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mrs-falcon · 3 years

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Vincent is finally getting his own ref sheet :3 This character is part of universe I created called "Shadows of the Real World", partly drawn, partly written complex story. Character created - 2017 (along with Raven) BASIC INFO: Current name: Vincent Jackson Former/Original name: Dmitry Sergeewich Trutliv (Дмирий Сергеевич Трутлив) (hopefuly english ppl will understand the pronounces xd ) - exhausted (looks like he's chill with almost everything) - can get easily mad/upset - quite slim figure after his mother - can be a loving parent/partner - caring about others he loves - hates his father - took care of Raven he'd found on streets Family: - father: Sergei Vasileevich Trutliv (Сергей Василеёвич Трутлив) (Black Yukon wolf) - mother: Alexandra Antonovna Trutliv (Александра Антоновна Трутлив) (Arctic x Eurasian wolf) - "stepmother": Melanie Manson (Shiba inu dog) - half-brother: Frederich Manson (Black Yukon wolf x Shiba inu dog) - partner: Sherab Azuki (irbis) - daughter: Rozaline Jackson (hybrid) Gender: male Age: 40 years (from the beginning of the written story) Height: 190 cm Species: inclination to Eurasian wolf Spoken languages: - native: Russian - first foreign language: English (American) - second foreign language: Japanese Born country: Russia Currently living in: USA Job: (currently) security guard in metal factory DETAILED HISTORY: [*WARNING - following text contains lots of triggers and mature stuff (such as abuse mention, violence, character's trauma mention,...), please read at your own risk] Born in a cage? First what Vincent, formerly Dmitry, remembers is aggressive voice going toward his mother. His father was a rich (yes - rich, not wealthy) and very famous person in his country for his position - Sergei was a successful communistic leader, business man and ... a professional rook. Living on far east part of Russia wasn't easy and, of course, not cheap. Thanks to Sergei's intelligence and extensive contacts he could easily manipulate with all people in his region, which led to exploitation of the lower classes working under his control, making Sergei's life much more "rich". However, a typical successful businessman has to have a perfect partner, right? Sergei's and Alexandra's encounter was a pure coincidence - Sergei needed a proper wife who would do anything according to her husband, Alexandra needed a man who would take care of her and financially secure her. Alexandra was a very young lady from a poor family. But what was worse than living from hand to hand was her untreated illness - fragile bones, fragile mind and a slowly growing cancer - that all was a secret Sergei never found out about. And due to Sergei's aggression and growing presure from his work and political position, Alexandra had to suffer slowly... and no-one could do anything about it. Not every home is the best After Alexandra gave birth to her son, Dmitry, she became even more fragile and exhausted. Her husband didn't care anymore, he only did his best to keep himself as a successful person in strangers' eyes. And because of that Alexandra had to gave up on her faith, who's a Orthodox Christian, and started to centralize around Vincent, her only hope. However, even in presence of their only child Sergei didn't hesitate to relieve his aggression on his wife. Alexandra was helpless - she could not leave without Dmitry, without money, without her own strength. Alexandra suffered five more years until she finally reached her prayed heaven, leaving her only son behind... Since Alexandra gave bith to her son, her health condition became worse, every day, and with this thought Sergei blamed little Dmitry from Alexandra's death and started developing aggression towards him. Little Dmitry, confused by why his father started hating him so much, tried to enjoy his free days somewhere outside. However, making friends with their long lasting rivals, tigers, was not acceptable, right? Little Dmitry learned another hurtful lesson. It took long time for Dmitry to get used to this life - he hated it, but he could not hate his birth country... which was taken away from him another five years later. Sergei could not handle the situation of his low class employees who finally after so many years started a revolution. Sergei's and Dmitry's home was in a centre of revolution - bricks broke the windows, fire engulfed the furniture... Sergei and Dmitry had to literally run away from this place, once called home, and run away from their country. Better start? America - a place of golden streets, a place of free lands. That was Sergei's new target. But was is exactly as he dreamd of? As other immigrants Sergei and Dmitry lived in crowded flats filled with filth and limited basic life needs. Dmitry was tangled to his father's back luck, whether he wanted it or not. But his father had still contacts. After few months they could move into a large, already rotten and almost fell apart, building with no-one around. Sergei saw a new change, Dmitry only worse start. His father started to get bored of his son's company and started neglect his son even more than before. Dmitry was sick of his new life, worse that before, but Dmitry's new "mother" was even bigger nightmare than he could imagine - a simple streetwalker only few years older than him. However, young people can get surprisingly mean. After Sergei's new mate, Melanie, found out about his fundations, she started to make a plan how to force Sergei leave all of his legacy for her. Best idea? Give him a better heir than Dmitry was. Get onto your own feet Dmitry could not handle the current situation in his life and decided to run away from his abuse father and his new rival. But who would accept a half-wild wolf cup in thier nest? With people's prejudices Dmitry started calling streets his new home since he had no other choice. And returning to his father? He would rather die than that. It didn't take Dmitry long to understand money are a key to, at least, standart life. But due to his low age no-one would employ a kid into their business... except for black markets and perverts. Ready or not, Dmitry knew living only from garbage wouldn't keep him alive for long. As a shadow, as a no longer officially existing person, Dmitry started making money through "gentle work" which left a great trauma on him. However, his first luck appeared - his body started to get features after his father and Dmitry started getting offers for street fighting. It wasn't exactly the best, but definitely better that his previous experience. "Vincent... now this sounds like a fighter!" Now Vincent earned his new identity and could finally afford a smaller flat and a proper food. He visited his "family" only few times since that. After that, he tried to focuse on his new, hopefully better, life. Luck! Luck! Luck! But that doesn't last forever With higher earnings everything went much more smooth. Vincent asked for asylum in a new region for young adults who aspired to find a job a leave the place as soon as possible. The workers of that place gave him few tips for work with recommendation. Another long years of his life Vincent kept up like a security guard. Was it a coincidence or not? The same working place was requested for a quite young female irbis immigrant, Vincent's future life partner - Sherab Azuki. Both of them did not honour the ancient traditions since Azuki was brought up by pair of ibex. Vincent knew this will be his life partner and tried his best to not lose her - he learned Japanese, found another two jobs for better earnings and even bought their own flat, that all only for his beloved Azuki. At the top of it, the pair was lucky to have their common child - Rozaline, tehir sweet Rose. Vincent could not even express his excitement and joy for his new, true family. His daughter and partner gave him new energy for their future life. Vincent tried to do his best he could, tried to be better father then his was. However, Vincents death number appeared once again... After the wolf came back from his work, he could not believe his eyes - Rose and Azuki were murdered. Who could do that? Someone who feared ancestros such as Vincent and Azuki were? Someone who did not accept hybrids? Someone who new Vincent was related to Sergei? There were so many options yet no-one could finds the true sinner of this terrible crime. Waiting for death The new energy quickly vanished, Vincent lost all of his jobs, his flat, his new hope. What did he do wrong for such terrible things that happened to him? Lost in emptiness of his inner world and left with despair, Vincent didn't try to continue in his life. Isolated at the far edge of the large city, somewhere in the middle of ruins, he waited for death to consume him. To quicken his "process" he started damaging his organs, especially lungs. But to the wolf's surprise his younger brother, now successful businessman like their father was, offered him a help. Vincent didn't trust his half-brother, but Frederich's current power over regions forced Vincent to join him. What an irony they ended up in the same place where it all began - in the old rotten building, now one of the greatest and high productionable metal factories in northern part of USA. Vincent wasn't surprised that this all inherited Frederich, now that their father is gone. But why so sudden? Even though Vincent was offered a job and a place to live, his current life was like a street's rat - hidding from the world and waiting for death... That all changed a young cat Vincent found behind the factory almost death, yet still breathing... -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Even tho Vincent's past was more drastic, Vincent's and Raven's lives are somehow very alike... This kind of "storytelling" leaves a lots of quetions. Does the Sergei's death and Vincent's murdered family have a connection? And what about Frederich? We haven't heard much of him in this post... Artwork, Vincent, story & SotRW (universe) © MrsFalcon (FalconFeatherTheCat) (me)

#my art #vincent #sotrw #reference sheet #ref sheet #drawing #digital art #digital drawing #Digital Illustration #digital #wolf #anthropomorphic #anthro furry #anthro #original character #original #my oc

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chirpingtiger · 5 years

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Strange’s Plan was a Bit Darker Than We Thought

In Avengers: Infinity War, Dr. Strange looks through the future to see every possible combination of options, and announces that they will only win in one of them.

Now, keep in mind, Dr. Strange is always thinking about the bigger picture.

He knows that even if they succeed in keeping the stones away from Thanos right now - even if Strange were to lock the Time stone in another dimension that Thanos could never get to, and if Wanda Maximoff were to destroy the Mind stone, leaving Thanos with only four - that Thanos will simply build up his army and continue killing half of all life, one planet at a time, just like he has been doing up until this point.

The stones were always a shortcut for Thanos.

In keeping the stones form him, they’ve only slowed down his progress. They’ve done nothing to truly stop him.

Strange is not looking to delay Thanos. He’s looking to make sure that he’s stopped. Permanently.

Strange only sees one way that they can truly win against Thanos, and that is by wiping him out of existence.

That is his plan from the start.

Strange hands over the time stone to Thanos, assuring everyone that this is the way it must be in order for them to really "win” against him for good.

Now, for those who aren’t chess players:

“In chess and chess-like games, the endgame (or end game or ending) is the stage of the game when few pieces are left on the board.

The line between middlegame and endgame is often not clear, and may occur gradually or with the quick exchange of a few pairs of pieces.“

“Many people have composed endgame studies, endgame positions which are solved by finding a win for White when there is no obvious way to win, or a draw when it seems White must lose.”

“The endgame, however, tends to have different characteristics from the middlegame, and the players have correspondingly different strategic concerns. In particular, pawns become more important as endgames often revolve around attempting to promote a pawn by advancing it to the eighth rank.

Usually in the endgame, the stronger side (the one with more material using the standard piece point count system) should try to exchange pieces (knights, bishops, rooks, and queens), while avoiding the exchange of pawns. This generally makes it easier to convert a material advantage into a won game. The defending side should strive for the opposite”

So Strange calling this the “Endgame” - that was the first hint that he would be sacrificing some key pieces, and promoting pawns to gain the advantage.

Pawns like Scott.

Who becomes instrumental to their quantum time traveling.

Pawns like Wanda.

Who doesn’t draw a lot of attention on first glance, but can spring into the fray unexpectedly and can entirely turn the tide of the fight.

Pawns like Nebula.

Who set off a chain reaction that leads to the downfall of the enemy’s key pieces.

Pawns like Carol.

Who has been out of the picture for years but gets called back to the fight when Fury gets snapped.

Dozens of little characters who start to play big parts, because the main pieces can’t play them on their own.

And even for the end battle, it isn’t just the heroes making a final stand - it is dozens and dozens of little pawns (the armies of Wakanda and Asgard, the Ravagers and the Sorcerers and just about every background fighter the MCU has to offer) who show up as support in the final hour.

Who all Assemble at the King’s command.

But the promotion of pawns is only one aspect of the “Endgame” strategy.

This was also the first hint that Strange would be sacrificing some key pieces in order to assure the win.

Strange knew going into this that the victory would have some costs, specifically in the form of Natasha and Vision and Tony.

Natasha and Vision wouldn’t be an issue for him - they each give their lives willingly for the good of others in every future he sees, Vision to try and stop Thanos, and Natasha to retrieve the soul stone.

Tony, on the other hand, poses a problem.

Strange specifically says that if he tells Tony how they win, that it won’t happen.

Let that sink in.

If Strange tells Tony that he must die in order to save the universe, he knows for a fact that Tony won’t do it.

Out of those millions of alternate realities that Strange looked into, there was not a single ONE of them where Tony would willingly sacrifice himself at that battle, no matter what was on the line.

So Strange doesn’t tell him.

In fact, he goes so far out his way to not tell him, that he instead does just the opposite - he instills a sense of immortality in him.

He makes Tony think that - in this one situation that he has picked - they are guaranteed the win no matter what happens leading up to it.

And Tony takes that bait - hook, line, and sinker.

Why?

Tony’s ego has always been his downfall.

This holds true from the first Iron Man movie where he assumes his money and fame make him untouchable...

To Iron Man 3 where he assumes his reputation as Iron Man and a few sassy comments will be more than enough to shut his enemies down...

To Age of Ultron where he assumes that he’s going to be somehow immune to the staff’s influence despite the fact that almost all others have failed...

To Civil War where he refuses to acknowledge any new information if it means that he might have been wrong...

All the way through to Infinity War where he assumes he can take on Thanos solo and win.

Tony essentially sees himself as being untouchable, because up until this point he has been incredibly lucky, and has not had to face consequences for any situation where his ego led him astray.

He survived the Ten Rings. Pepper wasn’t hurt in Iron Man 3. Nobody that he cared about got hurt by Ultron. He had free reign under the Accords following Civil War. Everyone he cared about survived the snap, and the one person’s death he feels somewhat guilty about can be blamed on Steve and subsequently brushed off.

Tony has faced NO repercussions for anything he’s done, and therefore this is what he assumes being a hero is - doing whatever you want, kicking some Bad Guy (TM) ass on occasion, and going home to relax while the world sings your praises. The end.

Thanos comes as a cold, hard reality check.

This is the first time that Tony realizes that he might not be quite as untouchable as he thought. The first time that it clicks for him that they are dealing with something that very well has the power to kill him.

The first time that he feels like he came out of a “hero” battle as the loser.

And he can’t stand that.

In fact, he rejects that losing status so hard that he winds up throwing a fit following his rescue.

He attacks Steve for “not being there for him” despite the fact that it was Tony refusing to use the phone Steve gave him that led to him fighting alone.

He yells about how they should have all been on board with the long-dead failed Ultron project of his, despite the fact that Vision - who was more powerful than Ultron - was still no match for Thanos.

How this was all their fault.

He grossly twists all the facts around to try and pin everything that happened on the others, regardless of how glaringly illogical it is, because he can’t physically comprehend that a situation exists where he could have made a decision that led to them losing - therefore someone else MUST have sabotaged him.

Going into Endgame, Tony still has his massive ego problems, but he’s (finally) gained a healthy fear of death and consequences.

He doesn’t want to risk disturbing his current happiness on the chance that they might be able to bring everyone back.

Thankfully, Pepper talks him into it, but he still retains the “as soon as it gets dangerous, I’m out” mentality.

This complicates Dr. Strange’s plan.

Tony has been told that there is one single ending out of millions of possibilities where they will win over Thanos.

Now keep in mind, for Tony, “we win” means that they all go home as heroes and the enemies all die.

He’s never been through a war. He doesn’t understand that there is no “clean sweep” in real life.

He doesn’t comprehend that there is always collateral, and death, and tradeoffs.

He doesn’t ever take the sacrifice play into account.

When Thanos gets the glove, Tony starts to doubt, because it seems like they might have picked the wrong ending if he’s going to have to rush Thanos by himself after Thanos wiped the floor with him PLUS Cap and Thor.

He looks at Strange, who holds up one finger. A reminder that they are in the one ending where they “win.” And that gives Tony the confidence to go for what would otherwise be a suicide run, assured that he will make it out in one piece.

Tony only grabs the stones because he is utterly assured in this moment that he can survive this - because Strange told him that this is the one ending where they WIN.

Tony would not have touched that glove if he knew that he was going to die. He would have let Thanos wipe out half the universe again, because Tony knows that at least he and everyone he cares about would make it through the snap.

He would still have Pepper. He would still have Morgan. He would still have Rhody and Happy and his cute little farm.

Tony only snaps his fingers because Strange has tricked him into thinking that he survives it and saves the day.

That he gets to be the big hero.

And Strange lets him run to his death believing that.

In the end, Strange sacrificed Tony to save the universe without an ounce of regret.....just like he said he would.

#endgame #avengers endgame #dr strange #endgame theories #stephen strange #dr stephen strange #infinity war #avengers infinity war #the long game #the plan #strange orchestrated this whole thing #anti tony stark #anti tony stans #anti iron man #anti tony #well that's why I have so many morons in the comments screaming about Tony

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al-n-cartoons · 4 years

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The Multiverse in a Blender: Prologue

"Hello? Is it-yes, the light's on. I think that means that it's recording. Let's see...where do I start? Well, first of all, my name is Ben. Benjamin Kurby Tennyson from the realm 1.1, alternate name "Soma Benton".

I've been dimension-hopping for a few years now, and it's gotten me in trouble more than once. I've also time traveled a while ago, but that's not important. There were a few 'spats' between dimensions, too, called the "Wreckonings", but they...they're also pretty irrelevant. Anyway, I like to go to different dimensions or realities or realms during my down time, although I normally find them while trying to keep someone from tearing apart the fabric of reality.

That how this whole mess came to be. See, there was this dealer guy, kind of like a bipedal porcupine, his name's "Argit". He'd found a weapon from old stories, swearing to the stars it was real, and made to sell it. I was there only because some other low-lives, as well as the leader to an intergalactic armada, were there and I needed to keep tabs on things. I doubted that the weapon was real, but kept it in mind.

The weapon was called something like "Annihilator" and "barge", it's function was to delete an entire reality and leave it an empty void. Argot got his hands on it, tried to profit off of it, but accidentally set it off. I was saved from being erased only because I'd been in the form of a higher being, Alien X. In that form, I can make anything happen, so long as the two other personalities of the form and I are able to come to an agreement. It's nearly impossible to convince them. By the time I did, though, it was too late, all we could do was make a copy of what once was. I...didn't want that.

Remake the universe and walk around, surrounded by lifeless husks? Because that's what they would be; empty and lifeless, entirely hollow. As Alien X, I could feel the life essence of everyone and thing around me. Bacteria, the grass, the birds, the people. Rook. It was all whisked away, burned and obliterated! I-

Sorry, I got a bit...loud there.

No, I couldn't do that. I grabbed the nearest fistful of realities and yanked them closer, making us whole. Two, three, four, five? Maybe more? I don't know how many in total, but suffice to say there were a lot. Some of them fit nicely together, like Rex's and mine, others are only partially connected. I'm not a hundred-percent sure yet, but if I were to cross certain geographical boundaries, I can cross into another world. I learned that while I was flying, one second a recognized hero in Summer the next a strange beast in the Fall. It was disorienting, to say the least.

So far, I've found and talked with people from three realms. Only the people I'd known of or met before all of this are aware of the change, because now they-you-have multiple different memories of the past. For example, there'd been an enormous explosion of a research facility some years ago that devastated the world, spreading micro-no, wait, sorry-nanobots, that infected every living thing. These caused mutations, most of which happening in the span of a few seconds, turning what was once a perfectly normal individual into a violent, maddened beast. There was an organization for these sudden bursts in mutations, "Providence", but I'm detracting. "Providence" exists in my world now, as a separate branch of the organization I help out with, the Plumbers. Bad name, I know, but it's better than the "Secret Scientists" or the "Men in White". I need to trash that last group fast....

Some people remember the event, some people don't. It depends on where that person is. If someone were to go to an area where, I'm the last, had high E.V.O. activity and had been effected in the world it originally came from, they would have the set of memories from that world. If they're in my neck of the woods, they remember the armadas and invasions instead.

Here's where things get hairy; the walls between our realm are thin and getting thinner. It can't keep the otherworldly beasts out anymore. If the last week is any indication, life will be getting a lot more tough for all of us. That's why I'm contacting you. I am personally delivering copies of this recording to the people I used as links, not just as an explanation, but as a warning. Be careful. Our enemies are probably going to catch wind of this soon, or be otherwise empowered, and we can't just sit back and wait for that to happen. Now, more than ever, we need to talk to one another.

The day you find this recording, around noon, I'll show up at your door. If you decide you don't want to continue on with this ordeal, then you can ask me to leave. If you'd like to help out, ask questions, or meet the others, invite me in and we'll talk. Some of you are more mobile than others and won't need my help getting around. For those of you without some way to fly around the world, I'll give you an all expense paid trip to some place were we'll all meet. Don't ask how, just know that I make bank off of copyright stuff. People really like to merchandise me, and I get a nice percentage off of anything they use my appearance, history, or abilities in.

I just explained it, didn't I? Well, one-take-wonder, keep it rolling.

One last thing, I wouldn't share this message with anyone other than those I wrote on the disk. Just a friendly reminder, not a threat. I told my partner and some of my friends, so they took me off duty for a mental health break. I spent all of this Sunday in a mental hospital until I could convince them that I was fine. They think I had a mental break down from the stress and suffered from a small delusion. Not. Fun.

We'll be in touch."

#ben 10 #ben #Soma #au #crossover #prologue #Chapter 1 #Rex Salazar #Danny Phantom

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bahinscute · 4 years

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American McGee’s Alice

I’d be underselling it if I said the visage of a morose, brunette Alice Liddel stained in blood and wielding a knife wasn’t something of a creature comfort for me. It brings me back to a time of unabashed edge and calling yourself -*twisted*- on MySpace. I never played either of American McGee’s Alice games when I was younger, but Madness Returns always intrigued me. A 3D platformer that seemed to conform to my every niche. It wasn’t until last year when I actually picked it up; and with it, the first game.

I don’t want to dwell too much in the history of the game, much less it’s titular auteur. I’ve watched a few reviews of the series in preparation and, much to my interest, many of them go into lengthy detail into the admittedly tragic life of American McGee. His mother was criminally neglectful in his early life, and in his later life he would come to bare the kidnapping and certain death of his sister, along with the cruel taunting that ensued by what we only can assume was his sister’s captor. It’s no wonder then, that the very first game he helmed featured such dark themes. Themes of survivor’s guilt and the utter destruction and reconstruction of a mind proceeding tragedy.

Here’s the short of it. The game takes place after Lewis Carroll’s novels and functions as a sequel more or less. Sound familiar? That’s the premise of Tim Burton’s live-action adaptation of Alice in Wonderland, but this time with a much less confusing execution. There’s no arranged marriages or trading companies for Alice to inherit. Instead, she’s been institutionalised in the wake of a house-fire of which she was the only survivor. This entire premise is exposited during the intro cinematic, so if you weren’t paying attention then too bad. These events are barely revisited again. This might sound like a critique on my part, but I appreciate this threadbare style of storytelling. The rest of what you need to know is laid out for you subtly, it paints a story for you through the subtext of the environment. Yes, you’re in a weird school, then a garden where even the ants tower over you, then a smothering claustrophobic cave filled with water. These seem innocuous enough (with maybe the exception of the Skool) but keep in mind, these events take place inside the players mind!!

Apparently, the manual which shipped with the game included a journal of Alice’s Ward as he tried his best to treat her mental state. I didn’t read this, partly because I don’t actually own the manual, but mostly because I think this is bullshit. Everything you need to know about Alice’s emotional journey is within the game itself, and a “real world” account only exists to muddle the game’s themes.

You could draw parallels to the player’s conquering of the game, the stages and the enemies, as Alice conquering her own trauma and retaking control of her own mind. Your arsenal grows as Alice discovers more tools with which to resolve the blame she assigns herself. Obviously this is all conjecture, what sort of game would it be without enemies and weapons and etc., but that’s art for you. It’s not entirely unfounded, of course. The Jabberwock fight is markedly a poignant fight for Alice, and the themes are much more opaque. The Jabberwock openly mocks Alice for letting her family die in a fire, and its death certainly represents a forgiveness she allows herself. It’s no mistake that this fight takes place in the Land of Fire and Brimstone. This is a running theme in American McGee’s Alice series, of bosses representing some part of Alice’s struggle. The Mad Hatter owns an asylum and dedicates his life to hurting his infirms. The Red Queen represents a fear of the real world and a complacency in fantasy. She urges Alice to stay where she is, doomed to face the consequences of losing herself to her own escapism. The Queen’s face peels back to reveal to Alice who she’s really speaking to, herself. And that’s an interesting thing to keep in mind in a story like this, essentially every dialogue Alice has is in fact a monologue.

If there’s one thing I’ve always admired in these late 90s-2000 PC games, it’s the amazing moods they always manage to create. They suck me in like one of those sucky things in a pool would suck at your leg. Most dev teams couldn’t or wouldn’t hire some writer to hi-jack their video game, so to compensate artists could inject the project with an incredible atmosphere you’d be hard pressed to find in any modern game. This game manages both and passes with flying colours.

The dialogue and tone, beyond the edge and grit, is unrelentingly Wonderland, short just of the copious Oxford educated maths jokes. Alice speaks with a sophisticated wit and approaches her own strange world with a seemingly innocent curiosity. Despite her broken psyche in the waking world, she’s comfortable in her fantasy, no matter how depraved it’s gotten. I’m sure I’m not the only one who can relate with this idea.

The majority of the locales are viciously memorable. The source material demands imagination and the game, with the exception of a few stages, certainly delivers. The first real location is the Skool, looking like a miniature from the set of Nightmare Before Christmas. The floorboards giving way to a hypnotizing infinite, where titanic stacks of books threaten to topple over and phantoms infiltrate the walls. The battlefield beneath the grass where insect troopers threaten Alice with bayoneted rifles, and the only refuge from the battle is down below the earth, in the treacherous ice caves. The Hatter’s Domain with it’s daunting amount of mirrors and ticking clocks, where enemies can be waiting around each corner, behind each wall. The Pale Realm, with it’s perplexing geometry and chequered stylings, where Alice must traverse as a Rook, Knight or Bishop. It’s just all so endearing.

The gameplay might be the one aspect of the game I’m still not entirely sold on. Unlike their first-person counterparts, third-person games developed on the id-Tech engine have aged like bread. See also: Heretic 2. The game requires a lock-on mechanic for you to ever hope to hit your attacks and it features a jumping reticle of all thing. Stand close enough to a platform and you’ll see a spinning imprint of Alice’s boots projected onto it. They seem like very rudamentary solutions to issues that console devs strived in solving. This game was released four years after Crash Bandicoot and Mario 64, and two years after Banjo Kazooie and Sonic Adventure. Even for its time, the gameplay was awkward.

Alice in Wonderland is one of those rare stories whose mythos inspires creators more directly than even what you might consider the most influential of art. Storytellers make allusions to Carroll’s work as much as they might Greek legend, which is a monumental claim to fame. The Jabberwock is referenced in the same tone as Hercules’ Hydra, the White Rabbit which leads Alice down it’s spiraling gateway has been used to symbolise psychedelics, More recently, Arkane’s Prey has borrowed an Alice title for it’s iconic in-universe Looking-Glass technology. McGee has made his very own impact in this legacy, instilling a grit and twistedness to the world which can still be seen today. I doubt that Tim Burton would have wound up directing a Wonderland movie without American McGee’s input.

I do hope McGee gets another shot at game direction. He’s a talented level designer, his life has been harsh and his Alice series holds a special, extremely biased place in my heart. That said, maybe he could give the series a break, maybe work on that Oz idea he had. Madness Returns left a bittersweet taste in my mouth, and his track record of video game direction slants slightly more to bad than good. I mean, google Bad Day LA.

#alice in wonderland #essay #review #american mcgee's alice #editorial

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fixaidea · 4 years

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@moonbelowsea This is a more comfy format for what I suspect will be a pretty long answer, so here goes!

My opinion on Star Wars characters - I’ll limit myself to those I feel strongly about one way or another, the rest can be assumed to be ‘okay I guess’. :) (Also I’m a Casual who only saw the films and read like three, now non-canon, books.)

Luke Skywalker - He went from ‘ehh’ to my favourite over the years, simply for the character development and cool Goth Upgrade he gets over the duration of the OT. (Also little me really appreciated the lack of - het - romance in his life, though at the time I didn’t realise why.)

Leia Organa - Another fave, I love how strong and no-nonsense she is. Also my favourite type of SW fic to write is her and Luke Family Bonding.

Han Solo - Interestingly he started out as my favourite from the OT, but kinda lost his charm over the years? Not sure why.

Lando Calrissian - Criminally underrated. (Can’t believe some people still have a bad opinion on him - you try and choose any better when forced into his position. Not to mention he turned right around to help Luke and Co. the minute his city was getting safely evacuated. Also A+ fashion sense.)

Anakin Skywalker/Darth Vader - I think he’s a cool, iconic, tragic villain. Also not gonna lie - when I first watched the prequels I found him so irritating I was rooting for him to turn at last - but the more I think about it, the more understandable he seems. This whole ‘no emotions, no attachments’ Jedi dogma just... didn’t fit his personality at all, as he was all about emotions and attachments, which, this way, Palpatine could easily use against him.

Palpatine - That bastard. I LOVE him. What a goddamn slimy, magnificent bastard!

Obi-wan Kenobi - He’s the Dumbledore of the series. As in if you truly look at it, he made a lot of mistakes, and questionable choices, but he’s still immediately likeable, even with all that.

Bodhi Rook - I can’t remember the last time I clicked with a character this hard? This ‘I’m so scared I’m basically on the werge of a nervous breakdown the whole time, but I’m doing the right thing anyway, because someone has to’ is a character type I first fell in love with in The Lord of the Rings, when I was five, and an attitude I respect the hell out of in real life.

Finn, Poe - I liked the idea of them, but I could only form an intelligent opinion about them if I saw them in at least two consecutive films that didn’t feel like they were written in different universes and were sequels to completely different stories.

Kylo Ren - I’d be neutral on him if not for an overly loud portion of his fanbase, but at this rate I’ll blacklist his name sooner or later and try to forget he exists. Also the above applies to him too.

#star wars #random fandom #star wars original trilogy #star wars prequels

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egophiliac · 1 year

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OH YEAH HIS TAIL ALSO LIGHTS UP

here's a bunch of quick reactions to some of the smaller bits, while I work on bigger things for the bigger bits and obsess over Silver's breakdown some more. don't be fooled -- this is only the beginning of my descent into pure diasomnia hell.

(I also need to figure out how to draw OB Mal better)

#art #long post #twisted wonderland #twisted wonderland spoilers #twisted wonderland episode 7 spoilers #twisted wonderland book 7 spoilers #ugggh sorry i really do need to figure out ob mal i have not managed a decent one yet #anyway saving my feelings for later #i have tried a couple of times to write something about how blatant lilia is #about being an ancient fae pretend to be a high schooler in order to keep an eye on his idiot dragon son #but every time i remember that this is a universe in which rook exists and is a real person that the characters know #and it's like. oh yeah. lilia isn't anywhere near the weirdest person they know.#they aren't exactly secretive about fae aging differently either #i assumed he told everyone he was literally 18 because he thought it would be funny #🤷#drink your juice everyone

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meta-shadowsong · 5 years

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On Moral Ambiguity in Fiction

And where it works and where it doesn’t (at least for me), using Star Wars and Harry Potter as sort of examples/case studies/what have you.

Couple sort of definition things to get out of the way--first, when I say ‘moral ambiguity,’ I’m talking specifically about characters and character arcs/dynamics, rather than overall situations/plotlines. Because the two universes, as a whole, are pretty firmly “there is Real Evil and we are going to Defeat It” type of stories. And both verses also have clear and obvious Evil Bad Guys Who Ruin Everything (Palpatine and Voldemort).

I should also say, as a sort of disclaimer before we get started, that I really like nuance, especially when it comes to characters and character alignments. I have a thing for double agents; for people who were once good but now evil, or were once evil but now good, or who are somewhere in the middle of the spectrum, and exactly where they end up depends on the weather/time of day/what have you. Which is not to say that I don’t enjoy the Obviously Evil villains, or the True Good heroes. Honestly, I think that a universe that has variety going for it tends to work the best.

Last definition - there’s a few different ways to do a Morally Ambiguous/Grey Area character. There are the fallen heroes, of course, and the redeemed villains. There are also “technically on our side in the bigger fight against Evil but also really shitty people” or “Your Allies Can Be Assholes”; and “clearly our enemy but also in some ways a decent person with whom we can Empathize” or “Your Enemies Can Be Decent People.”

(Also, while I’m not really going to focus on them here, I should mention that there are also sympathetic villains, who are never redeemed or switch sides or anything, and remain entirely Villains throughout, but have enough character development/humanizing characteristics that you can at least somewhat empathize with them even as they’re Horrible People who do Horrible Things. I’m leaving them out primarily because characters in that category tend to need way more in-depth discussion/their own essays about where they fall on the good vs. bad line; and besides I’d rather focus on different kinds of Morally Ambiguous/Grey Area characters for the purposes of this essay. Also, while I think there are examples in both verses, characters in this category tend to be very much YMMV. Basically, there’s a sliding scale from “Pure Evil” up to “Your Enemies Can Be Decent People,” and I’m trying to pick my examples that sit further on the lighter end of the greyscale here.)

Right. On to the actual discussion. Star Wars, on the surface, bills itself as straightforward good-vs-evil/Fairy Tale Logic/“once you start down the dark path” etc., etc. Harry Potter, on the other hand, has that great line: “the world isn’t divided into Good People and Death Eaters.”

Of course, once you actually start digging into it, Star Wars is absolutely not what it claims to be, and Harry Potter, while not technically wrong, fails to deliver on everything that statement implies.

When I look at Harry Potter, there are certainly a lot of Morally Ambiguous characters involved. We have Dumbledore, who fits into “Your Allies Can Be Assholes;” Barty Crouch, Sr. fits into this category as well. You have Fallen Heroes, with Pettigrew being the primary example. You have people who are maybe not technically actively working for/with the Big Bad, but are still Truly Awful People; i.e., Vernon Dursley. And you have people who are maybe on your side and maybe not assholes, per se, but have their heads so far up their asses with their preconceptions/have so many blinders on that they move past useless into actively obstructionist; i.e., Fudge.

But what you don’t find is the flipside of that. I can’t think of a single person who falls under “Your Enemies Can Be Decent People.” And while I can think of a few “redeemed” villains, they’re either so badly handled they become Your Allies Can Be Assholes (Snape), exist entirely in Backstoryland and thus don’t really have personalities or anything to latch on to (Regulus Black), or are barely present in the narrative by the time they have their Heel Realization (Dudley).

And that’s...like...leaving aside all the other issues with Harry Potter that have been cropping up in hindsight over the past few years...I think that’s a large part of why I fell out of love with the franchise. Like I said, I have a thing for double agents and grey-area/ambiguous characters, and I think a lot of it comes from the way I read this series when I was younger. I mean, it comes from some other places, too, but HP was a big one (probably because HP was such a big Thing for a long time overall, in my life and in pop culture in general). But looking back, it’s...really not what I thought it was. And it’s such a bleak, crapsack worldview, you know? “The bad guys are Bad Guys, but gueeeeess what! So are a good chunk of the nominal Good Guys!”

So, no, the world isn’t divided into Good People and Death Eaters. Technically. But it’s divided into Death Eaters, Other Bad People, and A Few Trustworthy Friends.

When I look at Star Wars, on the other hand--yeah, there are definitely Your Allies Can Be Assholes characters running around. Saw Gerrera, at least in Rebels and Rogue One, is of course the primary example. But there’s also--like, Borsk Fey’lya in Legends. And, depending on the reader/writer/narrator, various characters could fall into the “so many blinders on that they move past useless into actively obstructionist” categories. Plus, characters like Hondo, and others from the seedier side of the galaxy who are Not Good and Only Occasionally Nice, but they’re reasonable allies against the True Evils out there. And of course we have our Fallen Heroes--even if we exclude Anakin from this conversation, we have at the very least Barriss, to say nothing of Dooku and Pong Krell (we don’t really see either of them in their not-fallen hero state, but we know it existed at some point).

But you know what Star Wars also has?

The other side of this coin.

Again, even if we exclude Anakin and Vader from this conversation. Redeemed villains and “Your Enemies Can Be Decent People” are all over the place. I mean, there’s obviously my best beloved Alexsandr Kallus, but there’s also Bodhi Rook and Galen Erso; there’s General Madine (another super-prominent defector); going to Legends there’s Mara Jade and Gilad Pellaeon; there’s Ventress, who was a good person and then fell and then slowly starts finding her way back; there’s my girl Bo-Katan, who joined Death Watch and probably murdered A Lot of people, and then realized Just How Awful things were and tried to fix it. (...side note, I kinda ship Ventress and Bo-Katan, anyone with me? XD). I’m still catching up on some of the canon novels/haven’t really played the video games, but I know through Tumblr/fandom osmosis there are examples there, too.

Plus, something that came up quite a few times in the Clone Wars was that, apart from Palpatine and Dooku and their inner circles, the majority of people on both sides of the conflict genuinely believed they were fighting on the side of Right; and the Separatists actually did have some legit points about the way the Republic government was messed up. (Which is one of the bits I had a slight issue with in Queen’s Shadow, that they seemed to be taking that away from Mina Bonteri a little bit by having her in contact with someone who seemed to be either Sidious or Tyranus, but I digress.) But the PT era in general is where ambiguity and complicated politics lives, and this also starts getting into some YMMV territory, similar to Sympathetic Villains, so I’ll leave it at that.

I think that what it comes down to, really, is that HP, for all it makes its moral ambiguity explicit/centers it/talks about it, leans hard into the Your Allies Can Be Assholes aspect, while Star Wars leans more towards the Your Enemies Can Be Decent People side of things. And, again, this is not saying that there isn’t a range of quality in how these things can be handled. Like, Your Allies Can Be Assholes, when handled well, can be really engaging/amazing. And Your Enemies Can Be Decent People can quickly go in all kinds of bad directions if it’s not handled well.

But overall, a story that leans more towards the second is more hopeful. One of the main arc words in SW is hope, and I think that’s why the grey-area characters work so much better there, because they support that thesis, so to speak.

I also think that Star Wars has a much more balanced greyscale than HP does. Like, the Your Enemies Can Be Decent People is more prominent because, again, the series’ watchword is Hope, but there's still quite a few Not Nice people on the side of Good, which adds its own layer of nuance/interest, at least for me. ...and, you know, the fact that Star Wars has both Pure Evil and more nuanced villains/antagonists probably contributes to that. It might be that this kind of Moral Ambiguity works best when there is a clearly defined Evil to compare it against. Both in terms of the greyscale good guys and the greyscale bad guys.

In the end, I think there’s probably a lot of things that go into it, but overall the ambiguity in SW works so much better for me than HP. And I think the distribution along that sliding scale is a huge part of it. Because HP’s version kind of boils down to ‘Life Sucks; sure there are a few Good People who try to make it suck less, but most of the people, even on your side, are kind of awful’ and SW’s version boils down to ‘there is hope, even if it doesn’t always pan out; yes there is evil in this world and there are some, even on your side, who might choose it and refuse to change--but there are at least as many people who turn their back on it, even if it takes them a while.’ Both acknowledge that there is Evil in the world, and that dealing with it isn’t always simple or clear-cut, but SW takes a broader, more nuanced look at that question. Even if it doesn’t outright say that’s what it’s doing.

(And, sure, the fact that HP promised things it didn’t/couldn’t deliver and handled a few of the examples it tried to provide really badly doesn’t help, but...yeah.)

So, there it is. A lot of Personal Opinion, obviously, but...I feel like I might be on to something here? What are your thoughts?

((Also, I’m aware that I didn’t talk about the ST like at all, but that’s because, at least IMO, the ST has fewer morally ambiguous characters in general, at least in the sense I’m talking about. That being said, there’s at least the one guy from the Phasma frame story who falls into Your Enemies Can Be Decent People; and I guess I technically could have mentioned Kylo Ren when talking about fallen heroes, on the same justification I included Dooku/Pong Krell, even though I personally find him much less interesting than Dooku, in particular...Anyway, what I’ve noticed in the ST is that, when people are working at cross-purposes, they tend to still be firmly on one side or the other, just with differently-aligned priorities. And/or are Hondo, who marches to the beat of his own drum and always will. I love that he’s still around XD.))

#star wars #fandom #originally posted july 2019

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fuckyeahcharmcaster · 5 years

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An Ode to Omniverse!Charmcaster

OV’s Charmcaster is the non-Man of Action-involved Charmcaster that doesn’t entirely suck, and she has as much good points as bad points, all of which I’m analyzing in this post.

PROS:

Sensible progression in her story - Charmcaster’s story in OV went from point A to point B and so on in a logical way, a far cry from how it went in UAF. We understand why she first gets involved in the show to start with (because the Alpha Rune was stolen by Zs’Skayr while she was busy contending with Darkstar trying to steal magic from her realm), why she goes to Friedkin University (to take the family heirloom staff from Hex in order to replace the Alpha Rune as a power source), why she goes for the power of Bezel (she hears about it while trying to get the staff again and decides it’d be an even better power source), and why she seems so much more rational and reasonable in the game show episode (she’s been deprived of power for a while, and this has a healing effect on her mind). It all adds up.

A return to form in villainy and point of character - The original Charmcaster was all about seeking various sources of power for the validation of her own ego (she has a Inferiority Superiority Complex), with the point being that she did so in place of seeking love, which she subconsciously wants but consciously considers a weakness, a contrast to Gwen who is just as ambitious in the pursuit of growing stronger but does so with love and support from others. After UAF’s version of Charmcaster completely dropped this angle, it’s nice to see it restored with the OV version, who is blatantly portrayed as a troubled young addict to magic power that is too hung up on getting back at people she hates, only hurting herself in the process.

A fantastic design - Derrick Wyatt may have not had any interest in Charmcaster as a character, but he knocked it out of the park with her design, combining her OS design with aspects of her UAF design and topping it all off with stitches in her coat, giving the sense of someone broken trying to put herself back together. The purple hair highlights are cool too.

Badass magic powers - I was far more impressed with OV Charmcaster’s skill with magic than I was with UAF Charmcaster’s. The writing also backs this up, returning to the OS fact that Charmcaster was “always the better sorceress” compared to Gwen, rather than the bullshit retcon about Gwen always being the stronger one because she’s “made of magic”.

Kari Wahlgren’s performance - Just listen to it here. Kari sounds like she’s actually having fun with the role again, as opposed to the drab take on the character she performed in UAF.

Great character interactions - Charmcaster got to have some fun and interesting interactions with Darkstar, Adwatia, Zs’Skayr, Ben, Rook, Hobble, Hex, Gwen and Bezel...she even had non-verbal interactions between many of the other female contestants in the game show episode (providing plenty of crack ship fodder as a result). That was highly appreciated.

A far better ending - UAF’s Charmcaster ended on the worst note you could possibly leave the character on: alone, unloved and mentally broken inside of her awful home dimension. It was a slap in the face to her and to any fan who wanted better for her. OV’s Charmcaster ends in the custody of people who love her on Earth and is mentally recovering. Despite UAF’s Charmaster being the one saddled with the name of “Hope”, there’s actually far more to be hopeful about regarding OV’s Charmcaster. Seriously, just look at the difference here. I am forever thankful that this is where we left the original continuity’s Charmcaster* on.

*The original Ben 10 continuity before the reboot, known as the Prime Timeline, was a timestream, made of three different branches: OS, UAF and OV. So the OS and UAF branches and their Charmcasters technically still exist separately from OV, but not as part of the Prime Timeline. The Prime Timeline’s Charmcaster thus started as OS!Charm, shifted into UAF!Charm, and then finally into OV!Charm which is what she is left off as. Complicated, eh?

CONS:

Mischaracterization - I’m not going to say that I didn’t find the zany, cheerful, energetic, high-on-magic Cloudcuckoolander personality OV Charmcaster had entertaining. I did. But the fact remains that it’s not the personality Charmcaster is supposed to have. Take away all the witchy trappings, and Charm is a “thug life” girl. Strip her of her magic and she’d be ready and willing to throw down with her fists. She’s sarcastic and tough-talking, insolent to authority figures, competitive and kind of tomboyish. Basically, she aspires to be the kind of woman Rojo is: the baddest bitch around who nobody oughta mess with, and she’s constantly frustrated when her own awkwardness gets in the way of this and she is unable to back up this egotistical self-image, though she often blames the likes of Gwen for it instead of herself. UAF’s varying depictions of her as a sultry femme fatale, high school alpha bitch, sadistic and obsessively vengeful murderer, sympathetic outcast and freedom fighter, troubled daddy’s girl, or whatever the Hell she was supposed to be in “Couples Retreat” were not the right characterization, and neither is what was done with her in OV no matter how much more enjoyable than those UAF characterizations it may be. Only the reboot got it right.

Her story hinges too much on UAF’s crap - Just when you’re enjoying OV Charmcaster’s story, you suddenly hear things like “Ledgerdomain”, “Alpha Rune”, “Spellbinder”, “Adwatia”, or “Darkstar” get brought up, and you zone out thanks to the bad memories that are awoken. OV Charmcaster would’ve worked better without all this baggage from her previous self.

Unfortunate Implications - Some of this connects to the previous point, as it exists solely due to the UAF crap (ex: OV Charmcaster’s story means denying the route of Charmcaster becoming a better ruler in Ledgerdomain, sending the message that women aren’t capable of being good rulers because they just aren’t mentally up to the task). Others are just OV’s fault, particularly where Hex is involved - I get what they were going for with him, but to do so they had to whitewash the fact that he and Charmcaster weren’t a loving, mutually evil family; Hex abused Charmcaster in order to drive her to evil. To make Hex sympathetic by having him reformed and upset at his niece’s self-destructive behavior that ends up harming him while dancing around the fact that said behavior was Hex’s own damn fault to start with is gross.

Her relationship with Gwen is a non-factor - OV didn’t butcher the dynamic between Gwen and Charmcaster the way UAF did, but this is mostly because it barely did anything with that dynamic at all. The third act of “Charm School” is the only time the two actually get to interact, and it’s as basic as you can get, with Gwen being all “Charmcaster, you’re not well, stop this so that we can help you!” and Charm being all “How dare you get in my way? I wasn’t even looking for a fight, but now I’m gonna finish you once and for all!” They fight, Gwen wins, Charmcaster retreats, and that’s it. In “Third Time’s a Charm”, Charmcaster turns Gwen into a stone totem right at the very beginning, paying little thought to her for the rest of the episode. Gwen, meanwhile, doesn’t really have anything to do with Charmcaster until the very end of the episode, with her line about hoping to finally make friends with Charmcaster now. For a character who is meant to be Gwen’s foil, Gwen barely mattered to Charmcaster here.

No character development - UAF attempted character development for Charmcaster and did it badly. Once again, OV’s answer was to simply not even try. OV Charmcaster is static to an irritating degree, with the exception of her final appearance, in the game show episode, where she appears to be mentally healed...which naturally happened completely off-screen, since putting it on-screen would mean taking Charmcaster’s mental issues seriously, which OV was not willing to do...after all, it hardly takes anything seriously. I think that this was a missed opportunity, as it could have made OV Charmcaster’s conclusion even stronger.

Horribly paced, minimal appearances - Charmcaster appears in 5 out of 80 episodes in OV. Worse still, her first appearance is a brief cameo toward the end of episode 42, showing up afterward in episodes 47, 63, 75, and 78. This means that Charmcaster and her story is primarily a factor in the episode 61-80 period, which is considered by many to be the worst period in the whole show! It is transparently clear that the people behind OV did not have any real interest in Charmcaster whatsoever, she didn’t fit in with their preferred focus on Ben, Rook, the Plumbers, and stupid shit like “harem” antics and Blukic/Driba shenanigans.

The spin-off that never happened - A justification as to why Charmcaster was so underplayed was that Gwen was not a regular on OV and thus too many Charmcaster appearances without Gwen would feel weird. As it stood, an OV spin-off focused on Gwen at Friedkin University was being planned, and Charmcaster would have been a regular character on that show. The problem is that this spin-off didn’t happen due to OV bombing and the franchise getting rebooted, so Charmcaster having few appearances and no character development in a story arc dedicated to putting her in place for her role in that spin-off just ends up feeling like a total waste. As painful as it is for me to admit this, even UAF Charmcaster ultimately felt more meaningful to UAF than OV Charmcaster does to OV thanks to this misguided decision.

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zombiescantfly · 5 years

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Words About Games: Unreal Tournament (Epic Megagames, 1999)

In 2291, in an attempt to control violence among deep-space miners, the New Earth Government legalized no-holds-barred fighting.

291 years earlier, I heard that for the first time. Unreal Tournament begins with a narrated flythrough explaining two very simple things: there is a Tournament, and you are going to win it. After the lonely melancholy of Unreal, that's a pretty abrupt pivot. Why, after getting through most of the 90s with platformers, pinball, and fighting games, did Epic Megagames barrel in headfirst to the multiplayer arena shooter market, a playground run exclusively by industry already-giant id Software?

Because they wanted to.

As I mentioned in the Unreal essay, that game's multiplayer was a fun shell filled with horrible, horrible problems. Epic set to fixing it, but realized that beyond some quick and dirty surface-level patches, there wasn't a lot they could do within the same scope. So they broke away from a simple expansion pack and landed on creating a full separate release by the name of Unreal Tournament.

Unreal Tournament, UT99 from now on, was released on November 23, 1999, to an almost absurd level of praise. Quake 3 Arena, id’s latest offering in the Quake franchise and first multiplayer-only title, would come out just over a week later on December 2, pitching the two games into a deathmatch of their own which still rages to this day almost 20 years later.

Let's talk about Quake a bit. Shooters, up until around the time the first Quake came out and probably still after that, were commonly referred to as ‘Doom clones’ because, well, many were. Any unambitious dev could buy an engine license, whip up some sprites on a lunchbreak, and ship a game. There's a parallel to be drawn between that era and the current ongoing avalanche of Unity and Unreal asset flips, but you can turn to others for opinions on all that.

Quake was, famously, id Software’s followup to Doom 2, and an early frontrunner of fully-3d shooters. It was so popular and noteworthy that it even caused the term Doom Clone to fall away in favor of Quake Clone. Quake expanded the popularity of online play, and saw the creation of the some of the first AI bots made exclusively for deathmatch. Quake 2 came along not too far after and pulled in even more interest. If you remember from my Unreal essay, that was when it grabbed my own interest, and I became a frequent over-the-shoulder spectator of many a Quake 2 deathmatch.

But then, UT99. When I first played Unreal Tournament, I was blown away. By the bots. Meaning that they killed me a lot. I was very bad at it. I didn't even strafe back then, just ran forward and turned with the mouse. But I learned.

UT99 is actually quite an accommodating game. Bots have 9 skill levels ranging from drooling idiot to a fittingly-named godlike, and I remember bumping them up a level at a time over the years. UT’s bots were one of its largest selling points back then, and the cornerstone of the Tournament part of its name.

The titular Tournament in Unreal Tournament is a series of botmatches of increasing difficulty over the game’s five primary gamemodes: Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, Capture the Flag, Domination, and Assault. A final series of three 1v1 matches caps off the Tournament, the third of which pits you against the Big Bad Reigning Champ, a robot named Xan Kriegor.

There were a handful of firsts in that short bit, so let's take a look.

As stated, Quake 2 was the de facto king of online shooters at the time. But Quake 2, for all its fame, only had three gamemodes available: deathmatch, team deathmatch, and capture the flag. Unreal had dabbled with alternative styles of deathmatch and team deathmatch, but all of them were, more or less, the same gamemode, save one. In a unique take on King of the Hill, the first player to score a kill got a permanent damage boost until they were killed, at which point that buff was transferred to their killer. Killing the King awarded more points, matches were first to X points, you get the idea. RtNP added Cloak Match, a take on this KotH concept where instead of a damage boost, players fought for permanent partial invisibility and infinite jump boots.

Unreal Tournament was a little more ambitious than just reflavoring deathmatch, however. Domination used its own unique rotation of maps centered around controlling three points. Your team scores one point per every couple of seconds, per point held. Touching a point is enough to flip control of it to your side, and the result is a fun, frantic match with enough additional focus to guide it away from just another deathmatch. Map control becomes something more than just controlling various weapon spawns, and demands you keep your attention between the three points. Random respawns instead of near your team’s current territory and the instant capture of points meant the game never ground down to just being spawncamped, and helped reduce the prevalence of one-sided victories. Domination was great, the extra effort put in to creating its own category of maps was great, and games today still use the gamemode. That said, Destiny 2 really needs to make capture instant and not have you sit around for 5 seconds in a tiny room, like come on.

Domination may have been new for the time, and DM, TDM, and CTF made their own waves that I'll get into later, but Assault is what really caught people's attention. Assault was an attack and defense mode where one team was tasked with completing a series of varied objectives, while the defenders tried to stop them. The most similar thing we get in games now is pushing a cart down a predetermined path in TF2 or Overwatch. Payload gamemodes in those games are similar in the sense that one team must progress down a path to get to a specific location, and I suppose it might come across as a streamlining of the idea, but Assault is just more interesting.

UT99 shipped with seven Assault maps, and each one presented a different scenario. Assault was not just replacing the objective on an existing map, the same as Domination had its own maps. Each one had a little story it presented, from the attempted hijacking of a supersonic train, assaulting an ancient fortress on an alien planet, sabotaging an underwater research facility, stealing a Navy battleship, escaping a medieval castle, destroying an experimental battle tank, and even a recreation of the D-Day landing. Assault maps varied in how linear they were, with maps like Guardia, HiSpeed, and Overlord being fairly straightforward, to the more open-ended OceanFloor and Rook. It was, by design, an asymmetrical experience, but that design went so far as to change in-level as the attackers pushed further and further in. On HiSpeed, for example, the attackers start in a helicopter hovering over the rear of the train, and drop down largely uncontested. There's a full car where they can grab weapons and powerups, and then they reach where the defenders have spawned.

As objectives are met and various places in the map are reached by the attackers, spawn points start to change. On the same map, attackers spawn with a serviceable loadout of shock rifles and pulse guns (we'll get to the weapons later), both good options for the mixed-distance encounter they'll be facing as they move towards the next car. The defenders, however, spawn with access to flak cannons and rippers, which in the close quarters of the car’s interior are absolutely brutal. Once the attackers push far enough in to it, though, that car becomes their spawn point and the defenders are moved further back, thus giving the attackers access to those weapons for the next part of the map.

The same sort of design echoes throughout all seven Assault maps, and it creates a varied and frantic experience that was new at the time and still hasn't really been copied. The feeling of actually taking part in an event in the game’s world added so much to even the relatively sparse setting, and it remains a great example of an excellent piece of very quiet but highly effective worldbuilding.

The other gamemodes were again, team and free-for-all deathmatch, and as standard as that was at the time, UT99 made some weighty impressions on the genre. At the time of Quake 2’s release, it was common practice to just repurpose singleplayer campaign levels as the multiplayer maps. Quake 2 would get its own suite of maps designed explicitly for multiplayer later in its life, and Unreal shipped with 14 multiplayer-only maps, with a further 9 added later as free updates. UT99 shipped with multiple dozens of maps, each one presenting a different take on design and execution. You have a standard collection of flat-ish arenas, some truly impressive vertical design, maps with stage hazards, big maps, small maps, maps with areas of low gravity, and maps with secret passages leading to hidden weapon spawns. A handful of Unreal’s maps were even remade for UT99, and two in particular became series mainstays - Deck 16 and Curse. Both are still thought of as iconic maps, and for very good reason. They're well-balanced and play to the strengths of the game they're in while also, going back to Unreal’s bit here, feeling like they're a real space.

Because while UT99 may be a multiplayer-only fragfest with no real story, it has lore.

The opening narration is just a small bit of fluff, but it sets up a whole lot that the various designers had a ton of fun expanding on. Official weapon descriptions in the manual talk about the (in-game) real-world applications of each, and even set some up as not even being explicitly for combat. The Translocator, a personal teleporter by way of launching tiny disks, is a repurposed tool given to miners to help escape cave-ins. The GES Biorifle is a vacuum cleaner for toxic sludge instead of dust. The Impact Hammer is a jackhammer but sideways. The in-universe justification for those few weapons doesn't mean anything to the gameplay, but given that the Tournament was set up by Liandri Mining Corporation, it adds a bit of fun sense-making to the whole thing.

Maps, too, are part of that lore package. Each map throughout the Tournament ladder has a short description, and it's almost always about what this particular arena’s place in the world is. Most boil down to “this is a site built for the Tournament” or “Liandri bought this and made it a Tournament arena,” but it's about the tiny details hidden in the lines. Deck 16 is a toxic sludge refinery, but it's also a single deck of the spaceship Gaetano, rented out to Liandri whenever it's in drydock. Curse is an ancient temple that was an archaeological site until Liandri bought it after funding ran out. Arcane Temple is a Nali worship site on Na Pali left abandoned after the Skaarj invaded. Oblivion is a Liandri passenger ship that tricks Tournament entrants by being their first arena. Hyperblast, the final stage of the Tournament, is Xan Kriegor’s personal spaceship made specifically to be an arena.

The whole thing paints the Liandri Mining Corporation as this quirky half-malicious corporate giant, as big and influential as any sci-fi megacorp but out of an innocent love for their decidedly not-innocent game. It's a world where humanity spent seven days on the brink of destruction at the hands of the Skaarj, where the Corporation Wars tore entire planets apart, and where despite that everyone can get over it, crack some beers, and watch people blow each other away on live television, kept safe by technology that respawns them within seconds.

Character backgrounds, too, drop hints in their two to three sentence lengths. The bots you fight against or with all have tiny snippets of who they are, making reference to revolts, arrests, rebellions, other worlds, secret government experiments, and revenge.

The important thing to take away from this is that all of this was put in but none of it had to be. It doesn't affect the game and it's not even immediately noticeable unless you let every map and character description load before entering a Tournament match. Just going to map select for a practice session/instant action game doesn't show the same descriptions, so you have to go through the singleplayer ladder. It's work put in that shows a genuine and earnest excitement for the world the devs had created, and I still get a smile thinking about it. Unreal Tournament is such a weird celebration of every gritty science fiction trope, but turns them all on their heads to create a world for this game that feels exactly as expansive as it isn't. Because Unreal Tournament doesn't have anything to do with the lore it hides in all these corners, it's just a multiplayer shooter with no story beyond “kill better than the other guys.” And boy do they ever make that part feel great.

For better or worse, Wolfenstein 3D cemented FPS weapon progression. Ever since and with only a few minor alterations here and there, the loadout progression is melee weapon, bad pistol, automatic weapon, shotgun (though those sometimes switch position), a better version of one or both of those, some kind of explosive option, sniper rifle (that was a later addition), and then a superweapon of some kind. From Doom to Quake to our old nemesis Half-Life to our slightly newer nemesis Halo to Call of Duty, you get those weapons in roughly that order.

So let's talk about Unreal again for a second. I didn't mention that game's weapons because I wanted to bring the whole discussion in at once, but it does require me to go back in time a year and talk about where the series landed on its own weapons. The first thing to know about Unreal is that it was not immune to the Holy Progression of Gun, but it did make some incredibly noticeable changes. Unreal saw a videogame gun, famous for being a thing you can left click on men with, and asked “what if you could also right click on men?”

I'm moving a rough sort of progression, so be aware that this is only the general order you get these guns in. In Unreal, the first weapon you pick up is the Dispersion Pistol, a projectile-firing semi-auto gun that doesn't do a whole lot of damage. One fun thing about it is that its projectiles cast a real-time light on the environment so you can use it as a way to peek into dark areas before going in them with your vulnerable body. But another thing about the Dispersion Pistol is its alt fire, where you hold down the right mouse button to charge up a shot which then acts essentially as a rocket launcher shot - it deals better damage, it deals splash damage, and it can gib enemies. In-universe, the Dispersion Pistol is a Skaarj weapon, and you can also find hidden upgrades for it that boost the damage of both firemodes at the cost of taking more ammo per shot. Luckily, as your holdout weapon, the Dispersion Pistol recharges its ammo passively.

The second weapon you get is the automag, a basic hitscan pistol. Primary fire shoots a fairly accurate shot, alt fire has you hold the gun sideways to increase the fire rate at the cost of accuracy. It's dumb and I love it to this day.

Third up, the Tarydium Stinger, a projectile-based minigun with an alt fire that acts as a projectile shotgun. Here's where the lines start to get a bit blurred, but we're not totally out of the usual progression just yet.

After the Stinger you get the ASMD Shock Rifle, a famously curious gun that, as its primary fire, shoots a hitscan beam, and shoots a fast-moving projectile orb as its alt fire, trading perfect precision and speed for a little bit of splash damage. The thing about it is that if you shoot the orb with the beam you get a giant explosion that does an absolute ton of damage.

Moving from that piece of sweet hardware brings us to the GES Biorifle, a rapid-fire goop-throwing mine layer with a charged shot as its alt fire.

Then, the Eightball Launcher, a rocket launcher that has not two but four firemodes. Click primary fire to shoot a rocket, fast moving and with splash damage. Hold primary fire to charge up to six rockets that fire in a spread pattern, or click alt fire while charging to shoot them in a spiral formation. Also, you can get a mild lock-on effect by holding your mouse cursor over an enemy for about half a second. Alt fire is the same as primary but with grenades - click alt fire once to lob one, hold to charge up to six. The grenades bounce around for a set period of time, and also blow up on contact with an enemy.

Then possibly the series’ most famous weapon, the Flak Cannon. Primary fire is a projectile-based shotgun that fires individual shards that bounce around the environment for a bit, allowing you to fire around corners or even up at the ceiling to bank a shot over cover. Alt fire is another grenade launcher, though this one fires its shells at a shallower angle, a higher velocity, has a smaller up-front splash radius, and still creates little bits of flak that bounce around for a short time. This gun is my and many other people’s favorite gun in videogames.

The Razorjack is a strange gun that fires disks that bounce around the environment at scarily high velocities, and even have the ability to decapitate enemies if you hit their head, a useful feature in the Skaarj-infested levels where you first find it. Alt fire is a tricky system that lets you influence the path the disk takes, though its high velocity, bad turning radius, and small size makes “influence” a more appropriate word than “guide.”

Next is the Rifle, a high-powered hitscan primary fire with an alt fire that zooms in. Headshotting enemies decapitates them but other than that it's just a sniper rifle, let's move on.

Finally, Unreal has the Minigun, a hitscan bullet-spewing beast that shows up near the end of the game, leaving you with just barely too little time to get to use it as much as you want and also to realize that hey, it's just a minigun. Primary fire shoots with a short spool-up time, alt fire shoots faster but less accurately. Unfortunately this does not make you hold the Minigun sideways like the Automag.

So that was Unreal’s loadout, and it made some big waves at the time. Physics-based projectiles? Well sure, Quake had the bouncy grenade launcher, but the Flak Cannon and Razorjack made being aware of and using the environment second nature to players. The ASMD’s ability to produce a BFG shot on demand if you could combo properly was amazing. And the upgradeable nature of the Dispersion pistol made what was usually a loadout slot reserved for being sad about having to use a legitimate late-game complement to your arsenal.

So it stands to reason that Unreal Tournament barely changed it.

UT99’s arsenal did change a little bit, but not too drastically. Most changes were to damage or fire rate, and every weapon got a new model. Some weapons were slightly renamed, like the Automag becoming the Enforcer or the ASMD receiving its full title of ASMD Shock Rifle, the Eightball Launcher was just called the Rocket Launcher, the Rifle became the Sniper Rifle, and the Razorjack was renamed the Ripper.

The next level of changes was tweaking some alt fires. The biggest change here was the new Ripper losing its guided blade in favor of an alt fire that shot an explosive disk. Unlike the primary fire, it didn't bounce, and while it had only about half the splash radius of the Rocket Launcher proper, its fire rate and projectile speed were both much faster. Other than that, the only change to another gun was the Sniper Rifle getting a thematically appropriate overlay when you zoomed in, instead of Unreal’s Rifle not displaying anything. Additionally, because it seems to fit here more than the next bit, if you manage to find another Enforcer lying on the ground, you can pick it up and dual wield. It's pretty rad.

Larger changes came in the removal of both the Stinger and the Dispersion Pistol, and the addition of the Impact Hammer, Pulse Gun, and the series’ first superweapon, the Redeemer.

I'm personally a bit conflicted about trading the Stinger out for the Minigun. On one hand, UT99’s Minigun is a great piece of visual design - massive, chunky, and bold, with the added flair of seeing your arm holding onto a forward grip to really sell the vibe of that one scene in Predator. On the other hand, there's something to be said about a projectile weapon over a hitscan one, especially since so many high-powered hitscan weapons exist in the game already. But at the same time, UT99 does have an answer to the automatic projectile weapon, the Pulse Gun.

The Pulse Gun should be instantly familiar to anyone with a passing understanding of id Software’s early titles. Primary fire is just the Pulse Rifle from Doom, and alt fire is the Thunderbolt from Quake. But put together, married in this suitcase-sized brick of green polygons? A thing of beauty.

Let me at least address the Impact Hammer before moving on: it's a melee weapon you can charge up. It'll kill someone pretty good if you charge it up and manage to make contact. It has a pretty fun and inspired visual design but ultimately the only reason it's there is because you can run out of ammo with the Enforcer you spawn with. The end.

Alright, the Redeemer. The Redeemer is a man-portal nuclear warhead launcher, kind of like the Fat Man from Fallout 3 except way, way cooler. Primary fire launches a relatively slow-moving projectile that, on contact with anything, explodes in a shockwave that does enough damage to instantly gib anyone without 199 health and a Shield Belt powerup. It goes through walls, too. It's a very good superweapon. Making it better is its alt fire, where you take personal control of the missile as it travels, allowing you to guide it around the map with a surprising degree of maneuverability. The BFG may have a classic flair, but the Redeemer took the idea of a superweapon to a whole other level.

So how did all of these weapons actually play together? How did an arsenal designed for and balanced around a singleplayer game with fixed enemy spawns translate to a multiplayer arena? Quite well, in fact. Epic didn't design the game in a vacuum, and as Quake 2 was the reigning champ at the time, they didn't have to look far to see what worked and what could be changed for the better.

UT99 plays fast, hard, and unrelenting. People load into a map and immediately start running around picking up weapons and letting the lead fly. Now, it's time for my bias to show a bit. I only ever watched Quake 2 multiplayer, but I have in fact played Quake 3 and Quake Live, as well as a handful of hours of Quake Champions which I know isn't really comparable but it uses the same weapons so I'm still mentioning it. UT is my series, I have a preference for it, and this next bit is all my own opinion and observation.

Quake only has three weapons.

Quake is a game where movement is fast, projectiles are fast, and time to kill is fast. It's a fast game. But it's so fast that only three weapons end up mattering - the rocket launcher, railgun, and thunderbolt. They're the three highest-damage weapons in the game and they make up pretty much the entirety of its arsenal. Quake matches inevitably all play out as taking potshots at each other with rockets as everyone strafejumps around like crazy, switching to the railgun if someone manages to be in the open for more than half a second, and swapping to the thunderbolt if you manage to get close enough that another character model takes up more than a handful of pixels on your screen.

Quake is a very fast and chaotic game, and I'm not saying that this kind of play isn't skillful, it's just so fast that actual duels never really happen, and people just kind of end up taking damage from one end of the map when they're on the other. Quake’s other weapons just may as well not exist, because if you find yourself using your starting shotgun, the nailgun, or any other weapon you want to be close for, you're likely doing so in range of someone's Thunderbolt and that's not a race you're going to win.

It's a difficult point to make, so let me move back to UT and why I prefer it. UT is a small but noticeable bit slower than Quake in a way that I feel greatly benefits it. Overall, it comes down to bringing the action in a little closer, really making the fights seem more personal, and really giving players more of a chance to dance around each other rather than hopping around the level on their own accord until they find each other by chance. Projectiles are both slightly slower and much more visible than in Quake, so trying to slam a rocket into someone's face from three hundred meters isn't really going to happen. So, from further away, you'll want to use a hitscan weapon, but since your target will be smaller they'll be harder to hit. Unless you want to zoom in with the Sniper Rifle, but then you lose a bit of awareness of your immediate surroundings. Close up, the Flak Cannon is king, but its range is short enough to matter. The Pulse Gun’s alt fire is just the Thunderbolt, and it'll tear someone apart pretty handily, to say nothing of putting the Minigun into overdrive with its own alt fire. Even flipping your Enforcer sideways will get bullets into someone quickly, and with fancy enough footwork you can save yourself from a gruesome fate with the starting gun. Or, if you're trying to keep someone away, quickly laying down a gooey minefield with the Biorifle works just as well as filling a hallway with a dozen bouncing Ripper blades.

Every gun in UT99 can kill someone, and not just in theory. The game balances each of its weapons almost perfectly, and nothing ever feels totally useless or has an obvious better version (I am not counting the Impact Hammer or Enforcer in this statement). Jumping over or dodging away from rockets to close with the Pulse Gun’s alt fire is just as reasonable as forcing someone to switch away from their Flak Cannon by retreating backwards as your Biorifle makes it impossible for them to safely advance. Lobbing a Flak alt fire over that minefield is alway an option though, so be ready to get out of the way, and maybe pull out your Shock Rifle to push them backwards. A fully stocked Minigun can keep an approach locked off, but a quick sniper bullet right to the face will put an end to it.

Alright, admittedly the Biorifle is historically a bit ignored, and the Ripper didn't even show up in subsequent games, but both still had a purpose. I, personally, am a staunch defender of the Biorifle’s utility as an area denial tool, and the ability to charge its alt fire will instantly kill someone no matter their health and shield level, if you can hit them. It's certainly better in team gamemodes like Assault or CTF, though. But just shooting at people with the weapons does not an arena shooter make. For there to be the proper levels of frantic action, movement needs to have a strong focus.

As in Quake, you'll want to get familiar with your spacebar. Strafe jumping isn't a thing as far as constantly upping your own speed, but it sure does make you harder to hit, and getting decent at dodging rockets always helps. Double tap a movement key to do a quick dodge in that direction, useful not just for avoiding projectiles but for snaking down corridors. On an elevator? Jump just before it reaches the top to get a massive boost and go flying. The Impact Hammer isn't ideal as a weapon, but a quick blast downward makes a decent stand-in for a rocket jump, if at the cost of significantly more self-damage. Capping it all off is the Translocator, the aforementioned teleporting-disk-thrower. Primary fire to shoot a disk in a pretty generous arc, alt fire to teleport to it. Disks emit light and can be destroyed, if you teleport while carrying a flag you drop it, and yes, you do fall faster than the disk travels upward. Truth be told, I usually play with the Translocator turned off, but that's mainly because the bots, as good as they are at the rest of the game, are less than stellar at putting those disks where they want, often leading to a cluster of them bouncing their shot off a wall just inches under the ledge they want up to, and not taking any action until they get it. I think it has to do with the accuracy modifiers based on bot skill level, but I'm not sure.

The bots are great in every other respect, though. Sure, they'll never actually replace a human player, but they're more than good enough for a few hundred hours of offline play. All the tricks the Skaarj demonstrated in Unreal are on display again, and tuned up to use every weapon. Bots jump and dodge, retreat if they're low on health, make decisions about what weapon to use based on their proximity to you as well as their own inventories, switch between firemodes when it makes sense, and plenty else. Upping the bot difficulty doesn't just make them do more damage or give them more health (it doesn't even do that in the first place), it makes them smarter. Or ‘smarter’ if you really care - it changes their reaction times and how accurate they are, how aggressively they'll act, and even how good they are at using the weapons beyond just aiming. A low-level bot might not get close enough to hit you with the Pulse Gun’s alt fire, or will use a Rocket Launcher in close quarters with all the risks of splash damage and self-death that entails. Higher difficulty bots will bank Flak shots off walls and bounce grenades around corners, lay fields of Biorifle goop, or be deadly-accurate with a sniper rifle from above.

The bots are what really put UT99 firmly on the ‘classic’ shelf, because its contemporaries just didn't offer the same thing. Again, Quake 2 had bots, but they served the purpose of being moving targets and not much else. Driving UT’s bots was a dead-simple, if tedious to implement, system. If you'll indulge me, I'm gonna pull back the hood and reveal the not-at-all-secret ways Unreal Tournament made all of its bots so good at playing each map.

All over a map, there are invisible waypoints hand-placed by the designer. The goal is to make a rough trail of waypoints to each part of the map. Bots see each waypoint and have the ability to travel in a wide radius around each. Weapons, ammo, health, armor, and special powerups all act as special waypoints that a bot will see and travel to if they don't already have what that pickup is. Players and other bots are considered waypoints as well, and when all that comes together, a bot will very intuitively move around the level. Placing a waypoint higher in the air will make a bot jump to reach it, so having them move over obstacles is simple. Like I said, it only requires a loose sort of web across the level, as the world geometry itself is also something a bot sees. Going around a corner or a box in the middle of a room is no issue provided the waypoints are good enough.

So now that you know how the sausage is made, what does that mean for the game? Well, quite a lot. Bot support is built into every single one of the maps UT99 shipped with, which is no small feat considering the base game came with 53 maps across four gamemodes (deathmatch and team deathmatch use the same maps), with a further 30 maps added for every gamemode but Assault over the course of four free downloadable bonus packs.

Every single one of those is playable, to this day, offline with a complement of bots just as ready to rock as they were almost twenty years ago. And that's not event counting the thousands of user-made maps still available for download, but we'll talk about modding in a bit. Because right now, it's time to talk about another excellent thing present on each map - the music.

Returning from Unreal are indisputable gods of music Alexander Brandon and Michiel van den Bos, who trade the previous game's subdued alien score for a soundtrack full of some of the boppin’est, crunchiest, hypest EDM tracks of the late 90s. (Can you tell I don't know anything about music?)

Run, GoDown, and Organic provide the upbeat bleeps and bloops to murder by; Save Me, Razorback, and Superfist let you rock out with your shock (rifle) out; while Forgone Destruction, Skyward Fire, and The Course chill things out a bit so you can focus on getting sick headshots. The quality of the music in Unreal Tournament is impossible to overstate, just as it was in Unreal. Brandon and van den Bos are unrelentingly good at their jobs, and the mishmash of styles all grinds together across UT99’s broad palette of maps like butter full of shrapnel. It's good, is what I'm saying. The music's really good. Listen to it. Please.

Stage music is something I personally miss from shooters, if you'll indulge another tangent. I love hearing the gameworld as interpreted by the composers, it adds so much to the whole package, and we just don't really get it anymore. The rise of the modern military shooter in 2007 with the runaway success of Call of Duty 4 kind of slammed the door on stage music with a tactical-lite focus on identifying footsteps and directional fire, but even Halo’s deathmatches were filled with a blank silence. Or Halo 2, I suppose, since Halo 1 didn't have online play, except for the PC version, which did. No stage music though, that's the main takeaway.

UT99 had a truly odd mix of contemporaries, from the last days of Quake 2 and the imminent release of Quake 3 a week after UT itself came out, to Half-Life creating a mod scene in its multiplayer, to Halo a year or so later. The turn of the century would bring with it the generally-accepted death of the arena shooter, but they all went out kicking, and the few hundred people still populating UT99 servers to this day are a testament to its tight, clean design and no-frills focus on gameplay.

Unless, of course, they're playing a mod.

Truth be told, I never actually played much UT99 online. I was very bad, you see, and when I got better my horrible social anxiety had progressed to the point where the idea of even playing a game with faceless strangers was terrifying. I was 8. But anyway, modding! You may have, in your travels as someone who presumably plays videogames - an assumption I'm making because you're reading this - heard of the Unreal Engine. In a hidden bit of Trivia, Unreal was the first game on the Unreal Engine, and Unreal Tournament also used it. Wild!

Along with the game itself, both releases also shipped with the Unreal Editor, or UnrealEd. UnrealEd is the exact development tool the fine folks at Epic Megagames used to make those games, and they just casually handed them to the players. The result echoes throughout the game industry to this day, and while Epic was hardly the only developer supporting mods, they were the first to do so on that kind of level. As a result, there are thousands if not tens of thousands of user-made maps scattered around the web, along with new gamemodes, fan-made expansions for Unreal, new character models, weapons, and mutators.

Ah, mutators.

Mutators can be thought of as ‘mini-mods,’ if you want. There's a list of them you can select before each game that all change, or mutate (see?), the gameplay a bit. Superjump, low gravity, replacing each weapon spawn on a map with another, big head mode, stuff like that. Mutators are a fun addition that can mix up a usual match, but don't bring with them the sweeping changes of a full mod or total conversion. They were a way to illustrate how flexible the development options were, and a nifty thing for players to have available to them.

So, Unreal Tournament had lots of ways to keep the game fresh, either built-in or crafted by other players. Turn a small map into Explosion Hell with the Rocket Arena mutator, or download a player-made weapon pack filled with weird goodies. Wondering how Quake’s iconic maps play in UT? Somebody's made them. Hell, someone's even made a bunch of UT2004 maps for UT99, complete with de-made character and weapon models. A lasting legacy of creativity is what UT99 brought above all else, and the fact that so much of what it did can remain as the primary example of how to do something right says more than I can about its impact on videogames as a whole.

Unreal Tournament is a fast, brutal game balancing all of its various systems on the edge of a spinning razor blade, and it does so with a mastery that I feel was not seen among its peers of the time. From the weapons, the movement, the maps, and the gamemodes, Unreal Tournament presents you the player with so many options, but it never feels like a generic crowd-pleasing paste has been slathered over everything. The game's core is simple and well defined, and everything else builds on that. It has a certain tightly-realized identity that I feel is missing from a lot of games that try to have the same sort of arcady arena vibe - Halo was probably its closest rival as far as small genre shifts go, and looking at Destiny 2 as the latest version of that is a weird mix of procedurally generated weapons, hero abilities, flat maps, and very few projectile weapons. Skill has been taken out of some areas and added to others, but the design feels looser, less actualized. Call of Duty is fast, but still has that small desire to be somewhat tactical, so there are recoil patterns and weapon attachments, the rich-get-richer killstreaks, and a progression system that murders any attempt at balancing their arsenal. Quake Live, from what I understand, has a healthy enough playerbase, but my preference has already been stated. Quake Champions tries to marry its classic gameplay with that of Overwatch, and the reactions have been mixed. Team Fortress 2 has been bogged down with more and more weapons that blur the lines between classes, and the official map rotation - already small on launch - has barely been added to in twelve years.

This isn't a “games are different now and that's bad” sort of thing, my point is just that UT99 had a much cleaner mission statement, if you will, than what we get now. The industry's gotten bigger, and budgets followed. Expectations of sales rose, leading developers to want to bring in as many players as they could. Games can't really be niche anymore.

Or maybe that was true five years ago, but now the indie scene’s getting huge, and you can find a revival of your favorite genre just about anywhere. Most aren't super well polished, but isn't that what made games like Unreal, Quake, and Half-Life into what we remember? They all had more ambition than was perhaps warranted, and each made their huge impacts despite a healthy amount of blemishes. Endless polish makes for a good player experience, but maybe not as much of a memorable one.

Unreal Tournament all but made me into an FPS fan, and I think it's great that we all have so many types to choose from now. Public tastes have shifted and evolutions of the genre happened. I've enjoyed my fair share of Calls of Duty and Battlefields, I plugged hundreds of hours into TF2 throughout highschool, I've ridden the Overwatch hype train, and I love poking holes in walls and getting sneaky kills in Rainbow Six: Siege. But Unreal Tournament is my oldest bastion, and one I return to every now and then when the whim takes me. It occupies my top slot, though admittedly in an endless 1v1 with Unreal Tournament 2004.

But there was another Unreal Tournament between the two, one that came and went with mild fanfare while paving the way for what I feel is, hands down, the best game ever crafted by human hands. Check back at the end of the month for a short look at the odd little Unreal Tournament 2003.

#unreal tournament #ut99 #words about games #videogame #review #essay #fortnite #unreal retrospective

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mhelreads · 2 years

Text

The Midnight Library

By: Matt Haig

Finished on May 2, 2021

*‘Pressure makes us, though. You start off as coal and the pressure makes you a diamond.’ She didn’t correct his knowledge of diamonds. She didn’t tell him that while coal and diamonds are both carbon, coal is too impure to be able, under whatever pressure, to become a diamond. According to science, you start off as coal and you end up as coal. Maybe that was the real-life lesson.' (6%)

*The universe tended towards chaos and entropy. That was basic thermodynamics. Maybe it was basic existence too. (7%)

*‘Bands don’t last. We’d have been a meteor shower. Over before we started.’ ‘Meteor showers are fucking beautiful.’ (7%)

*‘Go confidently in the direction of your dreams,’ Thoreau had said. ‘Live the life you’ve imagined.’ Thoreau had been her favourite philosopher to study. But who seriously goes confidently in the direction of their dreams? Well, apart from Thoreau. He’d gone and lived in the woods, with no contact from the outside world, to just sit there and write and chop wood and fish. (8%)

*As she spoke, Mrs Elm’s eyes came alive, twinkling like puddles in moonlight. ‘Between life and death there is a library,’ she said. ‘And within that library, the shelves go on for ever. Every book provides a chance to try another life you could have lived. To see how things would be different if you had made other choices . . . Would you have done anything different, if you had the chance to undo your regrets?’ (11%)

*‘Every life contains many millions of decisions. Some big, some small. But every time one decision is taken over another, the outcomes differ. An irreversible variation occurs, which in turn leads to further variations. These books are portals to all the lives you could be living.’ (12%)

*‘You have as many lives as you have possibilities. There are lives where you make different choices. And those choices lead to different outcomes. If you had done just one thing differently, you would have a different life story. And they all exist in the Midnight Library. They are all as real as this life.’ (12%)

*Still staring blankly at The Book of Regrets, she wondered if her parents had ever been in love or if they had got married because marriage was something you did at the appropriate time with the nearest available person. A game where you grabbed the first person you could find when the music stopped. (14%)

*‘Want,’ she told her, in a measured tone, ‘is an interesting word. It means lack. Sometimes if we fill that lack with something else the original want disappears entirely. Maybe you have a lack problem rather than a want problem. (23%)

*‘Never underestimate the big importance of small things,’ Mrs Elm said. ‘You must always remember that.’ (32%)

*‘The rook is my favourite piece,’ she said. ‘It’s the one that you think you don’t have to watch out for. It is straightforward. You keep your eye on the queen, and the knights, and the bishop, because they are the sneaky ones. But it’s the rook that often gets you. The straightforward is never quite what it seems.’ (33%)

*‘And . . . and the thing is . . . the thing is . . . what we consider to be the most successful route for us to take, actually isn’t. Because too often our view of success is about some external bullshit idea of achievement – an Olympic medal, the ideal husband, a good salary. And we have all these metrics that we try and reach. When really success isn’t something you measure, and life isn’t a race you can win. It’s all . . . bollocks, actually . . (41%)

*To be part of nature was to be part of the will to live. When you stay too long in a place, you forget just how big an expanse the world is. You get no sense of the length of those longitudes and latitudes. Just as, she supposed, it is hard to have a sense of the vastness inside any one person. (48%)

*But once you sense that vastness, once something reveals it, hope emerges, whether you want it to or not, and it clings to you as stubbornly as lichen clings to rock. (48%)

*She imagined, now, what it would be like to accept herself completely. Every mistake she had ever made. Every mark on her body. Every dream she hadn’t reached or pain she had felt. Every lust or longing she had suppressed. She imagined accepting it all. The way she accepted nature. The way she accepted a glacier or a puffin or the breach of a whale. She imagined seeing herself as just another brilliant freak of nature. Just another sentient animal, trying their best. And in doing so, she imagined what it was like to be free. (51%)

*‘Erwin Schrödinger . . .’ ‘He of the cat.’ ‘Yes. The cat guy. He said that in quantum physics every alternative possibility happens simultaneously. All at once. In the same place. Quantum superposition. The cat in the box is both alive and dead. You could open the box and see that it was alive or dead, that’s how it goes, but in one sense, even after the box is open, the cat is still both alive and dead. Every universe exists over every other universe. Like a million pictures on tracing paper, all with slight variations within the same frame. The many-worlds interpretation of quantum physics suggests there are an infinite number of divergent parallel universes. Every moment of your life you enter a new universe. With every decision you make. And traditionally it was thought that there could be no communication or transference between those worlds, even though they happen in the same space, even though they happen literally millimetres away from us.’ (52%)

*‘Science tells us that the “grey zone” between life and death is a mysterious place. There is a singular point at which we are not one thing or another. Or rather we are both. Alive and dead. And in that moment between the two binaries, sometimes, just sometimes, we turn ourselves into a Schrödinger’s cat who may not only be alive or dead but may be every quantum possibility that exists in line with the universal wave function, including the possibility where we are chatting in a communal kitchen in Longyearbyen at one in the morning . . .’ (53%)

*‘Why is it always just one person that we see? In the place. The library. Whatever.’ Hugo shrugged. ‘If I was religious, I’d say it was God. And as God is probably someone we can’t see or comprehend then He – or She – or whichever pronoun God is – becomes an image of someone good we have known in our lives. And if I wasn’t religious – which I’m not – I would think that the human brain can’t handle the complexity of an open quantum wave function and so it organises or translates this complexity into something it understands. A librarian in a library. A friendly uncle in a video store. Et cetera.’ (53%)

*‘So,’ Nora said, ‘whatever exists between universes is most likely not a library, but that is the easiest way for me to understand it. That would be my hypothesis. I see a simplified version of the truth. The librarian is just a kind of mental metaphor. The whole thing is.’ (53%)

*Every second of every day we are entering a new universe. And we spend so much time wishing our lives were different, comparing ourselves to other people and to other versions of ourselves, when really most lives contain degrees of good and degrees of bad.’ (64%)

*‘There are patterns to life . . . Rhythms. It is so easy, while trapped in just the one life, to imagine that times of sadness or tragedy or failure or fear are a result of that particular existence. That it is a by-product of living a certain way, rather than simply living. I mean, it would have made things a lot easier if we understood there was no way of living that can immunise you against sadness. And that sadness is intrinsically part of the fabric of happiness. You can’t have one without the other. Of course, they come in different degrees and quantities. But there is no life where you can be in a state of sheer happiness for ever. And imagining there is just breeds more unhappiness in the life you’re in.’ (64%)

*‘Look at that chessboard we put back in place,’ said Mrs Elm, softly. ‘Look at how ordered and safe and peaceful it looks now, before a game starts. It’s a beautiful thing. But it is boring. It is dead. And yet the moment you make a move on that board, things change. Things begin to get more chaotic. And that chaos builds with every single move you make.’ (69%)

*‘At the beginning of a game, there are no variations. There is only one way to set up a board. There are nine million variations after the first six moves. And after eight moves there are two hundred and eighty-eight billion different positions. And those possibilities keep growing. There are more possible ways to play a game of chess than the amount of atoms in the observable universe. So it gets very messy. And there is no right way to play; there are many ways. In chess, as in life, possibility is the basis of everything. Every hope, every dream, every regret, every moment of living.’ (69%)

*‘Compassion is the basis of morality,’ the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer had written, in one of his softer moments. Maybe it was the basis of life too. (70%)

*He was a good person, and good people were rare. (71%)

*It was one of life’s rules – Never trust someone who is willingly rude to low-paid service staff – and Dan had failed at that one, and many of the others. (72%)

*She had known three types of silence in relationships. There was passive-aggressive silence, obviously, there was the we-no-longer-have-anything-to-say silence, and then there was the silence that Eduardo and she seemed to have cultivated. The silence of not needing to talk. Of just being together, of together-being. The way you could be happily silent with yourself. (74%)

*‘We only know what we perceive. Everything we experience is ultimately just our perception of it. “It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.”’ (77%)

*Sometimes she remembered the words of Mrs Elm on her first visit there. If you really want to live a life hard enough, you don’t have to worry . . . The moment you decide you want that life, really want it, then everything that exists in your head now, including this Midnight Library, will eventually be a dream. A memory so vague and intangible it will hardly be there at all. (84%)

*She realised that you could be as honest as possible in life, but people only see the truth if it is close enough to their reality. As Thoreau wrote, ‘It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.’ And Ash only saw the Nora he had fallen in love with and married, and so, in a way, that was the Nora she was becoming. (85%)

*She doubted he believed it, but Nora had to accept that – as she now knew only too well – some truths were just impossible to see. (86%)

*And when she thought of her root life, the fundamental problem with it, the thing that had left her vulnerable, really, was the absence of love. (87%)

*Never underestimate the big importance of small things, Mrs Elm had said. You must always remember that. (89%)

*It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see. (90%)

*They were all her. She could have been all those amazing things, and that wasn’t depressing, as she had once thought. Not at all. It was inspiring. Because now she saw the kinds of things she could do when she put herself to work. And that, actually, the life she had been living had its own logic to it. (94%)

*What sometimes feels like a trap is actually just a trick of the mind. She didn’t need a vineyard or a Californian sunset to be happy. She didn’t even need a large house and the perfect family. She just needed potential. And she was nothing if not potential. She wondered why she had never seen it before. (94%)

*Three simple words containing the power and potential of a multiverse. I AM ALIVE. (94%)

*‘Life begins,’ Sartre once wrote, ‘on the other side of despair.’ (95%)

*But it is not the lives we regret not living that are the real problem. It is the regret itself. It’s the regret that makes us shrivel and wither and feel like our own and other people’s worst enemy. (96%)

*We are as completely and utterly alive as we are in any other life and have access to the same emotional spectrum. We only need to be one person. We only need to feel one existence. We don’t have to do everything in order to be everything, because we are already infinite. While we are alive we always contain a future of multifarious possibility. (96%)

*So let’s be kind to the people in our own existence. Let’s occasionally look up from the spot in which we are because, wherever we happen to be standing, the sky above goes on for ever. (96%)

*And yet, everything was different. And it was different because she no longer felt she was there simply to serve the dreams of other people. She no longer felt like she had to find sole fulfilment as some imaginary perfect daughter or sister or partner or wife or mother or employee or anything other than a human being, orbiting her own purpose, and answerable to herself. (98%)

*‘Well, that’s the beauty, isn’t it? You just never know how it ends.’ (100%)

0 notes

lushscreamqueen · 3 years

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THE KILLER SHREWS on the Schlocky Horror Picture Show

August 03, 2008

OPENING: Hello, good evening, and welcome to the Schlocky Horror Picture Show. I'm your host, Nigel Honeybone. As the 1950's grew to a close so did the era of the giant radioactive beast. Spawned from the nuclear fears stemming from World War II, the movies saw dozens of animals super-sized due to one of the popular catch words of the time: Radiation! By decades end, just about every manner of giant beastie had been seen. Lizards, spiders, ants, grasshoppers, the list goes on. The major studios had lost the inclination to finance such projects, and gradually re-focused their attention on new trends like nudies, bikies and gothic horror. That is not to say that movies with ginogorous critters didn't exist. It's just that, more often than not, it was left to the little guy, the independent producer or filmmaking rookie to unleash such monsters. Witness tonight, if you dare, as a group of people trapped on an island during a storm must contend with a bunch of whippets in wigs, in the 1959 anti-classic, Attack Of The Killer Shrews! BREAK: Don't go away, we'll be right back with more dogs In drag, and then after the ads we'll get back to the movie. MIDDLE: Welcome back to the Schlocky Horror Picture Show. Attack Of The Killer Shrews, also known as just Killer Shrews, was the brainchild of Texas millionaire Gordon McLendon. Born in Paris, Texas in 1921 he would go on to win a nationwide political-essay contest, attend Yale University where he studied Far Eastern languages, work for the campus radio station, and served as business manager for the Yale Literary Magazine, all before the U.S. got involved in World War Two. After the war he bought an interest in a radio station and built up a following for his live baseball game broadcasts. Having built up quite a name for himself as a pioneer in the radio field, McLendon now turned his attention to film...a regrettable decision for producer and audience alike. He and his family owned several drive-ins and theatres. Like many drive-in owners discovered, their outlets for screening films were considered the bottom of the barrel by the pretentious lot in Hollywood and many in tinseltown tried their darndest to keep their films out of the drive-in chains. This only led to the drive-in owners taking the next logical step, they financed their own films. In 1959 McLendon financed three films: The Killer Shrews, The Giant Gila Monster, and My Dog Buddy, none of which are remembered as sterling examples of cinematic skill, if they're remembered at all. James Best, known far and wide as Sheriff Roscoe P. Coltrane on television's original Dukes of Hazzard, plays Thorne Sherman and captains his own ship. Sounds cool, but sadly it isn't any bigger than the SS Minnow, and the only person he has to boss around is Rook. He's a glorified gopher, delivering supplies out to Doctor Craigis on his island. Sherman is a man's man, which by 1950s terms means he drinks like a fish, smokes like a chimney, has an appreciative eye for the ladies and is ready for a fistfight on a moment's notice, the kind of simplistic brute we are gradually evolving away from, a little too slowly if you ask me. His Honour Judge Henry Dupree plays Rook Griswold and looks like he could have played the title role in that live action Fat Albert movie: Hey, hey, hey! He's Sherman's sole crewman, although the two seem to share a real friendship rather than just bossy Captain/abused crew dynamic. Poor Rook is the first person to bite it in The Killer Shrews, or more accurately, the first to get bitten. Repeatedly, as a matter of fact. In this way this film helped start the stereotype of the token black character becoming the first victim in horror films. You may think films like Night Of The Living Dead and Alien were breakthroughs for the token black character in American horror, but a pessimist might say they simply get more screen-time before being killed-off. Baruch Lumet plays Doctor Marlowe Craigis. He may not seem like much, but he fathered one of Hollywoods greatest producer/directors, Sidney Lumet, famous for

Twelve Angry Men, Failsafe, The Pawnbroker and Dog Day Afternoon. Speaking of dogs, he also directed the all-black musical The Wiz starring Diana Ross and Michael Jackson. Nobody's perfect. Anyway, Craigis says he hails from Sweden, and has come to the island of The Killer Shrews to further his scientific work, but you and I both know it was to keep his sexy daughter out of the Swedish porn industry. Craigis wants to shrink people, or at least slow down our metabolisms so the Earth's resources will last longer when overpopulation becomes a big problem. I think a bigger problem might be smarmy foreign scientists who screw around with Mother Nature... Swedish-born Ingrid Goude, a former Miss Universe, plays Ann Craigis, Doctor Craigis sexy daughter. She claims to be a zoologist, which is about as convincing as Nicole Kidman playing a brain surgeon. Though to be honest, I wouldn't mind checking-out her knowledge of biology, if you know what I mean, and I think you do. Ann serves no purpose here other than to scream on occasion, and to provide Captain Sherman with a new First Mate, if you know what I mean, and I think you do. Ken Curtis, another famous redneck, plays Jerry Farrell, part of Doctor Craigis research team. Curtis was inducted into the Hall Of Great Western Performers in 1981 for his performance as Festus in almost 300 episodes of Gunsmoke. Jerry's vital role in the mission is whining, cowering, boozing it up and generally being a waste of skin. He despises Sherman from the start, probably because he recognises that Sherman is much more of a man than he ever will be. I wouldn't get attached to Jerry if I were you. Played by Gordon McLendon, the Texas millionaire responsible for this mess Doctor Radford Baines is another one of the scientists helping Doctor Craigis with his work. This guy is really devoted to his work. In fact, he can hardly think of anything else and walks around muttering things like "Hematoxic Syndrome." His last moments on Earth are spent in devotion to science and furthering the understanding of mankind, instead of doing something really important like trying to get laid or run away. Unknown Alfredo DeSoto plays Mario. Despite the Italian name, Mario is apparently Mexican. He's most likely a servant of some kind, though his main duty seems to be as a device to advance the plot. Whatever he does, it doesn't involve too much physical labor, as Mario's mid section is expanding faster than a balloon. He isn't around much. Just long enough to say things like "Si, senor," "No, senor" and "Aaaahhhh!". It also explains why the shrews ran out of food. Mario doesn't look like he was missing any meals... Attack Of The Killer Shrews gives real meaning to the phrase Low Budget. Filmed on a mere handful of sets and featuring scene after scene of people talking, often with their back to the camera, with little in the way of action, and one could easily dismiss this as pure manure. The fact that the giant shrews are played by dogs in drag when they're not being represented by clumsy puppets, and one could not be blamed for turning up their nose at this movie. If there is a saving grace, it's the short running time. So yes, there's lots of boring talk, but there is also enough monster action to satisfy fans of such schlocky goodness. Besides, I shouldn't have to explain how funny it is to watch somebody scream in terror at a Collie wearing carpet remnants, when the dog is rolling over on his back obviously expecting a belly rub! And it's with that thought in mind we now return you to the carnivorous canine creepiness that is Attack Of The Killer Shrews! CLOSING: It's alright, you can open your eyes now. How exactly do Killer Shrews assimilate poison into their systems, anyway? For instance, I love to drink Absinthe, and I do mean Absinthe, not that over-the-counter swill. I've consumed hundreds if not thousands of litres of it over the years, over three thousand litres just in the last fifteen years, but I still haven't started frothing with green poison yet. If I can't assimilate my own favourite

beverage after drinking thousands of bottles, how can the shrews do so with poison after just one sampling of it? Anyway, please join me next week so I can poke you in the eye with another frightful excursion to the backside of the Public Domain, filmed in glorious 2-D black & white Regularscope on...The Schlocky Horror Picture Show. Toodles!

by Lushscreamqueen

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thisweekingundamwing · 6 years

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This Week in Gundam Wing Apr 1st - Apr 7th

Another week, another roundup! Special thanks to all who submitted works, both for themselves and others.

As a gentle reminder, we’re here to highlight any new content from the previous week. If we missed a submission, we’ll be happy to update our post or carry it over to the next week, but if we tried to include everything beyond a week, we’d never get a post finished!

Thank you so much!

--Mod Rem

Fanfiction:

A Little Piece of Gundam Wing

The archive is being ported to AO3! Check it out!

AerisEithne

The Snow Queen

Days after the incident that nearly sparked a new war, Relena returns to the Sanc Kingdom to contemplate her future. She can’t help but wonder which path the perfect soldier will choose… and whether their destinies will continue to collide.

Pairings: 1xR

Warnings: Gundam Wing: Frozen Teardrop, Preventers (Gundam Wing)

@the-indomitable-bhg, Morbidbirdy

Animus

A ghost of Heero's past takes possession of his life, relationships and his identity.

Pairings: 1x3, 2xH

Warnings: Violence, Rape/Non-Con, Post-Canon, Psychological Torture, Blood and Violence, Explicit Sexual Content

@claraxbarton , @kangofu-cb

Bad Company

"The only hell and the only paradise are the ones we build ourselves." - Unknown

Years after the wars, Preventers has decided to tackle one of the most powerful and oldest of all the Terran crime syndicates. Embedded dangerously deep in an undercover operation targeting the violent and bloodthirsty Sinaloa Cartel, Trowa Barton is pushed beyond even his flexible morals - and when his new "partner" arrives in the very unexpected and unwelcome form of Duo Maxwell, the one person he'd been trying to protect at all costs, both men must deal with the realization that preserving peace for humanity is turning into a bloodsport.

What follows is race against time to uncover the evidence they need to bring Sinaloa, and its beautiful but deadly leaders, down - all while keeping each other alive in the process

Pairings: 2x3

Warnings: Violence, Post-Canon, Undercover Missions, Undercover as a Couple, Implied/Referenced Torture, Implied Sexual Content, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Human Trafficking, Gang Violence, Explicit Sexual Content, Moral Dilemmas

CosmicAether

Untitled GW Resistance AU

When their communicator breaks down, Duo and Trowa must survive the night before attempting to rendezvous to their extraction point. Duo confronts Trowa about their relationship that night and vow to be more honest with each other, they need only to make it home first.

Pairings: 2x3

DarkDanc3r

April Writes Playlist Challenge

30 days, 30 songs from a Spotify playlist. Characters and pairings will be at the start of each chapter.

Warnings: Tumblr Prompt, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Fix-It of Sorts, Damnit Prowl Lives

GlassAlice

The Pictures He Drew

Hiatus is over! Last chapter will be up in two weeks. Re-write of a fic posted to 1x2 yahoo groups I wrote forever ago and lost. Only the bare bones of this fic have anything to do with the first one. Hopefully this one is a bit better. Originally posted under name Duos_hallelujah. Simple get together fic with Duo being an artist.

Pairings: 1xR, 1x2

Warnings: Rape/Non-Con, Song Fic Kinda, Rape/Non-con Elements, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, these boys are messed up, they need therapy, after war, the pilots trying to live their lives, 1x2, 2x1 - Freeform, 1x2x1, 1xR non con, 1x2 end game, we're back from hiatus, boys just trying to figure shit out, relena is kind of the bad guy, Sorry Not Sorry, i'm anti relena, so expect her to be treated badly, bullied duo, attempted suicide, Homophobia, Homophobic Language, language trigger warnings, a bit dark, Angst

Lithle

Like Oxygen

Five years after the war, Wufei seeks Duo out for one more mission. But Duo has his reasons for wanting to be left alone. As Wufei and Duo grow closer, so do Duo's memories of the war, and with them, the old scars and dangerous thought patterns that make even breathing seem difficult.

--Note: Originally published on FF.net, this is my 'Editor's Choice' edition. It's been edited and slightly rewritten for flow and cohesion.

Pairings: 2x5

Warnings: Unhealthy Relationships, Post War Trauma, Suicidal Thoughts, no EW, Post-War, Post-Canon, POV Duo Maxwell, Explicit Language, Sex, Duo is Broken, Wufei is Pretty Broken Too, Gritty, Get Together

Luvsanime02

Just One Day

Relena gets a surprise on her birthday.

Warnings: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Light Angst, Family Issues, Cocktail Friday

Maldoror

The Source of All Things

Center, a planet where magic and technology blend. Or more accurately, fight tooth and nail. A planet of Sources, holes in our boring dimension letting through arcane power, chaos and pseudo-deities. In this hot-house of myths and very real dangers, Trowa and Quatre find a mysterious man at the end of a shamanic voyage. Portents suggest this Heero Yuy is crucial to Center’s survival. He’s important enough to have some interesting enemies after him, at any rate: a devious killer and thief called ‘Shinigami’, and a very irate Dragon. Beyond them looms an even greater threat. Indeed, the greatest of them all.

Pairings: 3x4, 2x5, eventual 1x2x5

Warnings: Violence, alternative universe, Science Fiction, Fantasy, Plot Twists, fairly graphic depiction of sex, Mild description of self-harm, Mathematical Magic, weird science, crones - Freeform, Magic and Technology brawling and eventually screwing, Eventual Threesome, Kinda, Insanity of arcane origin, The universe is a pile of marbles and other dubious allegories

Two Halves

The two kingdoms of Sanq and Lin were at war for years; a conflagration involving magic, armies and political murder. The conflict left both nations devastated and strewn with refugees. The king of Sanq finds his infant son, lost at birth, among the death and the ruin, a miracle he barely dared to hope for. But there isn’t just one boy, there are two, clinging together like two halves of a whole that cannot be separated. Decades later, the truth behind that second child’s existence will put a hole in the world, or possibly save it.

Pairings: 1x2

Warnings: Fantasy AU, medieval setting with magic, starts with our heroes as children, Cousin Incest, sort of, eventually, being royalty this is in fact the norm and rather expected of them, Canon-Typical Violence

Margaret_Armstrong

Queen’s Rook

Rook; definition:

1. a gregarious Eurasian crow with black plumage and a bare face, nesting in colonies in treetops.

2. a chess piece, typically with its top in the shape of a battlement, that can move in any direction along a rank or file on which it stands.

Queen's Rook; definition:

(chess) A rook on the queen’s side of the board at the start of the game.

Truly, a female bodyguard is just what the Vice Foreign Minister needs. There are dangers about.

Pairings: Canon Relationships, 3x4, 2xH, 1xR

Warnings: Violence, Women Being Awesome, brothers in arms, everyone protects Quatre except Quatre, L2 forever!, The Past Never Stays Buried

@noelleian

The Pact

After seducing Quatre, the other four ex-pilots brave the uncharted waters of their new abilities and learn to cope with the unintentional gifts they were given. But as always, power requires responsibility and the humbling acknowledgement of humanity's weaknesses. The struggle to stay true to themselves becomes a dangerous and terrifying endeavor as they skirt the boundary where conscience bleeds into chaos and the dark abyss of temptation.

Pairings: 1x2x3x4x5, 3x4, 1x4, 2x4, 4x5

Warnings: Smut, Porn With Plot, OT5, Fluff, Humor, Fivesome - M/M/M/M/M, Angst, Newtypes, Possessive Behavior, Alternate Universe - Dark, Non-Graphic Violence, Alpha/Omega, Omega Verse

Green Olive

Duo's had a rough day and needs to unwind, but this time he's in the mood for some company.

Warnings: Friendship, Bromance, Underage Drinking

@noirangetrois

Cocktail Friday

This will be a collection of my Cocktail Friday snippets.

Pairings: Various

Warnings: Cocktail Friday, Alcohol

The Story of Wrong

Duo recounts his experiences during the war in order to explain... well, why he was wrong.

Pairings: 1x2

Warnings: Violence, Major Character Death, Duo POV, Angst, Drama, Tragedy, slight AU, Spoilers, very dark, Heero and Duo don't die, I promise, Yaoi, slowburn, Mental Instability, Mental Health Issues, Mental Breakdown, If those are in any way an issue for you then go ahead and skip this, Eventual Smut, VERY eventual, this is mostly canon-compliant but I've changed a couple things here and there

Outrightmight

MCU One Shot Series: After Colony 195

"It took Bucky a split second to get his bearings. The portal had spit them out into an aircraft hanger. The make and model of the one and only small jet was unfamiliar. He would have said it was of Soviet make, but the 50-foot robot idly standing in the middle of the hanger was making him second-guess himself."

Warnings: Natasha Romanov (Marvel), James "Bucky" Barnes, Steve Rogers, Duo Maxwell, Sam Wilson (Marvel), Heero Yuy, Canon-Typical Violence, One Shot

@remsyk-blog

Souls for the Bayou

For Trowa Barton, exploring the bayou is the ultimate adventure. Drawn to its borders since before he could walk, he spent his childhood learning its paths and uncovering its secrets.

But a chance encounter sets him on a path that spans across time, challenging everything he thought he knew, plunging him deeper into its mysteries than he ever thought possible.

Pairings: 2x3

Warnings: Supernatural - Freeform, Fae & Fairies, Fae Magic, Bayou, Cajun, Childhood Friends, Childhood Memories, Mystery, Slow Burn, Technically Speaking, Young Love, Use of accents, Original Character(s), Other Additional Tags to Be Added, I don't want to give it all away at once, Fandom Trumps Hate, Time Jump, Suspense, Quatre is a great friend, Mentions of Children Disappearing

Shenanigans

A Collection of my shitposts from Tumblr.

Enter looking for a good time. Expect the tags to change as more installments are added

Warnings: chat fic, shitpost, Professor!Trowa, Cooking, Pinterest, Pancakes, Exercising, Tumblr Prompt, Originally Posted on Tumblr, In depth analysis of riding dick, New Year’s Eve, Jenga, Stupid Dares, Just Heero Things

ShenLong

Bound, Bonded and Betrayed

Heero is the eldest son of the King of Colonia. His 21st birthday is approaching and as tradition dictates his betrothed is soon to arrive. However he is also bound by tradition to select his own personal slave. The events that unfold lead him down a path that not only tests his sanity but his humanity and love as well.

Pairings: 1x2, 1xR, 3x4, 13x11

Warnings: sap, Angst, Bondage, Slavery, Yaoi, Lemon, Lime, Het, Violence, Fluff, AU, OOC. - Freeform

@softnocturne

P.S. I Miss You

Quatre is missing Trowa who is off on a month-long mission.

Pairings: 3x4

Warnings: Fluff, Angst

StarLove18

Believe in Yourself

Children will live what they learn. Pain is costly, until one incident sparks a new flame of hope and a promise to persevere.

Pairings: 1&2&3&4&5

Warnings: Original Character(s), Bullying, Comfort/Angst, School, Minor Violence, Loss of Parent(s), Alternate Universe, AO3 FB Challenge

Thai_tea_addict

Abyss

Duo's not in a good situation when he falls in love with the man next door, and it goes downhill from there.

Pairings: 1x2, 2x3x4

Warnings: Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-con, Alternate Universe - Dark, Dark Character, Abuse, Stalking, Murder, Sadism, Infidelity

Warnings: DARK – please don't read if you think any of the following subject matter could hurt you: depictions of abuse, sexual assault, stalking, murder, sadism (not the fun kind).

Whenpigsfly84

Doormat Babe

A mysterious child is left with Duo one morning. As he seeks for answers he'll have to face his past and prepare for a haunting future he'd never expected. Will he be able to reconnect with old friends or will he lose all those he loves?

Pairings: 1x2, 2&H, 1x2x5, 3x4

Warnings: Violence, Drama, Angst, Hurt/Comfort, Minor Character Death, Swearing

White_fox

Life is a Highway

On an impulsive plan to travel from California to New York City to propose to his longtime girlfriend, Heero Yuy did not plan to pick up a hitchhiker in nowhere Texas. Faced with some setbacks and a growing attraction to his passenger, Heero goes through more challenges than he planned on facing.

Pairings: 1x2, 1xR

Warnings: light slash, Fluff, Road Trips, Dubious Morality

Snippets:

@lifeaftermeteor

Duo’s Apartment

@noirangetrois

Ladies Night

@weiclown

WIP

Headcanons / Meta / Discussions:

@remsyk-blog

Gundam Wing on Ao3 - Breakdown of Fanfiction stats

@terrablaze514

Ladies of Gundam Wing

Secret Magic Heero Yuy

Four Months after Mariemaia

Fanart:

@noelleian

Zero Three Zero Four

Hipster Quatre

@remsyk-blog

Duo Maxwell Hip Hop

@showtime-eric

Trowa and Quatre, Sandrock and Heavyarms

Crackposts:

@the-indomitable-bhg

BDSM

Calendar Events:

Cocktail Friday

https://gwcocktailfriday.tumblr.com/

A new prompt every Monday!

Submissions should be posted Fridays between 3 and 5pm EST, and tagged with @gwcocktailfriday

Interview with a Creator by @remsyk-blog @interview-with-a-creator

Remsyk has created an online interview for fandom creators to fill out and then she features one each week so that everyone in the fandom can learn a bit about each other.

This week features @scacao

If you haven’t filled out her interview, go! do! now!

#thisweekingundamwing #gundam wing #weekly roundup

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