaki Kato: “Again, our concept for Final Fantasy XII’s battles was that it must ‘progress seamlessly in real time’. We feared that if we added just the real-time aspect to the command based battle system that other Final Fantasy titles had been following, controlling everything might be too fast-paced and difficult, so to solve this problem we adopted the Gambit system.

“In fact, Final Fantasy IV’s battle system already had a Gambit-like mechanic that controlled the monster’s AI behind the scenes, so we developed this into a different direction to make the Gambit System for Final Fantasy XII.”

“There’s a great feeling of triumph when you defeat a formidable enemy through a fine-tuned setting of your Gambits.” – Hiroaki Kato

Takashi Katano was the lead programmer at the time, and joins Kato-san again on the Final Fantasy XII remaster.

Takashi Katano: “From the very early stages of the project, we all knew the gambit system was going to be difficult to create, but we really wanted to go for that idea so we pushed on.

“I remember Mr Hiroyuki Ito, the main battle designer, saying – and the whole development staff, too – that it was really hard to gauge whether or not what we were doing was going to work nicely or not until the very end. We had this idea and this vision of what we wanted to achieve, of what we thought would make a good game, but when it was only part done it was really difficult to see.

“It’s only when we got quite close to the end of developing the battle system that it all came together and that we saw that yes, this is the vision we had in mind. It’s not something you’ll know from the start.”

Returning to Ivalice

Another particularity of Final Fantasy XII was its setting, Ivalice. The world, its colorful inhabitants and its detailed and seemingly infinite lore didn’t solely belong to XII, but were originally created for Final Fantasy Tactics…

Hiroaki Kato – “Ivalice is a world where the environment and cultures completely change depending on the location and the era, and between Final Fantasy Tactics and Final Fantasy XII, the nature of the world itself and the stories told have changed completely.

“In a way, they both have completely new and different settings. However, there are key concepts that are shared between the two versions of the world, so for fans that have played Tactics, there’s a lot of fun to be had in solving the mysteries of the linked worlds using their intuition and imagination. Making that kind of thing possible is one of the reasons why we used Ivalice for Final Fantasy XII.

“The concepts that became the core pillars of the story were the idea of ‘duty’ and the ‘real meaning of freedom’. They seem like really heavy themes, but they are very universal and many people think about them – regardless of their age, gender, position and upbringing. We mixed these themes with the fictitious world of Ivalice and a war setting, and the story itself was woven together around the various main characters that have their own different ideologies.”

“Our idea for the Title Logo art was focus the “duty” theme of the game. We sent Yoshitaka Amano a request to draw Judge Master Gabranth, as he is the one who represents the idea of duty in the game. We had set out that the Judge Masters use two swords, so we were able to have Gabranth drawn in a very heroic pose holding his swords in both hands.” – Hiroaki Kato

The release of the International Version and the addition of the Job system

Shortly after the release of Final Fantasy XII, the International Zodiac Job System version was released in Japan and featured quite a few big system changes from the original.

Hiroaki Kato: “Compared to International versions that Final Fantasy titles went with before, Final Fantasy XII’s went through a very different approach introducing big changes to the core systems. “For Final Fantasy XII’s International version, it was decided that the director, Hiroyuki Ito, who was in charge of many of the battle designs of previous numbered Final Fantasy games and the creator of both the famous Active Time Battle and ability Systems, was going to re-create the battle system himself.”

Probably the biggest of these changes was the addition of its job system, with 12 jobs each related to a different Zodiac sign: Archer, Black Mage, Bushi, Foebreaker, Knight, Machinist, Monk, Red Battlemage, Shikari, Time Battlemage, Uhlan, and White Mage.

Hiroaki Kato: “My favorite Final Fantasy titles are Final Fantasy V and Final Fantasy Tactics, because they both have job systems in them. When developing FFXII initially, we were already thinking of linking a Job System to the License Board, but with the seamless battles and Gambit system both being so new we feared that players would be overwhelmed if we put in too many new elements. So we decided to have just one type of License Board.

“The design know-how and techniques that Hiroyuki Ito had learned over the years have all been poured into the game, and it has been polished really well.”

Thinking and creating today’s remaster

The International Zodiac Job System version of the game was unfortunately never released in the West, so western players never got to experience the game with all of these additions. Thankfully, it’s the version that inspired the new PS4 remaster.

Takashi Katano: “We discussed this internally for about two months. Improving the visual aspect is what is expected from remasters so of course we did that, but the real concept that we had in mind for the remaster was to make it a lot easier to play. In fact, the whole team sat down and played through the original game from the start to the end, wondering how we could make it more comfortable, easier, and overall more fun to play.”

At the time of its release, FFXII was judged to be a difficult game, which was probably due in part to a player base that needed to adjust to the drastic changes implemented with the combat system.

Takashi Katano: “In the original International version of the game, you could pick one job per character. In this remaster, you’re allowed to pick two for each individual character and use the different combinations there to develop them in different ways. So there’s an extra tactical layer added in with this characterisation system.

“We also made big changes in the game balance. The enemies’ strengths and weaknesses were adjusted, and their AI patterns and attacks will be different. The tactics you will have to come up with in order to fight them are going to be very different from the original.

“We also added a few quality of life improvements; we reduced the loading times, added a location map as an overlay to make it easier to navigate, and included features like auto save. We really wanted to make the gameplay experience smoother.”

Takashi Katano – “We really wanted to give something to players who were looking for all kinds of different things. For example, we have included a new mode where you have to play through the whole game without your level going up. Your team stays level 1 and it will be a very difficult challenge to go through the game with a very weak set of characters.

“Also for people looking for challenges, we’ve added in something called the ‘Trial Mode’. In this mode, you have to play through a hundred battles in a row against different enemies and a level of difficulty gradually increasing. You will have to master different strategies in order to complete this.”

A unique game with a forward thinking vision

In a number of ways, Final Fantasy XII set new standards for the industry. Modern RPGs have since commonly adopted seamless real time battles as standard, and the Final Fantasy series itself continued in this direction. The team, however, remains quite humble.

Takashi Katano: “We certainly did try new things, but we just thought of them as new challenges. At the start of the project, we were actually worried to see if our battle concepts would make for a fun game to play.”

Hiroaki Kato: “When we were making the original game we weren’t really thinking about how we could change the industry or anything like that. We really approached it more from the perspective of how can we make something that’s fun for the players to enjoy. We’re really happy that people said it’s new and innovative but it all came from what can we make fun for them.

“From a different point of view, the fact that seamless real time battles are very much the norm for the current generation of games is making me happy as a gamer.”

Final Fantasy XII: The Zodiac Age releases on PS4 on 11th July. If you haven’t had the chance to play this classic or want to go back to the stunning world of Ivalice, this is your chance!

final fantasyfinal fantasy xiifinal fantasy xii the zodiac agesquare-enix

The post Extended Play: How Final Fantasy XII’s gambit created one of the most distinct RPGs ever appeared first on Ship 2 Block 20.

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Quest for Glory III and IV

The VGA remake of Quest for Glory I. By this point, Sierra’s graphics exceeded the quality of most Saturday-morning cartoons, and weren’t far off the standard set by feature films, being held back more by the technical limitations of VGA graphics than those of the artists doing the drawing.

Quest for Glory, Lori Ann and Corey Cole’s much-loved series of adventure/CRPG hybrids, took a year off after its second installment, while each half of the couple designed an educational game for Sierra’s Discovery Series. After finishing her Discovery game Mixed-Up Fairy Tales, a less ambitious effort aimed at younger children than Corey’s The Castle of Dr. Brain, Lori headed a remake of the first Quest for Glory, using VGA graphics and a point-and-click interface in place of EGA and a parser. While opinions vary as to the remake’s overall worthiness — I’m personally fonder of the original version, as is Corey Cole — no one could deny that it looked beautiful in 256 colors. Sierra was, like many other media producers at the time, operating in a short-lived intermediate phase between analog and fully-digital production techniques, which gave the work a look unique to this very specific period. For example, most of the characters in the Quest for Glory I remake were first sculpted in clay by art director Arturo Sinclair, then digitized and imported into the game. One can only hope that contemporary gamers took the time to appreciate the earthy craftsmanship of his work. Sierra and much of their industry would soon fall down the full-motion video rabbit hole, and the 3D Revolution as well was just over the horizon, poised to offer all sorts of exciting new experiential possibilities but also to lose almost as much in the way of aesthetic values. It would, in other words, be a long time before games would look this good again.

Thankfully, the era of hand-drawn — or hand-sculpted — art at Sierra would last long enough to carry through the next two Quest for Glory games as well. Much else, though, would conspire against them, and in my opinion neither the third nor the fourth game is as strong as either of the first two. Today we’ll have a look at these later efforts’ strengths and failings and the circumstances that led to each.

Well before starting work on the very first Quest for Glory, Lori Ann Cole had sketched out a four-game plan for the series as a whole. It would see the player’s evolving hero visiting four different cultural regions of a fantasy world, all drawn from cultures of our own world, in adventures where the stakes would get steadily higher. The first two games had thus covered medieval Germany and the Arab world, and the last two were slated to go to the murky environs of Eastern Europe and the blazing sunshine of mythic Greece. In fact, Quest for Glory II ends with an advertisement of sorts for the “upcoming” Quest for Glory III: Shadows of Darkness, the Eastern European game. Yet almost as soon as the second game was out the door, the Coles started to have misgivings. To go with its milieu drawn from Romanian and Slavic folklore and the Gothic-horror tradition, Shadows of Darkness was to have a more unfriendly, foreboding approach to gameplay as well. The Coles planned to make “aloneness, suspicion, and paranoia,” as Corey puts it, the hallmarks of the game. They didn’t want to abandon that uncompromising vision, but neither were they sure that their players were ready for it.

Shortly before leaving Sierra to join Origin Systems, staff writer Ellen Guon suggested that the third game could easily be set in Africa instead, following up on an anecdote mentioned by one of the characters in passing in Quest for Glory II — thus extending the series’s arc from four to five games and postponing the “dark” entry until a little later. The Coles loved the idea, and Quest for Glory III: The Wages of War was born. Sure, making it did interfere with some of the thematic unities Lori had built into the series; its entries had been planned to correspond with the four classical elements of Earth, Fire, Air, and Water, as well as the four cardinal compass directions and the four seasons. But perhaps that was all a little too matchy-matchy anyway…

Other, less welcome changes were also in the offing: the new game’s gestation was immediately impacted by the removal of Corey Cole from most of the process. Corey had originally been hired by Sierra in a strictly technical role — specifically, for his expertise in programming the Atari ST and the Motorola 68000 CPU at its heart. His first assigned task had been to help port Sierra’s then-new SCI game engine to that platform, and he was still regarded around the office as the resident 68000 expert. Thus when Sierra head Ken Williams cooked up a scheme to bring their games to the Sega Genesis, a videogame console that was also built around the 68000, it was to Corey that he turned. So, while Lori worked on Quest for Glory III alone, Corey struggled with what turned out to be an impossible task. The Genesis’s memory was woefully inadequate, and its graphics were limited to 64 colors from a palette of 512, as opposed to the 256 colors from a palette of 262,144 of the VGA graphics standard for which Sierra’s latest computer games were coded. Wiser heads finally prevailed and the whole endeavor was cancelled, freeing up Corey to reform his design partnership with Lori.

This happened, however, only in the final stages of Quest for Glory III‘s development. Among fans today, this game is generally considered the weakest link in the series, and the absence of Corey Cole is often cited as a primary reason. I’ll return to the impact his absence may have had, but first I’d like to mention what the game undeniably does right: the setting.

Importantly, Quest for the Glory III, this “game set in fantasy Africa,” encompasses the whole of the continent. It’s often forgotten that Egypt, that birthplace of so much of human civilization, is a part of Africa; this essential fact, though, Lori Ann Cole didn’t neglect. Conforming to real-world geography, the northern part of the game’s map, where you begin, is based on ancient Egypt, complete with the pyramids and other monumental architecture we know from our history books. As you travel southward, the desert turns into tundra and then jungle, and the societies you meet there become reflections of tribal Africa. It’s all drawn — both metaphorically, through the writing, and literally, through the graphics — with considerable charm and skill. Sub-Saharan Africa in particular isn’t a region we see depicted very often in games, and still less often with this degree of sympathy. As I noted in my first article on the Quest for Glory series, there’s a travelogue quality that runs through its entirety, showing us our own world’s many great and varied cultures through the lens of these fantasy adventures. The third game, suffice to say, upholds that tradition admirably.

Also welcome is the theme of the game. In contrast to most computer games, this one has you trying to prevent a war rather than win one. The aforementioned Egyptian and tribal African cultures have have been set at odds by a combination of prejudices, misunderstandings, and — this being a fantasy game and all — the odd evil wizard. It’s up to you to play the peacemaker. “You start getting a better and better idea of just how senseless war is,” says Corey, “and how everybody loses by it.” Of course, there’s a certain cognitive dissonance about an allegedly anti-war game in which you spend so much of your time mowing down monsters by decidedly violent means, but props for effort.

In fact, any criticism of Quest for Glory should be tempered by the understanding that what the Coles did with this series was quite literally unprecedented, and, further, that no one else has ever tried to do anything quite like it since. While plenty of vintage CRPGs, dating all the way back to Wizardry, allowed you to move your characters from game to game, the Quest for Glory series is a far more complex take on a role-playing game than those simple monster bashers, with character attributes affecting far more aspects of the experience than combat alone — even extending into a moral dimension via a character’s “honor” attribute and the associated possibility to change to the prestige class of Paladin. It must have been tempting indeed to throw out the past and force players to start over with new characters each time the Coles started working on the next game in the series, but they doggedly stuck to their original vision of four — no, make that five — interlinked games that could all feature the very same custom hero, assuming the player was up to the task of buying and playing all of them.

But, fundamental to the Coles’ conception of their series though it was, this approach did have its drawbacks, which were starting to become clear by the time of Quest for Glory III. Corey Cole himself has admitted that “the play balance — both pacing and combat difficulty — and of course the freshness of the concept were strongest in Quest for Glory I.” Certainly that’s the entry in this hybrid series that works best as a CRPG, providing that addictive thrill of seeing your character slowly getting stronger, able to tackle monsters and challenges he couldn’t have dreamed of in the beginning. The later games are hampered by the well-known sense of diminishing returns that afflicts so many RPGs at higher levels; it’s much more fun in tabletop Dungeons & Dragons as well to advance from level 1 to level 8 than it is from level 8 to level 16. Even when you find that you need to spend time training in order to meet some arbitrary threshold — more on that momentarily — your character in the later Quest for Glory games never really feels like he’s going anywhere. The end result is to sharply reduce the importance of the most unique aspect of the series as it wears on. For this player anyway, that also reduces a big chunk of the series’s overall appeal. I haven’t tried it, but I suspect that these games may actually be more satisfying to play if you don’t import your old character into each new one, but rather start out fresh each time with a weaker hero and enjoy the thrill of building him up.

Sanford and Son make an appearance.

Quest for Glory III also disappoints in other ways.The first two games had been loaded with alternative solutions and approaches of all stripes, full of countless secrets and Easter eggs. Quest for Glory III is far less generous on all of these fronts. There just isn’t as much to do and discover outside the bounds of those things that are absolutely necessary to advance the plot. And one of the three possible character classes you can play, the Thief, has markedly fewer interesting things to do than the others even in the course of doing that much. The whole game feels less accommodating and rewarding — less amendable to your personal choices, one might say — than what came before. It plays, in other words, more like just another Sierra adventure game and less like the uniquely rich and flexible experience the first two games are.

This lack of design ambition can to some degree be laid at the feet of the absence of Corey Cole for most of the design process. Corey was generally the “puzzle guy” in the partnership, dealing with all the questions of smaller-scale interactivity, while Lori was the “story gal,” responsible for the wide-angle plotting.  And indeed, when I asked Corey about his own impressions of the game in relation to its predecessors, he acknowledged that “certainly Quest for Glory III is lighter on puzzles, while having just as much story as Quest for Glory II.”

Yet Corey’s absence isn’t the only reason that the personality of the series began to morph with this third installment. The most obvious change between the second and third game — blindingly obvious to anyone who plays them back to back — is the move from a parser-based to a pure point-and-click interface. I trust that I don’t need to belabor how this could remove some of the scope for player creativity, and especially what it might mean for the many little secrets for which the first two games are so known. I’m no absolute parser purist — my opinion has always been that the best interface for any given game is entirely contextual, based upon the type of experience the designer is trying to create — but I can’t help but feel that Quest for Glory lost something when it dumped the parser.

One issue with Quest for Glory III that may actually be a subtle, inadvertent byproduct of the switch to point-and-click is a certain aimlessness that seems baked into the design. Too much of the story is predicated on unmotivated wandering over a map that’s not at all suited to more methodical exploration.

I hate the Quest for Glory III overland map with a passion. Unique locations aren’t signaled on it, but it’s nevertheless vital that you thoroughly explore it, meaning you’re forced to click on any formation that looks interesting in the hope that it’s more than decorative, a process which disappoints and frustrates more often than not. And while you’re wandering around in this random fashion, you’re constantly being attacked by uninteresting monsters and being forced to engage in tedious combat. Note that what you see above is only the first of several screens full of this sort of thing.

When I played Quest for Glory III, I eventually wound up in that dreaded place known to every adventure player: where you’ve exhausted all your leads and are left with no idea what the game expects from you next. This was, however, a feeling new to me in the course of playing this particular series. When I turned with great reluctance to a walkthrough — I’d solved the first two games entirely on my own — I learned that I was expected to train my skills up to a certain level in order shake the plot back into gear.

But how, you ask, can such problems be traced back to the loss of the parser? Well, Corey has mentioned how Lori — later, he and Lori — attempted to restore some of the sense of spontaneity and surprise that had perhaps been lost alongside the parser through the use of “events”: “Instead of each game scene having one specific thing that happens in it, our scenes change throughout the game. Sometimes the passage of time triggers a new event, and sometimes it’s the result of the ripple effect of player actions. It was supposed to feel organic.” When this approach works well, it works wonderfully well in providing a dynamic environment that seems to unfold spontaneously from the player’s perspective, just the way a good interactive story should. That’s the best-case scenario. The worst case is when you haven’t done whatever arbitrary action is needed to get a vital event to fire, and you’re left to wander around wondering what’s next. Finally, when you peek at a walkthrough, the mechanisms behind it all are revealed in the ugliest, most mimesis-annihilating way imaginable. I understand what Quest for Glory III wants to do, and I wholeheartedly approve. But there needed to be more work done to avoid dead spots — whether in the form of more possible triggers or just of more nudges to tell the player what the game expects from her — or, ideally, both.

Another odd Quest for Glory tradition was to give each game in the series a new combat system. Quest for Glory III tried to add a bit more strategy to the affair with buttons for “swing,” “dodge,” “thrust,” and “parry,” but in my experience at least simply mashing down the swing button works as well as anything else. Thus another Quest for Glory tradition: that of none of these multifarious combat systems ever being completely satisfying.

Still, whatever the game’s failings, few players or reviewers in its own time seemed to notice. Upon its release in September of 1992 — just four months after the Quest for Glory I remake — Quest for Glory III was greeted with solid sales and positive reviews, a reception which stands in contrast to its contemporary reputation as the weakest link in the series. With this affirmation of their efforts and with Corey now free of distractions, the Coles plunged right into the fourth game. Quest for Glory IV would prove the most ambitious and the most difficult entry in the series — and, in my opinion anyway, its greatest waste of potential.

The game officially known simply as Quest for Glory: Shadows of Darkness — Sierra inexplicably dropped the Roman numeral this time and this time only — is indeed often spoken of as the “dark” entry of the series, but that claim strikes me as, at most, relative. My skepticism begins with the unbelievably cheesy subtitle, which put my wife right off the game before she saw more than the title screen. (“Someone should tell those people that darkness doesn’t make shadows…”) Banal subtitles, perhaps (hopefully?) delivered with an implied wink and nudge, had become something of a series trademark by this point — Trial by Fire? The Wages of War? Cliché much? — but this was taking things to a whole other level.

Dr. Brain fans will presumably be pleased to meet his alter ego Dr. Cranium in Quest for Glory IV. (Frankie, for the record, is a female Frankenstein whose “assets” Dr. Cranium very much approves of.)

To speak more substantively (or at least less snarkily), the “dark” aspects of the game come to the fore intermittently at best. I’ve played games which I’ve found genuinely scary; this is not one of them. It certainly includes plenty of horror tropes, but it’s difficult to take any of it all that seriously. This is a game that features Dr. Brain channeling Dr. Frankenstein. It’s a game where you fight a killer rabbit lifted out of Monty Python and the Holy Grail. It’s a game where you win the final battle against the evil wizard by telling him the Ultimate Joke and taking advantage when he collapses into laughter. From the Boris Karloff imitator guarding the gates to the villain’s castle to Igor the hunchbacked gravedigger, this is strictly B-movie horror — or, perhaps better said, a parody of B-movie horror. It’s hard to imagine anyone losing sleep over this game.

In fact, I was so nonplussed by its popularly accepted “dark” label that I asked Corey what he thought about it, and was gratified to find that he at least partially agreed with me:

Maybe a better word would be “unforgiving.” A Quest for Glory III theme is friendship and the need to work together with others. In Quest for Glory IV, we turned that around 180 degrees. The player would start out on his own, mistrusted by everyone. Through the course of the game, he will gradually win people’s trust and once again have allies by the end. This is not an easy theme for players new to the series to handle.

Lori Ann Cole elaborated on the same idea in a contemporary interview:

You’ll be very much alone [in Quest for Glory IV]. In Trial by Fire, you had a lot of friends to help you. You always had a place to go back to to rest. You always had a place of safety until the very end of the game. Once you get into Shadows of Darkness, you’re not going to have any sanctuary. You won’t be able to trust anyone because nobody will trust you.

It’s true that a few subplots here strain toward a gravitas unlike anything else the Coles have ever attempted. In particular, the vampire named Katrina can be singled out as a villain who isn’t just Evil for the sake of it. She’s kidnapped a little girl from the village that is your center of operations, and one of your quests is to rescue her. In the course of doing so, you learn that the kidnapping was motivated by Katrina’s desperate, very human desire for family and companionship in her isolated castle. You end up killing her, of course, but her story is often praised — justifiably on the whole, if sometimes a bit too effusively — as a benchmark for intelligent characterization in games.

Structurally, Quest for Glory IV is most reminiscent of the first game in the series. You arrive in the village of Mordavia, part of a region that goes by the same name, which has been plagued of late by vampires, ghosts, mad scientists, and most of the other inhabitants of the Hammer Horror oeuvre. As you solve the villagers’ considerable collection of problems one by one, they go from being spit-in-your-food hostile to lauding you as the greatest hero in the land. In the best tradition of the series, and in contrast to some of the most commonly voiced complaints about Quest for Glory III, much of the game is nonlinear, and some of it is entirely optional.

The combat system in Quest for Glory IV owes a lot to the Street Fighter franchise of standup-arcade, console, and computer games, which were among the most popular of the era. Corey Cole considers it the best combat engine in the history of the series; opinions among fans are more divided. For those not interested in street-fighting their way through a Quest for Glory game, the Coles did make it possible for the first time to turn on an auto-combat mode.

Sadly, though, the game is nowhere near as playable as Quest for Glory I, II, or to some extent even III. This fault arises not from doing too little but rather from attempting to do too much. At the risk of being accused of psychoanalyzing its designers, I will note that the Coles had clearly been psyching themselves up to make this game for a long time — that, even as it was being pushed back to make room for Quest for Glory III, it had long since come to loom over their conception of the series as the Big Statement. Even when they were giving interviews to promote the finished Quest for Glory III, the conversation would keep drifting into their plans for the fourth game. “It will be a very intense game to design,” said Corey in one of those interviews, a comment that could be taken to reflect either excitement or trepidation — or, more likely, both. This was to be the place where the series departed from being easygoing light fantasy to become something more challenging, both thematically and in terms of its puzzles and other mechanics.

So, they just kept cramming more and more stuff into it. The setting doesn’t have the laser focus of the earlier games in the series, all of which portrayed fairly faithfully the myths and legends of a very specific real-world culture. Quest for Glory IV, despite including some monsters drawn from real Eastern European folklore, is more interested in Western pop culture’s idea of Transylvania than any real place — a land of shadows and creatures that go bump in the night and “I vant to bite yer neck.” Then, because the parade of Gothic-horror clichés apparently wasn’t enough, the Coles added H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos to the mix (or, as the manual calls him, “P.H. Craftlove”). The two make decidedly uneasy bedfellows. Gothic horror, as expressed best in Bram Stoker’s ultimate Gothic novel Dracula, takes place, explicitly or implicitly, in an essentially moral universe drawing heavily from Christianity, in which Good and Evil, God and the Devil, are real entities at war with one another, thus setting up the narratives of sin and redemption which predominate. Lovecraftian horror, on the other hand, posits an utterly uncaring, amoral universe, in which Good and Evil are meaningless concepts, mere ephemera of the deluded human imagination. To combine the two in one work of fiction is… problematic.

For all that one has to wonder whether any fans of this heretofore genial series were truly saying to themselves, “You know, what these games really need to be is harder,” the Coles’ determination to make this entry more difficult than its predecessors isn’t invalid in itself. In trying to make their harder game, however, they sometimes fall into the all too typical trap of making a game that’s not so much more difficult as less fair. The CRPG aspects are yet further de-emphasized in favor of more puzzles, some of which push the bounds of realistic solubility. And, for the first time in the series’s history, there are irrecoverable dead ends to wander into scattered across the design, along with other situations that seem like dead ends. The latter arise because the design once again relies heavily on “events” that the player triggers without being aware how she does so — and, once again, this isn’t a bad thing at all in theory, but in practice it’s too easy to get stuck in a cul de sac with no idea how to prod the plotting machinery into motion again.

Greatly exacerbating all of these issues — indeed, virtually indistinguishable from them, given that it’s often unclear which design infelicities are intentional and which are not — are all the bugs. Even today, when patch after patch has been applied, the game remains a terrifyingly unstable edifice. If your (emulated?) machine runs just a little bit too slow or too fast, it will crash at random points with a cryptic “Error 47” or “Error 52.” But far worse are the hidden bugs that can ruin your game while letting you play on for hours without realizing anything is wrong. The most well-known of these involves a vital letter that’s supposed to show up at your hotel, but that, for reasons that are still imperfectly understood even after all these years, sometimes fails to do so. If you’re unfortunate enough to have this happen to you, it will only be much, much later, when you can’t figure out what to do next and finally turn to a walkthrough, that you realize you have to all but start over from scratch.

In my experience, an adventure game must establish a bond of trust with its player to be enjoyable. My dominant emotion when playing Quest for Glory IV, however, was just the opposite. I mistrusted the design, and mistrusted the implementation of the design even more, asking myself at every turn whether I’d broken anything, whether this latest problem I was having was a legitimate puzzle or a bug. When you have to meta-game your way through a game, relying on FAQs and walkthrough to tiptoe around all its pitfalls, it’s awfully hard to engage with the story and atmosphere.

Still, I can be thankful that I first played Quest for Glory IV a quarter-century after its original release, after all those patches had already been applied. The game that shipped on December 31, 1993, was in a truly unconscionable, very probably unwinnable condition. This wasn’t, I should emphasize, the fault of the Coles, who would have given anything to have a few more months with their baby. But Sierra was having an ugly year financially, and decided that the game simply had to be released before the year was out for accounting reasons, come what may. If there was any justice in the world, they would have been rewarded with a class-action lawsuit for knowingly selling a product that was not just flawed but outright broken. To give you a taste of what gamers unwise enough to buy Quest for Glory IV in its original incarnation got to go through, I’d like to quote at some length from the review by Scorpia, Computer Gaming World magazine’s regular adventure columnist.

My difficulties began after the game was installed and it simply refused to run, period. A call to the Sierra tech line revealed that Shadows of Darkness, as released, was not compatible with the AMI BIOS (not exactly an obscure one). This was related to the special 32-bit protected mode under which the software operates. Fortunately, a patch was available, and I quickly got it online.

After the patch was applied, the game finally came up. Unfortunately, it came up silent. The 32-bit protected mode grabs all of upper memory for itself, so nothing can be loaded high, and a bare-bones DOS boot disk is necessary. This made it impossible to load in the Gravis Ultrasound Roland emulator, and I found that with the Sound Blaster emulator loaded low, the game again wouldn’t run. So, I had to play with no sound or music, which explains why there is no commentary on either.

I ran from a boot disk without sound, and for a while everything was fine. However, the further into the game, the slower it was in saving and restoring. Actual disk access was quite speedy, but waiting for the software to make up its mind to go to disk took a long time, often a minute or more. Some online folk complained of waiting three minutes or longer to restore a saved game. It was usually faster to quit the game, rerun it, and then restore a position. For saving, of course, you just had to wait it out.

Regardless of the frustrations, I got through the game [playing as] a Paladin and a Mage, and then moved on to the Thief. Three quarters of the way along, the game crashed in the swamp whenever I tried to open the Mad Monk’s tomb. This turned out to be a “random error” that might or might not show up. It hadn’t done so with the other two heroes, but this time it reared its ugly head.

Well, Sierra had a patch that fixed both this problem and the interminable waits for saves and restores (this patch, by the way, came out some time after the first one I had gotten). There was only one drawback: because of the extensive changes made to the files, my saved games were no good and I had to start over again from the beginning.

So, I started my Thief over. By day 11 in the game, all the quests had been finished, the five rituals collected, and it was just a matter of waiting for a certain note to appear in my room one morning (this note initiates the end of the game). On day 26, I was still waiting for it. Nothing could make it appear, even replaying from some earlier positions. Either the trigger for this event was not set, or somehow it was turned off. I had no way of knowing, and, with that in mind, I had no inclination to start from scratch again. This also happened to other players who were running characters other than Thieves, and we all eventually abandoned those games.

A way around the dead-end problem was worked out by Sierra. The key is spending enough nights in your room at the inn to hear several “voice dreams,” and, most importantly, hearing the weeping from the innkeeper’s room one midnight (you are awakened by this; don’t stay up waiting for it). These events must happen before you rescue Tanya.

Once those situations have occurred, it should be safe to rescue the girl. I tried this in my Thief game, and after spending two extra nights in my room, the problem was cleared up and I finished the game with the Thief. So, if you have been waiting around for that note, and it hasn’t shown, follow the above procedure and you should be able to continue on with the game.

Scorpia’s last two paragraphs in particular illustrate what I mean when I say that you can’t really hope to play Quest for Glory IV so much as meta-game your way through it with the aid of walkthroughs. She was extremely lucky to have been among the minority with online access at the time of the game’s release, and thus able to download patches and discuss the game’s multiple points of entrapment with other players. Most would only have been able to plead with Sierra’s support personnel and hope for a disk to arrive in the mail a week or two later.

What ought to have been the exciting climactic battle of Quest for Glory IV was so buggy in the original release that the game was literally impossible to complete. It’s remained one of the worst problem spots over the years since, requiring multiple FAQ consultations to tiptoe through all the potential problems. Have I mentioned how exhausting and disheartening it is to be forced to play this way?

Some months after the bug-ridden floppy-based release, Sierra published Quest for Glory IV on CD-ROM, in a version that tried to clean up the bugs and that added voice acting. It accomplished the former task imperfectly; as already noted, plenty of glitches still remain even in the version available for digital download today, not least among them the mystery of the never-appearing letter. The latter task, however, it accomplished superlatively. In a welcome departure from the atrocious voice acting found in their earliest CD-ROM products, Sierra put together a team of top-flight acting professionals, headed by the dulcet Shakespearian tones of John Rhys-Davies — a veteran character actor of many decades’ standing who’s best known today as Gimli the dwarf in Peter Jackson’s Lords of the Rings films — as the narrator and master of ceremonies. Rhys-Davies, who had apparently signed the contract in anticipation of a quick-and-easy payday, was shocked at the sheer volume of text he was expected to voice, and took to calling the game “the CD-ROM from hell” after spending days on end in the studio. But he persevered. Indeed, he and the other actors quite clearly had more than a little fun with it. The bickering inhabitants of the Mordavia Inn are a particular delight. These voice actors obviously take their roles with no seriousness whatsoever, preferring to wander off-script into broad semi-improvised impersonations of Jack Nicholson, Clint Eastwood, and Rodney Dangerfield. Would you think less of me if I admitted that they’re my favorite part of the game?

https://www.filfre.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/qfg4.mp4

Of course, one could argue that Sierra’s decision to devote so many resources to this multimedia window dressing, while still leaving so many fundamental problems to fester in the core game, is a sad illustration of their misplaced priorities in this new age of CD-ROM-based gaming. The full story of just what the hell was going on inside Sierra at this point, leading to this imperfect and premature Quest for Glory IV as well as even worse disasters like their infamously half-finished 1994 release Outpost, is an important one that needs to be told, but one best reserved for a later article of its own.

For now, suffice to say that Quest for Glory IV was made to suffer for its failings, with a number of outright bad reviews in a gaming press that generally tended to publish very little of that sort of thing, and with far worse word of mouth among ordinary gamers. For a long time, its poor reception seemed to have stopped the series in its tracks, one game short of Lori Ann Cole’s long-planned climax. When a transformed Sierra, under new owners with new priorities, finally allowed that fifth and final game to be made years later, it would strike the series’s remaining fans as a minor miracle, even as the technology it employed was miles away from the trusty old SCI engine that had powered the series’s first four entries.

The critical consensuses on Quest for Glory III and IV have neatly changed places in the years since that last entry in the series was published. The third game was widely lauded back in the day, the fourth about as widely panned as the timid gaming press ever dared. But today, it’s the third game that is widely considered to be the series’s weakest link, while the fourth is frequently called the very best of them all. As someone who finds them both to be more or less flawed creations in comparison to what came before, I don’t really have a dog in this fight. Nevertheless, I do find this case of switched places intriguing. I think it says something about the way that so many play games — especially adventure games — today: with FAQ and walkthrough at the ready for the first sign of trouble. There’s of course nothing wrong with choosing to play this way; I’ve gone on record many times saying there is no universally right or wrong way to play any game, only those ways which are more or less fun for you. And certainly the fact that you can now buy the entire Quest for Glory series for less than $10 — much less when it goes on sale! — impacts the way players approach the games. No one worries too much about rushing through a game they’ve bought for pocket change, but might be much more inclined to play a game they’ve spent $50 on “honestly.” All of which is as it may be. I will only say that, as someone who does still hate turning to a walkthrough, the more typical modern way of playing sometimes dismays me because of the way it can — especially when combined with the ever-distorting fog of nostalgia — lead us to excuse or entirely overlook serious issues of design in vintage games.

But lest I be too harsh on these two middle — middling? — entries in this remarkable series of games, I should remember that they were produced in times of enormous technological change, in a business environment that was changing just as rapidly, and that those realities were often in conflict with their designers’ own best intentions. Corey Cole:

Lori has commented that we started at Sierra almost completely clueless, and had to figure out how to design a Sierra-style game “from scratch.” Then, armed with that knowledge, we confidently started work on the next game, only to have Sierra pull the rug out from under us. Each time the technology and management style changed, we had to rework many of the techniques we had developed to make our previous games.

They may be, in the opinion of this humble reviewer anyway, weaker than their predecessors, but neither Quest for Glory III nor IV is without its interest. If you’d like to see the progression of one of the most unique long-term projects in the history of gaming, by all means, have a look and decide for yourself.

(Sources: Questbusters of May 1992, September 1992, December 1992, September 1993, February 1994; Sierra’s InterAction magazine from Fall 1992, Summer 1993, and Holiday 1993; Computer Gaming World of January 1993 and April 1994; the readme file included with Sierra’s 1998 Quest for Glory Collection; documents and other materials included in the Sierra archive at the Strong Museum of Play. Most of all, my thanks go to Corey Cole for once again allowing me to pepper him with questions, even though he knew beforehand that my opinion of these two games wasn’t as overwhelmingly positive as it had been the last time around.

The entire Quest for Glory series is available for purchase as a package on GOG.com. And by all means check out the Coles’ welcome return to game design in the spirit of Quest for Glory, the recently released Hero-U: Rogue to Redemption. I don’t often get to play games that aren’t “on the syllabus,” as a friend of mine puts it, but I made time for this one, and I’m so glad I did. In my eyes, it’s the best thing the Coles have ever done.)

source http://reposts.ciathyza.com/quest-for-glory-iii-and-iv/

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