On Memes Revisited

To explain/kill the joke: I expected Fullmetal Alchemist dressed up as Bleach.  I got Bleach dressed up as the Warhammer 40k Inquisition.

Admittedly, Wakfu does show the influence of both ATLA and Asterix Le Gaul (especially Asterix).

-Stormshrug

On Old Favorites

It's been a while since I engaged with that image meme I love so much, but for a while, I had only a one or two role playing characters to meme up, and it was hard to get started.  Then when I got to critical mass, I was just lazy.

No longer!



Orpheus Agent Jared Argyris from Orpheus, Summer 2010

Veil Agent Mithan Dispara (Shadar-Kai Ranger), New Veras Campaign (D&D 4e), Fall 2010

Outcast Jerok the Honorless (Half-Orc Barbarian), New Veras Campaign (D&D 4e), Spring 2011

Taros Steelscream (Black Shield Assault Marine), The Cycle of Fate (Deathwatch), Summer 2011

Well, I expect to drop another one of these posts in a year or so.  I hope I'm lucky enough to have had yet another year of amazing RPGs to fool around in!

Edit: Bonus!

My Co-DM from the New Veras campaign has kindly provided his "what the DM actually saw" version of Mithan Dispara:

I can see that.  It's extra appropriate because I main Snake in Brawl.  And Mithan did love setting land mines.

-Stormshrug

On Storms of Bullets

So, a while back, Bertram the Murder-Bear wrote a review of Bulletstorm (and then a follow-up).  Now, I had been waiting to get an Xbox 360 to play this game because I was actually unaware that it is, in fact, available on PC.  On Steam, even.  Swiftjack, however, was on the ball, and told me where to buy a ticket to the rock'n'murder concert.

And what a glorious concert it was.  Despite the news that Bulletstorm was a total  financial fiasco, this game was very successful at what it set out to do, artistically if not fiscally.  Bulletstorm is to FPSes as Megas XLR is to Giant Robot shows.  It takes the genre conventions, cranks them up to parodic levels, and then wraps them in an explosive chain and kicks them of a cliff, destroying Jersey City in the process.  Most video games and giant robot shows are, to some extent, empowerment fantasies (except Evangelion, unless you're a masochist), but Bulletstorm and Megas both take this to new levels.  Bulletstorm does this in ways both subtle and blatant:  on the subtler side, its hit boxes for guns are very forgiving (once, when the sniper rifle's remote-control bullet system was bugging out, I managed to take down a large group of enemy snipers by setting up shots with the scope and then no-scoping.  I kept getting the "Show-Off" Skillshot for this, which was kind of funny).  On the more blatant end, enemies go into bullet-time when grabbed with the Leash, or kicked.  But you don't.  So yeah, they're pretty much at your mercy.  Use the Thumper and enjoy playing at Nox for a minute.  Now, this may be sort of an industry standard in sci-fi shooters these days (Mass Effect, Dead Space), but given how many gratuitous options you have in Bulletstorm, the slowdown is far more than just a few free shots.  Megas engages with the empowerment fantasy in slightly different ways, but you can't say that element isn't there.

On a more personal note, Bulletstorm caters to one of the things I want in video games (but rarely get much of), which is the opportunity for creative gameplay (also known as the ability to throw people off of cliffs, drop rocks on them, freeze them under lakes, and throw them off of cliffs).  Mass Effect (and 2) both had a fair bit of this, but it was very scene-dependent - when there were cliffs, then Shockwave became a killing machine if I could set the shot up.  On the flip side, a lot of the time, I didn't have access to terrain I could kill people with, so I just stuck with the old Reave-Shoot-Repeat combo until everything was dead for a fair number of fights.  Standard FPS fare, and enjoyable, but not as challenging an exercise as trying to optimize the number of kills I could get with a hot dog cart at the top of a staircase before blowing it up to light everyone who survived on fire (and hit them with flaming hot dogs).

You ALWAYS have terrain you can kill people with in Bulletstorm.  Ranging from the conveniently explosive trash incinerators to the giant cacti to holes in half-collapsed buildings that should never stay up (and almost never survive your destructive passing), the game offers a murderous smorgasbord of options with a side of good old dick-shooting, if you feel like it.  I never got to freeze anyone under a lake, admittedly, but you can't have everything.  I'd expect a freeze ray of some sort in Bulletstorm 2, if I thought there was going to be one.

The characters fit the setting, and the VAs were all top-notch.  Steve Blum is always on his game, but he nonetheless whacked the role of Grayson Hunt out of the park, and I can't think of anyone who could do a better Trishka Novak than Jennifer Hale.  Andrew Kishino made a good straight-man to the other leads in Ishi Sato, the murderous man-machine.  In terms of dialogue, the profanity was as obscenely creative as the violence, with writers making up disgusting new kennings (or sometimes just profane nonsense phrases) for any and every situation that the VAs delivered with palpable glee.  Though subtler, the Newsbots and occasional propaganda material gave us a glimpse into the parodically decadent, rotting culture that brought on the catastrophe that is Elysium.

The plot was serviceable - it wasn't the main attraction, but it provided sufficient motive for the main characters' actions, and despite one glaring oddity at the end, it was fairly tight.  Chekov's Gun was always fired if introduced.  It was usually fired into an unsuspecting enemy to launch him off a cliff, into a rotary fan, or just into a giant, spiked cactus.  But it was always fired.

In the end, while this wasn't as great a game as a Mass Effect 2 or as repeatably playable as a Left 4 Dead/2, it was a kick to play.  And said kick often threw an enemy off a cliff, which is always a plus for video games in my book.

-Stormshrug

On Macross Zero (Spoilers Marked)

If you find meaning in the TAB cans, congratulations.  You've dug deeper into this image than I have.

So, I chose Macross Zero as my "designated show to watch whilst working out."  Overall, I enjoyed it.  I'm not going to go into the gory details, but I'll make a few comments.  Starting with my favorite (and only) Rubric for grading anime series:


Action/Fanservice/Plot:
8/6/4

Miscellaneous Comments:

-The CG robots looked pretty decent, and they were definitely a stepping-stone on the way to Frontier's amazing CG integration.  They were done intermittently with animation and CG.  This worked pretty well, though the animated shots looked WAY better than the CG ones, and that was probably its biggest weakness.

-There's more nudity than I expected, and it's fairly detailed (about what you'd expect from an OVA, but still). Watch Macross Zero in public at your own risk.  Fortunately, I was working out at home when I discovered this, and not in a gym surrounded by people who could ask "why I was watching cartoon pornography."  Reminds me of the time I saw a guy start an episode of Game of Thrones on his iPad in a gym.  Then promptly stop about five minutes into the episode, and leave.

HERE THERE BE SPOILERS:

-If I hadn't seen Macross Frontier (which retroactively explains some of the weirdness of Zero, mostly through information about the Vajra and the Protoculture), beforehand, I'd have thrown up my hands and cried "Bullsh*t" repeatedly throughout the series.  As it was, I still had to forcibly suspend my disbelief, particularly at the end, since I couldn't in any way justify some of the events besides "magic."  That is what it is, and I have long accepted that many anime finales will contain magic regardless of the original genre.  I knew this one was coming, so the blow was softened considerably.

-The story was highly reminiscent of some other mecha anime that aren't from the Macross family, per se - Escaflowne, Eureka 7, and there was even a hint of Rahxephon and Evangelion.  However, it probably reminded me MOST of a Miyazaki film.  All of the allusions, parallels, and references to non-Macross series were relatively downplayed - at least in comparison to the blaring Macross motifs and emblems that adorned this nostalgia-piece.  There has been a ton of analysis comparing it to Frontier (and I blatantly stole images from one of these analyses), and rightly so.  It's a pretty deep series, though, and I think it's a fertile ground for comparative analysis in general.

-I don't think there is ANY J-Pop in the entire show.  There was some singing in surprisingly understandable French, though.  That made me think about how there won't be any new Wakfu until September, and I'll need to keep dipping into my archives for content for a while yet.


-Stormshrug


P.S.:  The final panel was almost comprised of an image of Harvey Birdman, dressed as a magical girl, shooting Touhou lasers and blowing up the planet Earth.  But I determined that this would be even more esoteric than what I have currently (which is already altogether too obscure), and would be considerably more time-consuming to create.

On George RR Martin's Standard Character Arc (mild ASoI&F spoilers)

Though I wouldn't worry TOO much about the spoilers unless you haven't read A Game of Thrones.  The pattern is pretty well established by the end of that book.  Still, I'll throw in some spoiler space so you can leave.

-Stormshrug

On the Morality of Being Nice

Debatably, this post has [Mass Effect 2 Spoilers].  I trust you guys to know where you stand on my definition of spoilers at this point.

So, I recently ran into, I think, an effective handling of a moral quandary in an RPG.  Dr. Mordin Solus is easily the most frustratingly morally ambiguous character I've encountered in a long time.  And, I kind of want to call him out on what he's done.  But he's party of my loyal BROhort, and what's more, he's a very loyal and *likeable* member of the Shepherd BROgade.  He made choices of terrible weight, and he definitely feels them.  I don't want to hurt the guy emotionally any more than I have to, but he has done some really bad things, and I don't want to condone those, either.  Do I comfort him, by telling him it's in the past?  Do I tell him it was wrong and demand some kind of enthronement?  Is it better to be nice to Mordin, a friend, or to be honest with him, as a person who has made some despicable, if debatably necessary, choices?  These options are both good and bad in their own ways, morally.  I was honestly conflicted about the whole matter.  What really made this work was that, quite frankly, I was more concerned with finding the option that satisfied me most, and not ferreting out the one that nets more Paragon or Renegade points.  That's the sign that a morality system is working, I'd say.

Now, there's a slight caveat to all of this.  It's worth mentioning that Paragon and Renegade are really more about "how nice are you" versus "how much of a jerk you are" than strictly "good vs evil."  In ME 2, with the introduction of "Paragon Action" and "Renegade Action" quicktime event options into many cutscenes, Renegade is as much about being a dirty-fighting, sneaky SOB as it is about being a baby-kicking jerk.  For instance, you get the opportunity to taze a guy repairing a gunship that you know you're going to have to fight (this isn't a spoiler, because it's obviously Checkov's gunship).  Given the context, this seems to fall within "reasonable video game warzone immorality" - it's a little lenient, if anything, since unless I seriously misunderstood it, he wouldn't have died from the tazing.  Hell, it might have saved his life (I don't *think* he was aboard the gunship later, though).  It's the sort of move Han Solo would pull -  opportunistic and kind of dickish, and also for the greater good.  With the system they have in place, the two aren't mutually exclusive.

Where the system breaks down is in that I metagame too much.  I can't help but optimize my playstyle to either Paragon or Renegade, since there are tangible rewards for doing so (more conversation options, easier resolutions of many conflicts between pairs of characters I like, etc).  So, even though a particularly grandiose Krogan mercenary is blathering on about how he's going to kill and eat me, and clearly I'm going to be shooting him sooner or later regardless of what I do, I feel compelled to sit there and listen instead of shooting the fuel tank he's standing on, because I don't want it to come back and bite me in the ass when I need to tell two bickering teammates to leave each other the f*ck alone.  And you still DO have to kick a lot of babies to amass enough Renegade points for it to be worthwhile (admittedly, when I say "kick babies," I really mean "say unnecessarily mean things to people who look up to you").  So, in Mordin's case, because I really feel conflicted about the whole mess, and because it can't be worth THAT many Paragon or Renegade points to say any particular thing so long as that thing isn't "Eat babies, regret nothing," I don't feel constrained by the mechanics of the system.  I care about making the choice I find to be most morally acceptable (which was, incidentally, just keeping my mouth shut - I wasn't happy with this, but I couldn't come up with anything better than what the game offered anyway), and I'm willing to let the chips fall afterward.  But I'll fruitlessly negotiate with people who clearly are just going to use that time to take aim because, later, I want to be able to tell other people to shut the f*ck up (very charismatically) and stop shooting each other.

Mind you, I'm not claiming that Mass Effect 2 has a truly functioning morality system.  I still think morality systems are mostly a doomed effort.  But, for me at least, it has instances where the system really does work, and I find that very interesting.

An addendum on the matter: maybe a two-part system, where you can set both an action and a demeanor?  So, you could be surly but moral or charming but evil?  Of course, I suppose this has the potential that leads to "shoot him in the dick [nicely]."

-Stormshrug

On Mass Effect Gameplay

So, I recently shredded through Mass Effect because I didn't have my copy of A Dance with Dragons yet and the lack of it made me want to kill some video game enemies in droves.  However, as my copy was coming via snail-mail, I still didn't have it when I finished Mass Effect.  As such, I needed more things to kill, and so I loaded up Mass Effect 2 to continue to bide my time by dismembering virtual aliens, robots, terrorists, and alien robot terrorists until my six-years-in-the-making Martin fix arrived.

I had heard that Mass Effect 2's gameplay was rather different, but I was still really struck by a few things.

1.  Ammo.  There was no ammunition collection in ME 1, due to some applied phlebotinum and handwaving whilst saying the words "Mass Fields."  I was totally fine with this - in fact, I hardly noticed.  What the inclusion of traditional ammunition in Mass Effect 2 made me realize was that I didn't really miss it in ME 1.  In certain games, yes, scraping for ammunition is part of the fun.  Making that last sniper rifle shot really count is critical.  Running out of ammo is scary.  But Mass Effect had offered a reasonable-enough explanation of why you had infinite ammo, put a different limiting resource on your weapons (overheating), and it worked fine.  Fight dynamics were more like an RPG than an FPS, in that they weren't about limited, unrenewable resources, but instead focused around cyclically available resources.  You could play the long game in any fight, because you could wait for your heat to drop, and once it did, the gun would work again.  I'd be annoyed if a hard-boiled FPS like Gears of War or Call of Duty removed ammunition, but Mass Effect, like World of Warcraft, really didn't need it, and it's kind of a hassle.  Let Hunters make their own magic arrows - it isn't going to unbalance the game, anyway.  In works of High Fantasy (and ME, like Star Wars, is basically High Fantasy IN SPESS), such abstractions are totally reasonable.  In ME 2, at least so far, however, your two resources (powers, which are cyclically available, and ammo, which runs out) work differently - which kind of makes powers better for my more conservative, calculating playstyle.  The other irritating thing is that I end up using guns I don't really like, since ammo is universal but apparently not transferrable.  This is a minor gripe - there is tons of ammo, and it is universal.  Thank god.

2.  Visible HP.  I'm not sure why, but ME 2 decided to go to the Gears of War-style "red marks appear on your screen" hit-points for your own HP instead of the previous Halo-style visible Shields and HP.  This particular change makes the game feel MUCH more FPSish, since it's harder to keep track of how you're holding out in a fight, or how much damage specific enemy attacks are doing.  This also slightly changes the strategic aspects of the game - you have to ballpark things, which is much more of an FPS trait than an RPG one.  Enemies still have HP bars, so that part remains largely unchanged.

It's interesting how, despite the mechanical gameplay being very similar, these two minor changes really shift it from feeling like an RPG-FPS hybrid to an FPS.

-Stormshrug