The Power of the Band

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I’ve written before about my enjoyment of Summoner Wars. It’s a delightful little card/war game. Its biggest draw and greatest strength is the simplicity of its mechanics. It’s my gateway drug into more complicated and difficult collectible card games. It’s as far removed from Magic: the Gathering as you could possibly get while still maintaining some of that early interest and enjoyment that I felt when I was young, dumb and had no idea how Magic worked. This was like fifty years ago when Magic only had two colours and everyone gave a handshake at the beginning and end of a match, of course.

Yes, I shall continue using this image until the damn thing comes out

Summoner Wars and its art belongs to Plaid Hat Games and Cupidsart. Find Alliances at their website http://www.plaidhatgames.om

Last year, I did my little preview of the upcoming Alliances expansion for Summoner Wars which will nearly double the number of factions I own and the amount of cards with which to play. Up until now, my sister and I have been making do with the Master Set which had been the best bang for our buck. Because it has a limited collectible element to it (thankfully, nowhere near as damn expensive as Magic though it does have its own frustrations), one of the biggest purchasing hurdles was deciding whether we would “reinforce” one of the factions we owned or buy a new one. Almost invariably, the new faction won out. Well, with Alliances, every new deck is a combination of a prior one so the possibilities for deck building will really explode once the damn thing gets off a ship from China and gets to my door.

Seriously, we get flotsam from Japan faster than shipments from China.

Anyway, I digress. The long and short of it is once the Alliances gets into my grubby hands, I can introduce my sister to the more complex elements of these sort of card games: deck building. Thankfully, because of Summoner Wars’ aforementioned simplicity, the deck building will likely be a fairly straight-forward process. What cards do you hate in your current decks? Replace those with some new ones. Boom.

There are more considerations, of course. But these are well beyond our current level of play. One of the trickiest elements of Summoner Wars is managing the economy. Every soldier you can field also serves as the resource required to bring more swords to the battlefield. Every ally which falls to your enemy is more fuel for them to reinforce their side. There’s a limited number of cards in a deck and thus there’s a limited number of things you’ll be able to bring to the board–both physically as you’ll run out of cards and economically in that you’ll run out of magic with which to summon them. Thus, much like Magic, there is the consideration for a good cost spread. You don’t want to throw every expensive unit you have into your deck since you won’t be able to summon most of them. There’s also the wider Summoner Wars meta-game to consider which places greater emphasis on champions over grunt soldiers and its this meta which I want to discuss further.

Accessed from http://www.plaidhatgames.com/news/377

Prince Elien and one of the dreaded “Big Four.” Art from Battlecon.

I’m not unfamiliar with meta-games. Anyone that follows some sort of competitive scene will have a basic understanding of the term. It is the most post-modern kind of consideration. Before you even start playing the game, you must consider the way that people play the game while you play the game. That is to say, there is a discourse which surrounds every competition and that discourse can affect what happens within the competition itself. The most obvious example of this effect in action is Dota 2. In D0ta 2, certain playstyles or heroes will become–inexplicably–popular amongst the competitive teams and that style will feature in near every game. The picks and bans will focus around the heroes of the month as teams try to predict and deny their opponents key players in their strategies. There’s innumerable stories of this effect in action. The rise of Dark Seer in competitive play is one such tale. Dark Seer, for the longest while, had seen absolutely zero picks by teams and, in order to encourage more diversity in team strategies, the hero saw his abilities continually improved patch after patch. Then, Empire (I think, we’re talking like two years ago now) picked up the guy and absolutely dominated their games with him. Dark Seer, ever since, has received nothing but nerfs to his abilities since. Arguably, the hero was well overpowered for the entire time he had been in the game but since the meta-game (specifically the picking and banning) had snubbed him so thoroughly, the hero just kept getting stronger and stronger. Then, of course, there are stories like Dreamhack’s Sven where that hero was picked in nearly every game of the tournament and then just fell off the face of the earth once the month was over.

It’s always humorous watching people try and explain why these things happen. It’s almost entirely armchair analysis, of course: prescriptive thoughts which have no value or weight in either predicting what teams will latch on to or what will be popular for the next big tournament. However, these discussions are important if only for highlighting where the analysts’ attention lies if not pointing out actual design issues that the creator may not have intended.

Summoner Wars has a similar meta-discussion. However, it is focussed almost entirely on defensive, passive play which encourages and promotes stalemates. Unlike Dota 2’s meta-game which mostly directs which heroes will see the lion’s share of attention and its stagnation simply needs a few soft prods from Valve to remind teams that they have a potential pool of 115 heroes to choose, Summoner Wars’ meta-game is sort of a dread whisper amongst paranoid conspirators about some terrible inevitability in the game’s core design. Specifically, the argument entails, the game is irrevocably broken on a design level and that if played to its ultimate competitive conclusion, the game would be a giant snore-fest of players passively passing turns and staring at each other with their tongues stuck out.

The argument is as follows:

There is an inherent advantage to playing defensive in Summoner Wars. All things considered equal, a person who has to defend their self from an aggressor can more easily reinforce their troops and has advantage in maneuvering their units into more advantageous positions. Since every fallen enemy is more power in your pool for summoning, a defender is able to more easily turn an aggressive advance into a crushing loss for his opponent by wiping out his troops and then performing a riposte fueled with more magic and units that his now expended foe can not rebuke. Furthermore, many of the earlier summoners feature special events which carry a specific rider that they must have fewer units than their enemy in order to trigger. Presumably, the design theory was that this would counteract the loss of an aggressive push, however most players now will kill their own units to reduce their numbers and selfishly hoard the magic gained from those deaths for their own use. Thus, they build their magic pool through their own troops, deny their opponent the same magic, then have fewer units in order to trigger these aforementioned “catch-up events” for an even greater advantage. Thus, they’re in a better position from the start, sitting on more resources than their enemy so should they be attacked, it would be inconsequential to win the war.

Taken to its logical conclusion, the only way to counteract this strategy by your opponent is to perform it yourself. There would, thusly, be a race to self-extermination with both players thinning their ranks to the barest of bones then sitting with a huge stack of magic to counter summon against an attack that will never come since their enemy is doing the exact same trick. Thus, by the game’s design itself, the best action to take is inaction and if any player truly desired victory, they must always retreat and hunker on their furthest lines with nary an assistant and wait for their opponent to make the first move.

Queue staring contest.

Accessed from http://www.plaidhatgames.com/sum_forums/showthread.php?168-The-Book-of-Grognack

Grognack of the Big Four. These guys are seen as the worst of the turtling factions

I am, by no means, a Summoner Wars professional. That said, no one is. Part of the issue surrounding Summoner Wars’ meta-game is the dearth of voices participating in it. There is not the player base for the game like there is for Dota 2. Thus, conversations generally devolve into the same few people shouting the same few arguments again and again. Innovation and development often come not from old guard who have figured the game out in their own eyes but by new blood who approach the game with a different perspective. This, once again, comes up in Dota 2 constantly. Invariably, with the yearly shuffling of teams and players, old dominating teams fall to the wayside and younger teams in the wings rise into prominent spots. Often, these players get an edge over their experienced opponents by utilizing new and surprising strategies. I would use MVP Phoenix as an example. The team from Korea is, in my mind, a rising star on the Dota 2 scene having worked their way to the last International through a very tough qualifying phase. And though their performance at the competition left a little to be desired, they have continued to play and improve posting results over old players that were once top tier. And one of their most famous hero selections is Warlock–a hero that sees just about as much play as Dark Seer did before Empire rode him to the top. Warlock had, for the longest time, been considered a lane support for more important heroes and languished in that role compared to other laning supports. MVP Phoenix, however, play the lovable guy as the actual farming carry–and hold him in the first position for gold and experience acquisition. That’s a far cry from the fifth position most others had seen him. And you know what? MVP Phoenix quite often dominate when they play like this. He’s a first ban in most games against the Korean squad as teams don’t know how to deal with him but neither do they know how to play him.

I feel Summoner Wars biggest issue is that its infusion of new blood is pretty small. I won’t deny the defender’s advantage but I don’t think it’s as dominant a strategy as people bemoan. I think the advantage of fighting on your own side and being able to immediately reinforce a defence serves more like a come-back mechanic or “rubber band effect.” These are usually systems put in place to make sure that an early lead in competitive games does not snowball into an impossible offense. Dota 2 has these mechanics. Heroes that garner kill streaks–many successive enemy kills without dying themselves–gain a larger and larger “death bounty.” That is to say, when this murderous hero finally dies, the reward for killing him is much greater than someone who hasn’t killed anyone in the game. Furthermore, a person that has died multiple times in succession without garnering a kill themselves has a lower and lower “death bounty” generating the murderous team less and less gold and experience for continually picking on the poor soul. Other games have similar systems. League of Legends has their base respawn after a certain amount of time has elapsed since a team destroyed parts of it–turning the improved soldiers for the successful army back to normal so these uncontrolled members of the teams return to an even level.

So, rubber banding isn’t inherently bad. Without some system, games can be determined within the first few minutes of their start. Terra Mystica has no rubber band effect and I suspect within the first few turns, you can probably determine who will win the game. For spectators, this really diffuses excitement. If first blood was the primary determinant of a match, you’d probably see teams play far more passive and defensive, taking less risks and extending the period of time that first blood would occur to try and wrangle themselves the advantage first. You can see in League of Legends how this passiveness can occur. The average game of League will have far less action than the average game of Dota (and no, for fans of either I’m not going to do a dissertation to support this–suffice to say I’ve seen enough of both to know that this generalization is true). Having some mechanic so that a player can come back into the game can keep the action exciting and intense, thus making the game even more enjoyable.

Accessed from http://www.plaidhatgames.com/images/news/summoner-wars/

Oldin of the Big Four. This card is one of the reasons for their hatred. The worst catch-up event that gives too much of a swing to the player that murders his own troops. Can also be found, surprise-surprise, with Prince Elien, Tacullu and in a roundabout way, Grognack.

Ultimately, that’s what I think the defender’s advantage is in Summoner Wars. It’s a more subtle effect that insures that whoever takes the first turn and is able to get the first few kills won’t spiral off that early two to three magic advantage into a position that is indefensible. Is the defensive advantage too strong of a rubber band is the real question. I think, with the game’s earlier designed factions, it is. It extended past the point of being a serviceable boost to keep the balance of the game tilting too quickly into one player’s advantage and offers a defensive player too much to discourage anyone from wanting to cross the middle line. However, I feel the main culprit for this is the company’s earlier fear of aggressive play being too powerful. You can see it in some of the earlier factions and how they were “weakened” well beyond the point of balance. For instance, the Jungle Elves first summoner has an event that allows him to move a unit two spaces during the event phase. This, in-of-itself, is a good event but not the best in the game. However, the faction also has a three attack melee unit (the lioneer) which can move seven spaces in a straight line on its movement phase. No doubt in playtesting, the designers found the Jungle Elf player was able to move this unit two spaces and then charge right on the summoner, opening up the possibility of a one or two turn kill depending on dice and the summoner they were attempting to maim. Thus, this Chant of Haste was balanced so that it only worked on units with a summoning cost of two or less.

This is an obvious design element meant to weaken offensive play but nearly all the early offensive decks have examples such as this. The carefulness in overbalancing aggressive play is, in my mind, the true culprit for slowing down Summoner Wars’ larger meta-game. Granted, nothing can be done about these factions now, however I feel this is good news. Since the meta-game has developed into such a defensive and stalling direction, I think the upcoming Alliances is going to introduce factions that are stronger on the attack.

Ultimately, I can understand the hesitation over making attacking too powerful. What the stalemate proponents fail to realize is that you literally can not win Summoner Wars without attacking. The whole “issue” arises because players refuse to attack, trying to force their opponent to do so first so they can utilize the defender’s advantage. For most of us, this sort of mentality won’t be a problem. My sister and I are too aggressive, if we make any sort of mistake. I think this “sit back and wait” mentality would only really crop up in tournaments–as few as they are. And to fix the problem in that setting, I think is relatively easy. Set a maximum game length and, should the game go to clock, both players will have the match considered a loss. This would make the player with the advantage forced to press the issue–the only element which currently is missing from the game. Since, if I’m sitting and “turtling” the best, building up the greater magic pool and holding the best series of events, then waiting until the clock runs out is against my goals. It means that I will definitely lose a game which I currently have the stronger odds for winning. Since there is now an “inevitability” of a loss, I would have to act or–ultimately–get the loss and hurt my overall tournament standings.

Granted, this isn’t the most elegant fix. What I predict is that the Summoner Wars’ meta-game will devolve into picks and counter picks where factions have a disproportionate level of success given their opponents. Thus, the meta-game’s top tier deck could be the Filth as they have the greatest success against other strong decks but the Filth may have incredibly horrible match-ups against the Cave Goblins and Cloaks who, otherwise, may be considered some of the worst. Ideally, you’d want each faction with close to equal chances of winning regardless of the match-up. Though that’s a tall order to fill. Ultimately, I’d rather factions with lots of one-sided matches but with still clear weaknesses that can be exploited by others than a game where two people decide to simply sit across from each other and stare.

Accessed from http://www.plaidhatgames.com/sum_forums/showthread.php?754-The-Book-of-Tacullu

The last of the Big Four. Ultimately, I don’t even think they’re the best turtles; they’re just the most annoying. But we’ll see when Alliance hits… any day now.

Went Woman

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Yes, I know, everyone worth listening to has already seen this and commented on it. A little background story: I wanted to see this movie while it was in theatres. I proposed that my family watch it instead of seeing Guardians of the Galaxy which would no doubt be another standard Marvel movie release with all the pew-pews and little else. My sister, of course, had no interest but then it wasn’t really up her alley. My mother, on the other hand, loves going to films and loves seeing thriller and action movies. This would be the perfect situation for a child-parent quality time sort of experience. Of course, that didn’t happen because Gone Girl’s release came and went and my mother expressed no further interest in seeing it and rather bemoaned that we never watched Guardians of the Galaxy. And thus, our movie watching window closed. I had to content myself with hearing other people’s impressions as by the time it was clear I would not be seeing it with my kin, my friends already had.

Alas.

Anyway, Gone Girl came to video–as movies are want to do–and thus it was possible for us to schedule some time when neither of us were busy so we could sit down and watch the highly contentious movie (contentious only in whose fault it was that we never saw it in theatres). We were both eager for a decent thriller and suspense movie and came in with high hopes especially after all the positive word of mouth surrounding the picture. Aaaaand that was a mistake.

I didn’t like it. Neither did my mom. For her, there was just something off about the movie. For me, I simply didn’t get it.

And this isn’t some sort of confession that the movie was too “intelligent” or complicated to follow. The plot is not, by any stretch, difficult. Everything is explicitly detailed for the viewer. There isn’t any sort of Nolan ambiguity that may create some confusion in the audience. Knowing the truth of the situation is simple because the movie shows you it with any potential contradicting information clearly framed as being unreliable. Yes, the story uses an unreliable narrator but it becomes really evident when things aren’t being present to the audience at face value.

So what was there not to get? This was essentially my conversation with my mother afterwards. It is, to be fair, a perspective that I’m learning most people don’t possess. Most consumers of our media seem to focus on the act of consumption itself. They read the story, the follow the action and they smile or frown at whatever tone the author ties it up with at the end. Few people seem to take the approach which everyone was taught in their (competent) English classes. It seems like there’s a natural aversion to dissecting work and trying to peel the layers back and view the muscles and tissues beneath which make it all work. Perhaps most people are scarred from the English classes. I know I’ve had discussions with Kait about teasing themes and motifs from fiction and at first she always threw up her hands and declared she never saw it. The process is not onerous, however. It is basically taking the mind of a four year old; you simply always ask ‘why?’

As a creative person myself, my major question generally revolves around “Why was this made in the first place.” On first blush, the answer seems obvious: to entertain. But that’s not what I’m looking at. As an entertainer myself, there’s lots of ideas in my head that float around crying out for attention and form. I’m not looking for the reductionist answer for entertainment media, I’m looking for why this specific work had reason to come into being.

I am aware of no writer who sits down to a blank screen, puts their fingers to the keyboard and out pops a novel of its own accord. We are not the proverbial thousand monkeys at a thousand typewriters. In fact, a lot of new writers struggle with that intimidating empty page. Looking upon that vast white emptiness full of potentials and possibilities can actually stifle creativity and progress. You can get wrapped up in all the ‘what ifs’ and ‘how what about that’ to actually get anywhere. No, writers have some idea when they sit down of the form they wish to create. No sculptor mindlessly chisels at rock and thus no writer mindlessly drools on paper. Thus, there is some core that a story is written around. There is some central idea, theme or metaphor that serves as the foundation for everything that branches outward. This isn’t always something profound. I mean, Star Wars was created because George Lucas wanted to create a movie of his favourite pulp sci-fi action hero Flash Gordon but could not get the rights to the intellectual property. Thus, he made his own. You can see that primary motivation glimmer throughout the first movie before all the elements are brought in to flesh the piece out. He wanted a space opera and thus he created a space opera.

Now, I understand people’s disdain for this analytic approach. I know when I was younger it always felt a little like “reading too much into it” and trying to impose your own motifs and feelings on a piece that were never the author’s intention. I mean, you can look at my prior discussion of sexism in Name of the Wind for something that was not consciously part of this initial creation. These accidental themes are, in my opinion, just as important as the intentional ones for a strong writer will have much better control over their central concept and can keep out unwanted messages that would dilute or distract from their original intent.

So, my question to everyone who saw Gone Girl would be “what was the point of this movie?” I can not answer this question with any degree of confidence and that is what I don’t get about it. I don’t know why it was made (well, I do now because I read interviews of the author afterward) and ultimately that’s because the story is a bit of a mess. At its core Gone Girl is a confused jumble of raw ideas rather haphazardly forged together into a meandering tale. All these little pieces and ideas, on their own, could probably work as a piece but together it becomes too much for me to ignore the ends as they fray and come undone beneath the slightest scrutiny.

But let’s begin with the start since that’s what everyone knows. Gone Girl is at its strongest in its first act. It opens with a rather morose Ben Affleck visiting a woman whose relationship is not made clear immediately preparing the audience for a sense of vague uncertainty. We don’t know anything about these individuals and the tease of a mysterious treasure hunt devised by the hauntingly absent Rosamund Pike is certainly powerful enough to grab attention. It’s not long before Ben Affleck receives a call from a concerned neighbour and he returns home to find an empty house with a smashed table and immediately calls the police. The detectives trouncing about the house is segregated by a narrated backstory by the missing Amy Dunne explaining the happy life her and Nick led before she was dragged out into the Midwest America Suburbia and, for all intents and purposes, died.

As an aside, I find Ben Affleck really distracting in movies. It’s too hard for me to not shake that I’m watching Ben Affleck training to be Batman pretending to be some down on his luck average American whenever he does these kinds of features. It was the same issue in Argo (though made even more apparent in Argo because there was a deliberate attempt to not make everyone else look like a Hollywood Superstar). He’s got the same sort of goofy, Ben Affleck personality as he mopes about the screen kind of being sad about his wife’s disappearance and kind of not. On the one hand, he does a good job of communicating Nick’s detachment from his wife. On the other hand, I feel he would have got that across even if he weren’t trying to do it.

Anyway, digression over, I really liked the set-up and exploration of the two character’s lives as it followed the police’s investigation trying to find this woman and piece together what happened that morning. Nick’s testimony is always held with a bit of skepticism because of his laissez-faire attitude towards the whole affair. As the investigation continues, incongruities in Nick’s personal life and actions rise to the surface. However, there’s always some lingering doubt hanging over his suspicion. Despite Amy’s overtures, the fact that Nick’s sister Margo is so adamant against the woman (and something which is never clarified by either of the main characters thus by structure indicates that her feelings are genuine) and her rather cold demeanor towards her family and the strained relationship she had with them in her recollections make it clear that Amy isn’t some innocent, bumbling homebody that was apt to fall to some nefarious scheme. It’s in these slow moments of revelation while the life of Amy Dunne exists in existential uncertainty that the movie really shines. However, as the pieces begin to surface, it all felt too exact for it to be right. I was glad that the detective was self-aware enough to express the same cynicism over the case and continued to push the question of Amy’s fate away from the meticulously laid explanation that Nick had killed her and back into a more ambiguous “nothing seems right.”

And then the truth is revealed rather abruptly and far too early. Unsurprisingly, Amy is alive and driving off with a giant wad of cash. It’s explained that she discovered Nick’s affair and, so infuriated, decided to absolutely ruin her husband in as self destructive a manner as was possible. This… could have worked and I wouldn’t mind a story looking at how invested a marriage can create between two individuals that when that union becomes inextricably broken, there is no healing the wounds it leaves behind. I can get behind the idea that Amy was so distraught, so shut-off and so isolated that her only way out she could see was to fabricate this highly exacting set-up, manipulate the media towards a favourable bias and have Nick executed for her murder which would be cinched with her own suicide.

But then the movie keeps going. Suddenly, it’s not even about some desperate housewife but tries to reveal that Amy has all along been some incredibly twisted sociopath who has always manipulated the law in her favour against her jilted lovers. She has a habit of rather extreme self-harm in order to present an image of her living a life of constant harassment, abuse and sexual assault. It’s the sort of accumulating nonsense that arises from an need to easily explain a mountain of contradictory behaviour driven less by theme or character and more by a need to raise the ante to see how far one can go. It’s the modern equivalent of ‘the devil made me do it’ and this sort of lazy way out is expected in the incredibly silly modern slasher horror flicks. Somewhere along the way, Gone Girl lost its way and seemed to forget what it was trying to discuss. It devolves into this weird, Silence of the Lambs-esque lens on a bizarrely fictitious psychopath that had tried to elicit sympathy and humanity from its start. It would be like trying to watch Hannibal Lector be a caring if absent minded father in a Modern Family episode before having some inexplicable breakdown and just start eating people while trying to convince you that all that time you were watching him be a sitcom dad he was really also eating people… at some point. Don’t think about it, they didn’t.

It’s this shift from being a character piece to a narrative piece that also leaves Gone Girl in its weakest state by the end. When Amy returns covered in Neil Patrick Harris’ blood after coldly killing him (and not reacting at all to it because… I suppose having your life savings stolen from you is as good enough an excuse to send someone into the extreme depths of antisocial behaviour) the police question her over her story. The contradictions in her desperate attempts to keep her original plan to frame her husband accurate while also pretending she had been kidnapped the entire time are far too obvious and far too easy to prosecute. I mean, she tries to argue that there’s video footage of her imprisonment with the movie conveniently forgetting that there’s only footage for her at the house over two days since she spent the vast majority of the time in a Louisiana motel. Not to mention her arrival at Neil Patrick Harris’ house would look really bizarre seeing that she appeared in disguise and had to be provided with new clothes, hair dye and a diet in order to be returned to her normal look after a month of binge eating snacks.

But no, I’m sure that ten second footage of her crying over spilt brandy on her nightie would certainly trump the fact that nothing else makes a god damn lick of sense.

Accessed from https://killingfloorfilm.files.wordpress.com/2014/10/gone-poster-080114sp.jpg

Gone Girl belongs to Gillian Flynn and 20th Century Fox.

Gone Girl basically undid itself because it either didn’t have a clear goal of what it wanted to say or it simply didn’t keep to it. It lost its best elements by getting more and more ludicrous in an attempt to keep the “audience on is toes.” By the end of it, I couldn’t help but feel that the story itself is too self indulgent. It feels like it was mainly written as a form of wish fulfillment. The author wanted to explore two characters that were actually one: herself. In Nick, she had a picture of herself: an individual who tries their best but is often foiled by their own petty indulgences and desires. In Amy is the person she wants to be: an individual so in control of herself that she can manipulate even the behemoth media giants to dance to her whim–a woman that is both dangerous and desirable like an addiction that no person can quit.

And at its end, Gone Girl feels like that ludicrous fantasy. All that effort and work spent trying to sustain the suspension of disbelief and to flesh-out and round characters reduced to so many cliches and shallow explanations. It’s about as unsatisfying as Nick’s marriage.

The Draw of RPGs

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Clarification: When I discuss RPGs, I am referring to role-playing games and not rocket-propelled grenades. Except for the times when I am talking about rocket-propelled grenades but those are few and far between.

We here at somewherepostculture are fond of many things. Derek loves puns. Kait loves pulpy fantasy stories. I hate everything. If there is one thread of unity which binds the three of us together, it is the role-playing genre. Albeit, my sister is a neophyte when it comes to your traditional RPG goodness, she still expresses that kindred longing in every post-novel lapse where she fills her head with mighty adventures of her going through the wonderful worlds that she loves and adores. I know this, because every time I write a story she immediately makes a spin-off of it. Also, despite her reluctance and adamant denial, she has enjoyed the few times she’s played an RPG. She’d be totally hardcore if it were more convenient to her schedule.

Granted, this shouldn’t really be surprising. There’s a lot to love about RPGs. They are, in essence, the the age old entertainment from when we first were capable of language and cobbled our kin around the primordial fire and–bored–filled ears of any who would listen about people and places that weren’t this fire. Entertainment at its core is simply selfish empathy wherein we peek into the lives of another in order to vicariously experience their highs and lows without actually having to risk those highs and lows ourselves. Of course, to tickle those dopamine receptors to their max, the listener has had the proud and long standing tradition of heckling. It wasn’t until we got so adept at sharing our stories that we faced the immutable forms of the written word which can only bend to our personal whims through sheer force of mindful inattention.

Accessed from http://www.wga.hu/frames-e.html?/html/b/bocklin/the_surf.html

The Surf by Arnold Böcklin (1883).

Then we had the wonderful role-playing game step in and restore that give and take between teller and listener once more. Dungeons and Dragons, of course, is the grand daddy of the modern role-playing genre for taking what, on reflection, is a very simple idea. What if we could have our tabletop war games but instead of mindlessly waging conflict between our two different players, we took all the mechanics and instead wrapped it in personal adventures and stories?

I have spoken at lengths about the merits of D&D, often around the time I sit down to create a character. It’s a fascinating topic for me to study since there are so many elements at play with the game that it truly does have widespread appeal. As I’ve stated, my personal bias is the narrative construction of the game and though I like to paint a universal portrait for the importance of story-telling in our day to day lives, the truth is there are equally valid components included that attract people that may not give a rat’s ass for the cultural mono-myth of our existence and lives. For these undeveloped plebeians, there are other worthwhile draws. Some of my most die-hard D&D fans are attracted to the system itself. This surprises no one as RPGs and math nerds are like espresso and overpriced tiny cups–you just can’t serve one without the other. For these fans, the enjoyment comes not from the back and forth experiences between the Dungeon Master and the player but taps into the old war game roots. For these players, there is an enemy and that is the stated foes listed in the monster supplementaries. Their goal is a simple one: master the system so thoroughly as to leave any battle not only alive but as the clear victor.

If I had to create a spectrum, however, I’d place these power games–for it is the power of the system which they seek to master–diametrically opposed to me, the role-player. But that is, perhaps, another discussion. All I know far too well is how these power gamers have a tendency to ruin the best portions of D&D by trying to stick their swords in pretty much any situation which extends too long without someone mindlessly throwing some dice on the table.

However, just like D&D’s atrocious alignment system, the breadth of the fans can not be properly placed into two camps. There are also the tourists, who enjoy investigating and navigating another world and see the game through the frame of a puzzle to be solved. They are the people who always wish to know more about their environment and visiting fantastical places. They can cast themselves off to these places which are not here and can imagine a world that is not their own. Whether they view this world through a lens of scientific intrigue or childhood wonder varies from person to person, of course. There are other elements as well, of course: co-operation amongst a group to overcome challenges, social interactions and living a character, shoes and bags of holding.

I make mention of this because I feel that D&D remains the undeniable king of the genre. With the advent of computer gaming, there is a plethora of attempts to bring the RPG genre to the digital landscape. However, despite the huge steps in technological advancement, I feel that the game will always be best represented at the table. There are just too many factors involved for a single game to capture them all. The biggest problem, of course, being that we still don’t have any computer which has the processing power of our own imaginations and rivaling that tech will probably never happen in my lifetime.

As a consequence, discussing computer role-playing games can be a difficult thing. Given the inherent complexity, sacrifices have to be made in order to see a game come to fruition. As such, most games will excel in one or two areas at the consequence of others. It’s why when asked what my favourite cRPG is, I have to give an incredibly varied list. It’s why Derek and I can have endless debates over the merits of Bethesda’s entries. Whether I like a cRPG is going to depend on which aspect the developers decided to place their focus. If its on an element for which I don’t truly care, then I’m not going to really jump into it.

Accessed from http://www.wga.hu/frames-e.html?/html/b/bocklin/pirates.html

Attack by Pirates by Arnold Böcklin.

My favourite example to use, of course, is The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim. Skyrim is kind of a big deal. It was released at a time when the most successful games on the market included heavy multi-player aspects. Bethesda’s Elder Scrolls series had always been a single player experience and people were begging at Oblivion’s release and after for a massive multiplayer online game. This would, of course, completely destroy what the Elder Scrolls are about (and coincidentally, people can see the difference given that The Elder Scrolls Online is a thing and has recently gone free to play–perhaps indicating it wasn’t as successful as Skyrim). Derek loathes Bethesda’s games and I can’t fault him for that irrational hatred. They lack a lot of what he really likes. Their mechanical systems have always been functional at best. Their characters are about as detailed as one can get when they have to create a thousand of them. Interactions between the player and the characters and plot on any meaningful basis is never going to happen.

And that’s because the Elder Scrolls are focused on exploration. They aren’t about epic narratives or compelling characters. They’re about stepping over that ridge and stumbling across a dungeon, delving inside to find strange grottos or hidden pirate lairs. You are invited to live in the world and play the part of a tourist. Take a look around the scenery and follow these exciting short dramas that are created within it. As a cohesive whole, the Elder Scrolls leaves a lot to be desired. But the only other game that gives you that “discover a new world” feel is procedurally generated Minecraft.

We’ve recently finished Divinity: Original Sin (expect a review shortly) and its world is probably one of its more laughable qualities. Whereas both share set pieces in their design, to be sure, you just can’t compare the two. I mean, The Elder Scrolls is designed from a first person perspective which, I would argue, is the strongest one for creating immersion. D:OS, however, is an isometric top down perspective that makes you feel more like you’re moving pieces across a chessboard than an individual exploring a world.

However, D:OS makes Skyrim’s combat a joke. The amount of interactions between abilities as well as the complexity of even the most basic encounters with zombies is truly astounding. Every time you draw your weapon, you have a calculating strategy battle that demands you position and chain your abilities properly in order to rival your foes. Otherwise they will (especially on hard) murder you. It’s the sort of combat that would be impossible in Skyrim, partly because of its reliance on a party and partly because the creation of Skyrim’s breathtaking world has to drop all the data for interaction between items and abilities. And neither of these are touching on my favourite elements: character and narrative.

In a sense, it’s a shame. My “dream game” would basically combine all the best qualities and recreate Dungeons and Dragons for a digital space. However, there is some joy in exploring titles and seeing the refinement of a specific element that might otherwise be ignored. There’s some exploration within the genre itself and it means that there is still things that can be pleasant surprises. My only word of caution would be in blindly trying to sell the games more than what they are. I can’t take anyone seriously that argues D:OS has terrific writing, an engaging world or gripping characters. It doesn’t, especially not compared to the games that actually focus on those elements. If I were to solely compare D:OS to Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines on those fronts, there isn’t even a debate to be had over which is better. Bloodlines would take D:OS to the cleaners. But turn the tables and start discussing combat systems and suddenly things aren’t so bleak for D:OS.

Accessed from http://www.wga.hu/frames-e.html?/html/b/bocklin/isle2.html

The Isle of the Dead by Arnold Böcklin (1883).

So there’s an aspect of finding what you like and looking into the titles that do those the best. But there’s value to be had in looking at those that extol the virtues of elements that may not be the favourites either. Dark Souls is another game that emphasizes combat and boss encounters and I loved it for that.

There’s lots of reasons for loving RPGs. The quest for you is to find your own.

Never Mess Around With My Greens

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Alright, Friday’s review is probably not going to cut it. So, today I’m going to do an actual review of Disney’s Into the Woods. I have a sneaky suspicion my sister is doing her own look at it later this week. Yes, we’re really milking this for all it’s worth but unfortunately we haven’t done anything exciting in our lives recently so you’ll just have to deal with it, I suppose. If you want some personal update, I’ve completed work on one short story and am doing the initial drafting of a second.

Accessed from http://shootingstarsmag.blogspot.ca/2015/01/movie-review-into-woods.html

Into the Woods belongs to Disney and Sondheim and people.

But who wants to hear that. Presumably if you’re still with me you want more details on this damn Disney musical.

And it is a musical by the way. I feel every review is going to make note of that. I can’t possibly fathom why Disney decided to market it as something else but I have my suspicions about Disney’s view of the product before its release. But on with the show!

Yes, I enjoyed Into the Woods. Thankfully, Derek had braced me before I went about its Broadway roots. Course, what he didn’t tell me, was it that was an adaptation of a Stephen Sondheim production. I wouldn’t exactly expect that name to ring many bells–it certainly didn’t for me–but when perusing his past work, the old man was behind Sweeny Todd which I really enjoyed. Oh, and he did a little thing called West Side Story as well which you may have heard before. I haven’t seen that, much to the chagrin of my older generation, but I put up with Grease so I feel my responsibilities to their sensibilities has been served.

Where was I? Right. Sweeny Todd. If you haven’t seen it, I recommend that you do. Yes, it’s a musical but it’s closer in vein to my favourite: The Evil Dead: The Musical. It’s a near perfect fit for Tim Burton who has pretty much covered the quality spectrum. It’s a rather impressive accomplishment that this man’s products include such varied titles as Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure, Batman Returns, Sleepy Hollow, Planet of the Apes, Big Fish, Edward Scissorhands and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. I won’t share which of these I think are utter trash and which are actually good but I think it prudent to take a moment and just marvel at his filmography nevertheless.

Sweeny Todd finds that right mix of weird and melancholic on which Tim Burton thrives. We get a non-goofy performance from Johnny Depp, a standard but still great performance from Helena Bonham Carter and a musical that isn’t afraid of dowsing the screen in gallons of blood. Like I said, what’s not to love? Course, it’s the blood that makes Sweeny Todd relevant to the discussion at hand. At it’s heart, Sweeny Todd is dark–there is no deny that. It’s a story of a man so hellbent on revenge that he loses sight of the things he’s actually avenging. If there’s any suspicion that there is redemption awaiting the titular anti-hero, Sweeny Todd does a very good job of making clear that those suspicions are wholly unfounded. From the moment Todd steps into London, you know he’s a rather unredeemable rogue when he contradicts the young star-crossed lover on how London is the world’s largest asshole. The rest of the production supports Todd’s claim when pretty much every character we meet is a disgusting wretch of a person. Burton does the very obvious play of filming the movie incredibly dark to make really obvious the dark themes but, whatever, it’s Burton and what do you expect?

The thing is, those dark themes were there in the original work and Burton’s job was essentially seeing them transfered to the screen.

And now we have Into the Woods by Disney.

Accessed from http://www.hdwallpapers.in/walls/johnny_depp_the_wolf_into_the_woods-wide.jpgWhereas Burton is known for being dark, broody and melancholic, Disney couldn’t be further from those motives even if it tried. In Disney’s eyes, life is a wonderful candy-floss filled world choked to the brim with charming, smiling rodents and helpful secondary characters who exist solely to fulfill every young girl’s desire for true love’s kiss. Disney trawls old fairy tales like Japanese fishermen tearing apart the Pacific for every last edible scrap of tuna. They rip their cargo up, gut it of all that nasty bile and organs, fillet the nicest flesh and throw it on a cute little bed of rice with some radishes shaped like eyes and a broad mouth so you forget that you’re devouring a mutilated corpse and fall for the idea of dining on some abstract concept of happiness and contentment. Disney de-scales its subject matter more than any fishmonger, making sure that there is no trace of the rough edges of the original tales which they plunder and copyright. Into the Woods is set-up along Disney’s modus operandi; it’s a conglomeration of a bunch of old, familiar stories slapped together. We have a tiny village filled to the brim with the iconic Red Riding Hood, Rapunzel, Jack Giantkiller and Cinderella characters. The interest comes from the interweaving of these different stories into one.

Into the Woods wears its Broadway origins plainly on its sleeve. The opening is a fourteen minute song setting up the principal conflicts for the ensemble cast. The biggest issue of the movie is shown immediately: you can’t help but see that this production is awkwardly shoved into the wrong medium. I couldn’t help but wonder how the work plays on the stage and that a lot of the spectacle would be quite impressive when working beneath the constraints of a theatre. And musicals are all about the spectacle. But not all of us can get into Broadway so here we are. Thankfully, unlike Sweeny Todd, the cast of Into the Woods are near universally equipped with some damn decent pair of lungs. The singing is top notch and the performances are incredibly engaging–with the sole exception of Johnny Depp but it’s clear he’s not a singer so thankfully he was reserved for a bit part. Meryl Streep stands out but it’s Meryl Streep and that’s what she does.

Anyway, the other thing about Into the Wood’s intro is that you start getting an indication that this isn’t going to be your standard Disney fare. I started noticing it when Cinderella sang her swarm of birds to pick up lentils to fill a pot so she can go to the king’s festival. The original fairy tales are far more intact here and the little details really make it stand out. There’s a charming dark lining trimming the production with sly comments from Red Riding Hood wondering if her grandma is already dead, the baker arguing with his wife about how Red is a thief, Cinderella getting domestically abused by her sisters and so forth. Then Meryl Streep breaks in and comments immediately on the Baker’s Wife’s infertility.

Quick question: when was the last time Disney showed a pregnancy yet alone talked about its complications? Sure, the Baker’s Wife suffers beneath a magical curse but I’m hard pressed to think when even something innocuous as pregnancy was deemed appropriate by Disney’s overbearing board. Granted, this is mostly used as motivation for the primary characters to head into the woods as all the cast are sent with some grand personal issue to solve. However, the audience is set up pretty early that no topic is truly off bounds. Red Riding Hood’s encounter with the wolf is a thinly veiled discussion about a young woman’s sexual awakening with a very obviously older and predatory male partner. The Baker and his Wife are tormented with trying to accrue the Witch’s required ingredients through noble means with varying success: both attempt bold face robbery of either a defenseless girl or lost maiden and conspire against an obviously naive boy to purchase his only cow with worthless beans despite the boy needing to sell it so his family can have food to eat.

Intermission

It appears the website ate half my review. That’s wonderful. Now let me try and see if I can’t recapture lightning in a bottle.

End Intermission

There’s Sondheim’s wonderful black line again. Though, I’m not entirely certain I can ascribe all the credit to him alone. Old fairy tales are ripe with rather bleak justice or unforgiving individuals. Into the Woods is subtle in bringing these elements forward. The first is characterized by Red Riding Hood and the Wolf. Though they only speak it and keep all the details behind a curtain, there’s no misunderstanding that after her encounter with the Wolf, the Baker is required to cut and gut the monster in order to rescue Red Riding Hood and her grandmother. Perhaps even more macabre is that Red wears the Wolf’s skin for the rest of the story, trading in her red hood to the Baker as thanks for rescuing her.

Into the Woods dances around the old morals and the heartwarming lessons which Disney loves. But there’s a sardonic undercurrent to them. The two youngest characters are the quickest to learn their “lessons” in the woods. After being rescued, Red admits that she should have been more obedient and she’s learned to not trust strangers even if she wants to and what they offer is strange and enticing. Jack, after discovering giants at the top of his beanstalk, regales the Baker with his experiences and says that he’s learned the value of home and the homestead. And yet, through the course of the story, these morals don’t end up serving the characters at all. Jack gets convinced to go up the beanstalk again and again after failing to purchase back his prized Milky White and is encouraged on by a skeptical Red. Red finds later that listening to others doesn’t actually resolve anything and decries how, though she’s decided to be more assertive and defensive, it doesn’t contribute when faced with larger problems.

Accessed from http://cdn.collider.com/wp-content/uploads/into-the-woods-anna-kendrick2.jpgThis is repeated with all the characters. Throughout the second act, everyone one of them achieves their heart’s desire: the Witch gets her cursed reversed and turns beautiful after the Baker and his Wife concoct her potion, Jack gets Milky White back after plundering the giant’s household and stealing all of his fabulous treasure, Cinderella gets her Prince Charming and is rushed off to the castle for the grand wedding. Had the story ended here, it would be indistinguishable from a Disney tale, and it would be all the worse for it. For it is at the height of Cinderella’s crowning ceremony that the kingdom is shaken by the arrival of the giantess.

And here Into the Woods strays well into its darkened boughs. For, in obtaining all their wishes, the characters have created a perfect storm of circumstances that swings around upon them. In their sale of Milky White, the Baker’s Wife keeps one of the beans as part of their ruse over the value of the items (and, perhaps, a touch of avarice). Jack, of course, angers the giants by stealing from them in the hopes of getting Milky White back and ultimately kills the giant husband when he seeks to catch the little thief and the latest of his plunder. The Witch discovers that her beauty charms no one and she has lost her ability to curse. The Baker’s Wife ends up trading the last bean with Cinderella in order to obtain her shoe and Cinderella, in her inattentiveness to the world and people around her, casually tosses the final bean aside thinking it worthless.

Of course, the giantess is furious with the murder of her husband and demands Jack be given to her so she can get her revenge. No one is willing to hand him over, and thus the giantess vows to tear the kingdom apart. No one knows how to deal with the problem, the two princes least of all. Cinderella’s Prince Charming reveals himself as the unapologetic rake that he is as he seduces the Baker’s Wife while everyone is searching the woods for Jack. Rapunzel’s Prince simply rides away from the problem, wanting nothing to do with it. Suddenly, everything everyone wanted is revealed to not be anything they needed. Instead of solving all their problems, fulfilling their wishes created only more. In the meantime, people die and ruin falls upon everyone’s house. Here, the character’s real issues surface. The Baker is forced to confront his abandonment by his father and the uncertainty of following in his footsteps. Jack must realize that things are out of his control and he can’t solve all his problems. Cinderella has to face the problems of her meekness and indecision, taking a stand where others will not. Ultimately, the real lesson is that hardships arise not from wicked people but mistakes and the consequences of actions. The giantess and witch aren’t really evil but people reacting to troubles visited upon them. There’s no grander force at work which insures justice.

As the story comes to a close, we’re well away from the happily-ever-after promised at the end of these tales. A great price was paid for the hard lessons taught and the wishes brought to life. In the end, no one could know what would happen in the woods. Even Witches and Princes are powerless against the unknown amongst the trees. Truly, the greatest lesson the characters learn is that nothing needs to be done alone. Their only real gift, their only real reward, is to see the value of what they had–community and family. And while they’re no safeguards against troubles which arise, they are all that are left when everything else gets ruined.

Accessed from https://ewvox.files.wordpress.com/2014/10/streep-into-the-woods-1335_612x380.jpg?w=612&h=380&crop=1It’s not truly grim but nor is it singing into the sunset either. It’s bittersweet and it’s the very thing which Disney tries its hardest to hide. You can feel the executives’ fingers all about Into the Woods but I can’t help but wonder if Disney didn’t sign on to this without really knowing what they were backing. And there’s only so much they can sweep under the rug. I can’t help but see the parable between them and the Witch. Disney’s goal has always been to shelter and coddle from the hardships of life, confusing people’s desires for something pretty and fanciful while failing to understand that uglies and blemishes can’t be compelled to disappear. Unlike the Witch, however, I doubt Disney’s willingness to become a pariah for the good of everyone else. If there was one lesson which Into the Woods seems eager to tell, it is one of caution. We can’t know the outcome of our actions, so we should be mindful of the effects they may carry whether that be in the wishes we seek or the stories we tell to our children.

So, yes. I liked Into the Woods.

When You Speak, All I Hear Is Bastion

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Accessed from http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/4/41/Transistor_art.jpg

Transistor and its images belong to Supergiant Games and its respective whatevers.

Well, how about we review something that isn’t four years old, hm?

It was the holidays which means presents, sales and free time to get some things off the old backlog. One of the games I crossed off was Supergiant Games’ new(ish) release Transistor. Supergiant is the studio behind the much lauded Bastion. I picked up the title amidst the swirl of good word and awards. It’s a charming little number that I quite enjoyed (and is also four years old). It wasn’t the best released in good old 2011, however I still thought quite highly of it. Its gameplay was rather straightforward but the nice touch was that the player set the difficult not through a menu toggle but by activating handicaps within the game. Thus, the top down action combat became more difficult not because enemies were turned into enormous health sponges with fists of steel but because they now exploded upon death, touching them was harmful to the player, they periodically turned invulnerable or the like. Of course, succeeding with these additional challenges produced a higher score so there was reward for making this difficult. The art was nice, the music gorgeous and the voice narration was incredible all wrapped in a seeming incomprehensible world where some great disaster had destroyed a city.

Transistor is a top down action combat game set in a city being destroyed by some incomprehensible threat wrapped in pretty art, alright music, alright voice narration and a difficulty the player sets by activating handicaps within the game.

Alright, I’m not the first one to make this reductionist joke but that’s the price of being late in reviews. However, I can’t help but feel a lot of the praise held for Transistor feels so… hollow. But instead of focusing on what’s the same, let’s examine the one area that Transistor differs from its predecessor.

The combat in Transistor revolves around the titular weapon. The protagonist–Red–wields a giant circuitry sword which allows her to pause time and execute a flurry of actions in the blink of an eye. Whereas in Bastion the player was encouraged to experiment with different weapon combinations and active ability, in Transistor the player is able to choose up to four special attacks which can be upgraded as well as equip passives on themselves. These are represented by the poorly explained ‘functions.’ Each function will revolve around an idea. For example, the Get function when set as an attack will do marginal damage and pull the target towards the user. When it is used as an upgrade for another attack, it adds a pull attribute to the primary attack. When it’s a passive… I can’t remember. Something really underwhelming. Maybe increases the range that dead cells are pulled towards Red?

Accessed from http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/images/14/may/transistor4.jpgIt’s an intriguing system that could open up a number of unique and variable playstyles. However, much like Bastion, there isn’t a whole lot of balancing between the factions. I do think some personal preference does play a role. I’m not convinced that the mortar in Bastion is considered as good as I valued it. The game encourages experimentation by unlocking dossier details on the functions “history” whenever the player uses it in a different capacity. Thus, I obsessively tried to unlock all the little details though the reward was ultimately rather underwhelming as the information really doesn’t provide any greater revelations to the Transistor story proper. It also meant I discovered that there is a ‘fail state’ in the game when I hilariously waddled into the second boss fight with only a single actual attack equipped and promptly got it disabled the first time my health bar depleted.

Which brings us to a second curious difference between Transistor and Bastion. Instead of outright dying when your health reaches 0, Red will instead find one of her functions disabled while she pops right back to full health. In theory this gives the player a second and third chance to get through the combat. In actuality, this really diminishes the game’s difficulty even with multiple limiters installed unless the player has a combat style that is reliant on one single attack. This, to me, was highlighted in the final battle where your opponent has transistor like abilities and will also not be defeated the first time you empty his health bar. The first time I fought him, I was–once again–loaded with some useless functions I was trying to unlock. After I lost my primary attack and had some hilarious running around of pulling the opponent to me which just set him up for repeated Turns, I fixed up my load order and while he managed to take out my primary attack, I was victorious three times in a row that a true failure was still well away from occurring.

I think part of the problem with this system lies in the fact that the transistor power is so strong on its own. The ability to freeze time in order to execute a furious combo generally left the opponent obliterated. I took the faster Turn refresh passive and would spend time between freezes skirting the periphery of battle until I could leap in, murder a target and rush out before anything was capable of retaliating. On the other hand, Bastion required a lot of timed rolling and dodges to keep alive in some of the more hectic combats though my strategy there was quite similar in that I would dance around the edges of battle only that time I would lob great explosive mortar blasts that generally did the trick before I faced the maker.

Granted, the player won’t really ‘break the system’ in Transistor right away. This is mostly due to the fact the game gives you no direction in how to play or what the hell is going on. It is a prominent ‘narrative device’ with both games and I was a little surprised to see it spill over to the gameplay this time around. On one hand, I do like the element of discovery and the lack of hand holding in a day and age where games provide the player with hours of forced tutorials. On the other hand, it takes most of the game to really understand what the hell you’re doing in a battle. It seems to me that the greatest pleasure in the system comes from planning and executing complex procedures during each of the player’s Turns and you won’t really ever get there until the game is coming to a close. I’m going to give the game a ‘recursive’ play (which means doing the damn thing over to get achievements but at least the new game+ mode keeps intact all the functions you had on your first run) so maybe I’ll have more fun the second time around.

There is, of course, one big stumbling block. Accessed from http://fashion-artexpression.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/transistor-screenshot-2.jpeg

I really don’t like Transistor’s story.

Now, I wouldn’t have said Bastion’s story was something praise-worthy. It existed in a functional sense and there general confusion of the world was an alright motivator for keeping the player intrigued. Truly, the biggest draw of Bastion’s narrative was the narrator himself. Had they a less robust and powerful voice actor, I think the plot’s general lack of… well… everything would have cropped up more in criticism. Transistor has that problem. It’s sole voice, some unidentified benefactor who took the sword blow for Red in the opening, is an alright actor. He is no Rucks but it is a passable performance. Unfortunately, because he doesn’t have that engaging delivery, the fact that the vast majority of time he’s called upon to spout nonsense really stands out. He also narrates perhaps one of the least convincing love stories since the latest Final Fantasy release. What really got me, however, is how more obtuse Transistor is. Bastion wasn’t particularly forthcoming with its narrative structure and really we don’t have much more than racist scientists make a stupid superweapon that backfires and destroys their city. However, this seems like a coherently thought out and well developed line compared to Transistors.

Which is unfortunate because there’s some neat ideas floating about Transistor’s head. The game takes place in Cloudbank, a supposed futuristic super democracy where everything is tied to voting and public discourse. One of the examples that comes up frequently is that the citizens have the power to vote and decide the weather on a day to day basis. The villains of the game, a shadowy group called the Camerata, do not like this arrangement. They developed the transistor to stop this… because.

Motivation is super lacking in the game which makes some of the story’s twists seem rather… well… hollow when they occur. From what I can gather, the Camerata developed the Process–Apple-esque robots which serve as the primary mooks Red runs her circuitry through–in order to stop the constant changes in Cloudbank. And, in true Supergiant fashion, the Process immediately spiral out of control and are the force that are destroying the city… for reasons. Just like the Camerata, if you’re expecting some justification for these actions then you’re putting in more thought than Supergiant did. The villains’ goals are hand-waved away with a paradoxical creed that even on the shallowest look comes across as meaningless: “When everything changes, nothing does.”

The hell is that suppose to even mean? Don’t expect transistor to explain. There’s also the element that all the functions in the transistor are powered or fueled or inspired by individuals the Camerata identified and absorbed… also for reasons. Nothing makes sense because there appears so little effort to tie the ideas together. I couldn’t help but think how the game’s themes could be stronger and tie into the gameplay better with just a little more planning and forethought. For example, the player comes across a number of OVC terminals which generally just dispense news but always allow the player to either participate in a vote or comment on the news. What I would have liked to see is the idea that the player’s voice in these matters really means nothing. Have it so no matter what the player chooses, the end result is always the opposite of what they picked. Make it even more clear that no one is reading the comments and have that impact the story’s progression. This would tie in nicely with the protagonist’s literal loss of voice and the transistor could shift less into some bizarre weapon meant to–I think–have complete control over the city’s malleable form and turn it into a repository for individuals and their consciousness. The Camerata could view themselves closer to a stewardship rather than moustache twirling mad scientists who see the loss of valuable individuals in the overwhelming sea of public opinion. Their prior targets, instead of being prominent people always poorly excused for why no one found their disappearances distressing, be instead individuals who had great merit or skill but either fell from grace or could never curry the public’s favour to get the recognition the Camerata felt they would deserve.

Accessed from http://www.modvive.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/Transistor.pngThis would elevate the game from a simplistic bad guy wants to take over the world and perhaps take a look more at problems in a system that its audience is going to consider inherently good. Red could, instead of being a highly successful singer overly self-conscious about her public impact into a struggling artist adorned by few and failing to build the fanbase she needs. Then, perhaps, her mysterious lover’s sacrifice and consistent loyalty would be all the more powerful. All I felt over the closing montage as relationship to Red was revealed was how absurdly hamstrung it felt. The sword first confesses his love to Red when high off Process vapors (or whatever) as though this confession were some great secret when it’s made immediately clear that the two were in a relationship when she pointlessly commits seppuku by his body.

Like I said, the love story is atrocious. But really, the story in general is atrocious because, much like the combat system, Transistor struggles from having too many disparate elements with no clever way of tying everything together. It’s a poor mish-mash in the end that reveals far too starkly how reliant the company is on the success of its first product. And really, you had the perfect set-up for there to be four main boss battles with the different Camerata members. How the company bungled this opportunity still baffles me.

The art, though, is really pretty. I think it’s the only thing I like better than in the original.

The Most Lonesome Road

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Obsidian hates endings. I make this bold proclamation after going through the wonders of Neverwinter Nights 2, its expansion Mask of the Betrayer, Knights of the Old Republic II: the Sith Lords and–to a lesser degree–Alpha Protocol. Neverwinter ends with a rather lackluster battle followed by a super unsatisfying ending told through slides about how your noble and courageous party were all crushed by falling rocks in the evil baddies inevitably structurally unsound lair. Mask of the Betrayer’s start pulls a fast one by revealing that you didn’t actually die but are now part of some near immortal campaign against the Lord of Death’s wall of damned souls. You gather your allies, storm his city on an extradimensional plane and… stumble around the most barren municipality before the Lord of Death shows up, slaps your soul into your hands then sends you on your way with a pat on your bum. No one needs to go into detail about how rushed the Sith Lords was nor how its ending is bafflingly incoherent if you haven’t peered into the design documents to glimpse what was meant to be fashioned before the game was packaged and kicked out the door before it was done.

Alpha Protocol’s was probably the best of the bunch though its set battle pieces were rather ham-fisted given how reactive the rest of the narrative had been up to that point.

Accessed from http://fallout.bethsoft.com/eng/vault/diaries_diary15-9-20-11.php

Fallout: New Vegas, Lonesome Road and all other trademarks belong to Bethesda and Obsidian in equal turn.

Of course, Fallout: New Vegas continues Obsidians writhing hatred for closure. The battle for Hoover Dam is, much as Mask of the Betrayer, pretty lifeless and uninspired given all the work you’re tasked with leading up to it. I suppose a plane flies over at some point and fire bombs some suckers which is kind of fun.

What does this have to do with the downloadable content? Well, my prior reviews of New Vegas’ DLC had talked about how they were building up this personal, interwoven and persistent antagonist. Unlike the foes at Hoover Dam who basically sort of pop up at the last moment to be slapped around a little like eager puppets in a whack-a-mole distraction, the player has three separate stories constantly speaking of this mysterious Ulysses. In fact, Ulysses had been ghosting the player’s steps long before Obsidian even got around to creating these final four morsels to round out the remaining ideas of their long cancelled Van Buren. One of the first things the player learns is that the courier mission which saw them to the world’s shallowest grave wasn’t initially even meant to be performed by the player. It was Ulysses who passed on the simple task after seeing you were next in line for the position. This uncharacteristic action haunted me until Lonesome Road was finally released. Here, at last, would be a grand personal reveal that would carry far more weight than the detached foes of Caesar’s Legion and the New California Republic who are far more obsessed with water and power than some shmuck who spends his time running up and down mutated roads.

Needless to say, there was a lot of build up for this story and thus there exists no word which can properly describe the disappointment felt when Lonesome Road concluded and its ending slideshow rolled across my screen.

Now, most people complain that the primary problem with Lonesome Road is its incredible linearity. I take no issue with this. It seems clear to me that Lonesome Road was conceived as the ending for New Vegas which Obsidian had no time or manpower to create. Honestly, its title insinuates that there isn’t going to be much to this story. I was fully prepared for a long, narrow walk down an uncompromising path with only my will set against Ulysses. In my mind, this would be the culmination of a very specific technique of narrative development Obsidian has toyed with multiple times in the past. The Sith Lords is perhaps the most elegant execution. Your character is one of maybe a handful of individuals who have been cast from the Jedi Order. However, the exact details for this expulsion and the motivation for you to accept it are somewhat shaped by the players own decisions. A lot of it is smoke and mirrors, of course. Despite their interactivity, video games will never have the same sort of creative back and forth between designer and player as a  tabletop role-playing game. There is a fascinating interplay between player and character knowledge in the game, however. The player learns things which the character knows while simultaneously making decisions often with only half the understanding. Based on those decisions, the character’s past motivations are determined. It takes a very specific view of role-playing. Instead of making the character, the player is taking on a specific role. This comes up again in Alpha Protocol. While the player has control over the motivations and reactions for Michael Thorton, they don’t create his entire back-story or personality.

Not actually Lonesome Road but my screenshots were pretty limited.

Not actually Lonesome Road but my screenshots were pretty limited.

It had been my hope that Lonesome Road would take the same risks. Given how much Ulysses prattles about how your actions formed him just as severely as the world of Fallout was formed by the cataclysmic nuclear war, I anticipated personal revelations which would reshape my entire view of the New Vegas story proper.

This doesn’t happen. Instead, Obsidian has fabricated some complicated scenario which ravages a place simply called The Divide. I can’t help but taste wasted potential across the entire length of the story. To me, Obsidian wanted to tell this kind of story but they simply didn’t know how. Maybe the build up had proved too much, I can not say. However, the themes–as limited as they are–on the Lonesome Road all explore the stripping away of the superficial differences between Caesar’s Legion and the NCR. Here, both serve as enemies as the endless red dust storms and radiation have reduced both to near mindless ghouls who work together insofar as to destroy any intruders into this ruined sanctuary. Ulysses is unabashed in denouncing you for creating this particular wasteland. You as both the player and character are equally baffled by this judgement. It does the story no justice that most of it is told through Ulysses’ discarded journals which require discovering. Ulysses himself is far too obtuse and poetic to communicate anything and unlike the other DLC there is no supporting cast to offer further clarification. The only friendly entity is a copy of the robot ED-E who only beeps (and only beeps about some stupid children’s show because it’s far more important to detail a robot’s background than the protagonist’s).

Through the rambling, it seems the player made a delivery to a town on the Divide which somehow started up because the courier made frequent passes through the Divide while doing deliveries. It’s hard to gauge a chronology partly because there’s so few points of reference and partly because Ulysses prefers the sound of his own voice over making sense. I can’t help but feel some of the vagueness is in part because it was so hard trying to wiggle Lonesome Road’s story into the greater New Vegas whole. At some point it was a major focus in the fight between the NCR and the Legion even though no one talks about the Legion penetrating that far into NCR territory (or even that the Divide was that necessary of a supply line). Another major problem is that the player determines the Courier’s age, so it seems really strange if you’re playing a young Courier how they could have possibly been employed long enough to discover, chart and ultimately lead enough people to the Divide for a town to grow up before the Courier ultimately delivers a package which brings about its end.

This mysterious package, it turns out, is the activation code for the numerous nuclear warheads scattered throughout the Divide. Apparently, in the Old World, the Divide was a major military outpost with hundreds of nuclear armaments pointed towards China. Ulysses’ plan is to return to this location and launch the warheads at both the NCR and Legion–since he sees them as one and the same. He requires your presence for some sense of poetic justice, I think. From what I can gather, he was in the Divide when the Courier unintentionally delivered the package that tore it apart so he was one of a few “sane” survivors. The Courier, somehow, delivered the activation orders and pissed off before the explosions since there is at no point any response that indicates the character’s knowledge differs from the player’s. And the player certainly doesn’t know anything about this place before stepping in it.

Real bad-asses don't look at explosions.

Real bad-asses don’t look at explosions.

Ultimately, it’s a jumbled mess. Even as I try to write this review, I can’t recall the content very well. Unlike the last three, there’s very little that’s memorable about a journey which should have been the crowning achievement for the entire game. I know I was grossly disappointed with how slap-shod all the prior references to Ulysses ended up becoming. His meddling in Honest Hearts, Dead Money and Old World Blues turns out to be incredibly incidental. His plan is haphazard and carelessly thrown together. The player is offered a choice at the end of the road–whether to bomb the NCR or Legion (or both or none)–though there isn’t any truly compelling reason given to do either. Ulysses’ desire is framed as villainous though it’s not justified nearly as well as any of the other antagonists. One of the highlights of New Vegas, for me, is how understandable Caesar is when you sit down with him. Sure, he’s a slaving, misogynistic asshole hellbent on a megalomaniac conquest spree but at least you can understand how he got where he was. Likewise, Elijah’s obsession is well established and explained so when you hunt him down and see the extremes he’s gone to you know how he got to the end of his road. Both offer far more compelling antagonists than Ulysses and neither had as much time devoted to them.

Lonesome Road is simply yet another disappointing ending in a long series of disappointing endings. Perhaps its best accomplishment is its visual design which does convey a sense of tragic destruction near wiped clean from the greater Fallout universe with the passage of time. You look over the Divide and get a sense of what the world would have been just after the bombs fell. Standing atop the ruined overpasses running through a city seared of its identity, there’s an awesome horror at the massive sense of loss and destruction. The best way to enjoy the Lonesome Road is probably by walking it alone, turning off Ulysses’ prattle in your ears and ED-E’s chirping by your side. A solitary stroll down a path the Fallout world has tread again and again across a land thrice devastated. With wind whistling through empty concrete windows like souls bemoaning from the abyss, you can’t help but truly think, “War. War never changes.”

New Year, Old World

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‘Tis a bright and new year and what better way to start if off than with the age old tradition of retreading the works and achievements of yesteryear! Why, I couldn’t possibly imagine a better method of looking bright-eyed into our glorious horizon than staring straight behind at the road we just tread. Come with me on this fantastic journey as I go over the entertainment which I explored in glorious 2014 but had not got around to discussing.

I had, on a previous entry, espoused my love for Fallout: New Vegas and explained in subtle, vague terms how it was so much better than that derivative drivel Fallout 3. I looked at its first two DLC–Dead Money and Honest Hearts respectively–with  a lick and a promise that I would cover the final two when I got around to them. Good new! I finished! Bad news. You get to hear about it.

Old World Blues was the third DLC released and is generally considered the best of the bunch. I can not refute this statement. In my prior post, I detailed how I enjoyed the ideas behind Honest Hearts and Dead Money even if the execution left a little something to be desired. They were, at the end of the day, an interesting look at the world going to hell. Dead Money revolved around the obsessive need of a billionaire eccentric desperate to keep himself and his little piece of earth from the consuming fires and destruction of nuclear devastation. He had, unfortunately, latched his sail to a sinking ship and when he discovered that the woman whom he would craft an entire world for meant to betray him, he turned his marvelous bomb shelter into an inescapable tomb. There was a very obvious and pulsing vein of greed running the entire course of the DLC and the little addition of personal player greed was a neat touch on an otherwise clunky and straightforward corridor experience. Honest Hearts, however, revolved around a dead and broken man’s devotion to redemption. Joshua Graham hoped to expunge the sins he committed in designing and raising the murderous Caesar’s Legion with the small defence and rescue of the Sorrows tribe from the villainous White Legs. The current running beneath the petty tribal dispute and the one between the last Mormons on Earth was the story of the Survivor and how his personal struggle following the fall of the nuclear bombs had irrevocably changed him as it had the world around him. He, too, hoped to keep the woman of his life alive through his recordings and memories, ultimately falling in the final years of his life with only the scattered memoirs to be unearthed by the player in the most remote caverns dotting the Grand Canyon.

Old World Blues is about talking robots.

Accessed from http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Old_World_Blues_(add-on)

Old World Blues and Fallout belongs to Obsidian Entertainment and Bethesda Studios in various legal ways beyond mortal ken. They are not mine.

Franchises are a curious thing. They, more often than not, live long past their creators and what they come to mean is often quite different than what was previously intended. Ask ten fans what Fallout is and you’re apt to get ten different answers. The first two DLC explore some rather personal and grim outcomes of total nuclear devastation. However, Fallout has never been entirely dark and emotional. There’s a bold splash of zany anachronism and otherness. It is slapped right on the front of the cover as a cheerful cartoon of Vault Boy often stands smiling and winking over a blazing mushroom cloud. It is the lingering fifties Americana wrapped about golden age science fiction devices which work through vacuum tubes and prayer than honest science. Turn on the radio and you won’t hear some futuristic sounds befitting a world struggling to rebuild in the year 2281 but the glorious melodies of Roy Brown, Danny Kaye with the Andrews Sisters, The Ink Spots and the Kay Kyser Orchestra. Mad Max-esque punk raiders and cannibalistic tribes are just as much Fallout as brains in a jar and red rocket laser weaponry.

Old World Blues is devouted to that last aspect. Once installed, the player is enticed to head towards Nipton’s Drive-In Theatre to enjoy the Midnight Feature which turns out to be a rather perplexed eye dancing across a faded screen projected from a fallen satellite. Whereas Dead Money you’re lured by the sultry tones of Vera Keyes, inquisitiveness is the only trait which gets the player to touch the satellite before they’re whisked away to the reclusive and secretive Big Mountain research centre. Here, the scientists of bygone America were sequestered in order to develop and prototype weapons necessary to win the war against filthy, Communist China. Part of their development included a holographic fence which served as a shield to shelter from radiation and bombs. Of course, the one thing the scientists didn’t develop against was the simple passage of time and the player is greeted by five floating tri-monitors eerily displaying a pair of eyes and an unmoving mouth as though that were all which is necessary to interface with biological specimens. The Think Tank of Big Mountain conquered death by simply shoving their brains in jars and hoping for the best. While they live on–in a sense–they lost any sort of connection to their humanity or sanity and devoted themselves to the noble and pure pursuit of science for science!

Part of that involved an experiment which destroyed most of Big Mountain and no one ever feels the need to expand further on that incident.

To Old World Blues credits, the Think Tank and their villainous colleague Mobius are well written. You get a sense of their character from their mad ramblings–a brief window into the peoples lives before time and science! stole any shred of individuality away from them. Ostensibly, you are left in Big Mountain to solve the puzzling puzzle of your brain being absent from your body (along with your heart and spine) as per regulation for all guests to Big Mountain. You are outfitted with cybernetic replacements, as are all lobotomites, but you exhibit the curious propensity for speech and thought despite lacking the traditionally required elements for such behaviour. As such, the Think Tank see as a sort of saviour–or at the very least a useful anomaly–capable of aiding their otherwise unarmed and unhelpful robotic forms against the unending tide of robo-scorpions Mobius unleashes on his erstwhile coworkers.

Of course, in order to properly assault Mobius in his ruined bunker to the north you must gather the three great MacGuffins scattered throughout the complex. It’s a rudimentary plot device meant to encourage the player out of the Dome and into the various laboratories around spacious Big Mountain. Old World Blues is less on linear narrative and more on Valve’s environmental telling. Most of the player’s understanding and learning of the complexes history is discovered from poking in every nook and cranny of the crumbling place. Here, too, is the ever persistent allusions to Ulysses and ‘the Grand Plan’ to be revealed in Lonesome Road but they are more in vein with Honest Hearts where it’s a rudimentary connection at best. There’s a bit more explanation for Christine Royce and what actually happened here to cause Dead Money to transpire but nothing of true note is discovered other than Ulysses supposedly learning something “important” from the Think Tank which they can’t remember or can’t be bothered to remember. For the most part, the narrative is well executed in this manner. It pulls on the sense of discovery and exploration which I enjoyed in Honest Hearts and some of the revelations tie back to the New Vegas proper like the origins of the dreaded Cazadores.

My biggest issue with Old World Blues, however, is that it is safe. There’s really nothing deeper beneath it. When you confront Mobius, the floating brain isn’t some madman with some gloriously thematic reasons for his nefarious actions. He’s just a rambling old brain addicted to Mentats and barely keeping his thoughts together. He realized that after their “immortality” the Think Tank lost all sense of their humanity and, should they ever get the motivation to expand beyond their protective bubble, they would turn into tyrannical science! tyrants far too willing to enslave and destroy the wider world outside to keep bodies fueling their ever more demented experiments. Thus, he reasoned that if there were a persistent threat upon their lives they would be more than happy to squirrel up in the basement of the Dome. Mobius didn’t so much steal your brain as rescue it from the plumbing and is more than happy to give it back–assuming you can convince your brain to come back with you.

Old World Blues most interesting moment is a dialogue challenge to convince your brain to join you on your grand, stupid adventures. It’s an interesting climax for a story, especially given how reactive it is to some of your prior exploits. It also is the perfect highlight of the absurd experience of Big Mountain though there is a cursory confrontation with the Think Tank where you can convince them to be good people if you’ve fulfilled the prerequisite Sunday Morning Special morality lessons for each of them. Or you can shoot them in the face. They really don’t have much in the way of defences even on very hard. And you’re apt to be armed to the teeth with barking mini-guns or singing sonic emitters.

Accessed from http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=197809318Which I applaud the design for Big Mountain in that one regard. Unlike the past two DLC, Old World Blues is more amicable to wider character builds. There are energy guns, conventional weaponry and melee items with which to defend yourself. It’s–ultimately–the inverse of the prior DLC. The execution and design is top notch but the themes and motifs underlying it are rather shallow and uninteresting. Its light-hearted (to Fallout’s degree) and the characters are entertaining so the writing remains consistent. I couldn’t help but shake that I was treading through cut content, however. There was a feeling that Big Mountain was more a museum than a laboratory which preserved all the ideas and locations which simply couldn’t make it to the final release. It doesn’t help that loading up New Vegas’ map shows a conspicuous large ‘crater’ in the northern corner which could very easily once hold the saucer remains of Big Mountain. And much like Dead Money, there’s an alternative ending depending on potential decisions to make in this space. It’s impossible to go through the area and not think “what if this were part of the original experience and it was integrated into the final act.” If, much like Dead Money, you could participate in the battle for Hoover Dam with crazed robots and lobotomites along with hologram fighters and a rust death cloud, I feel like the “gather your allies” story of New Vegas would have been all the richer.

As such, Old World Blues exists in the New Vegas world much as it does here: an optional place plucked from time and sheltered in its own little sphere waiting to be poked, prodded, probed and ultimately abandoned.

Malevolent Maleficent

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As my brother has posted this is the holiday season, thus the lack of posting. It is also a time to catch up on entertainment. I have seen two movies of late: The third part of the Hobbit and Maleficent. Today I will write a short reflection on the latter.

Aurora, Maleficent and Crow (couldn't be bothered learning this one's name). Image from the internet.

Aurora, Maleficent and Crow (couldn’t be bothered learning this one’s name). Image from the internet.

Maleficent was meh. I had extremely low expectations having watched recent remakes like Mirror Mirror (very clean and simple) and Snow White and the Huntsman (truly terrible film). The movie did not exceed them. On the other hand, it was not frustratingly worse than I had expected.

Best scene in the movie - The Cursing of Baby Aurora by the Evil Maleficent. Image from the Internet.

Best scene in the movie – The Cursing of Baby Aurora by the Evil Maleficent. Image from the Internet.

Angelina Jolie had a great scene when she cursed the baby Aurora. Otherwise her acting was good, but not great. The acting of the other primary characters was terrible, while some of the tertiary characters were better acted. The visuals pulled heavily from Lord of the Rings. The vine monsters were kind of neat, but completely unnecessary (as were many of the elements). The story was a mess. The writing was terrible. And the world development was a mess.

The simple princess. Not the type to survive political intrigue, war, famine or even the hallways of her own castle. For an affectionate child, she was surprisingly unmoved by her father's demise. Image from the internet.

The simple princess. Not the type to survive political intrigue, war, famine or even the hallways of her own castle. For an affectionate child, she was surprisingly unmoved by her father’s demise. Image from the internet.

Maleficent was trying to give a different perspective to the class Disney Sleeping Beauty while at the same time still retreading very familiar material. Unfortunately in attempting to make the villain sympathetic, Disney cleaned her up to heroic level. In order to accomplish this unnecessary feet, the writers had to create a different villain (the king, Aurora’s father) and kill all characterization of the other characters. Aurora came off as simple, in the classical sense. For a princess, Aurora did not fill me with confidence for the future of her land. She seemed the sort of oblivious individual that would get lost in her own castle.

 

The sort of Scottish, increasingly Evil King Stefan. Probably because he is an orphan and if I learned anything from the film it is that orphans do lots of damage to the land. Image from the internet.

The sort of Scottish, increasingly Evil King Stefan. Probably because he is an orphan and if I learned anything from the film it is that orphans do lots of damage to the land. Image from the internet.

I found Stefan (the king) a poorly organized character. He was an orphan (and that is sad), in order to make a connection to the fey Maleficent (also a sad orphan). Stefan was driven by greed to excessive and unexplained proportions. His actions seemed as inconsistent as his vaguely and randomly Scottish accent. By the end he was so irrationally evil that no one, including his perfect daughter, mourned his death.

Actually, this reflects a problem with the world building. One human kingdom is located next to a full blown fey kingdom. Naturally an all-powerful king rules over the Human lands. While the Fey live via democracy, at least until Maleficent goes on a vengeance kick and subjugates all the other, conveniently smaller fairies. Of course, when Maleficent is finally redeemed as a character at the end of the film she then crowns Aurora as Queen of the Fey kingdom – and yet no one sees this as a problem?

Also, if the Humans had been living next to the Fey for so long, why were they so surprised and baffled by magic? It should have been normal or at least explained why it was not normal. Also, after the Humans spontaneously declare war on the fey and Maleficent repels them at cost, why do three little fairies go to help the king and bless his daughter?

Why the wings? Well 'cause she is a fairy of course. Why is Maleficent a fairy? Umm... hmm... still can't answer that one. Image from the internet.

Why the wings? Well ’cause she is a fairy of course. Why is Maleficent a fairy? Umm… hmm… still can’t answer that one. Image from the internet.

At the end of the day the motivations for Maleficent becoming the evil sorcerer that she is famous for, were far from compelling. Her redemption was contrived. It was … not good. A better direction to take the story would be to start with the cursing. Then work out the why behind the actions. As my brother suggested, I wouldn’t redeem Maleficent. I would however explain in sympathetic terms why she became evil. It would be done in a way that while Maleficent’s actions were explained and understood, the audience could also sit back and see she was still evil and should not have done the curse. I also wouldn’t have her as a fairy, just a sorcerous. Furthers, since we know the story of Sleeping Beauty, I would not worry about having all the familiar elements. Why rehash old material when time could be better spent telling a new and interesting story. I also wouldn’t randomly make the King evil just to have a villain – Maleficent is the villain, the story should be why.

The bottom line: Maleficent took one of the greatest, most recognizable villains and forced her to be a weakly explained, psuedo-hero.

Happy Holidays

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Yes, it’s been quiet around here lately and yes, I’m certain many people aren’t coming over because of all the work that has yet to be done. And if you are coming over, why haven’t you finished all the work that has yet to be done! Oh, you’ve finished and have better time management skills? Do you do coaching?

We here at somewherepostculture–if you haven’t noticed–are not the best at juggling multiple obligations at the best of times. Through in the Christmas season and you’ve got a frantic recipe for disaster. As usual, I blame Derek. I mean, really, when was the last time he posted?

Anyway, today’s update is to confirm that we are now on holidays and will be taking a hiatus from the site while we enjoy time with family, friends and imaginary family and friends. It is our wish to you that your holiday season is filled with mirth, good cheer and fantastic presents. Perchance we could even convince you to join us in our futile attempts to resurrected that age old tradition of wassailing. Unlike caroling, this one ends with beer!

From all of us here, we wish you the merriest Christmas, the most festive holidays and the bestest New Year! See you all in 2015!

Accessed from http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f7/Adolph_Tidemand_Norsk_juleskik.jpg

Norsk Juleskik by Adolph Tidemand (1846).