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m0e-ru · 3 years

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eight months in somebody actually asked me abt visualive instead of me immediately annoying ppl about it without former notice. I might actually write properly for once 😳😳😳

OK OK!!!!! In this essay I will.... I will.... Visualive Adachi.... Visu/BURSTS INTO TEARS/

OKAY OKAY for real I just care Visualive so much (as someone who can’t fully understand Japanese AHAHA)

First I’ll add some foundation about what Visualive really is, then I talk abt Adachi in the latter parts of it because this is technically the first time I’m properly talking about this hehe 🐿

T....table of contents???

Visualive

Visualive the Evolution

Masami Itou

Visualive Adachi

Visualive the Evolution Adachi

Terms and Legend

VL - Visualive

VLE - Visualive the Evolution

stage - shortened for “stageplay”

面白い - omoshiroi (it’s just that specific)

Yuuya - VL Hero name

Hayato - VLE Hero name

Baba - Hero

Masami - Adachi

Taniguchi - Dojima

Saotome - Daisuke

Mamiya - Izanami

I add honorifics but sometimes I forget the hyphen intentionally or unintentionally I’m sorry if it makes it hard to read lol

all links have automatic timestamps for easy viewing. i mean. i hope the timestamps work

VISUALIVE “Persona 4.” A stage adaptation of SMT: Persona 4 by Atlus. It adapts the first part of the story, from the hero’s arrival to after recovering Mitsuo Kubo from the TV world. It also ends on a cliff hanger, showing a teaser of Shadow Naoto being projected on the screen.

It takes up a speedy recapitulation of the hero’s spring life, before slowing down and showing in depth his school life in summer. A day before Morooka-sensei’s death, there is a little skit with Kou, Daisuke and Adachi. The hero walks into the conversation before the two other boys leaving, and Morooka-sensei walking in on the student and detective. The next day follow’s the teacher’s death and the Investigation Team (IT) begin investigating their new lead.

From the words “visual” and “alive,” the niche of this stage was meant to be the fusion of live acting and visual digital projections. All seen from the stageplay with the colorful cast of actors and CG animations being projected on the screen. This offers an opportunity for characters to summon their personas, perform cool visual effects, change the backdrop, or even confront their own Shadows.

Performed in Sunshine Theater from the 15th to the 20th of March 2012. The screenplay was written and directed by Shintaro Asanuma from the theatrical group “bpm.” The video production produced by Shutaro Oku, a film director and visual planner. He later takes over as director for VISUALIVE THE EVOLUTION, the sequel stage. The stage music was produced by Shunsuke Wada, with a special show exclusive vocal track sung by Shihoko Hirata.

On this note, I haven’t seen any sort of original soundtrack released for any of the stages and I’m SO SAD. The last song in Mitsuo’s boss fight was such a BANGER and literally EVERYTHING ELSE Marvelous, Wadasan please take my MONEY

Regarding the cast, there were some special accommodations for Teddie, Rise, and Nanako, all of which did not have live actors at the time. During the casting, actors for the three characters could not be found or simply left the directors unsatisfied they couldn’t cast anybody. An exception for Rise, who was able to have a live actor in the sequel stage. It has been stated that there weren’t any “pretty boy” actors that fit the “Teddie Criteria.” While there weren’t any child actors that were believed to portray Nanako well.

Teddie was only ever seen in his bear costume while Rise was busy talking through a call, all voiced by their video game cast. Nanako has never appeared on stage, only being scarcely mentioned in the script. Again, this is different in the sequel stage where her role was extremely important and was shown as a screen projection.

VISUALIVE “Persona 4” THE EVOLUTION. A sequel stage. Beginning abruptly in the middle of Shadow Naoto’s boss fight, the story continues from there until the “true end” of the game’s original story. *Certain characters are introduced while others have been reintroduced. And on a personal note, when it’s all comedic in the beginning, it’s all for what’s coming right after.

I don’t know if I’m salty or just find it really funny AHAHA I might go talk abt it some other day with more context ehehe

Performed in The Galaxy Theater from the 3rd to the 9th of October 2012, only a few months after the PSVITA Persona 4 Golden release, which is July 2012. The screenplay was now written by Jun Kumagi while directed by Shutaro Oku. And music production finally taken over by Shoji Meguro himself.

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HAHAHA this is starting to look like a wiki page. moving on. I might start rambling rn

(warning LONG !!!! aaa,,)

My thoughts on the stage adaptations. For the first Visualive (VL) I believe it’s pretty close to canon! I enjoy the characterization and how much love and care was present when handling the entire production.

Actors were busy playing the game itself, wherein a PS2 was present in the practice room. Along with magazines and game guides explaining the game’s story and the characters itself. Actors performing together and even improv acting together to get a grasp of their characters. All of them knowing well of Persona 4 as a well loved game, delicately handling their characters and hopefully performing them right while making the audience happy.

The staff taking care of each other while the director and video producer, Asanuma-san and Oku-san, working together well to make their vision into a reality.

The same thing happened with VL the Evolution (VLE) and literally every other good stage. Except... I feel the script kinda got out of hand with too much liberty where it feels a bit more disconnected from canon. But! It makes up for it in its content, whether comedic or (INCREDIBLY) dramatic! It’s great as its own story at that point. So in this case, I like to take the first VL and get to connect it canon, while I don’t know what the hell happened in VLE to the point I’ll just enjoy it as its own content.

These opinions deserve its own essay, post whatever bc I have SO much to say abt this. ANYWAY. VL ADACHI

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Tohru Adachi is portrayed by Masami Itou (伊藤マサミ), a screenplay writer, director and an stage actor himself. He does have a single character voice role along with a fellow troupe member in the same franchise, but mostly works as the former three. He is part of Asanuma-san’s entertainment group “bpm.” On a similar note, Masashi Taniguchi, Dojima’s actor, was also part of their group from 2011 to 2016, which may explain their good synergy as the boss and the bumbling fool dynamic. I mean, somebody’s gotta get hit in the head every few skits.

With Masami-san being an important part of the cast, he doesn’t appear as often as Taniguchi-san in backstage content like the VL bonus disk or the official blog. Mentioned in his own personal blog, he had been busy with his roles as assistant director (I am assuming also for VL).

Also fun to note, because his role is mainly comic relief, he has been using his liberty to change up the material almost everyday making each performance exciting. This also leaves some other actors jealous of his freedom in his role, such as Saotome-san, Daisuke’s actor.

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VL Adachi really has a... how do I say this? an adorable speech pattern (THE SAME SPEECH PATTERN THAT DROVE ME MAD TRYING TO DECIPHER I THOUGHT YOU WERE A CITY BOY OSSU OSSU MY ASS /shakes you violently/). Overall, he really fits the loose lipped bumbling fool, and his accent really makes him seem more casual and invested. What I’m saying is... VL Adachi either actually has genuine empathy or he actually has more energy to fake it (compared to some other edgelord. i mean you saw my p4ga analysis. I’m sick of him lol ahaha).

One of my favorite ways to explain this (OTHER THAN CHAIR CAR ADVENTURE MY BELOVED WE’LL GET TO THAT LATER) is the rice field scene with him and Dojima. It’s overanalyzation time 🎉

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(43:04)

While investigating, Adachi whines about being tired while Dojima smacks him in the head. In this case, it’s established that Adachi doesn’t want to be there, yes? It’s the country, it’s hot and it smells like green.

"Ah... Dojima-san..! Why don't we take a break? (...) There really is nothing out here... Is the criminal still even here at all? (...) I wonder if I've passed being a rookie yet. Haha, but this city doesn't even have convenient transportation. I can't go to leisure lands (recreation, amusement parks, arcades, ect.) and head home at all."

Adachi then tries to tell Dojima a story. “when I got to this city after being newly assigned, I met an interesting guy (...) Yeah, I remember that the cherry blossoms haven't bloomed yet. So, I was driving my car and got near the station and--” Dojima gets a phone call.

Adachi politely puts his hands down waiting for his boss to finish so he can finish the story. Again and again, Adachi attempts to talk to Dojima about a story he’s so persistent trying to tell someone about. It was so 面白い that he would find someone to talk to about it. Even being polite and patient enough to wait for a chance to speak. He even gets fed up with it and blows up in front of his boss, clearly irritated he’s not given a chance to talk.

Sure, it could be Adachi feeling fed up like a normal person where someone agreed he to listen to him, before being constantly ignored. Or Adachi trying to be a more annoying whiny brat, depending on where you look at it.

If the story wasn’t too “interesting” to Adachi, he would’ve just brushed it off and stopped talking to Dojima entirely, or start up new small talk, or even complain some more. But no, he had a story he wanted to voice out so bad that he got irritated that the one person in the vicinity couldn’t listen to him.

Only after Dojima told him to continue their investigation elsewhere did Adachi finally stop and focus on something else. Maybe that story was for another day, or maybe it was never meant to be told.

What if it was just original (game) Adachi? He’d find a way to squirrel out of the investigation as usual, or push Dojima to “investigate” elsewhere. “Hey boss, don’t you think it’s hot? Why don’t we go elsewhere? We’ve seen this place too many times to count and I doubt anything new’ll turn up. How about we take a break at Junes, y’know? Where it’s cool? C’mon boss,” something like that.

og Adachi is just really annoying and silly to me. Some grown man thinking he can freeload because he never gets anything out of putting in more energy and effort? I don’t care how tall he is, I will smack him in the head.

Yeah VL Adachi whines, too, but at least it doesn’t look like he’s going to escape and waste his time somewhere else. He just sucks it up stops trying to leave the situation.

Or maybe I’m getting this all wrong and VL is exactly the same and my rage just gets dampened because of Masamisan’s execution of character hmm...

SO. What was his story about anyway? The one he really wanted to share to Dojima?

I mean... it’s obvious enough

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First day in town? Spring? Actually mentioned driving a car when literally out of every single persona 4 media at the time was there not a SINGLE mention of Adachi having a car OTHER THAN the same stageplay it’s being mentioned in?

A story, from somewhere around uhh four? five months ago? was something that he remembered so dearly and was willing to share despite it obviously embarrassing him even if he puts the blame on a certain somebody in the same story?

Or maybe it’s because he really had nothing to talk about ever since he realized all his stories from the city weren’t actually that funny or interesting in the first place.

BUT then that would mean out of all the things he could talk about—more whining, complaining, complimenting, small talk—he insisted about talking about this story in particular.

Okay, look. I’m just. Just. As someone who talks too much, of course I have things I actually want people to hear out of all the bullshit that comes out of my mouth. And if the thing I actually want people to listen to doesn’t even get heard, I’d go mad.

Sure, Adachi’d be fine when his complaints or intentionally unfunny jokes get brushed off. But a story of a guy that he thought was so funny, interesting, 面白い gets ignored, he really blew up, even just for a split second, maybe.

And ALL the things that happened in that story—on his first day in Inaba! His car got dented, he had to deal with a weirdo dumbass employee that knew zero personal space, yelled in his ear, who didn’t know how to do their job, got his station reputation messed up on the first day, got his ass grabbed, got (unintentionally?) mocked for his lame stories, and got his car dented for the SECOND time. Probably MORE

And he STILL wanted to talk about it /punches through concrete wall/

yes I’m overthinking about this of course i am

This little tidbit of VL Adachi kinda makes me go insane sometimes—his entire characterization in VL in particular. It was really refreshing to see and how they included both of his characters in it, his facade and how irritated he is of a lot of things underneath. And how flexible his character is immediately working with other characters when there’s sudden improv to balance the situation. Like him and Dojima, Morooka, the attendant, or even Yuuya (hero) himself.

I’ll take Taniguchi-san’s messing around in the VL bonus backstage disc in place of Masami-san being so busy he couldn’t appear in it as often as other characters.

For stagetime that lasted for fifteen minutes or less, my appreciation for VL Adachi, even if he was just comic relief, really rocketed. I say VL, bc Adachi the edgelord he’s supposed to be in literally every other media is something I analyze separately.

I haven’t even gotten to VLE oh my GODDDDD

Like I said, I don’t really regard VLE close to canon but as something to be appreciated for what it is by itself. But the way Adachi was characterized there, in or out of character, still struck me.

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Yes, there was his strange fan-agreed-canon which is,,, now canon obsession with cabbages (not that that’s a bad thing lmao). There was also him being a lot more jumpy and intimate in a clowny way, patting people on the shoulder or even downright hugging them just to mess around. Even FORGETTING who the same goddam loser who grabbed his ass almost a year ago is. But like, can’t blame him they literally changed their actor (and screenplay writer) AHAHAHA

ha... no more comedy, only dorky sword fights now

(speaking of sword fights I think it’s a fun thought how Mamiya-san [Izanami, also one of the youngest in the cast] admitted it was his first time doing sword fight choreography and even thanked Masami-san and other staff members for guiding him)

One thing unintentionally in character was Adachi accidentally nabbing the sushi overdosed in wasabi. Masami-san didn’t actually account for a joke sushi and didn’t immediately eat it—until Taniguchi-san (who also made Dojima go off his shits compared to VL) jokingly yelled at him and even riled up the audience for him to eat it. He even went off stage to get water just for him to eat the goddam sushi.

And Masami-san did! (kinda choked, but he’s fine).

Continuing from the same scene, while being overly giddy about sushi dinner (and I mean overly--he was singing about it while hopping to the Dojima residence), he tried to remind the two, Dojima and Hayato (hero), that Nanako was sleeping. Probably where she was sick if the scene was translated from the game.

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(30:07)

And... the dramatic parts of VLE

Adachi was the one who reported to the IT that Dojima was chasing Namatame in the rain. While Naoto was discussing Namatame’s journal entries, Adachi, as giddy as he is, took it from Naoto’s hands and reveled in the discovery of evidence so childishly(?). He even ran to Dojima when he began regaining consciousness and immediately called the nurses to help him wheel Dojima to the ER.

Then, The Hospital Scene™️, right after Nanako flatlines.

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(1:02:02)

Adachi, who recently walked into the scene, immediately worries about Dojima and IT who were ALL crying. He looks down, devastated—before yelling how Dojima’s heading to Namatame’s room.

He yells in terror and the same grief at his injured boss, all while running past and even jumping over children, who fell to the ground sobbing, to get to him. He continues yelling in a pained fashion while immediately reprimanding Dojima to stop. He gets carried by the collar before being tossed to the ground at Hayato’s feet, all while being pat by the same boy.

Dojima makes his speech about how unfair it is for the ‘killer’ to be alive when his daughter isn’t. When he finally falls to his knees, Adachi rises from the ground, humbly saying he’ll do his best to take care of Dojima (or something like that I’m in tears I literally can’t do VLE’s hospital scene i h8 this). He finally starts crying along with everyone else, being pushed away again but still tries again, trying to usher his boss away from the door.

With the help of the guard in front of the door, they all disappear off stage

please... I know this scene doesn’t need that much translation because of how important this scene is in the entire story. and I know my narratives aren’t enough so just,,,, just watch it please it’s so much more than this. everyone’s acting was just spectacular

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(1:08:47)

So, after the IT (YOSUKE. JUST YOSUKE. good job Mae-chan) stop themselves from k wording Namatame, it was ADACHI who reported Nanako’s miracle recovery. He ran to the same corridor where they all cried in, even panting and falling to the ground in relief trying to report the good news. Then he pats Hayato on the shoulder and says he’s going to Dojima.

With this... /slaps roof of half of VLE/ ALL of this....adachi.... adachisan.... he Cares™️..... holy shit.....

now. comparing to the game. do you even remember what og Adachi did? did he.. even do anything?????

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(56:39)

NO!!! he just stood there!!!! being a bumbling fool but.... inappropriately!!! man. he didn’t act concerned enough.

adachi: /walks into a bunch of kids crying outside a hospital room/ “lmao why tf are y’all crying? did uhhh what’s her face uhhh nanako. did she d word or something? rip, I guess lol” LIKE????? CAN YOU IMPLY FASTER

and then he’s like “wgat hmm Where’s Dojima-san Heading Because That’s Not The Way To His Room 🤔” and only when he’s asked he actually mentions he’s heading to Namatame’s room and still needs to get choked by a first year for the room number like..... zero consideration

and his boss??? where his daughter he loves so much just??? di*s???? and he’s so devastated he’s doing what he can that very moment while he’s so numbed of thinking of the consequences???? And adachi goes “uhh boss that’s illegal” LIKE. BITCH. /punches through a concrete wall but harder/

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And??? His confrontation scene??? Like, I know they mashed it up w his tv confession scene to save stagetime for other scenes BUT IT WAS SO MMBMBMBMMGN /gestures in a good way/

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(1:15:56)

UM?? guy behind everything??? in a vulnerable area where he could easily get physically assaulted bc hes not in the tv world w his persona?? Trash talks women like he absolute misogynist he is??? getting yelled at by a bunch of kids and YELLING BACK IN THE SAME AGITATED MANNER even TAUNTING THEM then and there to GET HIS ASS?????

og Adachi was such a pussy he got caught and just scurried off into the TV world where he ended up having powers like...ok....scared of getting beat down by a bunch of highschoolers unless you have powers...ok....

he only taunted them to get him when he was in the tv world too.....he rlly couldn’t say shit in the real world huh... lol

(yeah yeah this shows how VLE Adachi knew abt his TV world powers which would make you think if he ever went into the tv world and came back out alive. Or he’s really just a badass who doesnt give a shit abt anyone’s opinions and CAN beat anyone’s ass. i have a separate thing abt this but bc i like to laught at vle rather than overthink its own lore i might. not. idk lol)

and ??? VLE Adachi can??? He can swordfight??? he doesn’t even NEED a gun—he even reflects bullets w his blade (but apparently he can still get slapped by a flying fan more often than any other attack). His fight choreo was just...so poggers. He’s like short villains done good—like??? he’s short compared to everyone else!!! but he makes up for it for stuffing all the energy inside him while is bursts out making him him the over energetic gremlin he is!!! go VL adachi!!!!

(am I low key making fun of Madono-san in the TUUSH stageplay I’ve seen four minutes of? maybe)

OK!!! Yes I was gushing abt Masami-san again back to Adachi.

It’s portrayed that while not being afraid to admit his crimes, he also goes out of his way to be a bastard and have the gall to get a bunch of kids to fight him, one on eight. He can use a katana, probably a narrative dark reflection of the hero, Hayato which I thought was nice—and he can fight!!! It also shows his persona, yes, but...it doesn’t make it clear if he’s overwhelmed by his Shadow like in the game, where his eyes were yellow and he was emitting a dark aura.

But it gets interesting how he sees he’s getting overwhelmed and starting to lose his edge towards a bunch of kids. He falls to the ground even banging the floor like a whiny brat while literally the IT tries to tell him to turn himself in. Again, like a brat he tells everyone to shut up—before getting incapacitated. While some of the IT rejoice, he bolts up unaccepting of his defeat—before getting hit in the stomach.

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(1:23:54)

And his words from when he drops his katana, “Why..?” He grabs the foldable chair against his stomach, and with a remorseful look in his eyes, he says “I’m sorry..!”

THEN HE BACKFLIPS—then Hayato slashes him.

In a tone of disbelief, he goes “no way...” and collapses to the ground, being possessed by Ame-no-Sagiri.

Blah blah blah then Teddie rockets himself into the eyeball spy cam and then they both explode aaaaa

Teddie survives but I really don’t know where Adachi went. Not even a mention by Dojima if he turned himself in or was ever found—or I need to review VLE for the 48274827482nd time hehe

WHOO then the whole cast appears for the dance number at the end of show YAHOO

#long post #persona 4 #persona 4 visualive #persona 4 visualive the evolution #tohru adachi #sulululat #pagsususuri #p4 #p4v #p4ve #//HAPPY 4K WORDS VL ANON #// if theres anything u want to ask... im right here /collapses/#// i almost went ham over actor relationships like. talking abt bpm was ENOUGHHH we're talking about the character not the assistant direct #// aaa this took so long... i literally mashed up so many other idea documents into one.. man.

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funeralprocessor · 3 years

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Games & Canon

I was having a talk with someone about the Elder Scrolls, and a weird topic cropped up: video games as a medium have kind of a weird relationship with their own canon. Every medium has a certain degree of separation from the “real”, intended form of the story and its setting, for instance a movie having cheap/bad effects, but games are the only one I can think of where they routinely depict things that are just straight up wrong or not actually present, where the work can essentially be non-canon to itself, either through technical/developmental limitations or conceits of the medium/genre/etc. The Elder Scrolls is a good example, because Tamriel is implied to be a much larger, fuller world than we’re shown. The Imperial City having more than a handful of buildings, or there being more bandits than citizens in Skyrim. Obviously the technology to really show the world they want to in a AAA format just isn’t there yet and certainly wasn’t there for older entries in the franchise, but it goes beyond that, especially for the fandom. There’s a sizable contingent of TES fans who hold that the games only get the broadest strokes right, with most of the “actual” timeline of events playing out fairly differently. For instance, assuming that the player characters not only don’t do every possible quest available to them but rather do very few outside their main stories, with most of them being done by unnamed third parties or simply going unresolved. Magic is another bugbear that seems to be contentious, with in-universe descriptions of learning and casting often sounding not at all like what we do in the game. Of course there are people who take it too far and say that nothing in the games is representative of the truth, or go the opposite route and say that the games are the only canon that matters and any IU sources or word of god are unreliable. That’s a little complicated in the case of TES because there are a lot of implications that the quirks of the medium *do* exist in universe to some extent, but the ambiguity is enough that debate can be had Respawns/extra lives/reloading is a medium conceit that is an integral part of most games, but probably not actually how things work in universe. Something like Hotline Miami where death is constant and restarts frequent, but where in the true form of the story Jacket never dies. Same for Doomguy, Laura Croft, Leon Kennedy, really any character where the narrative doesn’t acknowledge their deaths. Some games have settings/canon loose enough and cartoony enough that you really can’t tell if something like a 1up or extra life is something that actually exists in universe or not, and some do actually make some effort to explain death not being the end for you and incorporate it into the setting. For example, bonfires from Dark Souls or the new-U stations in Borderlands. Except that last one isn’t actually true, because for some reason Gearbox not only went out of their way to make an IU explanation for respawning, but drew attention to it with bright colors and constant quips. You even know who in-world makes them! But then they decided that they don’t actually exist and that you never really died throughout the whole trilogy. It’s largely to circumvent questions about certain plot points and make character deaths feel substantial, but it just strikes as a really bizarre move that again raises the question of where the fuck canon begins and ends.

On a similar vein, anyone who’s ever played a JRPG, particularly the more old school ones, will know the slight dissonance and frustration of having items and services that can resurrect your dead (and I mean definitely telegraphed as dead, following behind you in a coffin dead) party members only to be confronted with an NPC death that’s treated as a big deal. Like Sephiroth stabbing Aeris kills her for real, but him stabbing Cloud to death in their later fight is an easy fix. There was a game I don’t recall the name of where you have to help a king who’s dying. Dying of what, you ask? Why, snake venom. But none of the fistfuls of antidote I was carrying when I met him could quite do the trick.

I once got into an argument with someone over whether or not the For Honor setting had magic. I said no, not really, but they insisted that it did, because of the various energy effect cosmetics, emotes,etc. I said that those were clearly not actually things happening in the game, just decorative gewgaws to show off your character, but he said that they very much were real things happening in the game because they *do* happen in the game and nothing ever contradicts that. And I couldn’t really argue with him. Why say one cosmetic is invalid pseudo-canon but not others? Things like that, elements of the systems/mechanics of games that aren’t totally abstracted from the world and thus could be canon, I don’t know what to think about.

#long post #video games #canon #essay?#elder scrolls #borderlands #For Honor #meta #ludonarrative dissonance

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lifestreamsblog · 5 years

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Why Gaming is Slowly Becoming a Chore

(In this article, I’m not going to link to examples and / or articles, so you will have to use your own imagination and / or knowledge.)

It’s really hard for me to enjoy gaming these days.

And no, it’s not because of the AAA Games Industry causing their own bubble burst. And it’s not because I don’t have access to my favourite consoles. And it’s not because I don’t have games that I love (and no, it’s not even because I have too many games that I love).

It’s because of two factors:

I prefer to play games with (or for) other people in my life

The games fandom and industry is full of nostalgia, toxicity, misogyny, mindless hatred, misdirected anger, unforgivable hypocrisy and rampant misinformation

This sort of garbage is enough to make any gamer girl completely uncomfortable...

I Prefer to Play Games with (or for) Other People in My Life:

This is perhaps one of the most difficult things about gaming for me, as what I play generally is tied to what other people in my life play. For me, gaming is a purely social experience, whether that’s playing multiplayer games...

...or playing single-player games with other people around watching.

This is difficult when you’re truly in love with one particular console, while other people in your life drift to another console. Forgetting the issue of console loyalty for a moment, it has to be considered that gaming is an expensive hobby. And when interests in your social circle shift, it can be difficult to keep up, especially if you truly enjoy one console versus another.

I’m a huge fan of the Nintendo Switch. And for a long time, so was everybody else in my life, including my fiancée, who was perhaps the single-most-important person in my life, as well as the person I played games with the most.

Recently, my fiancée has become much more interested in the XBOX ONE, which has made things difficult for me, as I was only able to get one after our household’s federal tax return came in. This meant that for months, I wasn’t able to play games with her nearly as often as I would have liked, which really made me depressed, even though I tried--likely unsuccessfully--to hide it.

Of course, I have my own XBOX ONE now, so I should feel happier now that we’re able to play more games together, right?

Well, the truth is that there was something truly magical about our experiences together on the Switch and while the XBOX ONE has offered both of us some amazing experiences thus far, it hasn’t matched the magic I felt when we played games together on the Switch.

Another thing that doesn’t help is that the Switch almost seems like an afterthought in conversations not just with my fiancée, but with everybody else in my household. Instead of discussing the games getting Switch versions, we’re discussing the PC and XBOX ONE versions instead. It doesn’t help that games like Octopath Traveller are no longer Switch exclusives, which leads me to feel even more alienated, as everyone seems so excited that a game that made Switch very special is--all of a sudden--going to a “more powerful platform.”

This is a lot more hurtful to me than I likely let on...and really, the only time I’ve ever discussed feeling this way is right now, here in this article. The fact that I’m not able to articulate my feelings as well as I would like makes things even worse. In the end, I love my new XBOX ONE, but I really wish that the Switch didn’t get all but the boot simply because we got Microsoft’s latest and greatest system...

The Games Fandom and Industry is Full of Nostalgia, Toxicity, Misogyny, Mindless Hatred, Misdirected Anger, Unforgivable Hypocrisy and Rampant Misinformation:

I don’t suppose this one needs much explanation, but I absolutely want to discuss how it’s making gaming more difficult to enjoy for me in particular.

I can’t begin to number just how many “reboots” and “remasters” of old games and franchises are being released these days. It’s not just in gaming, but in all of mass media. It would seem that people who grew up in the 80s and 90s would like to have those eras come back in full force, forgetting just what it means to have actual “progress.” It’s like these people have never heard of “trying something new” before.

It’s fucking stupid and completely uncreative.

And this mindset also leads to the next set of issues: toxicity and misogyny. Men who think women are objects to fulfill their own needs...and people who think all Muslims are terrorists, all LGBTQ people are sick and all black people are criminals are rampant within the gaming fandom. And these people act so entitled that they come across as if they are in the right for demanding women jump on their dicks while claiming that all people not like them are evil and criminal. It creates such a horrendous atmosphere that I dare not ever join in any kind of live chat.

And this whole situation surrounding the misogyny, specifically, creates an aura that drives many women in gaming to extreme sex-negativity. One of the many reasons SONY recently decided to block sexual content from all future games is in the name of not wanting to offend their women gamers. Not only was this a disingenuous move, it shows just how this situation stifles sex-positive feminists such as myself, who have found empowerment in franchises like Senran Kagura and Hyperdimension Neptunia, both of which have sex-positive content and both of which have huge lesbian fandoms that far outnumber the male fandoms.

And both of which will now suffer content blocking from SONY because of sex-negativity rooted from misogyny-based trauma.

Way to remove representation and relatability for people like me, folks!

It makes me want to puke.

Then there are the fandoms. The fandoms are full of people whose brains are so stuck in how long they’ve been following a particular company or franchise that they don’t often understand what’s happening right in front of their faces.

Like when Nintendo fans claim that there is no third-party support for the Switch. Or that Nintendo may--one day--become like EA or Activision. And how about the Nintendo fans who think the Wii U is a huge, steaming sack of shit simply because it didn’t sell an obscene number of units? And then there are the Nintendo fans who don’t shut up about Pikmin 4, Metroid Prime 4, Animal Crossing: Where’s Our New Game? and more. And the Nintendo fans who think Let’s Go! isn’t a real Pokémon game and that a lack of Nintendo Directs in any given month means Nintendo is ignoring their entitled asses and I could go on and on and on.

And then there are the general fans. The general fans who complain that games aren’t hard enough and that everyone who wants easier game modes are complete and utter idiots who don’t deserve to play videogames. And then there are the fans who think that if you don’t have the right graphics card or right PC rig that you’re a total imbecile who shouldn’t be in the same room with gamers. And gatekeeping gatekeeping hatred hatred shittalk shittalk blahblahblah.........

And some of these fans complain about all of the above and more! Yes, even Nintendo fans fall into the general fans category sometimes.

These people are a pure delight, aren’t they?

The games community is so unwelcoming, hostile, bitter and full of shit that it makes me feel really alienated when I’m already struggling to enjoy myself amongst other people in my life. And it leaves me feeling as if I have no voice whatsoever.

It just makes me want to break down into sobs...

Sometimes, I wonder if things will ever improve. Sometimes, I sit with my thoughts and let them brew inside of me for days, weeks and months on end. People in my life can often tell I’m unhappy, but I don’t always speak up enough about how I feel.

In Grade 8, I had an English teacher who helped me with my writing, which--at the time--was atrocious. I couldn’t even string together a proper sentence. And my last paper I wrote for him wasn’t much better than the first. When he gave me his remarks, I burst into tears. He just handed me a box of tissues and waited for me to calm down a bit before saying this:

“Never stop writing. Promise me that. Because one day, you will improve. And when you do, you will be able to tell the world how you feel.”

I never forgot that. And because of him, I developed my now-strong writing skills.

Even though I have had trouble speaking up about how I feel regarding these issues previously, In the end, the most I can do is try my best to speak up now, which is why I wrote this blog post in the first place. While some of you may stumble upon this from the broader internet, this piece isn’t for you, but rather for those in my life.

This is me trying to open up a bit more.

And I know this article isn’t my best work and that it’s full of rambling and subject-switches, but I’m very depressed and this whole piece reflects that mood, so I’m going to leave it--for the most part--in the imperfect state it’s currently in.

#gaming #depression #struggle #fandom #community

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groundramon · 5 years

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i just watched detective pikachu too what are your thots on it!

I enjoyed it actually!! More than I thought I would. I’ll give my slightly more spoiler-ish review under the cut:

I’m not a big fan of adult humor shoved into movies just for the heck of it but I felt like the adult jokes in the movie were actually written with intention and care rather than “oh shit our script is bad…we need to make the adults laugh, let’s make a cocaine joke!” Maybe part of it is that that’s exactly where my brain went too with that shit and it was humor based on important plot points, and the dialogue didnt feel awkward (well it did but it was supposed to because tim was in a tizzy). Another part of it might be ryan renold’s just natural inclination towards those kinds of witty roles but tim’s actor (IDK HIS NAME SORRY) played off the same energy and made them flow okay too. All in all, I can completely agree with the statement that Detective Pikachu is what hollywood video game-to-movie adaptations should be. It feels very hollywood while also not being an insult to the Pokemon franchise, which is a very delicate balance although in retrospect it’s not that hard bc pokemon and hollywood both just want to make money. I just have low expectations.

Seeing Braviary made me rlly rlly happy!! he looked so good!! I saw rufflet in the trailer ofc but I never saw Braviary and he looks super cool! I really loved the treecko on the window at the apartment building as well. The torterra were another cool surprise. I can agree that most Pokemon in the movie are in at least one of the trailers in some form tho. But seeing their full performance in the movie is much more fun imo! Overall the CGI was really great, there was like…one scene or two scenes where I noticed slight awkwardness between Tim/Pikachu when they were interacting physically, but it was pretty minor (like when Pikachu was unconscious, Tim wasn’t cradling him as baby-like as I would, he seemed more tense and less careful than I’d expect).

The bulbasaurs made me cry and my mom liked the mr mime scene. I saw that one post a lot and still didn’t believe it until I saw it. He’s fucking dead now I guess. ALSO I FEEL SO BAD FOR MEWTWO just let him be free and happy!!! he just wants to chill with the bulbasaur and the morelull!! goddamn!!! I wanna do that too, just fuck off to the woods and hang with some bulbasaur and morelull, tbh

Plot-wise I think the villain was the most relatable villain in the entire Pokemon franchise because I, too, would do anything to become a Pokemon. Idk why he thought it was necessary to do that to other people tho. Like he could just charge money to do that to people? And he’d get paid AND not get arrested? People would pay to do that. I would pay to do that. Is it ethical? No. I just thought his motivation for that part was kinda weak. Typical weak hollywood twist villain tbh. But god his actions were great, i wish I could copy paste his goal onto an actually good character.

Girl character is girl and romance is cliche. Would’ve been more fun if she stayed a psyduck and Tim had an ethical dilemma as to whether or not it’s okay to fuck a psyduck with a human-level consciousness (a pussyduck, if you will). And I hate it when fictional scenes make me think of the ethical-ness of inter-species breeding so that’s saying a lot.

The story’s main pull was the relationship between Tim, his father, and Pikachu, and the mystery they had to solve, and while the plot is kind of rough, the emotion behind it makes it all worth it imo. It’s a typical hollywood film, I’m only 18 and barely watch any movies but I’ve literally seen this story done before. But to do it with Pokemon, and to do it with actors who really seem to care…that’s what made it worth it. You’ve seen the story before, but it’s still a cute film. It’s not bad or obnoxious even though the story is pretty rough. It can still make you emotional even though it’s kinda cliche. It’s just…fun. Turn off your brain because it’s Pokemon and Pokemon never has a good story, and you’ll just have a lot of fun.

I wish I was in rhyme city when that all happened so that I could ask mewtwo to keep me a pokemon

Oh I was also surprised by the amount of gen 5 Pokemon, although I was in the trailers too. I’m gonna count up all the Pokemon I remember seeing now - I’ll probably forget a few gen 1 pokemon since it’s definitely gen 1 heavy and I was mostly looking for non-gen 1 pokemon, but hopefully I still got them all.

Gen 1: Bulbasaur, Charmander, Charizard, Squirtle, Blastoise, Pikachu, Jigglypuff, Growlithe, Arcanine, Machamp, Polywhirl/wrath…? (I think but I dont remember aaa), Gengar, Snorlax, Magikarp, Gyrados, Eevee, Flareon, Pidgeotto, Pidgeot, I think there were Pidgeys but I couldn’t really tell…, Mew (picture only), Mewtwo, Ditto, Psyduck (…duh), um…I think that’s it?TOTAL COUNT: 24+ (again I might’ve missed some)

Gen 2: Noctowl, Aipom, Snubbull, SneaselTOTAL COUNT: 4

Gen 3: Treecko, Ludicolo…I think that’s it…TOTAL COUNT: 2

Gen 4: Torterra, um…..?? seriously wait, is torterra the only one? I gotta google this hold on-

…i forgot lickitung, cubone, doduo, dodrio, and rattata in gen 1. and primeape. i also forgot togepi and actually a fuck ton more. i remember all of those tho not some of the other ones. f. i dont remember primeape tho and also i mostly remember doduo and dodrio from the trailer oops

I FORGOT MOTHER FUCKING MR MIME

this post is cancelled but looking on bulbapedia tells me that the totals for each gen pokemon (species, not how many appear) are:

Gen 1: 32

Gen 2: 7, but bulbapedia says 6, i saw several noctowl towards the beginning of the film tho and bulbapedia doesnt have noctowl listed

Gen 3: 4

Gen 4: 3 (lmao)

Gen 5: 8

Gen 6: 4

Gen 7: 2

Overall a kind of weird distribution imo. I realize the first chapter of Detective Pikachu (the game) came out before gen 7, but still, it’s kinda weird to me personally. Gen 5 only has a major lead compared to every gen except for gen 2 and gen 1, but still. The fact that it’s the second most represented gen (more than gen 2, even!) is interesting to me. Maybe cuz the film was made in the US? so Unova? //shrug emoji//

But anyways yeah, i thought it was good!

#stormy speaks #stormy answers #what did u think sol!!

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killscreencinema · 6 years

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God of War (PlayStation 4)

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So I missed out on God of War.

Back in 2005, when the first game was released by Santa Monica Studios for the Playstation 2, I was finishing up college. I remember reading about the game’s development and being fascinated by the concept - a Spartan warrior who decides he wants to kill the Greek gods? Cool. I never got a chance to play it upon its initial release because I was a broke college student and had probably spent what little money I had on some other game. I considered renting it, but no, no, this was a game I needed extensive time on and didn’t want to binge in order to get it back to the video store on time.

Before I could get ahold of it either way, some college buddies of mine bought the game and so began playing the ever loving crap out of it. Every time I came over to hang out, they were playing God of War, which bugged me because the whole game was being spoiled for me. When my friends played a game, they had this sick compulsion to REPLAY it over and over and over (whereas I finish a game and move on, like a sane person). This went on for at least 2-3 months before my desire to play the game myself was replaced with resentment for the entire series.

I had always meant to play the trilogy at some point, but other games took precedence. So when the 4th entry into the series, simply titled God of War, was released this year, and it was clear that the game was a kind of soft reboot/sequel (in the way that Resident Evil 4 was a soft reboot/sequel), it seemed like a perfect jumping on point for a newb like me.

Now I want to say normally I’m very uncomfortable just jumping into the the middle of a series like this. I don’t like to say things like, “I’m OCD”, because I feel it trivializes an potentially serious mental illness in order for people to make themselves sound less boring, but... I think I have mild OCD, especially in that I’m incredibly resistant to watching movies and TV shows out of order or playing video games out of order. It’s not just a preference thing - I get physically out of sorts when someone insists I watch something like The Raid 2, but I haven’t seen the first one. They might be like, “It’s an entirely new story with different characters, you don’t need to see the first one” to which I’m like, “No, you don’t understand, I NEED to see it.” However, I don’t think I’m actually OCD because many times I’ll break down and just get over my weird fixation on watching/playing things in order. My introduction to the Elder Scrolls series via starting with Oblivion and never looking back (Morrow-what?) is evidence enough to me that I am perfectly capable of skipping games in a series without feeling terribly bad about it.

The point of this dumb tangent is that I was dead set against playing this new God of War until I played through the first three, but it seemed to me like the developers went out of their way to make this game accessible to people who are new to the franchise, so I pulled an Elder Scrolls and blew caution to the (Morrow)wind. I’m kind of glad I did too, for reasons I’ll explain further when I discuss the story.

The game takes place years after the third, with the legendary “Ghost of Sparta”, Kratos, having retired into the mountains far away from his homeland of Greece. When we meet Kratos, he is in the process of building a pyre with which to cremate the remains of his dead wife so that he and his son Atreus can take her ashes to the “highest peak in all the realms”, according to her final wishes. At first Kratos is reluctant to bring Atreus on the journey, believing him to not be ready, but his hand is forced after a god named Baldur, brother of the Nordic god Thor, unexpectedly shows up to pick a fight with Kratos. After barely surviving the encounter, Kratos realizes that he and Atreus both would be more safe on the move than staying in one place long enough for Baldur to show up for round two. However, along the way, Kratos uses the journey as a opportunity to continue training his son to become a man, while Atreus is insatiably curious to learn more about his stoic badass of a father, but Kratos ain’t talking because he doesn’t want his son to know about his true godly nature.

So yes, the new God of War game is, at its core, a story about an estranged father and son bonding during a journey. Cue “Cats in the Cradle”:

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Kidding aside, I absolutely loved this aspect of the game and I enjoyed the back and forth between the characters throughout the story. This was helped by excellent voice acting by Sunny Sulijic as Atreus and Christopher Judge (of Stargate SG-1 fame) as Kratos. Evidently, Judge took over the role because the game developers needed someone who was physically closer in size to Kratos in the game for animation purposes. While I’m sure this was regrettable for fans of Carson’s work with the character, Judge is no slouch, and does such a great job even diehard fans of the series have to give it up to him as worthy of the mantle.

Fans of the series may be quick to point out that I may not feel that way if I were more familiar with the series, and that’s fair. Like I mentioned before, though, I’m glad that I’m coming in fresh, because not only does that make me a little more open to a different sounding Kratos, but not being as familiar with mythos of the series makes me just as eager as Atreus to hear more about his bloody past. One might say it takes on a... mythical quality?

No, wait, please keep reading, I apologize!

The game plays like a brawler in the style of Bloodborne or Dark Souls, though certainly not as difficult as those games are infamous for being. That being said, God of War ain’t a cake walk either! The game has a respectable bite to it challenge wise, forcing the player to learn how to deal with individual enemy types beyond repetitive Dynasty Warriors style hack-n-slashery. The optional boss fights with the Corrupted Valkyries is an absolute treat in which to test one’s skills, leading up to a hell of a brawl with the Valkyrie Queen (whom I couldn’t beat... dammit). That being said, epic boss battles like that are way too sparse and the same enemies get overused a little too much.

While Kratos eventually regains his iconic Chaos Blades from the previous games (spoilers), his main weapon is an axe called Leviathan and ohhh what a fun weapon it is too! Similar to Thor’s hammer Mjolnir, Kratos can hurl the axe at enemies, and call it back at will. This spices up battles a lot, allowing you to pull off awesome moves like throwing your axe at an enemy to freeze them with its ice powers, and beating another enemy with your bare fists, before calling your axe back to you, which slices up or trips enemies in its trajectory back to you. Meanwhile, your son isn’t just sitting on the sidelines cheering you on (or warning you of attacks from behind, which is helpful) - Atreus jumps into the fray to help either by shooting baddies with his bow and arrow or he’ll often leap on their head and keep them prone long enough for you to deliver powerful, but slow, cleaving blows with your axe.

And anyone with traumatic memories of GoldenEye 64 escort missions need not worry - Atreus cannot die! Yay!

Besides the main story quest, the game offers a nice variety of side quests to keep you busy without being so overwhelming that you totally forget there even IS a main quest (which is something that often happens to me A LOT with games of this type). Fortunately, besides killing all 50 of Odin’s ravens, the side quests are actually a lot of fun and don’t involve insipid fetch quests. While some of them can be fairly time consuming, like the labyrinth in Niflheim, none of them ever felt tedious.

If my ramblings haven’t made it clear, God of War is amazing game, which delivers a compelling “cinematic experience”, but without sacrificing substantive gameplay (a formula a lot of AAA developers named after badly behaved canines have trouble balancing). However, you don’t have to take MY word for it...

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#god of war #playstation #playstation 4 #ps4 #ps4 game #santa monica studios #sony #kratos #christopher judge #stargate sg1 #action adventure #previously recorded #rlm #red letter media

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2bstudioblog · 3 years

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Thoughts on Composer forums, no more negativity...

But before we begin, let’s make it a straight and clear... I don't want to out anybody, but I guess it isn't news because we are all aware that these community/forum problems/people exists, no matter the content or platform.

In the community of film-composers, game-music composers, Audio-directors, Sound-designers and perhaps music supervisors, the film-composer forum/community has been one of the first stepping stones to help and most of all build new relationships with people in the industry.

I’ve always had the image of this community to be about being equal, nobody was above or below, but talking to each other on the level. All that was required to enter was 1 IMDB credit (Internet Movie Data Base), get it verified and then you were in this very exclusive groups.

But so far, the idea was sound, we started to establish a group of a mix of westerners and Japanese composers, and the idea was to share ideas, help people who wants to break into the Japanese scene and the AAA-gaming industry. However, we only had a few meetups and 2 of them happened in a very interesting place in Korean Town in Tokyo. We ended up in the home of former On Tour QUEEN Keyboardist Morgan Fischer, who in turn was one of the first names I remember on an instruction manual for the Yamaha DX7. The first gathering brought about 7-8 members and we talked, showed each other what we do and then we enjoyed general talk, jamming and had a lot of fun. There I also ran into another young guy, who just scored an iPAD app. Let’s call him R2.

A few months later I was contacted by someone from the U.K community chapter, a young lad, with ideas on how things should be and he asked me if we should meet up and talk a little bit since he knew I’ve written music for Resident Evil 6 at this point, so I felt honored and thought let’s help each other out. Let’s call this guy D2.

D2 is now at first glance, I thought he was an OK guy, and I showed him around the city, we talked a little about ourselves and then I had to get back to my ordinary job as a teacher afterwards. He’s very focused on keeping up a fashion and to look cool... all the time. At this I didn’t really care, but I told him that if you want to have a chance at pitching to get into the industry, perhaps he should meet one of my agents. So I arranged that, brought him over to the agency, took about 1 hour, sitting down talking to one of the toughest and impressive women in the industry. She asked about his ambitions and why he was in Japan for a casual tourist visit and in the end the question came: - “What game would you like to write music for in the future?” -”Metal Gear...” was his answer.

He already told me before the meeting that he always wanted to work on a MGS project but I felt a little bit guilty but I told D2: -”I can’t guarantee anything about the chances of getting that kind of gig as a first from that agency. But they’ll try to find something up your alley.” The agent said that would be hard one to get him into because they only like to work with established artists on their MGS franchise, so getting it would seem to be impossible at this point, since we didn’t know that it was being developed at the moment, or so it had been in secret.

He returned back to Europe and I was on my own again. But we promised that we’d follow each other on the platforms and he said he’d try to promote me to get a few more followers on twitter (Duh, he didn’t, naive as usual.) and give a shout-out on his “incredible” YouTube channel devoted to his brand of a software/kontakt library creator. Nothing came to fruition on that front. I sure did give him a shout-out and told people about him, but I got nothing in return.

A few months later he returns and he decides to meet with me again, so I thought, what is it this time? Well, turns out he was back in Tokyo again for a business meeting or something, however he also met someone last time he was in Tokyo and decided to say hi to his girlfriend. So we all 3 went out to a cafe in Shinjuku area and we sat down and talked about film, games and music since we all were kinda in that industry. But since I know he is passionate about “EPIC” music as he would call it, we (me and his girlfriend) started to talk about Star Wars and he was .... incredibly ignorant. I told him, if you want to hear EPIC music, these are the films you have to see.

I told him: -“John Williams is the reason I am here. The reason I started to do film-scoring and bringing that into cinematic games like Resident Evil 6.” -”Who's John Williams? Never heard of him...” was his response.

Me and his girlfriend were completely flabbergasted of this guys total ignorance of a film-defining classic that changed film-music for science-fiction, approaching it with an operatic execution, giving characters themes, music that flowed with the action like those old golden-era film styles, but modernized for a new generation of movie-goers. It was the biggest risk, bringing in an orchestra for a sci-fi fantasy, but it paid off. Orchestral music was COOL again. Without John Williams, we wouldn’t have one of the first hybrid-action scores in Return of the Jedi with big thick synthbasses in Jabba’s Palace for that ominous uncertain character that turned out to be Leia unfreezing Han Solo from his carbonation chamber. Minimal amount of synth, but it was there.

The ignorance of D2 started to show. But I didn’t want that to be the moment, so I told his girlfriend to sit down and watch those films together. Not sure if they did, but it was here I started to feel the “British twit” mentality, the “I am better than thou”, the “I’m in my 20′s and I have already figured out the meaning of life...” All he had was his own business back home generating the dough in making sample-based kontakt-libraries. Good on him.

Then a few month’s later, I saw something on his YouTube channel that really started to kill my vibe for the dude. Whenever when I work for big companies like Konami, Capcom or Sega, I always sign an NDA. That mean’s I’m not allowed to record or show off my work for projects that are in progress. But here he is, talking about his cues he’s composing in real-time on YouTube. My first thought was, maybe I should tell anybody about this, but I don’t want to be a buzz-kill. I decided I didn’t want to butt in. Perhaps he would learn something from that mistake. Or did he?

A few months later D2 came back, now the game was pretty much in it’s final stages and he decided to meet me up together with R2 and we went out to yet another cafe, talking about software and stuff. Before we even met up with R2, D2 started to ask me if I had any registration keys for some software he didn’t own... I’m now getting even more confused. Is he asking me for pirate copies??? I just can’t make this one slide, so I’ll just stay quiet. R2 shows up, they start to make fun out of my English, my use of words in fun ways. I know the Britt’s and the Australians share the dry word humor, but I told them that I really like to perform on real hardware and twisting knobs for cutoff filters and stuff. All they wanted was to make fun out of me using the words “I like to turn knobs” (English slang for wanking off people, not my intention since we are talking about synthesizers...) R2 however was sucking up to D2 due to his huge following on YouTube and Twitter, so my point of view was completely irrelevant for R2. I had made valid points, but D2 shot me down, R2 is right behind him like a narcissists flying monkey.

This was the moment where I felt I should distance myself from D2 for trying to acquire pirate software keys, asking me if I had any cool software etc. He’s bloody rich. He should buy the software like everyone else, especially guys like me. I pulled a small ploy and pretended I got a phone-call from an agency going;

*hanging up the phone* -”...Sorry guys, it’s seems to me something important has just landed in my lap and I have to leave you here, but I wish you all good on your ventures. Take care and talk to you guys later.”

From that moment, I was just exhausted from R2 and D2. They are a perfect fit for each other. But the ignorance and bluntness from D2 lost all of his credibility for me and I just said to myself quietly I just have to keep fighting my own battle in an uphill, serving D2 with the best kind of courtesy I’ve learned from the Japanese and being shit on in the process. He doesn't respect many of us, so I’ll now don’t give a damn.... I need closure. And with a snap of my fingers, all the bad went away.

After leaving these thoughts to you, I’m ready to let go and start a new future in the land of music production. But one thing is for sure, I'm done with the charade.

Of course there are times when enough is enough. And I've had enough.

#Film #Score #Music #Film-industry #community

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dokidokikusoge · 6 years

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TOp TeN GaMes of 2017 The Official Only List Forever I Can’t Believe I GOt Teleported To Another World As A PIece of ChiCken MEat

Hi.

It’s been quite a while, hasn’t it? Well it’s that time of the year again, which means I get to write out a list of ten video games that I thought were awesome in the year 2017. Despite being busy translating and editing video game text for work, I somehow found time to finish approximately 30x more games this year. In the name of research. Or something.

Boy oh boy has there been a whole lot of good games. Everything from massive AAA titles to tiny little indie darlings. Free experiments and expensive 150 hour adventures across time and space.

This is not an objective list, but it is 100% the absolute truth and all other lists are full of shit. Fuck those lists. Fuck my list. FUCK THE POPO.

Let’s rock.

For what it’s worth, there are a TON of other games I adored this year that didn’t end up making the list. Titles I’m still playing like Splatoon 2, Super Mario Odyssey, or Fire Emblem Echoes (amazing localization). Just because they’re not on this list doesn’t mean they aren’t every bit as fun. This was a packed year.

10. Xenoblade Chronicles 2

I’m cheating.

I have not beaten Xenoblade Chronicles 2 yet. I’m 85 hours in and on chapter 7, but I have not beaten the game. I desperately wanted to include it on this list, and quite frankly, would have put it much closer to the bottom. It’s just that good. However, I figured it’d be unfair to do so considering I haven’t even come close to seeing the end credits.

Xenoblade Chronicles 2 is the best big budget PS2/Dreamcast JRPG that never saw the light of day until now.

That’s about the best compliment I can afford it.

9. Gravity Rush 2

So the original Gravity Rush was one of my favorite games the year it first released for the Vita. Despite the load times and some of the muddy visuals, I found Kat’s bizarre tale of gravity bending madness to be equal parts charming and dark. Coupled with the legendary Kohei Tanaka’s score, I couldn’t help but be dazzled by her ability to travel through the air like a rocket. I spent years waiting for a sequel that would wrap up her story. I’m glad I got one.

It has its issues (the quest design and some of the pacing), but Gravity Rush 2 is still mostly everything I wanted from the end of Kat’s story. Beautiful world design crossed with fun traversal, an amazing soundtrack, and a whimsical little cast of characters means that even almost a full year removed from its release, I still think back fondly on the game.

See you around, Kat. Thanks for all the fish.

8. Resident Evil 7

It’s so good to have you back, babe. I missed the shit out of you.

I used to be one of the biggest Resident Evil fans this side of the east coast. I’ll never forget Christmas Day many years ago, when I opened up two boxes to find a Playstation console and a copy of Resident Evil 2 (and no memory card WHOOPS). But since then, things have taken a turn for the worse. I enjoyed Resident Evil 5 for what it was, but it was starting to feel like something else entirely.

And then Resident Evil 6 happened, and I couldn’t get more than a few hours in before getting angry.

Yet somehow Capcom managed to win me back. Somehow Resident Evil 7 reminded me of what I used to love about the series. It certainly didn’t hurt that I played the entire thing in VR and loved every second of it.

Bring on RE8.

7. The Evil Within 2

And the award for most improved sequel goes to... The Evil Within 2. A wonderful surprise and return to form for producer Shinji Mikami and his team. If you like good survival horror, this will be your jam. Fixes every single issue with the original game, at least in my opinion.

Bethesda dropped the ball on marketing this game, but don’t let that stop you from experiencing one helluva time.

6. New DanganRonpa V3

The less said about this one the better. Try to go in blank if you can.

Some people aren’t fond of the direction this one takes. I don’t think it could have gone any other way. The perfect way to end this franchise, should this truly be the end.

5. The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel III

But Elliot, how is this game not higher on your list!?

The answer is actually simple. I’ve stopped really approaching each entry of the series as independent games. They’re just chapters in one larger saga. No single game is my favorite. The series as a whole is my favorite.

Cold Steel III cut me deep. The game takes the format of the original CS, improves on it, and then shakes things up to the point where you’re not even sure where you’re standing anymore. I can’t count how many times I screamed at fellow series fans, shook by what had just taken place. This series continues to blow my mind time and time again, and the wait for Cold Steel IV couldn’t possibly feel any longer than it does right now.

4. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

I don’t like 3D Zelda games. Let’s just get that out there. I never liked Ocarina of Time. I never liked Majora’s Mask. I enjoyed Wind Waker the most out of the bunch (but still nowhere close to my love for the 2D games). I hated Twilight Princess and I had zero interest in Skyward Sword and its motion controls.

I also don’t like open world games very much.

A 3D open world Zelda game? Well now you’re talking my language...?

Any other year and this would have been an easy number one. Too bad that 2017 is packed with killers.

I can’t wait to go back and play the DLC.

3. PUBG

Man, what a surprise. I haven’t been THIS into a realistic multiplayer shooter since my days of playing Call of Duty 4 endlessly during its beta test on the 360.

To be honest, I’m not even sure if it’s the game I’m in love with so much as it’s the moments with friends I’ve gotten to experience within the game. I only ever play in team matches, but every single round is like some dumb action movie starring me and my pals, and even when things go poorly, they typically go poorly in the stupidest way humanly possible. I’ve played so many hours of PUBG that I’m scared to check the exact number.

I want to play this game with every single one of my friends. It’s that kind of experience.

2. Dragon Quest XI

I think the funniest thing about Dragon Quest XI’s place on this list is that in any other year, this shouldn’t have been close. That just goes to show you how absurd 2017 has been for video games.

The less said about the journey of DQXI the better. All I’ll say is that it is simultaneously the perfect jumping point for franchise newcomers while also being the most beautiful, glorious love letter to those who have been there since the beginning. This is quite possibly one of my favorite games of all time, and if you manage to make it to the true end without being at least a little bit moved, you might not have a soul.

You might be an android or something.

Wait a sec.

1. NieR: Automata

Was there ever any questioning this? What else is there to write about this game that people much smarter than me haven’t already? It’s oppressive, it’s suffocating, it’s joyous, it’s hopeful, it’s hopeless, it’s crushing, it’s tear-inducing, it’s a breath of air after emerging from deep within the water. NieR: Automata is a very special game, made by an extremely talented group of men and women who should have been recognized for their talents a long, long time ago.

Much time has passed since Drakengard, that bizarre and kind of terrible but fascinating PS2 game, first hit shelves and got dumped on. But now, finally, Yoko Taro and his close collaborators are finally getting the chance to step out into the light.

Thanks, 2017.

#GOTY #Still Alive #Nier Automata #DanganRonpa #Zelda #Dragon Quest #PUBG #Gravity Rush 2 #Sen no Kiseki #The Evil Within 2 #Resident Evil 7 #Xenoblade Chronicles 2

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junker-town · 4 years

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Ron Wright had the worst MLB debut of all time

Three plate appearances. Six outs. This would be a freakishly terrible day for just about any hitter in baseball. For Ron Wright, who as a minor leaguer was compared to Cecil Fielder and Fred McGriff, it was his whole career. A series of wildly improbable events — botched surgery, incredible perseverance, baserunning calamity and a baseball to the ear — all came together to build this moment, the worst MLB debut of all time.

It’s weird to say this now, but on April 14, 2002, the Seattle Mariners were an elite baseball team. They were coming off matching the all-time record for wins in a season, boasted the defending MVP and Rookie of the Year in Ichiro Suzuki, had eight (!) returning all-stars, had made a big trade to upgrade at third by swooping for Jeff Cirillo, had added another power bat in Ruben Sierra and were also looking at a full season of rising ace Joel Piñeiro. The 2001 Mariners had been a juggernaut. On paper, at least, the 2002 edition were going to be even better.

By the time they arrived in Dallas for their four-game series against the Texas Rangers, the usual suspects were rolling. Ichiro and Bret Boone had been relatively quiet, but the likes of John Olerud and Mike Cameron were piling up the runs, and the Mariners had rushed to an early lead in the American League West. There was, however, something missing. Or, more to the point, someone.

John G. Mabanglo/AFP via Getty Images

ARLINGTON, Texas — Seattle Mariners designated hitter Edgar Martinez has a ruptured left hamstring and was scheduled to have surgery [on April 13].

Martinez injured the hamstring while running out a grounder to third base in the ninth inning of Thursday’s 8-4 victory at Anaheim. The six-time All-Star had to be helped off the field.

An MRI exam was done Friday, and the Mariners put Martinez on the disabled list. Rick Griffin, Seattle’s trainer, said the exam revealed a ruptured tendon behind Martinez’s knee.

In 2001, future Hall-of-Famer Edgar Martinez owned a .306/.423/.543 batting line, compiled over 132 games. Now the Mariners were going to have to do without their iconic designated hitter for a few months.

Edgar’s hamstring blowing up was exactly the sort of situation that the team signed Sierra to handle. And, indeed, the 36-year-old was handling it. In his first game spelling Martinez, Sierra hit a grand slam to lift the team to a 7-3 win. In his second, he hit a double and drew a walk. While life without Edgar wasn’t ever going to be fine, it looked at least like it would be bearable.

But Sierra wasn’t just Seattle’s backup option at DH. He was also the team’s primary bench bat and a rotation option in the outfield corners. While he was pencilled into the Edgar slot, the team needed some cover for their cover. And so, buried in that article about Martinez’s hamstring surgery, was a note about a minor roster move.

The Mariners purchased the contract of first baseman Ron Wright from Triple-A Tacoma of the Pacific Coast League.

Wright’s name would have meant very little to Mariners fans back then. I suspect it didn’t even mean that much to Wright. He was drafted by the Atlanta Braves out of high school in 1994. As a seventh-round pick, he wasn’t expected to amount to much of anything, but he quickly pushed his way through the minors, reaching AAA for the first time as a 21-year-old.

By then Wright was already with his second organization. The Braves had claimed the World Series in 1995, and by the time August ‘96 rolled around they were making a push for a second consecutive ring. They needed pitching reinforcements, and decided on Pittsburgh Pirates lefthander Denny Neagle.

Neagle did not come cheap. He had made the National League All-Star team in 1995, and by late summer he’d amassed a 14-6 record with a 3.05 ERA. If the Braves wanted him, they were going to have to give up some talent. On Aug. 28, 1996, two minor-leaguers and a player to be named later were dispatched to Pittsburgh. Wright, ranked by Baseball America as the Braves’ No. 8 prospect, was part of the deal.

Ron Wright during a 1998 spring training game with the Pirates

Back then, Wright was projected as a Fielder or McGriff type. He’d strike out, he’d walk, and above all, he was going to hit home runs. He would hit huge home runs and a huge number of home runs. In two full seasons, he’d managed to rack up almost 70 of them, several of them true monsters. Having dominated at A and AA, it was time for him to move up.

Wright thrived in his first season with the pirates, smoking the Pacific Coast League, hitting .304/.348/.539 for the Calgary Lookouts over 91 games. Sure, there were only 16 home runs, but in 91 games, coming from a 21-year-old in AAA ... that’s the sort of performance that turns heads. A breakthrough seemed inevitable.

It was not.

A wrist injury robbed Wright of a September call-up in 1997. Worse was to come. Going into 1998, he was ranked as the Pirates No. 5 prospect, but a back injury immediately knocked him onto the disabled list. That injury required surgery: a spinal disk needed repairing. Wright was out of regular action for almost two years. When he returned, the power was gone.

While rebuilding that busted spinal disk, Wright’s surgeon had damaged his sciatic nerve, causing loss of feeling in his right leg. A key part of the swing that produced those mammoth home runs had disappeared. Wright’s calling card, the key to his prospect status, was no more.

Wright slowly fell down the Pirates pecking order. After the ‘98 season, Baseball-America had him at No. 6. A year later, he was their No. 10 prospect. And a year after that, he was gone, claimed on waivers by the Cincinnati Reds.

Denny Neagle, incidentally, made 71 starts for the Braves, going 38-19 with a 3.43 ERA. In 1997, while Wright was tearing up the PCL, Neagle finished third in the National League Cy Young voting (the two dudes ahead of him were named ‘Pedro Martinez’ and ‘Greg Maddux’, so we’ll call that a moral victory).

The Pirates, disappointed in Wright, still did OK out of that trade. The PTBNL ended up being 23-year-old pitcher Jason Schmidt, who carved out a productive career up in Pittsburgh before blossoming with the San Francisco Giants.

Meanwhile, Wright couldn’t gain any traction. A mediocre 2000 with the Reds was followed up by an equally mediocre 2001 with the then-Devil Rays. By the time 2002 rolled around, Wright was a fully-fledged journeyman, his prospect status long forgotten. He was a traveling mercenary, organizational filler. The particular organization he’d be filling that year was, of course, the Seattle Mariners.

Did Lou Pinella have any intention of actually playing Wright while Edgar was out? Probably not. At least, not much. On April 14, Wright had been in the majors for two days, and he’d spent them parked happily on the bench, watching the Mariners beat up on the Rangers. There he would have stayed but for starting third baseman Jeff Cirillo taking a baseball to the face.

Cirillo would eventually become sort of a bogeyman for Seattle, the human marker for both the end of franchise’s golden era and the perils of doing business with the Colorado Rockies. Neither is, strictly speaking, fair. The bulk of his pre-Seattle career was spent hitting .307/.383/.449 in Milwaukee, not Denver, and during his two years with the Mariners the team won 186 games. But there’s no getting around that fact his tenure in the Emerald City was, well, awful.

On April 14, however, all that lay in the future. He was off to a slow start, sure, but with his pedigree and status as the team’s major off-season acquisition, few had any hint at the mess that was to follow. Cirillo was pencilled in at third, hitting second behind Ichiro and he’d have hoped to bust out of his season-opening mini-slump against Rangers southpaw Kenny Rodgers.

He never got that chance. During batting practice, center fielder Mike Cameron cracked a line drive off the pitching screen. By an implausible twist of fate*, the ricochet took the ball straight into Cirillo’s left ear. The cut required three stitches.

*This wasn’t the only time in Cirillo’s career that he picked up a freak injury. According to Tom Haudricourt, he once just missed a home run and threw his batting helmet in frustration ... right at his ankle. He was out for four games.

Piniella hastily re-jigged his lineup. Charles Gibson was shifted from left field to third. Sierra would go to left field. And Wright, who became the 33rd man named ‘Wright’ to appear in a Major League Baseball game, would get the nod at designated hitter.

That Wright wound up making his debut for the Mariners looked suspiciously like fate. He might have been drafted by Atlanta, but Washington State was home. He’d moved there at eight, and played high school ball at Kamiakin High School in Kennewick, three and a half hours drive from Seattle and the Kingdome. He had to navigate two away series before the team got back to his home state. Make some noise in Dallas or Oakland and he’d get to swing the bat in front of his family.

During his first appearance, he made zero noise with the bat. None whatsoever. With two runners on and no out, and the Mariners up, 1-0, it was the perfect time to do some damage. But Wright took Rodgers first pitch, a fastball, for strike one. Then he took the second. Strike two. One more and he was back in the dugout, a strikeout victim. He hadn’t even taken the bat off his shoulders.

A debut strikeout is forgivable. It’s the sort of thing that happens to rookies in their first game, especially rookies who’ve taken the scenic route to get to the majors. Upon his return to the dugout, Wright would have gotten (I assume) a good butt-slapping and told to go get ‘em next time.

It’s the top of the fourth. It’s almost an exact replica of the opportunity he missed the first time up. The Mariners are still 1-0 to the good. Sierra and Olerud are on base. The only difference is that this time Sierra is at third, an easy RBI opportunity. Wright wasn’t going to let this chance get away. He was going to swing.

He swung three times. Two were swinging strikes, sandwiching a pair of balls to bring the count to 2-2. Then, for the first time in his career, he made contact. As it turned out, the Mariners would rather he hadn’t:

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Wright should not have swung at that pitch. It was down and well away, and drew the sort of swing that leads to embarrassing outcomes. This particular swing produced an ugly tapper back to the mound. Rodgers (who’d win his second gold glove that year) eased his way off the mound, made a slick grab, stared Sierra back to third base, then fired to second to get Olerud on a force play.

That should have been that. End of story. Erasure of story, really. But someone had blundered. If Sierra had simply stayed put, history would have remembered Wright’s debut as merely a bad one, and we’d have no reason whatsoever to discuss him years later. But every interesting story is made up of a collection of tiny chances, seemingly unrelated events which Rube Goldberg themselves into an unstoppable force.

We arrived at this moment through a botched surgery, an exploded hamstring and a face-seeking baseball. But the pivot this story really turns on is Sierra being a huge idiot.

Unlike Wright, Sierra had been around the Major League block. 2002 was his 16th season in the big leagues. He knew how to run the bases just fine, swiping well over 100 bags over the course of his career. His speed had long-since gone by the time Wright came around, but a player with that much experience should know better than to break for home while the shortstop is essentially holding the ball at second.

Sierra broke for home while the shortstop was holding the ball at second. Alex Rodriguez duly tossed the ball to the catcher, and a half-assed rundown ensued. During the melee, John Moses told Wright to advance to second, thinking that the Mariners might as well keep a runner in scoring position despite Sierra’s blunder.

Further calamity ensured. As Wright bolted for second, Sierra gave himself up, allowed Rodgers to tag him and throw to second again. Michael Young applied the tag to complete the play. 1-6-2-5-1-4. Wright had become the first player in a century to hit into a triple play on his debut.

He wasn’t done there. His spot in the lineup came up in the sixth, with the Mariners now 2-1 down. Sierra and Olerud were on base again, having hit back-to-back singles. Rodgers was near the end of his tether, having given up 11 baserunners in 5+ innings. His pitch count was in the 90s. A hit here would have tied the game.

Wright came up with a first-pitch double play instead, grounding hard to Rodriguez at shortstop.

The Mariners came back, but Wright did not. Seattle grabbed four quick runs in the top of the seventh, with Olerud knotting things up with a line drive single to right field. With runners at the corners, Piniella decided he’d had enough misery out of his DH for one evening and pulled Wright for super-utilityman Mark McLemore, who ended up going 0-2 with two strikeouts. It takes an unusual day for that to be an upgrade.

Wright’s game in full: 0-3, K, GDP, GTP. Nine pitches seen; two balls; three called strikes; four swings; 50 percent contact; six outs made. Once known for his ability to hit ridiculously long bombs, he had hit the baseball a combined 150 feet.

Some of the magic of baseball is a product of sheer volume. Enough baseball is played for all sorts of strange things to happen, and here they just happened to happen to Wright. Unsurprisingly, he was sent back down to AAA following the end of the Rangers series. Wright never got to play in front of his family at Safeco Field. Two years later, after a couple more minor league stints and then a go-around with the independent Sioux Falls Canaries, he was out of baseball entirely.

After the injuries he picked up in the late-90s, there wasn’t much chance Wright would have had a lengthy career in the majors, even if his first crack at the bigs hadn’t been quite so catastrophic. But by doing so, he turned his non-career into a spectacular event, a nonsensical comet blazing its way through a Dallas afternoon.

Reaching the pinnacle of baseball takes an obscene amount of talent and even more hard work, and Wright’s path was even harder than most. Getting to start for the Mariners at all represents an incredible achievement, and if Wright didn’t exactly make the most of it. at least he impressed himself on the history books.

Fortunately, that’s how he sees it too. Talking to Larry Stone 15 years after the fact, Wright looked back at his performance with few regrets:

If I got into one game. I might as well do something memorable. I wish it had been three home runs, but it wasn’t. It was kind of a weird sequence of events that led to the actual outcome. With different baserunning and different bounces, you never know.

As for the 2002 Seattle Mariners, they’d go on to win 93 games but miss the playoffs anyway. It was the start of what is now the longest playoff drought in American sports.

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cmpriest · 7 years

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The Emerald City and Me

Well, we made it. We closed on our Seattle house literally the evening before we left the Chattanooga house – and it only happened then because a dedicated notary came out to our place after hours and helped us file all the paperwork. First thing the next morning, we hit the road.

It was a six-day drive back to the West Coast. We took two cars, and we each took two animals – I drove with Greyson in the back seat, and Quinnie in the front seat. (Both secured, yes.) My husband brought the eldercat and Lucy in a similar configuration. Using a AAA travel agent, we booked all our hotel rooms in advance – making sure that we could bring our furry family members along without any difficulty. All but two of those nights were screwed up by the aforementioned travel agent; but when all was said and done, nobody had to sleep in the car and everything was fine.

My husband and I each traveled with a small suitcase. For the animals, we packed the largest suitcase we own – and at first we could barely close it, for it contained pre-measured meals for all four of them, plus bowls, medicine (for all four), fluids kit (for the eldercat), cannibis oil treats for the canine nervous nellies, flea/tick preventatives, and five disposable litter boxes stacked together. And I guess now I know how to manage a good “bug-out bag” for the whole family, so there’s that.

Eventually we arrived at a house I’ve named “Rockford Place” – a late mid-century modern with an angular seventies vibe and a massive fireplace surrounded by natural stone. There’s also an enormous backyard that’s mostly rocks and trees, terraformed into paths and a nice landing area.

Besides, I like James Garner. So yeah, it’s called Rockford Place.

The house is really rather neat – lots of cool angles and funky architectural features (without going overboard, I mean.) But the bathrooms are an embarrassment, and when we got here, the kitchen was stocked with appliances that only halfway worked. We’ve decided to live with the bathrooms for now, but the kitchen…well. We scraped up the money to replace the appliances, which turned into a massive shit-show courtesy of HomeDepot.com… but that’s another story. Frankly, I’m so fed up with the experience that I’m not likely to relate it here. Suffice it to say, don’t buy appliances from HomeDepot.com. Home Depot’s own employees (at a local store) told me the in-house joke is that online orders are “job security” because one way or another, they’re fucked up literally 100% of the time.

Anyway, we do have working appliances now. Thank God.

We also have a new veterinarian, which is good because the eldercat ran out of fluids, Lucy came down with (what seemed like) a UTI, and Quinnie has had a couple bad bouts of diarrhea – one bad enough that I took her to the kitty ER. Still not sure what’s wrong with her, but she’s wrapping up another round of medication at present, and she seems to be 100% fine and dandy. Cats, man.

All four of the critters really seem to like the new house. The cats love the stairs, and the dogs love the yard – which is fenced all the way around to the front patio, so they can really get a good loop of “chase” going on. Both dog-fatties have even lost a little weight, which is good.

As a side note: If you’re mostly following me (on any platform) because of the household animal population – or if you’d like to, going forward – you can catch me on Twitter or (more recently) Instagram. Twitter is sometimes LadyRage, but often pet pictures. Instagram is almost exclusively pet pictures. In case this matters.

Hm. What else?

I guess you might also be reading this because I write books. By way of What’s Up Next, I can offer the following:

In December, a new installment in the Wild Cards franchise hits the streets – including a story from yours truly. The book is called Mississippi Roll, and my contribution is a somewhat wacky romp called “Death on the Water” that features my (now retired) Fort Freak cop Leo and his new wife, Wanda, on board a haunted riverboat. They share the stage with a trio of ghost hunters who, um, are entirely fictitious and not all mocking re: any given TV show that my husband and I might jokingly call “Brost hunters.” Ahem.

Speaking of Wild Cards – I’ve just handed in a draft of my next piece, but I can’t tell you about that yet. If all goes according to plan, it will be inserted into one of the old volumes, as part of a future re-release. But that’s another year or two down the pike, I assume.

Production is finally getting underway on my next young adult project for Scholastic – a book called The Agony House. We don’t have a pub date yet; things have been delayed on this one, largely because my original editor left the house for another job (which happens, such is life). But my new editor is on the case, and I should have more information on that for you before terribly long. The Agony House is not related to I Am Princess X, but it *does* feature a comic/illustrated element in a similar fashion. More details to come!

And that’s all the writing news that’s fit to type, for the moment. To be honest, writing updates are probably going to be few and far between for a bit, as I’m taking a little breathing room this year – breathing room that will give me time to get some work done on the house, and take on a day job, perhaps. I could use a steadier paycheck for a bit, and some room for my brain to cool off a bit.

I’ve been in fifth gear for the last few years, and I’m looking forward to just…doing production work on the Wild Cards projects, and The Agony House, and another adult horror project from Tor called The Toll (pub date TBD). So it’s not like I’m quitting the industry and flouncing into darkness or anything. I’m just giving myself a break. Kind of.

More news as it develops.

Okay folks, that’s all I can think of, at the moment – but I *will* try to update more regularly over here, now that we’re more or less settled in. (We’ve been here about two months.) So as always, thanks for reading, and thanks for visiting this page. One way or another, I’ll see you around…

The Emerald City and Me was originally published on The Haunt*

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skittelsen · 7 years

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My Secret Origin as a Super-Fan

*This post is my personal story. It does not represent the opinions or views of NetherRealm Studios, WB Games, or DC Entertainment.

What a week!

My first game as Narrative Lead, INJUSTICE 2, launched worldwide, and the response from fans and critics has been overwhelmingly positive—as in I feel overwhelmed by all the positivity. This week also marked the tenth anniversary of my NYU graduation. Finally, there’s the MOST important milestone of all, my son’s third birthday. For me, all these events are connected.

Of all the reactions to Injustice 2 out there, I love most when someone remarks that the people who made this game must really love DC Comics lore. Trust me, they do. Everyone on the I2 team has a favorite DC character, from the iconic to the obscure. My favorite is Superman.

It might come as a surprise that the Narrative Lead on a game in which Superman is portrayed as a lethal tyrant would profess to be a Superman fan, but I am.

Here’s why. When I was about 4 years old, my parents told me that I was and would always be their son, but that I didn’t come out of Mommy’s tummy like my sister. I was adopted. My birth parents, whoever they were, couldn’t raise me, so they sent me away to find a family who could provide a better life for me.

This kind of news can really mess with a kid’s head. I was an indoorsy, deep-thinky emo boy, and I would dramatically stare into the bathroom mirror and wonder whose eyes were looking back at me. Fortunately, my Mom and Dad were a real life Ma and Pa Kent, equipped with big hearts to manage my drama. They loved my sister and I as much as any kids could be loved, and they never treated me any differently on account of my secret heritage.

Superman: The Movie was on TV a lot in the 1980s. I don’t remember when, but at some point not long after my parents told me I was adopted, I made the connection that Superman was adopted. Superman was just like me!

From then on, my personal identity as an adopted kid was still fraught with complications and insecurities, but it wasn’t always a source of trauma. In my mind, I had a secret origin, a source of strength. And how cool would it be if I found a spaceship buried in the basement?

My parents reinforced this imaginative coping mechanism by indulging my every superhero fantasy. They took me to every comics and collectibles shop in upstate New York looking for special issues and rare action figures. Mom sewed more than one Superman cape (and a few Batman capes, too), and she and I binge-watched George Reeves in Adventures of Superman. For my 18th birthday, my Dad bought me the S-shield tattoo that’s still on my shoulder. A year later, he got the same S-shield tattoo on the same shoulder as me. He sat in the inker’s chair wincing from the needle, quoting Marlon Brando as Jor-El, “The son becomes the father, and the father becomes the son!”

Without my parents’ support, I may never have gone to Metropolis for college at NYU. They were so proud at my graduation, but I wasn’t proud yet. I wanted to be a writer, but instead, I found myself working as the Corporate Files Administrator at the HBO Legal Department and taking an LSAT prep course by night. I was lost.

Then, two things happened that set me back on course. First, I was hired by an indie producer to write a screenplay, enabling me to quit my job at HBO. Second, at my wife’s urging, I sent a fan letter to one of my favorite writers, author and educator Douglas Rushkoff, asking if he needed any help.

They say don’t meet your heroes, but in Rushkoff, I found a mentor and a lifelong friend. Working as his editorial assistant was a dream come true. I learned more in one year working Rushkoff than I had in four years studying at NYU.

Then my screenplay deal fell apart, the global economy tanked, and like a lot of recent college graduates, I faced the real possibility of going broke and moving back in with my parents. Rushkoff couldn’t pay me a full time salary, but he offered to help me get an inside track at DC.

Applying for a job at DC Comics without a personal recommendation is like throwing rocks at the moon. For years, from sophomore year of college on, I had applied for every DC internship and entry-level position available. Never got a response. Rushkoff recommended me and I got a call from WB HR within a few hours. It certainly helped that I now had a few more bullets on the CV. It also may have helped that the person Rushkoff recommended me to was Paul Levitz, then President and Publisher of DC Comics.

An extensive interview process later, I was hired as Assistant Editor - Interactive at DC Comics. My family was with me when I got the phone call. We all went out for dinner and celebrated, and I got so drunk, I ate a bowl of unpeeled shrimp with the shells intact. That hurt in the morning, but it’s still one of my favorite memories.

Little did we know how much that job would change things. Less than a year after I started at DC, Paul Levitz stepped down and Diane Nelson arrived as President. DC Comics became DC Entertainment, and the office was split between New York and California.

It was a great deal of change in a relatively short period of time for a company invested with decades of tradition. That made for a controversial and upsetting time for many of the employees who had been at DC for years. I had the benefit of being the newbie, and my wife grew up in California, so were were excited to relocate to Los Angeles, even though it meant leaving our beloved city and so many wonderful friends behind. I accepted my offer to join the new team in Burbank, and off we went.

Working at DC was a dream job. I considered my colleagues like family members, and I got to work with more talented creators than I can list here. One of my favorite collaborators, though, was NetherRealm Studios.

Working with NRS on Injustice: Gods Among Us felt like a big deal. Mortal Kombat was a formative games franchise for me growing up, and the team was just coming off an amazing 2011 reboot of the MK franchise with an incredibly ambitious cinematic Story Mode.

Plus, this would be the AAA game in which my favorite hero, Superman, could finally take center stage. He would be the villain of the story, but a villain motivated by good intentions in response to a horrific tragedy.

The results were nothing short of awesome. From that first game through five years of comics and a blockbuster mobile adaptation, the Injustice universe took off like a bullet train.

I left DC before Injustice launched. It was a dream job, to be sure, but I still had that other dream of being a writer, and for HR reasons, that wasn’t possible while I was a DC employee. So when a Burbank creative agency offered me a leadership role, a better salary, and the freedom to write for anyone I wanted, I knew it was time to go.

Leaving DC felt like a big risk. It doesn’t get bigger than Superman. What would I find in the great beyond? But after getting comfortable in my position at DC, disrupting my routine and transitioning to games marketing was a challenge I needed. My partners and I built a crack team of creatives and account managers. That team pitched and executed campaigns for clients all over the world, and went on to win award after award after award.

My risky marketing venture was now a successful career. It was possible to envision a future where I never wrote again, living comfortably off all those marketing dollars. I had co-written a screenplay since leaving DC, but apart from that, I no longer made the time to write. My wife was pregnant, we’d just a bought a house, and I was traveling on a weekly basis. There were only so many hours in the day, and I needed to make those hours profitable.

But all the money in the world couldn’t fulfill my goal to be a writer. It was at this time that some close friends challenged me to write. Well, not just to write, but to finish something. One comics editor friend put it to me, “If you can’t write a 12-page backup, what can you write?” That put the fire in me. So I wrote a short story that editor, then a short story for another. Then I sold an original comic series (still upcoming!). And then I got a call from an old colleague.

At DC, I worked with an incredible woman named Victoria Setian, or as we call her, Tory. She had been part of Team Interactive with me, and since I’d left DC, she’d also moved, across the street to WB Games, where she was a budding producer on Mortal Kombat X, which of course was being made by some of our favorite developers, NetherRealm Studios.

Tory asked if I wanted to throw in a pitch for an MKX comic series. I knew the lore, I knew the team, what did I have to lose? So, in between agency work and preparing for a new baby, I wrote my pitch.

Then my son was born. A big deal for anyone, an extra big deal for an adopted person who’s never laid eyes on a blood relative before. My son opened his eyes, and for the first time, I saw myself in another human being. The experience was psychedelic. Becoming a father profoundly changed me in ways I’m still figuring out.

Everyone who knew me knew that I wanted to name a son “Clark” someday. Didn’t want to force that on my wife, though, so we came up with an alternative name, and she picked from both names once she saw the baby and got a sense of his personality. He was quiet for a newborn, a little gentleman, she said. She named him Clark Eric, taking his middle name from my father, which was an added surprise. Suffice it to say there wasn’t a dry eye among the Kittelsen men that morning.

The call from my editor at DC came that week while I was still home with the family. I got the gig. How soon could I turn around a new outline?

Thus began the most difficult summer of my life. New house, new baby, new writing gig, and I still had to pitch, travel, and manage the creative team for the agency. There was pressure coming at me from every direction. I became depressed. Something had to give.

Alan Moore gave an interview once where he talked about taking the leap to freelance. He came home to tell his wife he was quitting his industrial job, but when he got there, she told him she was pregnant, so he went back to work. But in time it occurred to him that no matter how poor his writing career might make the family, the baby would survive. They’d find a way. The only question was, would the baby grow up with new shoes and a miserable father who resents his lot in life, or with secondhand shoes and a father who can honestly tell that child she can be anything she wants to be.

This was the choice I faced. Fortunately, I didn’t have to make it alone. I had my wife, my partner, to work it out with me. She drafted a household budget, figured out how lean we could live, how long we might survive, and together we put together Humble Wordsmith, LLC, my freelance business.

I quit the agency job, reduced my monthly expenses to bare minimums, and started working from home. Beyond the comics, I had freelance gigs as a copywriter, a marketing consultant, whatever I could get paid to do. I busted my hump, but no matter how hard I tried, I never seemed to build momentum. That first year, our household income went down by over 75%.

Things picked up a bit when I got hired by WB Games to write story and in-game content for the DC Legends mobile game. With that under my belt, I looked for more games writing gigs, but they were hard to come by. I focused more of my time on Feral Audio, a start-up podcast network was growing steadily.

That’s when I got another call from another old colleague, Senior Producer Adam Urbano. NetherRealm Studios was looking for a writer to join their team and work on the story for Injustice 2. Would I be interested and available? After years of working with NRS on various projects in various capacities, this was the ultimate compliment.

The rest, as they say, is history. Writing for the game is the best dream job I’ve ever had the privilege of working. There was so much work to be done, I handed off my Feral Audio duties to my partners at the network. For the first time since I graduated from college, I could focus on one job title: Writer.

Becoming a father was wonderful but disruptive. Writers are selfish people, we like having lots of time to ourselves to “think” and “be creative” and sometimes even to write. But I can’t be selfish anymore. So with each year since I started freelancing, I’ve worked harder at balancing my family life with my work. The more quality time I spend as a Dad, the more fulfilled I become. I’ve been around for all Clark’s achievements, from walking to talking to his first tantrum. At the agency, I feared I would miss all those priceless memories. Now I have a treasure trove.

As if all this weren’t enough, there was one more surprise waiting for me in the lead-up to launching Injustice 2.

**MINOR I2 SPOILER WARNING** In the game, Superman meets his cousin, Supergirl, for the first time. It’s the first time he’s ever laid eyes on a blood relative. The first time he sees himself in someone else. Just like the first time I saw Clark.

Writing that scene was obviously somewhat personal and emotional for me. Now, a couple years later, I get to live that scene out for myself.

See, ever since my wife became pregnant, I’ve been taking DNA tests, trying to decode my secret origin. They never yielded any close results, but the ethnographic results they provided me were interesting, and I never knew what they could yield, so I kept taking them. Then, just this March, I got a match to a distant cousin. On a lark, I sent her my adoption info, and within hours, she sent me the name of my maternal grandfather. Then we found my grandmother.

We did not find my birth mother. In a soap opera twist, my birth mother was given up for adoption, just like me, so her identity is still a mystery. But I can’t complain. I’ve found new uncles, aunts, and cousins, they’ve welcomed me to the family with open arms, and they want to help find my birth mother.

By finding the birth family my mother never knew, I’ve found another missing piece of myself. Now I can look in the mirror and see the pieces I gave to Clark, as well as the pieces my grandparents gave to me. Sometime soon I’m going to meet my cousins in person for the first time, four Supergirls who share my blood. The game becomes the writer, and the writer becomes the game.

So there it is. My life story as a Superman fan, a writer, and a father. This week I got to celebrate as all three. Remember when I said I graduated from college and my parents were proud of me, but I wasn’t proud of me? I’m proud of me now. I just checked off my bucket list by the dozen.

How am I possibly going to top this experience? I’ll have to figure that out. For now, I’m going to savor this moment with gratitude and satisfaction. After 10 years of professional ups and downs and always searching for the next opportunity, I’m happy where I am, and on the whole, I think it’s just swell. ;)

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artyloreviews · 7 years

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Destiny 2 - The Open Beta

A bad tech demo for a game that should have broken boundaries, but instead alienates its new playerbase by expanding to the PC games market.

The Destiny 2 Beta has come to PC and it looks greater than ever, boasting higher framerates, enhanced texture quality, postprocessing and particle effects. If I were to judge Destiny 2’s debut on PC just on its graphics, I’d say it was a rousing success. Having been liberated from the dreaded 30 FPS lock on consoles, people with a more competitive edge will welcome the higher refresh rates and lower response times in the predominantly PvP focused open beta with open arms. PvE players also get a taste for what is to come with an intro mission, revealing a new threat to the players and the new antagonist - Dominus Ghaul; along with a new strike - “The Inverted Spire”. Due to the linear nature of strikes, it does not offer a lot of replayability and therefore you could expect only about an hour or so of content to get your feet wet, if you’re not interested in partaking in PvP. Currently, the two available player versus player maps involve either a “Counter Strike”–esque deploy/disarm the explosive or a standard capture points gamemode. And judging by the current Twitch viewership for the game, PvP is the single driving force for the open beta. Which warrants another question – where is the rest of Destiny 2?

Considering that the original Destiny featured a semi-expansive open world with procedural questing, which are weirdly not present in the current build, leaves the beta looking like more of a tech demo for the PC crowd, rather than a representation of a game that is set to come out in less than a month. The original had hub spaces where you could meet other players, visit vendors, socialize and go off on missions, while the beta for the sequel finds having an expansive open world MMO completely unnecessary and forces you to play either with your friends over Battle.NET or with random players similar to World of Warcraft’s group finder, completely killing any involvement in the games story and world. Bungie and Activision seem to be unaware that expanding their horizons to PC involves selling this new playerbase the world of Destiny and not just pertaining to the people that have bought and played the original on console. On multiple accounts I’ve seen people refusing to part with $60 in order to play, what they think is a full AAA game, consisting of just a single strike and two PvP modes with no word of the game’s story or open world. I wouldn’t be surprised if newer players consider Destiny 2 to be something akin to the Call of Duty franchise – an extremely linear single player campaign, designed to be a tag-along to the multiplayer PvP modes, providing nothing that hasn’t already been seen on the PC games market for years.

More seasoned players can expect four new planets, featuring Io, Titan, Nessus and Earth’s European Dead Zone, which is said to twice the size of the original’s Cosmodrme. But oddly enough, there seems to be no word of this in the game’s promotional material, which proudly displays the pre-purchase or digital deluxe bonuses, yet the actual information on the game’s content is sparse. The Destiny 2 store page on Battle.NET simply mentions an epic campaign and the presence of cooperative and competitive multiplayer gameplay. Yet, you can clearly see that preordering gets you an experimental exotic trace rifle and a mysterious legendary sword, which for all we know might be the most overpowered weapons in the entire universe, putting you at a disadvantage compared to players, who are willing to part with some more money in order to get these desirable weapons. And the erroneous idea that selling an expansion pass for the so called Expansion I and Expansion II, for which there is no information whatsoever, solidifies the notion that players are still willing to put money on the table on the basis of a promise for future content, that may or may not be utter garbage.

The game itself gives you a choice of three classes, each with their own unique abilities and exotic weaponry – the Titan, the Hunter and the Warlock. Each class also features two sub-classes, which change up the abilities almost entirely. During my time with the beta, I managed to try all but the Titan, which is the designated tank of the three, boasting higher health and resistances, along with a small deployable shield or a charge, which makes him a preferred class for many players interested in PvP. Both the Hunter and the Warlock class seem to share a general damage dealer archetype, where the Warlock is seemingly more focused on using abilities, rather than the high mobility gunslinging of the Hunter.

Upon choosing your flavor of character, you are given an exotic weapon according to your class and you are thrown into the intro mission, where you are attempting to save the day and protect “our” home from that pesky Red Legion, determined to destroy “us” all, as if the writers are begging you: “Please empathize with our world and like our characters!”. Speaking of the characters, in the intro you are introduced to three plot significant individuals, representing the three player classes. Weirdly enough, I struggle to remember even their names, due to two thirds of them feeling like the brownest of cardboard cutouts, which are yet again begging you to empathize with the tragedy that is befalling “your” home, despite making no effort to explain anything at all and promptly disappearing in a cloud of smoke, never to be seen again. The other third of the cast is composed of the overly quirky comic relief character - Kay, who is always about two seconds before breaking the fourth wall and play opposition to the really serious and life-changing events about to unfold before your eyes, as if the writers are making a desperate attempt for their characters to have any appeal at all.

As you are taken by surprise by Ghaul, who strips you of your “light” and proceeds to reveal his genetic superiority by beating you to a pulp and eventually kicking you off the platform of his spaceship, you are magically launched into orbit by way of falling to your death, just after being shown how completely limp and powerless you are. I suppose the marketing team couldn’t be bothered to show any of the European Dead Zone, where I would suppose you would fall right after the intro. Instead of that you are sent to what I could only describe as a mission select screen, where you are again given the rich assortment for three entire modes.

PvP is divided into a “low intensity” and “high intensity” variant. The former of which is a supposedly casual capture points experience, which oddly enough isn’t all that low intensity. The latter competitive mode, called “Countdown” puts you in a “cops and robbers” scenario where one team has to set off an explosive, while the other team has to stop that from happening by either disarming the bomb or killing the entire enemy team. There is of course the caveat that upon dying in this high intensity mode, you are left waiting for upwards of thirty seconds in order to see if anyone is going to revive you or will the entire team get wiped out, trying to save a single dead member, which in term leaves you waiting a lot, rather that the quick kill – quick respawn action of the supposed lesser intensity mode. Despite that, it seems that Hunters get a very slight advantage, since both modes often take place in close quarters, and every hunter has increased maneuverability and gets an exotic hand cannon, which is more of a miniature shotgun, rather than a pistol.

The included PvE strike is a little bit more interesting, by featuring some colorful writing and actually showing a bit of the world this game inhabits. The Inverted Spire sets you on a investigation of a mining site where the Red Legion have apparently unearthed something ancient and terrible. Even then, you still need to traverse a fairly large map that provides multiple occasions for you to completely utilize your character’s kit. You are given platforms to double jump towards or tactical positions where you can take out enemies at long range by using your sniper, or even tight spots with high enemy density where you can utilize your abilities. You would think that The Inverted Spire would be the single redeeming quality of the Destiny 2 Beta, but upon closer inspection and a few more playthroughts, you start to notice that some design decisions were seemingly made on a whim. For instance, somewhere around the middle of the strike you start getting thrown about by jump pads, which sometimes negate fall damage, while in others they outright throw you against a wall, leaving you to fall to your death. Even one of the final boss’ mechanics involves him deleting the floor, yet being dealt fall damage is hit or miss, often killing you in zones with restricted respawn when you least expect it.

In the end, I have no doubt that Destiny 2 will be a great game, but seeing how Activision and Bungie are treating their sequel’s debut onto the PC games market, by botching an essential beta period, filled with bugs, pre-order and digital deluxe malarkey and overall bad developer practices is not going to be in their favor when the game eventually releases onto the platform. But then again, it might turn out to be a pleasant surprise for those, who are willing to give it a shot, despite the horrible pre-release.

#beta #review #first impressions #games #pc #console #activision #bungie #battlenet #pve #pvp

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weare1520 · 7 years

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1520 BLOG: 1520'S TOP 10 GAMES OF 2016

Hey everybody,

2016 has been a weird year video games. It brought us several nice surprises, plenty of critically acclaimed and daring AAA games, a continuous stream of indie gems, and of course the record breaking, history making Pokemon Go. It however was also the year in which the AAA games market started to really deteriorate. In an industry as unpredictable as the video games industry, who knows if that trend will continue, but we personally expect some big changes in the next few years. What those will be is anyones guess. When it comes to 2017, we look forward to the Nintendo Switch, to finding out if consumer VR will make it after all and if incremental consoles will actually become a real thing, and of course to playing some great new games. For now though, let's take a minute to look at back at our favorite games of 2016.

1. Mafia 3 (Xbox One)

Mafia 3 is a special game. It was rightfully applauded and criticized for how it tackled racial and broader political tensions in the American South of 60s. It was also applauded and criticized for its mission design and gameplay. Some people said it was repetitive and lazy, while some (most notably Far Cray 2 fans) enjoyed its potential for randomness and chaos. I, for what it's worth, loved it. It reminded me a lot of Assassin's Creed Syndicate's open world and mission design, which is great. It had great writing, great characters, some beautifull vistas and amazing gunplay (which, even 10 years after Gears of War, is apparently not a given). It might not have been a critical darling (shoutout to Waypoint's Austin Walker and Danielle Riendeau for riding hard for Mafia 3), but it is our favorite game of the year 2016.

2. Tokyo Mirage Sessions (WiiU)

Tokyo Mirage Sessions is a Persona-like JRPG made by Atlus, set in the Japanese idol scene, only that scene is being invaded by demons that feed on artistry and talent and you have to fight them by summoning characters from Nintendo's Fire Emblem series - unless you'd rather walk around in a colorful version of Tokyo and eat bagels of course, because you can do that too. If that isn't enough for you to understand why it is easily one of the best games of 2016, I don't know how to help you. Just look at this video of an actual attack move in the game, I guess.

3. Fire Emblem Fates (3DS)

I have to be honest, even after playing countless of hours of both Birthright and Revelations (two of the three different games released under the name Fire Emblem Fates), I'm not sure I actually know how to play Fire Emblem. I guess I'm just bad at strategy games. That doesn't change the fact that the gameplay is strangely addicting, the writing is great and the cutscenes are beautiful. Thank God for Phoenix Mode.

4. Pokemon Sun/Moon (3DS)

Some people, both critics and random people, will tell you that this is the game that significantly changed the Pokemon formula. Those people, most of which appear to be people brought back to the series by Pokemon Go, are wrong. Yes, they made some changes (in my humble opinion, mostly bad ones - where the fuck is Super Training?!?), but it's still very much a fairly traditional Pokemon game. That just means that it is another entry in what might just secretly be the best and most consistent video game franchise of all time though, so we'll take it.

5. Gears Of War 4 (Xbox One)

Gear of War 4 is a return to form for the series after the disappointment that was Judgement (although even that entry still had better shooting mechanics than most other games - get it together, developers). It's really what you'd expect from a Gears Of War game, only this time with millennials in it (do they have millennials in the Gears universe?!). It's still the mechanically best third person shooter series on the market, it still has great split screen co-op, and the competitive multiplayer is still comically brutal and hard as hell.

6. Battlefield 1 (Xbox One)

Unlike many AAA games this year (including this year's Call Of Duty), Battlefield 1 outperformed publisher expectations. I give it a lot of credit to DICE and EA for realizing that the future warfare trend is a sinking ship. The fact that Battlefield 1 is set in World War 1, with its rudimentary machinery and basic guns, makes it feel weirdly fresh compared to the fast paced shooters that have dominated the last few years. It also has the best Battlefield multiplayer since Bad Company 2, meaning it's absolutely amazing.

7. Steep (Xbox One)

If the idea of a somewhat realistic feeling snowboarding/skiing (the rest is fun but whatever) game with a beautiful open world appeals to you, Steep is the game for you. If not, I imagine it is boring as hell. The beautiful open world, based on the alps, is largely about discovering drop points (which let you fast travel) and being able to just ride for a long time. Just driving down the mountain with no particular goal in mind delivered some of my favorite gaming moments of 2016. The missions are more of a menu-based thing, although you can start one just by driving through a circle if it happens to be on your path. It's all very seamless. Once you started a mission and fuck up you can press Y and instantly respawn, old school Tony Hawk style. Steep is a criminally overlooked gem and we're still amazed and thankfull that Ubisoft released a AAA winter sports game in 2016. We'd love to see more games like it.

8. Firewatch (Xbox One)

Firewatch is what some would call a "walking simulator", but if you ask me, it's a narrative driven adventure game. The game and its mysterious story are set in a beautifully rendered national park, which is really the main draw of Firewatch. It allows you to get lost in the moment, even if you don't follow the story. The fact that it was made by some of our favorite people in the video game industry makes it even better.

9. Dishonored 2 (Xbox One)

Dishonored 2, a steampunk first person stealth game, is a lot like Dishonored 1. In some ways that is too bad, because we would have liked to seen more from a next gent Dishonored, but Dishonored 1 was was also a really, really good game, and this one might be even better. What really stands out about this series is how it allows you to solve problem in a multitude of ways. The amount of stuff you can do in this game is sometimes overwhelming, but always worth exploring. Also, the world building is some of the best in the industry. Don't sleep on Dishonored 2.

10. Dragon Quest 7 (3DS)

Dragon Quest 7 for the Nintendo 3DS is a remake of the original Dragon Quest 7 for the PS1, one of the more unpopular entries in the series. The 3DS version still does not magically turn it into one of the best Dragon Quest games, but it heavily improved the game regardless. It's fun, it's charming, it's deep, it's occasionally annoyingly tough and grindy, and it is long as shit. What I'm trying to say is that it is a Dragon Quest game and I'll always want another Dragon Quest game.

Honorable Mentions

Stardew Valley, which I've only started playing last week, is pretty damn good, but I still think it's a little too blatant in its copying of Harvest Moon. Rune Factory 4, a game made by the actual minds behind the Harvest Moon (now Story Of Seasons) series, came out several years ago, but I played and enjoyed it a lot in 2016. I also played a lot of Tony Hawk's Underground for the GameCube, a game from 2003, and it's still better than pretty much every game on our list.

That's it for 2016. Thanks for riding with us.

One Love,

M | 1520

#Video Games #Gaming #Games Of The Year #GOTY #Mafia 3 #Nintendo

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eagle-eyez · 3 years

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In BioWare's Mass Effect, you play an alpha solider, well-known in military circles across the galaxy for “what you did in _____” [(you get to) fill in the blank with some vague heroic undertaking]. Beyond that, the accolades involve being the person with the lowest stamina in the world and someone who never quite got around to figuring out the concept of jumping.

Now, not the only fate of billions of lives rests on your shoulders, but you also gotta show them no-good alien species why humans are the undisputed No 1 anywhere and everywhere, forever and ever. Nobody puts baby in the corner.

Starting out with the franchise today, some 14 years after the release of the first game, can be a bit of a jarring experience. While certainly a polished and optimised, the age shows in almost every aspect of the game. Does that mean one should navigate to avoid the pull of this franchise in 2021? Let's find out.

The remastered trilogy (yeah, we don’t talk about you-know-which-one), released last month, seemed to be targeted primarily at the fans of old, as a chance to re-live the experience on the new generation of machines, with better graphics/gameplay. And fans of the series, there are many. But the Legendary Edition (as the re-release is called), also offers a chance to players unfamiliar with the franchise (believe it or not, they do exist) to jump into the shoes of the protagonist, the above-mentioned elite and entirely clueless human soldier Commander Shepard, for some space exploration and alien butt-kicking.

Considered by some to be one of the greatest of all time, the influential action role-playing video game today comes, like few others of similar stature, with a disclaimer: You'd better like it.

And there is indeed much to like, and love. But all that glitters is certainly not gold here. For first-timers like yours truly, while it throws in some unexpectedly delightful surprises, it does come across like a game that perhaps hasn’t aged all too gracefully.

Before we get further, a side note: Just so we’re on the same page, the game being discussed here is the first in the series, simply called, Mass Effect; and not the entire Mass Effect trilogy.

It would do well to bear in mind that the game is a remaster, and not a remake. So while the graphics are upgraded and some mechanics improved upon, the core gameplay remains the same. For example, the combat, which is a big part of the game, is as basic as it gets. Take cover, point and shoot. (When in crouched cover, moving sideways remains a sight to behold.) You do get to choose two squad mates (from a roster of six) to assist you during each mission (more on them in a bit), but there is little depth to it. Meanwhile, the Mako, a somewhat futuristic-looking tank-like vehicle in which you spend way too much time, drives like a broken supermarket trolley on an oil spill.

But what about the story, the storytelling, the characters and all that good stuff?

Well, here is where things get interesting.

Spanning a galaxy, the scope of the tale told is vast; but like much else in the game, it revolves around conflict and acts of violence. Fighting is more often than not the ultimate, approaching virtuous, means to a goal. While it is a reasonable argument that in the game’s universe, the aggression of the enemy needs to be met with equal force, whenever it does come up, diplomacy is almost looked down upon, something to trick oneself out of. Although fantastical in its plot and world, the game is plain in its imitation of life, whether it's the portrayal of racism, the tussle for power among classes or the forever wars. One wonders then if the core story could have been elevated with a bit more ambition and tact.

Like the combat, how the said story is told also feels outdated by today’s standards. While on one hand you start off playing with a character of considerable renown, having seen and done far more than any of your average Joe; at the same time you seem to have no knowledge of even the most basic things and happenings in the world around you. Living under a rock would be a grave understatement. Subsequently, the way exposition works here is by means of you bluntly asking other characters questions on par with if water is wet. The resulting effect is humorous at best, bewildering more often. (Tip: Going through the codex a couple of times makes the whole experience much better.)

But where the game excels, even by today’s standards, is the fabulous voice acting, carried by an incredible cast. It’s difficult to stress upon how much the voices lend weight to bringing the various characters to life. Apart from the numerous personalities you run into across the galaxy, you are surrounded by a core team of seven (six squad mates and the pilot of your spaceship, the Normandy), each with a reasonably rounded backstory (although many of them just happen to latch on to you — more or less swearing their lives and alliances — within moments of meeting you for the first time, so there’s that). After each mission, you can interact with the said characters who confide in you more and more as the game progresses, providing much grounding to your expansive, action-oriented space opera. Weirdly enough, while the voice acting is aces, the overall sound mixing is somewhat all over the place. At times a character will be barely audible (looking at you, Kaiden Alenko), while certain instances trigger speaker-splitting sounds (the ear-splitting Mass Relays were only fixed in the latest patch).

As mentioned earlier, there are times when the story does leave you in awe. But it’s not the big set pieces or action sequences (some of which are pretty absorbing as well), rather what the game leaves to your imagination. Moments like when one of your squad mates, Tali'Zorah, describes her home, the Flotilla (or the Migrant Fleet), a massive collection of starships that became home to her species and how life is like there. Or when Ashley Williams (another of your squad mates) talks about her family, giving a glimpse onto her life and childhood. Or when the leader of a small settlement on Feros, a planet of ancient crumbling skyscrapers, talks about finding tranquillity amid the ruins, making you see the surrounding in a new light. That the mission ends in a rather (un)expected manner isn't the point here.

These are the moments that make you take a step back and truly appreciate the world-building and story potential of the game. And stay with you long after you’re done ticking-off your mission objectives and overcoming dramatic odds.

By the time you finish the game, it is hard not to argue that beyond its janky mechanics and at times questionable themes, Mass Effect has a heart. Although I believe that arguments on the lines of whether the game would have been such a success if it was released today to be rather futile, it does merit to ask if the game is worth diving into for the first time in 2021.

In pure technical terms, no one would be surprised to know that the game does not match up to the contemporary standards. Gaming as a whole has grown leaps and bounds in the last decade and half since Shepard became a household name in the community. Playing Mass Effect today on the back of any current AAA games is almost a sensory shock. But the simplicity of the mechanics also help make it more navigable if you're in just for the story, and would like to move on to the next offering of the franchise.

So, while the remaster does not quite live up to the years of hype behind the game, it does manage to offer a glimpse into what the best version of this world could be. And perhaps most importantly, it lets the mind wander into the possibilities of what stories and secrets may lie across corners of the galaxy, beyond conflict.

Game played on PlayStation 4 Pro. Review code provided by publisher.

source https://www.firstpost.com/tech/gaming/mass-effect-legendary-edition-stray-thoughts-conflicts-and-whats-left-in-the-imagination-9717641.html

#Technology

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aurelliocheek · 4 years

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Introducing Slow Gaming

How a former The Witcher developer has had enough of AAA Games and is inventing a whole new genre.

Artur Ganszyniec was Lead Story Designer and one of the most influential people in the development of The Witcher. At some point, however, he was tired of the stress and pressure. He left CD Projekt Red and founded Different Tales, the somewhat different studio in 2018. A studio exploring the idea of slow gaming. A studio that wants to tell other stories. Stories rooted in the common human experience. Stories that you discover at your own pace. Stories with the potential to bring about change.

Their first game is Wanderlust Travel Stories. This isn’t a typical game; Different Tales name it a “digital travel experience”. You take the role of various modern travellers, live their adventures and shape their stories. Each character has his own whishes, hopes, and fears. You’re both the reader and the storyteller. You guide the characters’ actions and experience ther emotions. With every choice you make, you create a journey of your own.

During his many travels Jacek spent some time in Thailand, and brought back the picture.

Wanderlust Travel Stories was created by a team of travelers, journalists, artists, and game makers and was inspired by real-life experiences. There are over 300,000 words of text in this adventure including four novels and five short stories. Relish in discovery and awe, longing and hope as you journey from Africa to Antarctica, from Europe to Asia. The change brought by this odyssey will be your own. A bridge between literary experiences and gaming.

Slow Gaming Movement is a response to the rising need for deeper, more grounded games and healthier practices in the game development industry. The goal of Slow Games isn’t to challenge skills and reflexes, but assumptions and feelings. Driven by emotions more complex than anxiety and fear of losing, they allow gamers to play at their own pace — and grow. Slow Games stem from views and ideas important to the team. They aren’t designed as toys. They are tales of common human experience. Wanderlust Travel Stories, available for PC, iOS and Android, is such a game. We had the chance to talk with Co-Founder and Game Designer Artur Ganszyniec about Wanderlust and his studio Different Tales.

Making Games: Please tell us briefly about your career in the gaming industry. Artur Ganszyniec: I started working on the first Witcher game as a dialogue writer, later became the Lead Story Designer for the franchise, and I left CD Projekt Red a year or so before the release of The Witcher 2. For the next six years I worked on mobile games like Puzzle Craft or Another Case Solved. Then I spend some time in 11 bit studios, designing a prototype for a new project. And since June 2018 I am a part of Different Tales, and our first release is a playable documentary called Wanderlust Travel Stories. I also teach Game Design on Lodz University of Technology.

Monkeys are quite photogenic, but they can also be aggressive. If you’re not a profesional photographer, proceed with care.

Why did you turn away from AAA games and make Indie Games now? Have you ever regretted your decision? Making AAA games became just too much for me – the crunch, the constant stress of working in a big organization, the emotional cost of working on the same project for many years. One day I realized that I need something different, and quit. Making smaller games provides the same, or even more, opportunities to experiment and learn. The difference is that I manage to work on smaller projects in a way that is not damaging to my personal life and mental health. I failed to do that when working on AAA games. Have I regretted my decision? Sure, there were moments when I missed the thrill and adrenaline rush of working on high budget games, but overall I think it was a good decision for me.

You call your game Wanderlust a „Slow Game“. What does this mean and why is this your preferred genre now? We had this idea of games that play on emotions other than fear, frustration and triumph, games that give you space to reflect on how you feel and what you think. When we started exploring the idea, we noticed many similarities to the Slow Living movement (Slow Food, Slow Fashion etc.), so we started using the term Slow Gaming, to talk about games like ours. I mean games that are grounded in local inspirations and personal experiences, games that do not exploit fears but encourage growth, games that trust you and treat you like an adult, games that are made in a way that is not harmful to the team. That are the ideals we strive for, and now we are discussing them with the industry, players, press, to see how others see Slow Games and what they need from such a movement.

Joanna, who wrote about Barcelona, had lived there years ago, and Jacek flew there, especially to take the pictures for the game.

What inspired you to Wanderlust? The inspiration was very personal. My business partner, Jacek Brzezinski (which whom I worked on the first Witcher, where he was the Project Lead), is a traveller. He visited over 110 countries, went around the globe, and travelling is a very important part of his life. When we met and started Different Tales, Jacek was working on a game about travelling – a backpacker simulator. We took this idea and after a few prototypes, we knew that we were more interested in simulating the feelings and experiences of travelling, not only the boring logistics of the process. And so Wanderlust Travel Stories was born – a playable documentary, something between gaming and literary experience, a collection of stories inspired by the common human need to learn about distant places.

Talking about the development process: What problems did you encounter in general and how did you deal with them? The most interesting problem we encountered was that we had no benchmarks on the market. We knew that we wanted to make a playable documentary, so travel magazines, travelogues and interactive fiction were points of reference, but we had no idea, how to combine showing the world as it was, with a story shaped by player’s choices. We gathered a team of travel journalists, writers and translators, and started with research. Only when we knew what places and what problems we wanted to document, we started designing the stories. The solution we found was that we created fictional characters with their own engaging narratives, and we placed them in a real, well-researched world. Players, by making choices, shape the experience and the emotions of the characters, while learning about the world through the characters’ eyes. This is the magic of games as a medium – the story moves forward only because I, the player, make decisions and then experience the consequences first hand. I am no longer an observer, but an actor and the story is no longer something I read or saw, but something that happened to me. This is a powerful learning tool.

The American short story is based on Karolina’s documentary book about Coney Island.

Which feature are you particularly proud of? I think the whole team made a great job and I’m very proud to be a part of this production. Personally I like how we managed to show that what we see when we travel, is coloured by our emotions. In the game, the player’s choices influence the character’s mood, and the mood changes large portions of the text. So, for example, Paris can be a beautiful city when the hero is optimistic, and a dirty, overwhelming metropolis, when the hero is sad. The system works in the background, almost unnoticed, but I really like how it makes every story unique and personally aligned with the player’s choices.

How did you finance the development? We were financed by Walkabout Games — a Polish game dev studio incubator. We pitched them the idea, and they helped us with the business side of the production and also acted as the publisher for Wanderlust.

The (lack of) state support for the games industry is a much-discussed topic in Germany. What about it in Poland? The game industry in Poland is still growing, at least that is what I see, and games are becoming a hot topic for Polish politicians. There are some financing programs you can apply to, but I think that the state is still trying to figure out how to approach the matter, as the biggest state-funded program GameINN, doesn’t work very well, at least in my opinion. Most of the devs reach for private funding, try their luck on the stock exchange, or work with various accelerators or investment companies.

The Wanderlust team. From left: Jacek, Artur, Piotr, Mateusz, Joanna, Karolina and Marta.

How satisfied are you with the reviews, the feedback from the community and the sales so far? We knew — when we were working on Wanderlust — that this would be a tough product to sell. Many of our perfect customers are not gamers, but consumers of culture in general, and reaching them is a tricky thing when you come from a gaming background. We managed to reach outside the gaming market in Poland, but not in the USA, at least not yet. The reviews we received were great, and so is the feedback from the community, so we keep working to bring Wanderlust Travel Stories to as many platforms as we can, and hope for the best.

Artur Ganszyniec Co-Founder and Game Designer

Having grown up isolated behind the Iron Curtain, Artur was fascinated with books about the wonders of the world. He was the Lead Story Designer on The Witcher – a game awarded for its immersive narrative. Artur is also the person behind Puzzle Craft, the winner of Best of App Store 2012 in New Ways to Play. Now he’s crafting the Wanderlust experience.

The post Introducing Slow Gaming appeared first on Making Games.

Introducing Slow Gaming published first on https://leolarsonblog.tumblr.com/

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entergamingxp · 4 years

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Assassin’s Creed is a Lost Memory of What It Once Was

May 8, 2020 5:00 PM EST

The mainstream success of Assassin’s Creed has me happy as a fan, but the sacrifices it made makes me question if it was worth it.

The Assassin’s Creed franchise has had a rollercoaster history of development and direction. When the first game released in 2007, it gave me a fresh perspective of creativity that I haven’t really experienced in another AAA franchise since. From the beginning, the stealth action-adventure series has delved into different important eras of history through simulation. This created a balance between living out these characters’ stories with the Assassin Brotherhood, all while the main character of the series is learning how to be an assassin in the modern-day. Even though this is still relevant to the more recent entries of the franchise, its identity of a unique open-world experience has fleeted away.

Assassin’s Creed has become one of those rare franchises for me where I will always get the latest entry; Ubisoft has earned that for me due to the experiences that the franchise delivers. I love climbing up towers to synchronize and Leap of Faith into a barrel of hay, or killing targets and speaking to them in the “white” room before their death. There is also the fact that you are an assassin with (normally) an incredible outfit. We have seen games like Horizon Zero Dawn and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild borrow ideas that were introduced in Assassin’s Creed like viewpoints, but it isn’t the same because that is a part of the franchise’s identity. However, over the years, the elements that have given Assassin’s Creed its own identity have felt diminished to attract a more mainstream audience.

“Assassin’s Creed has become one of those rare franchises for me where I will always get the latest entry.”

Up to the latest entry in the franchise, Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, I like to consider that there have been three different eras of Assassin’s Creed. The first is what I call “the Desmond era.” The Desmond era consists of every mainline game from the original Assassin’s Creed to Assassin’s Creed III. During this time, Desmond was the main character and focus of the overall story. Most of those who have played the Assassin’s Creed franchise from the beginning will likely tell you that they do not care much for the modern-day/Desmond story. I am not one of those people and I believe based on what was originally planned for the franchise, it could have done some incredibly great things.

For those unfamiliar with Assassin’s Creed, the series began with the lead protagonist Desmond Miles, who is someone with an ancestral connection to the Assassin Brotherhood. After being captured by a company known as Abstergo, Desmond is put inside a machine called the Animus which allows him to live the lives of his previous Assassin ancestors to learn their skills. He also learns more about the Assassins’ enemy known as the Templars, an organization determined to create a utopia under their lead. During modern times, the Templars are the creators of Abstergo. After learning that those of the current creed infiltrated the company, Desmond escapes with them to train and become an Assassin to take down Abstergo.

“Over the years, the elements that have given Assassin’s Creed its own identity have felt diminished to attract a more mainstream audience.”

At the time of playing through these titles leading up to Assassin’s Creed III, my friends (as well as myself) thought that the plan was for the final game to be set during the modern era as Desmond finally unlocks all the skills he needs to become an Assassin. But that never came to be. In Assassin’s Creed III, Desmond was killed off in an attempt to save the planet, leaving the future of the series up in the air. Desmond’s voice actor, Nolan North, has spoken about the character and the pitch that he was first given that didn’t come to fruition, due to rumored differences between Ubisoft and former creative director Patrice Désilets. Désilets was the creative director for Assassin’s Creed, Assassin’s Creed II, and Brotherhood, before parting ways with the studio in the summer of 2010. So with no main protagonist and the series’ lead director gone, where does the franchise go from here?

Starting with Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag, this begins “the Fallout era” where our new main protagonist is technically a random Abstergo employee. This particularly wasn’t a bad thing, because it showed us the inner workings of how Abstergo and the Templars functioned as an organization, but it was clear that Ubisoft didn’t have a direction with the modern-day story. Assassin’s Creed Rogue is more or less a direct sequel to Black Flag when it came to Abstergo’s in-house story and ended with a major cliffhanger that, as far as I’m aware, never gets resolved fully. The next two entries, Assassin’s Creed Unity and Syndicate, are nearly absent from the real-world story aside from some interaction with lesser side characters from Desmond’s era, but to a degree that it isn’t even worth mentioning.

“The purpose behind playing as these Assassins to directly affect what is happening outside of the Animus has been relatively absent.”

It wasn’t until “the New era” where things have begun to shape up with a new protagonist named Layla. The purpose behind playing as these Assassins to directly affect what is happening outside of the Animus has been relatively absent. That being said, there have definitely been entries that try their best with what they could to move this storyline forward, but in recent years, that is hardly the case.

Following Syndicate, Ubisoft decided to revamp the franchise by turning the series into an action-RPG with Assassin’s Creed Origins. Initially, this didn’t bother me as long as Origins kept the things that made Assassin’s Creed the series that it was. My only hopes were that it had fun stealth gameplay, the white room where the Assassin you were playing as spoke to the templar you killed before their death, and those compelling moments of storytelling that you can’t get anywhere else.

“Assassin’s Creed is one of my favorite video game franchises, but in its current state, I feel like it is now just a dark shadow looming over what made the franchise special in the first place.”

When it came to Assassin’s Creed Origins, I loved Bayek as a character, his story, and how it all ties into the Brotherhood. All of the things I wanted from an Assassin’s Creed game were in Origins, but after playing more than 25 hours of the latest entry, Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, nothing of what makes the franchise special to me is present. Origins was able to strike a good balance between being a stealth game as well as an action-RPG, but Odyssey removes the stealth aspects almost completely. Traveling through the massive expanses of Greece, most of the time I find it difficult even to find a pile of hay to hide in. To me, Odyssey feels more like Shadow of War or The Witcher III with an Assassin’s Creed skin over it. I simply can’t recognize it compared to any of the other titles in the series.

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With the upcoming Assassin’s Creed Valhalla and Ubisoft taking a year break, I hope that this next entry in the series is a return to form. My main hope is that Valhalla brings back a narrative where the historical and real-world aspects go hand-in-hand with each other. I want Valhalla to make me feel like an actual Assassin again with its gameplay instead of something I can expect from the majority of other AAA open-world titles. Assassin’s Creed is one of my favorite video game franchises, but in its current state, I feel like it is now just a dark shadow looming over what made the franchise special in the first place.

*Feature art credited to Teadsantap on Reddit.

May 8, 2020 5:00 PM EST

from EnterGamingXP https://entergamingxp.com/2020/05/assassins-creed-is-a-lost-memory-of-what-it-once-was/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=assassins-creed-is-a-lost-memory-of-what-it-once-was

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