Sinners at the Hands of an Angry Dog

"Official" blog of Barachiel, "professional" opinion-haver

[bearakeel]

Commissions are Open I Guess

Hi! I'm Barachiel, I'm a genderfluid person with a Twitch audience of three, and I'm quitting my job because of trauma that accumulated over Covid. To tide me over until I get a new job, I'm gonna take some cross-stitch commissions.

Pricing is as follows: -$25 for a 4-7in diameter pattern -$35 for a 8-12in diameter pattern

The prices include me making a pattern from your request, a bamboo hoop frame, and domestic shipping within the US. I can do a square piece for framing as well, but you'll have to provide your own frame. Border stitching for a square piece will add $5 to the price; likewise, I'll give a $5 discount if you provide a pattern, or if you want an NES or similarly small sprite.

As an allergen note, these will be crafted in a home with a cat. Not sure how much that'll matter, but better safe than sorry.

If you're interested, send me a message here or at my twitter, barachielispan. Below, I'm including some examples of my work that I've made for friends and for myself. If you have any questions or ideas, please don't hesitate to reach out!

[bearakeel]

I promised myself I’d use this blog again before two months is up, so here’s my review of My Hero: One’s Justice.

My Hero: One’s Justice is an arena fighting game based on My Hero Academia, and while it is a fun game, most of its value will be to people who are already fans. While that sounds obvious, my point is that it’s not going to win any new fans for the series. There is a story mode, but it seems mostly concerned with retreading the main series plot, so I’ve mostly played arcade mode, which is an absolute fucking blast.

The game’s controls are fairly simple, and everyone controls more or less the same, with one button for basic attacks, one for a quirk attack, and one for a different quirk attack. Each character’s moveset is unique and different enough to do justice to the series’ signature variety in character design, and having a simple control scheme neatly avoids the Mortal Kombat problem (which is, to a lesser extent, also the Street Fighter problem) of having to look up the move list for each character in order to play them. Jumping into arcade mode and figuring out your moves using your opponent’s face is incredibly fun, and most of the moves are dynamic enough that you almost always get a photo finish.

The main issue I’ve had with the game so far is not in learning to control the characters, but in learning the game itself. The engine is very dedicated to replicating the incredibly dynamic fight animation of the anime, with camera angles and frame borders changing and shifting around long combos in a way that I found somewhat hard to predict. To that same end, the gravity in the game will sometimes rotate to favor a wall with seemingly inconsistent provocation. At first I thought it was something I was doing as Uraraka, but then it kept happening. I think it’s triggered when you slam someone hard enough into a wall, but it seemed to skip that step a few times, so as cool as it looks, I really don’t understand it, and all it does practically is negate whatever obstacles may be on the floor.

All in all, it’s a fun game, but something that’s definitely aimed at existing fans. If you like the look of it, I recommend picking up a copy, playing the first story mission, then messing around in training mode for a bit before you start beating the crap out of arcade mode and/or your friends.

[bearakeel]

Today, we present a loose collection of thoughts on the role of fantasy in a video game, poorly disguised as a review of the current generation’s Gundam titles.

Currently, the PS4 has two games from the Gundam franchise. In Gundam Versus, you pick an iconic mobile suit from your favorite Gundam subfranchise and engage in small squad battles, either with other players or online. The controls are a bit unintuitive, but once you’ve figured out the pattern and realized that your movement input sometimes matters when using an attack, you’ll find yourself unleashing all the most iconic moves from the show; Exia throws its beam sabers, the RX-78-2 aims under the arm with the beam rifle, and Wing 0 does its ridiculous spin move. Meanwhile, New Gundam Breaker takes the concept of player customization and makes it a core mechanic; you start off with a 1/144 scale model of the RX-78-2, which you use to battle other models in arenas ranging from meteor mining operations to gunpla-laden club rooms. The parts collected from fallen foes can then be used to build your own custom mobile suit, with special abilities, unique stats, and a cool name. The gameplay is similar to a musou game like Dynasty warriors, with player-controlled powerhouses beating up hordes of neutral AI-controlled fodder enemies to complete missions assigned randomly to both teams.

These games have a lot in common. They both have a very large roster of mobile suits from a very broad spread of shows, books, manga, other games, etc, but both of rosters have very glaring omissions. Why does GV have the Forbidden but not the Aegis? Why does NGB have the Jesta Cannon and no form of Heavyarms? Who knows. They also both draw very heavily on Gundam canon, using specific moves and attacks from iconic moments in each suit’s life, such as Wing Gundam’s ability to self-destruct in NGB. That’s not even a joke. Both feature boost movement and ammo mechanics that force the player to think tactically about how they act, and allow for a broad range of playstyles. The critical difference between them, then, is their fantasy.

All games that contain context or story elements provide the player with a fantasy. In Mirror’s Edge, the fantasy is in freedom of movement; you run, jump, and slide with absolute fluidity around the city, and the simple act of moving from place to place is intensely satisfying because you do it in a very fun and interesting way. Meanwhile, in Papers Please, the fantasy is that your life and livelihood are hanging from a thread with fifteen different knives pointed at it, and you have to work yourself ragged to keep them all at bay while simultaneously deciding which looks the least sharp. Different games provide different fantasies, and although the differences are sometimes subtle, the details can sometimes make all the difference. I say this because of the two Gundam titles under examination, I think that New Gundam Breaker is the better game, and that largely comes down to fantasy.

The fantasy of Gundam Versus is that you are a Gundam pilot. You are Heero Yuy in Wing Zero, or you are Setsuna F. Seiei in the Exia. The fantasy of New Gundam Breaker is that you are the pilot of a Gundam you created. The difference is slight, but crucial; in New Gundam Breaker, you can be something new and unique. Nothing’s stopping you from recreating the Unicorn Gundam with its exact weaponry, but you could also strap its legs on the Nightingale’s body and run around kicking people to death while your Guntank arms shoot everything rude enough to not enter foot range. There’s room for creativity, personal expression, and, well, fantasy. Gundam Versus is the far more tactical game, featuring more complex mechanics and more nuance in the controls, but ultimately, its a game about established glory. The inclusion of iconic attacks is a nice homage, and most of them look really cool with the help of the game’s dynamic camera system, but at the end of the day, we’ve seen it before, and the obscure nature of the input reliability gives me the distinct impression that rather than being a pilot, I’m just suggesting actions to a pilot. In New Gundam Breaker, I end up creating mobile suits faster than I can use them, and having an absolute blast doing so. I have two IBO-style mechs, remade a custom Gunpla I painted a few years back, and developed a line of suits called the Ophidians that are each designed to use a different inner frame to the fullest. The fantasy is in forging something new, rather than reliving something old.

The issue with judging a game based on its fantasy is that the value of a fantasy is subjective. Even how well-realized a game’s fantasy is can change from person to person; I’ve been playing League of Legends for five years, and have an odd tendency to fall into character when I’m doing well, but I know several people who’ve said that the top-down interface distances them from the character too much for them to get invested. Ultimately, while fantasy is a useful qualifier for a game, it can’t yet be a quantifier. Not until human instrumentality is completed, at any rate.

[bearakeel]

Well, you gotta start somewhere.

I’ve been playing Rise of the Tomb Raider recently. I bought it a few years ago, but never got around to actually playing it for some reason, but now that I work at Gamestop and have ads for Shadow of the Tomb Raider blasting at me every forty minutes it seemed like a good time to go back and actually do it. It’s a lot of fun, and a very well-assembled game, I think, but there’s something that’s been bugging me, and I’ve finally figured out what it is.

See, the game looks a little wonky at times. The super crisp realistic graphics make the jumping look weird sometimes, because the degree of control you have of Lara while she’s in the air is beyond impossible in real life. I’ve tested, you can literally do a mid-air U-turn from a light jog. It works great mechanically, because this is a game that involves a lot of jumping and that Uncharted-style climbing that passes for platforming in AAA games, so a high degree of control allows for course correction and keeps you from dying five times to one jump because you didn’t take five minutes to tweak the camera into the perfect angle (hello, That One Blue Shard In DMC4). It’s a decision rooted not in the game’s presentation, but in its mechanics.

On PS4, clicking the left stick makes Lara sprint, upping the move speed until you let go of the stick, make a sharp turn, or run into a fence. In many games, sprinting is accompanied by a widened field of view; In both Minecraft and Horizon: Zero Dawn, the camera pulls back when you sprint, which both creates a more dramatic sense of speed and allows you to see more of the game world, allowing you to react earlier to the things you’ll reach faster. Rise of the Tomb Raider does the opposite; when you sprint, the camera pulls in behind Lara, almost as close as it does when you’re aiming a weapon, but a bit lower. The focus is on Lara and her destination, which is now framed very harshly against her back and dominates the center of the screen. It’s the sort of camera behavior you’d see in an action movie, reminding us of the character’s goal while showing either their determination or desperation, as appropriate.

Once I realized that, I started noticing other times when the game makes decisions with its camera based on cinematic value, without considering the needs of the player. One example (that happens to me a lot because I haven’t quite learned the distance of the dodge scramble) is when Lara drops down from a surface to hang off the edge. The camera immediately snaps to a severe top-down angle, framing Lara and her platform at the bottom of the screen to show the distance of the fall and the sharp rocks and/or wolf pack at the bottom. This is something of a curious case, because while the decision is rooted in cinematic ambition, attention is paid to the mechanical concerns: the camera angles slightly toward the surface to allow the player to see any points of danger or safety below them, often resulting in a very drastic change in viewpoint, but rather than a hard cut, the camera swings to its new spot very quickly, letting the player keep track of where they are in the game’s space.

A less common and far more severe example occurred to me when I was exploring a challenge tomb. I made a jump, grabbed a ledge, and it collapsed under me. The wooden platform swung down on a hinge and slammed into the rock face it was attached to, and the camera lurched downward to emphasize the sudden impact and show that there was not another surface below me. However, in doing so, it moved Lara’s hand to the very top of the screen, and in doing so, moved the indicator for the quicktime event to secure her grip almost entirely off the screen. I recognized the edge of the indicator and succeeded in the button prompt, but I was left to wonder if hiding the indicator had been a deliberate choice, and if so, if it was fair to do so.

That last question is an entirely unrelated essay, so I’ll loop around to my point: Shadow of the Tomb Raider is torn between its identity and duties as a game and its desire to create cinematic spectacle. It’s still a very fun game, and most of the time, it balances these goals quite responsibly, using the pageantry of cinematic display to enhance the emotional impact the game has on the player. However, the point of conflict between them is something that game developers have been struggling with recently, especially the bigger names and titles in the industry. This was, perhaps, inevitable; the push towards visual realism started by the advent of polygon graphics meant that video games suddenly had an entire existing medium to base themselves on, as opposed to the aimless and uncharted territory forged by 2D and sprite/pixel games. That said, I’m not sure its healthy, and rather than continue to try to emulate film practices, I think video games as a medium need to move past the rules of cinema, to take those lessons and create something new and unique. Maybe by getting someone other than David Cage to direct his next game.

[bearakeel]

Being one of the poor saps who bought the Arkham Knight season pass, I recently gained access to the Harley Quinn playable DLC. My thought on Arkham Knight writ large are best saved for another theoretical post; for now, I'll just say that I thoroughly enjoyed it, and felt it was the perfect wrap to the Arkham "Trilogy." That being said, it did nothing to address my longest-standing issue with the series, which is their portrayal of Harley Quinn as the unerringly loyal hench-wench of old, joyful and psychotic, having no personality beyond her unfaltering love of good ol' Mistah J. In the comics, Harley Quinn decidedly graduated from "loyal hench-wench" and became a walking bedlam entirely of her own volition a few years back. Harley was originally created for Batman: The Animated Series in the early 90s, and her relationship with the Joker has been deliberately written as horrifically abusive (by anyone who isn't a rampaging misogynist with half a slug for a brain) ever since. Even within a season of her appearance, Harley got an episode dedicated to her trying to leave Joker. As such, it seemed weird to me that as of Arkham Knight, Harley would still be prancing around in clown makeup, bashing heads in the name of her puddin', long after he had left this world. I'd just accepted it as one of the flaws of the series, but as of the Harley Quinn DLC, I think I understand the choice a bit better. In the comics, future publication potential dictates that the Joker can never, ever die. Not for good, anyway. They only got away with it in the DCAU by doing it post-main series, in the Batman Beyond movie, and even then they brought him back for one last punch-up. So, Harley had ten long years of delightful spousal abuse to realize that maybe the Clown Prince of Crime wasn't interested in having a princess as much as a punching bag that followed orders. However, the Arkham timeline is largely isolated from the mainstream comics, so we don't know for sure how much time passed between Harley joining the Joker and Joker laughing his last. What we do know is that at the time of Joker's death, Arkham Harley had not moved on. She was still obsessed with the idea of the joker, fascinated by the only person who ever seemed to care about her, enthralled by the brave new worlds of murder and insanity he showed her, and as soon as someone dies, everyone is immediately more inclined to think fondly of them. So Harley is left as a violently psychopathic killer, driven by an obsession she calls love (and will likely never learn was anything else) to carry on spreading death and chaos. Another thing I really liked was how they did Harley's equivalent to Detective Vision. The dark red color scheme and slight shaking of the camera made me instantly uncomfortable, which I suspect was the point, and gave even the safest situations a sense of chaos. In addition, every surface is covered in giant scrawled writing about Joker, which (in addition to adding to the discomfort) makes me wonder if that is literally how she sees the world, or if it represents how much thought actually goes on in her head, underneath the aggressively chipper and ditzy facade. All this and a few brief internal dialogues between Harley and an inner voice subtitled as "Harlene" paint a fascinating picture of someone who has been thoroughly broken, to the point that she may actively want to stay that way. Unfortunately, the DLC clocks in at about ninety minutes, and that's if you take your time and die a few times. I would be really interested to see a game focused on Harley, exploring her psyche, her relationships with Joker and Ivy, her feelings towards Batman, and maybe culminating in her becoming the still murderous, but more more mentally healthy Harley Quinn we see in the comics. This seems unlikely, though, because in no incarnation of her character has Harley been a burly sullen white man with a bit of stubble.

[bearakeel]

Inaugural Post

Hello there, whatever small corner of the internet finds this. I am Barachiel, and this is my blog.

This is all new territory for me. I've thought about serious blogging before--I'm certainly opinionated enough for it, and I do like talking a lot--but I've never really gotten off my proverbial ass for long enough to actually do it. In light of recent events, however, I've found myself inspired to start something new. Regrettably, the biggest catalyst to me starting this blog is the death of respected animator and literal Final Fantasy character Monty Oum.

As I understand it, Monty embodied the American dream of the rags-to-riches success story in a very pure, wholesome way. He started out animating because it was something he enjoyed, and by hammering away at it, he eventually got noticed, and became surrounded by good friends and adoring fans. I remember being in high school, getting so excited by Haloid and that scene in RvB where Grif drives a warthog into Agent Washington, and thinking how wonderful it must be for whoever made those animations to have such amazing talent and vision. I've always been aggressively creative, but I was never able to find a medium for it that I could stick to for long enough to become truly excellent. In the wake of his passing, I found myself inspired to create something, to find a passion and chase it like he did. I realize I'll probably never get more than a handful of followers, and that a lone nerd yelling about the games industry will never affect as many people as Monty's work did, but doing this seemed like the best way to honor him.

Anyway, the TL;DR of this is RIP Monty, and please bear with me until I can get my shit sorted out.