A two-factor glitch (combined with Tumblr support’s uselessness) rendered me unable to login to my Tumblr account a week ago. I was planning to walk away, but it turns out I still need Tumblr for some things, so I made a new one. So, if you previously followed me at:
All the new content that would’ve gone on any of those URLs will now be viewable at http://ift.tt/2lGKGv7. (It will be occasionally NSFW; I promise to tag my posts appropriately.) Thanks for reading, and sorry for the inconvenience.
– My offsite blog
– My Twitter account
– My Mastodon account
– My Weasyl, which I need to get back to updating again
– And why not: My YouTube and Twitch.
If you’re incapable or unwilling to follow me anywhere else, I completely understand. I’m currently posting this through an IFTTT widget, which appears to be the only functional link I have to this account; I’ll be disabling it shortly after this posts. Here’s what’s happened:
I recently ran CCleaner on my desktop computer. I did a somewhat rushed job on it; it wiped out all my browser sessions and cookies. This wasn’t in itself a big deal; I figured I could just log in to all my sites again. I headed to tumblr.com; I entered my email and password into the login screen. The site took me to its two-factor authentication screen; I entered my authentication code, only to be kicked back out to the login screen, where I was informed that either my username or password were incorrect.
I repeated the process a few times, then when it produced similar results, I tried alternatives. Every time I typed something different than the credentials I’d saved in my KeePass, it would kick me out without asking for my two-factor code.
So, I went through the “lost your password?” process. Tumblr sent a recovery link to my email account; I entered the new password and my two-factor code, and it would respond by giving me an error message saying that there was an error resetting my password, and that I should try again. I tried this numerous times, each time encountering the same results. I waited a night, went through the entire process from scratch again. I tried it on my iPod Touch in the official Tumblr app, just in case there was something wrong with my computer. I received the same results, every single time.
What conclusion would you come to in this situation? Personally, I assumed that there was something wrong on Tumblr’s end. So I sent a support request, explaining why I think the issues I’m encountering are a result of some glitch with how the site is handling my two-factor code. Here is their response.
Their protocol for situations like this is apparently the same as if a user wanted to disable two-factor altogether. Since (as some of you may know) I reject my body and dislike looking at myself, I do not take selfies. Because of this, there are no selfies on any of my blogs, and thus no secure way of confirming to Tumblr staff that I’m not a crafty hacker/social engineer impersonating myself to bypass the two-factor.
“But Tarah!”, you may ask. “If you can post this here, then why can’t you take a selfie, post it through IFTTT, and regain access to your accounts that way?” Because then I would have to show my IRL face here for as long as it takes for Tumblr staff to revoke my two-factor — which, if I decided to do that, would be extremely uncomfortable for me — and even if that happens, and they actually accept a selfie posted after the account access request (which, if it can’t be hosted offsite, I would not be able to delete if they decline), there is no guarantee whatsoever that a similar lockout won’t happen down the road. To put it simply, my dysphoria has made this proposition too risky for me to pursue.
Because of these circumstances, my blogs, including:
It’s really a shame. This won’t affect who I’m following (I catch up with posts through an offline RSS reader), but as you can guess from the number of accounts I held, I was greatly attached to all of these. And it was a genuine thrill, gaining validation from seeing some of my friends (as well as several people I admire) like and reblog my posts.
If you are a follower of mine: I am extremely grateful for your support, and I love you all. I look forward to whatever service comes along that fixes the issues I encountered with Tumblr itself (more than what I’ve described in this post), and when that happens, I hope you will join me on it.
Feel free to spread the word about this news, but please do not reblog this post.
I've decided to bring this feature back! Tumblr reblogs have been excruciatingly slow for me during the late nights I'm active (and who knows how long Tumblr itself will be a thing, besides), so I realized it'd be faster to publish these in a big textpost.
A look behind the curtain: lately I've been catching up with my newsfeeds through an offline RSS reader (RSS Mobile) on my iPod Touch. When I discover something I like, I Telegram the link to myself, which allows me to compile it into a curated list of reblogs. Those who follow me are likely to have noticed I separate these by category; the categories are the same ones I list below. (I figure this format will be worth it, considering I’m sure it’s frustrating to see 50+ posts from me all within the same hour-long period.)
Pick and choose which ones you'd like to look at, or ctrl+click on each link to open 'em all up in a new tab.
Politics
Image Posts:
Hundreds of anti-fascists take to the streets in Shibuya, Tokyo on Saturday
The Republican Healthcare Plan
Text Posts:
On Obama’s legacy and “respectability politics”.
On Republican abortion hypocrisy.
Serious Time
Meesh on references.
Moral righteousness on “bad content” websites.
“Pocket friends.”
“The Sweater Curse.”
Raw, Unfiltered Shitposts
sjw post “i remember the good old days of printed vice...” gonna draw now “my 13 year old brother” stardew valley “hello, my name is possum!”
Game-Related Content
Animated GIFs:
Burning Rangers 1 2
Eternal Daughter
Momodora: Reverie Under the Moonlight
Mother 3
My Garbage Cat Wakes Me Up at 3AM Every Day
Tiny Heist
Nintendo Switch:
“The evolution of a species is now complete.”
From the (uncut) Parental Controls video.
Some excellent box art.
Dane Martin: Useless Filler
Lucie Ebrey: Talking with Friends
Marco and Marty: A Good Dog
Positive Doodles: “We’re here for you.”
Smitten Mitten: My Good-hearted Girlfriend
It's been a few days since Nintendo's Switch announcement! Here's a list of my thoughts on the system itself, as well as what it represents:
First: once the presentation was over, myself and all three of my housemates each resolved to buy one for ourselves over the next year. It wasn't necessarily due to the lineup of software they showed (though Breath of the Wild, Splatoon 2, Mario Odyssey, and Xenoblade 2 were certainly helpful in this respect); it's more an issue of how good everything on it looked.
Here's the situation: We are now capable of a dedicated portable gaming device with a beautiful screen, a full suite of buttons, and better graphical capabilities than the already-fantastic Wii U. If you've followed my thoughts on these sorts of things for a while, you know how I feel about graphics in video games: they have not needed to get any better since the PS2 era, unless you're specifically chasing photorealism (and are willing to endure the diminishing cost/benefit returns that come with such an approach). The rationale for the truncated experiences you found on portables up until now -- limited resolution, limited color depth, limited memory/storage size -- simply doesn’t exist anymore.
This isn’t necessarily to say that you’ll be seeing XbOne/PS4 multiplatform titles on it, of course. Those games already have their audience, and I'd be surprised if they decided to go anywhere else. I have my own personal suspicions as to what kind of third-party support the Switch will receive in the long term, if you’re OK with enduring my armchair market-analysis:
The Japanese developers who create sprite-based visual novels and JRPGs with PS2-level graphics (like Atlus, Spike Chunsoft, and Nippon Ichi), who were previously relegated to the 3DS and Vita. Unless Sony releases a new portable, Nintendo will have cornered the market on this.
Indie developers, thrilled as always to develop and release their projects on a Nintendo console, this time in a way that feels inherently beneficial to their work: people can buy this game here and get both the TV and portable versions, no cross-platform development or special marketplace functions necessary. Wow!
Mobile developers. With mobile games!? Oh yes, it's true!
To expand on that last point: The Switch has hardware similar to modern Android tablets, as well as a development environment that allows for games on common engines (like Unreal and Unity) to be easily ported. I'm not sure if Nintendo will support the idea of using the Switch as a controllerless tablet -- or even in a vertical orientation, for that matter -- but even if they don't, it still seems primed to be a viable third pillar for the Android/iOS game market in ways the Wii U and 3DS weren't. The fact that you can say this about a system with fully-featured console-style games is incredibly powerful to me.
Other notes:
I'm glad Mario Kart 8 is getting a second chance to reach a wider audience; everything about it is incredible, and it'd be a shame to see all the effort that went into making it go to waste.
I have already migrated one pre-order (Sonic Mania) from XbOne to Switch. (It'd be two if there was a way to reserve Yooka-Laylee for this. Some games just seem like a natural fit.)
The console/portable dynamic inherent to this device has me seriously considering double-dipping on one or two things (Minecraft, primarily, which I already own on PC).
There is supposedly a Virtual Console upgrade service planned, which will work the same way some players experienced it when they migrated from Wii to Wii U. If so, I greatly hope Donkey Kong 64 is offered for it, if only for a chance to overcome the Wii U version’s inexcusable input lag.
I might actually import some games for this, depending on whether or not Taiko Drum Master and Minna de WaiWai! Spelunker are released Stateside.
As a lifelong scopophobe who shuns eye contact, I will never ever ever be able to play 1-2-Switch.
The strangest thing about my 2016-in-videogaming has to have been my evolving reaction to PC/XbOne/PS4 puzzle game The Witness. When it was first released in January, I wrote it off as another attempt by an established indie dev to display his patented edge (which I felt I'd had my fill of in Braid), so I passed over it. And legendary Let's Play personality SuperGreatFriend started an excellent video series about it, which documents his puzzle-solving process in real-time (speeding up the moments where he repeatedly bangs his head against a wall); as far as experiencing the game for myself was concerned, I felt like those videos would suffice. (If you're curious about it but not enough to play for yourself, his LP is about as close to a pure experience as you're likely to get, and if the game doesn't sound like your thing, I recommend it wholeheartedly. Spoilers follow after the jump, as usual.)
As the Let's Play went on over the following months, I eventually found my justification validated -- Austin Walker, on the Giant Beastcast, mentioned that the audio/video clips you find while exploring in the game feature highly disagreeable ideas about how to be a good person. I think it's very easy to get this impression; the game puts a code for one of the most objectionable video clips immediately after the first set of puzzles. The clip, from a 1978 BBC science show, states plainly that since creative disciplines are interpretative, they are therefore inherently far less valuable to society than scientific disciplines are. Science provides nothing short of the cold, indisputable truth about what things are and how they work, whereas even the greatest art is too far removed from its subject material to actually tell you anything of substance.
That clip, in itself, was hard for me to swallow -- and given the way most games construct narratives around the media they contain, it made me think the entire premise of the game was structured around blithely lecturing its players about how fun and useful it is to learn and discover things about the world, with the end goal of helping you achieve an attitude you can take with you outside the game. It would end with you discovering you’ve become a more interesting and well-rounded human being, capable of bringing us as a species closer to the utopia we all deserve. For me, this theory was only amplified by an audio quote, found elsewhere, of a passage by William K. Clifford. Combined with the premise I'd constructed, this quote painted what I assumed was a cruelly libertarian underlying philosophy: one that suggested everyone is obliged to personally know the inner workings of everything they're responsible for (avoiding delegating that responsibility to contracted experts whenever possible); if you don’t, you’re denying the natural curiosity entertained by all truly good people. Like nuclear physicist and icon-of-scientific-curiosity Richard Feynman, featured multiple times in The Witness and at least once in Braid!
So, I rolled my eyes and mimed jerkoff motions whenever a new piece of in-game media came up. But the gameplay, puzzles, and visuals looked excellent, and the game itself houses an entertaining mystery of what the island setting is and why you suddenly find yourself there. Not only that, but -- truth be told -- I'd watch SGF play Desert Bus if he suddenly decided to, so I kept watching and following along with the puzzles as he solved them, with my partner and I independently figuring out the puzzle rules as he came across each new area. And despite the apparent ideology (which, as a Twitter follower pointed out, I had partially fabricated because I was looking for it), the game eventually hooked me, 10 months after launch; I decided I'd had my fill of watching someone play through, and instead opted to buy The Witness and explore the island myself. And what did I find? Well. (Deeper spoilers follow.)
I should get this out of the way: There's no excuse for the use of puzzles whose solutions require you to separate different types of colors and sounds. They're technically skippable, but only if you think you'll be satisfied with the game's first (of two) endings. For the color puzzles, the exact same mechanic could have been used for most of the puzzles if the colors had vastly different values. The sound puzzles should have either been given a visual component (like getting to view the waveform of each audio clip), or just been omitted as a true-ending requirement entirely. It's fun to learn them, but unlike the other "rules" you learn, sounds are almost never used anywhere else. The few times they are, figuring out the solution required a fair amount of trial-and-error from me. And speaking of fiddly puzzles: the ones that require you to look at light reflecting off the puzzle panels would have worked far better in a Myst-like game with a limited number of fixed camera angles, especially when the reflections are only visible for a few seconds at a time from one specific section of a room.
Those complaints aside? The Witness is excellent. I blasted through it in two days, and it’s now second only to Stardew Valley in my top-ten for the year. I ended up concluding that the underlying philosophy I'd pieced together from my assumptions wasn't what you're meant to take from the game as a whole, and this becomes obvious when you see -- for example -- a 45-minute video of a cult leader explaining that all memory is illusory and all that truly exists is the moment we are experiencing now. (Imagine what reaction would have been intended if that was meant to be taken as the game’s underlying philosophy. "Jon Blow has done it! Through his skillful use of archival footage and philosophical quotes, he's successfully pierced the veil and exposed us all to the singular truth about human existence itself!")
One thing I'd like to point out: the game has a concrete story, but not much of one. I think it exists only as a bonus for players who specifically would not feel content with The Witness had a story not revealed itself. I bring it up because everything else about the setting -- and there’s a lot of it -- is meant to be left up to the player's interpretation, which is a thing most other games generally don't do. Usually when game stories attempt to engage you on a non-surface level (and I hesitate to describe such a style as "more" because I don't think there's anything lesser about entirely-explicit storytelling), it's either incredibly obvious or it's spoiled by the game's writer in their first interview. And it's nice; it helps this game feel like something I can easily recommend to people who don't normally play games, which is a feeling I don’t experience often.
The Witness is engaging, challenging, entertaining, and requires very little in terms of reflexes or familiarity with the common interface-language games typically take for granted. I can only hope other developers, indie or otherwise, take lessons from it into concepts and stories Gamers™ are less likely to immediately dismiss, the way I initially did.
So you're thinking of sending something to me? Wonderful; thanks for your thoughtfulness! Insurance MIGHT be covering my SRS in 2017 (fingers crossed), so I figured this guide needed an update. If you're in a giving mood and would like to send me stuff for the Winter holidays, here is a list of preferred methods.
Please don't feel obligated to buy things for me, especially if you're strapped for cash! I am relatively comfortable and in good health. The consumerist aspects of the holiday season are insidious in how thoroughly they pressure us all into buying unnecessary gifts. Your friendship with me is just as valid regardless of whether you choose to participate in this or not.
Gestures of platonic affection are amazing gifts; don't let anyone attempt to convince you otherwise.
Another great gift idea: a recent receipt to a charity or organization that helps marginalized people, made in your name, forwarded to [email protected]. I of course refer to groups like the Southern Policy Law Center, the ACLU, and Planned Parenthood -- but also organizations like Trans Relief Project, Direct Relief, and GiveDirectly.
"But Tarah, I'd like for you to specifically receive a material item I paid for!" Well, you're in luck; I have an Amazon wishlist I'd gladly accept gifts from! (Make sure it's ordered from smile.amazon.com, if possible!)
I have a Steam wishlist, but I only use that to keep track of sales for myself; I'd make it private, like my GOG and Humble lists, if the Steam store let me. If you'd still like to get me something from that for whatever reason, please limit your purchases to $15 or less, because I'm far more likely to play things on consoles than on my PC.
THAT'S IT, hope it was helpful; please don't reblog, naturally. Thanks again!~
Spoilers follow; if you’re interested at all in ZTD, do not read until you’ve beaten the trilogy.
I see Zero Time Dilemma as a good game with a bad plot. Here’s why:
One midgame conversation, about whether Protagonist M from that one time-travel movie (the one with the car) had a rich duplicate completely defuses all the tension from the overall story of the series. VLR ended with an ethical quandary: is it truly right to go back in time and erase 45 years of two billion people’s lives? But that conversation establishes “no, it’s OK, there’s infinite universes and VLR’s is just one of them.”
Not only does it remove the tension -- it also directly contradicts major elements of both previous games. In VLR, Akane suggests there are negative consequences if the prerequisites for the Ambidex Game aren’t met -- and in 999, she turns feverish/completely disappears if Junpei strays too far from the universe where he doesn't rescue her younger self. If ZTD’s argument is to be taken at face value (and the events of the game suggest it), she could've just been rescued by a Junpei from an alternate history in a second Nonary Game set up by Aoi following his sister’s death.
As though that wasn't enough, this revelation makes Brother’s goal -- to stop a religious fanatic from starting a humanity-exterminating nuclear war -- ultimately worthless. If every choice creates an alternate universe, then the only thing at stake is whether the versions of the characters we’ve been following end up in one of an infinite number of universes where an apocalypse doesn’t happen.
Heres how I’d fix it:
Due to the Sleeping Beauty problem and memory-loss drugs, there is no SHIFTing whatsoever due to a consciousness-catching Faraday cage of Zero’s design; all deaths are performed with clone bodies through precognitive slight-of-hand. Existing SHIFTers (Sigma and Phi) only think they’ve SHIFTed when, in fact, they’ve only been injected and spared the memory-loss drug. All nine participants are kept alive throughout the entire game. After each ending, their bracelets inject and memories are lost; the flowchart is revealed to be a perfectly straight line.
It’s revealed that Akane and Sigma in VLR’s timeline had developed a method to SHIFT non-SHIFTers to specific points in time, to any brain physiology that exactly matches their own. However, this requires a plausible internal throughline on the part of the non-SHIFTer between their pre- and post-SHIFT memories; the explanation they have for where they are now can’t be “oh, my consciousness was teleported”.
Kyle from VLR SHIFTs into one of Sigma’s clone bodies and influences things from behind the scenes; posing as the original Sigma to the rest of the cast at one point.
Clover and Alice were cloned before being shipped to VLR’s game of death, with the cloned bodies stuck in identical cryopods side-by-side with the originals in an unobserved chamber. A computer would then either switch the two pairs or not, depending on an invisible coin flip. Clover and Alice, post-VLR, take a heavy dose of memory-loss drug and are SHIFTed into the bodies that aren’t the originals.
The mysterious box, instead of just being a bomb, releases Clover and Alice. Are they the ones who went to VLR’s game of death or not? Who can say?
Carlos, the game’s only protagonist, eventually grows unsure of his identity. Akane recognizes this and tells him what’s going on. It turns out his consciousness is ?, a projection of the will of a mysterious cosmic entity (the player), only doing things the player wants to see happen and rationalizing those choices with the memories and personality stored in Carlos’s physical form.
Zero turns out to be Akane a third time -- but a second Akane from the one in the main cast, due to intertimeline transportation after having SHIFTed backward post-VLR, seen herself revealed as Zero, and set ZTD’s game of death up in order to preserve causality. Her philosophy, “this is all tragic right now, but don’t worry! we’ll eventually create an ideal timeline where no one dies!” wears thin as the amount of suffering she creates in the process is made clear.
Brother is actually Aoi from 999 -- Akane’s brother, sent physically back in time to found Free The Soul, spread Radical-6, and create a stable time loop.
Q discovers that he’s an android on his own, and nobody else is made aware of it throughout the entire game. His personality is Quark’s, SHIFTed back to an emulated human brain template paired with a body modeled after a blonde American male child from a commercial cloning facility, the original body kept in cold storage in the bomb shelter.
The game ends with Akane dependent on Carlos to start the transporter that sends copies of her and Aoi back to the past. You then have the option to either comply with her or destroy the transporter, and if you destroy it, we actually see what happens when causality is directly denied. The universe attempts to correct itself like a spring contracting from being unwound; everyone collapses to the ground.
All Decision Game participants -- Carlos, Akane, Aoi, Junpei, Clover, Diana, Alice, Q, 25-year-old Sigma, and pre-VLR Phi -- wake up in a locked bomb shelter together. Just like in Payoff, all surviving participants struggle to remember why they were there in the first place -- and they have to Seek A Way Out, in a puzzle room that’s only been set up by circumstance, with “puzzles” (obstacles) they have to brute-force their way through (the way you would IRL).
The final obstacle is busted through from the outside by -- you guessed it -- Seven (who is still referred to as his 999 name in this game), working together with Light, who plays a stunning harp solo over the final set of cutscenes.
After You Found It, Q realizes he can’t remember who he is. He removes his helmet after surfacing in the Nevada desert; it takes a bit of pulling, but eventually comes off all right, revealing a face that isn’t exactly Quark’s, but similar enough for there to be a resemblance. He’s the original, non-android body in this timeline; he stays with Junpei and Akane.
Game over; the world is definitively saved! Everyone gets married; they all adopt rescue dogs; they all have babies! :D
Zero Time Dilemma is a cutscene-driven puzzle game. It's the third game in the Zero Escape series, which began with the success of 999: Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors for Nintendo DS. After 999 succeeded in the West (far beyond the expectations its developer, Spike Chunsoft, had at the time), director Kotaro Uchikoshi chose to expand upon his original concept with a sequel, with the intent of establishing an overarcing story that the third installment would conclude. Very vague spoilers for the entire series follow; no spoilers specifically from ZTD itself until the very final paragraph; content warning for sexual assault.
If you've played 999's sequel, Virtue's Last Reward, should you play Zero Time Dilemma? Of course! VLR ends with some powerful sequel hooks, including a True Ending that outright states some gnarly stuff is going to happen in the next installment, so if you enjoyed it, you practically had no choice but to stay tuned. That ending was so effective that when they announced a third game was not in development (due to VLR flopping in Japan), fans like me were devastated. So, if you're going to play the first and second games (which up to this point I seriously considered some of the best of all time), the third game is mandatory to get some basic closure on the second one.
I would argue, however, that ZTD is a weaker installment than either of the first two games, and in fact strengthens the case for stopping at the first one. ZTD does happen to be more concise -- the first two games were in desperate need of an editor, and the third one has almost no prose to speak of -- but there are fewer escape rooms (13 compared to either previous game's 16 with no escalation in difficulty or tension whatsoever) and the shift away from visual novel format into a more Telltale-like cinematic presentation makes it more difficult to take the story seriously, since it gives you fewer blanks for your mind to fill in, which are instead filled with stiffly-moving low-poly models paired with less-than-stellar voice acting (VLR’s cast had near-complete crossover with Persona 4; the only returning VA for this one is the woman who played Phi). Compared to 999's cel-animated characters, I think it's safe to say the VN story format is one where less is more.
ZTD's case wasn't helped when I read an interview with Uchikoshi himself where he was asked about oversexualization as it applies to gaming (and to his games in particular). I wouldn't say he handled these questions as poorly as possible, but that's not by much: he makes the first question about sexual crime rates in Japan (in effect saying 'this is necessary in Japan for men not to rape women') and completely dismisses the second one ('it's OK if I put at least one woman per game in a highly-unjustified, impractically revealing outfit and involve the others in perverse dialogue and/or use them as sexist story props if I either make them math geniuses or have them weaponize their sexuality at some point. Also, aren't heavily muscular male characters also a form of sexual objectification? Checkmate, feminists!').
I can overlook all that, even if many people can't. What I can't overlook is that the game leaves its job unfinished. It addresses many of VLR's biggest issues ("who is this person, why are they doing what they're doing?"), but completely ignores at least three of the biggest mysteries posed by VLR's true ending. It makes me think those questions were written as an afterthought, since no lipservice is paid to them whatsoever. Spoilers follow.
It's just like in that one movie about time travel. You know, the one where the teenagers (let's call them 'B' and 'T') travel back in time with a futuristic phone booth to write the most excellent history report they can? This isn’t a real example (the movie is actually very tightly written), but imagine if one of the historical figures looked at the camera and said “I’ve got some big time-travel plans of my own”. You'd expect that character to show up, or at least be mentioned in the sequel, wouldn't you? But if the sequel didn't address that and instead said "well, it turns out T and the personification of Death, we'll call him 'D', are twin sons of B due to the use of an interdimensional teleportation device developed by aliens who are brought up once and never seen, heard of, or talked about again", you'd respond "OK, great, that's kind of cargo-cultish prequel/sequel writing, and it drags the original story down a bit, but what about Genghis Khan’s time-travel plans?". It's JUST like that.
- Agents of Mayhem
- Fe
- Prey
- Dishonored 2
- Forza Horizon 3
- Watch_Dogs 2
- Grow Up
- Steep
- Death Stranding
- Spider-Man (PS4)
Not including Nintendo in this, but they’re not really participating this year, so I feel comfortable in making my list now. I probably won’t be getting all of the above-listed games (only ones tentatively confirmed are Agents of Mayhem, Forza, and the (owo) mask game), but it’s a far better list than what I was expecting, which -- considering previous years -- really wasn’t much of anything. It would’ve been nice to hear a huge backward-compatibility announcement from either console manufacturer (support for OG Xbox/Kinect on XbOne, support for PSP/PSOne Classics on PS4), but that’s not what audiences want, I suppose? Understandable, either way.
Of note: Dishonored 2 and Watch_Dogs 2 would not be on this list if not for their reported emphasis on being able to play through them nonlethally! Prey and Death Stranding seemed intriguing (especially given the talent attached), even though we know virtually nothing about them. Spider-Man is in the list not necessarily because of the pedigree, but because it looks like a direct continuation of the Sunset Overdrive formula (Sunset Overdrive is incredible, and you should play it if you get the opportunity).
For as much as I enjoyed a few games from the Ubisoft conference (Steep looks crazy and I hope it plays as good as it looks, given how extreme sports doesn’t appear to be a game genre anymore), the South Park segment was utterly painful and rife with secondhand embarrassment. I guess Ubi feels comfortable putting pointed racist and misogynystic slurs directly in their presentation? How must the visibly-aging Trey and Matt feel, having to constantly appeal to boundary-testing teenage boys?
“But what about ______?”: (Referring to games I’ve previously shown interest in.)
Mass Effect: Andromeda: I still haven’t had it in me to finish Dragon Age: Inquisition, which I own. I think the core BioWare game loop might be wearing thin on me. Also: Rumors that it’s about colonialism beg the question: why go to Andromeda to begin with? What possible reason could there be?
Scalebound: “WHY WON’T YOU DIE?!” ughhhhhhh
Trials of the Blood Dragon: The second time in a row the Trials license has decided to play directly to the gamer id in an explicitly Ubisoft way. Trials isn’t without its silliness by nature, and I’m glad they’ve embraced it to an extent, but that ends when everything is filled with memeworthy randomness and characters are wielding guns. (Blood Dragon had a wonderful aesthetic, but felt hollow to me.)
Crash Bandicoot?!: Wow, a new remake of the original Crash trilogy! Except the original trilogy hasn’t aged well at all for me, and nobody’s demonstrated an ability to upres Crash’s design without making him look like garbage. They could have done the Yooka-Laylee thing and made a new license that cleanly conforms to a Crash-style aesthetic, involving the original talent whenever possible, but that wouldn’t have gotten as large of a crowd reaction, I guess?
The Last Guardian: So, I have a problem when emotionally impactful media chooses to iterate on itself in new installments. When a piece of media really hits me, it takes a lot for me to experience its next one (I haven’t listened to Shaimus’s third album because The Sad Thing Is, We Like It Here was a perfect capsule of millennial frustration; I have no plans to watch Bojack Horseman season 2 because the first one was such an effective character study). I really liked Ico and SotC, but approaching this over a decade later feels almost like Sony pointing to the aesthetic and asking “Hey, gamers! Are you ready to get heartfelt?!”
This isn’t to say it looks like a bad game; it’s just that it’s starting from zero for me, and it’s relying too much on nostalgia in its messaging. It really has to win me over; like it needs more than what it’s been showing me so far, and I’m honestly not sure what that is.
American politics under the cut; please don’t reblog, thanks.
I’ve decided that if Hillary wins the nomination, I will not vote for her as I initially planned; I will instead side with a third-party candidate who shares my ideals. (The chances of this happening are unlikely, given Stein’s anti-vax/anti-autism views. Still, hope reigns eternal.)
It seems like the Democratic party thinks the threat of another Bush is enough to get hardline leftists like me to support a moderate like Hillary. And I say this because if they had an ounce of sense in their heads, they’d rally around the clear crowd favorite; the one who wins elections without having to rely on obscene amounts of money from SuperPACs; the one with a clear progressive platform working toward an infrastructure and social support network on par with Canada or Scandinavia. But no, they’ve made their intentions loud and clear: they want business as usual, and they’ll force us to give it to them if they have to.
But that’s not how the Democratic process is supposed to work, nor should it; the candidate needs to find some way to appeal directly to me if they want my vote, and Hillary doesn’t even do that. She has a well-documented disdain for poor people on welfare, so for me, all she has going for her in the general election is “I’m not the other guy.” And granted, the other guy needs to be permanently locked in a comfortable cell for being a horrible racist hypercapitalist who makes the world worse with each breath he exhales -- but that still isn’t enough to make me compromise on my core values, and I wish people would stop expecting me to do so.
The Nader debacle in 2000? That was the result of a dissatisfied electorate. It would absolutely happen here if Sanders decided to run as a third-party candidate. I don’t want it to happen, but if he did, I would at least have an option I’d be comfortable with voting for.
Anyway, hopefully it won’t come to that. Either way, my fingers will still be crossed for Oregon to turn blue in November without me (it probably will).
Post-thanksgiving edit: I ended up voting for her anyway, because I was terrified about the potential rise of American fascism. Hopefully we’ll survive this.
In no particular order, here are fifteen characters I identify as, in response to a meme that’s been floating around on Twitter. Explanations after the jump:
With some of them I really like their look; with others I really like their premise; with a few of them a confused young Lobst responded to them, as characters, with “I’m... really feeling this person. Is this normal?”
Notes:
- Oblio works well for me because despite his aloof nature and antisocial attitude, he’s clearly passionate about dancing; it’s the thing that motivates him above everything else, but he doesn’t do it for anything other than love of the craft itself.
- I legitimately thought Yoyo was an androgynous woman at first, due to the round face/baggy clothing.
- Persona 4′s second slot could have easily gone to Kanji. I needed one of the game’s bruiser characters in my lineup in addition to Naoto; in the end, the one struggling to stay feminine won out.
- Gogo was included for his reclusiveness, adaptability, and androgyny; the fandom had theories that he was actually Setzer’s (female) friend Daryl.
- Cait Sith for how he’s actually a human businessman who never leaves Midgar throughout the entire game. He could travel with everyone else if he wanted to, but he chooses to stay inside and exclusively express himself through a remotely-piloted toy cat.
- Frog was a no-brainer, but this image in particular went a long way for me! Seeing him struggling to fight in the snow (which can't be pleasant, as a cold-blooded amphibian!) resonates especially well.
- Five Undertale characters were in the running for this; I picked Mettaton here because he seemed the most on-the-nose.
- Nordom’s whole thing is how disconnected he is from rigorous Modron society by his very nature; his arc is focused on finding a place where his way of thinking is accepted.
- It was very important for me to pick that screenshot of C.I.D. in particular, as it encapsulates what about it hit me the most.
- I didn’t play much of Princess Maker 2, but Cube immediately stuck out to me long before I realized I greatly enjoy service stuff.
Themes: mystery, androgyny, dysphoria, remote/shell piloting, robotics, formal style, rebirth, rigid speech, anonymity. A worthwhile exercise, I think!
Rock Band 4 for PC had a crowdfunding campaign recently, which ended up being unsuccessful! It’s disappointing, but not entirely surprising, considering the lukewarm reception both it and Guitar Hero Live received when they came out for consoles last year; in fact, even though I’m a massive fan of rhythm games, I couldn’t work up the enthusiasm for either one. Here are my reasons, in convenient Lobst List format:
(Quick edit: I should preface this by saying that these reasons are my own, and I don’t consider them reflective of the general public, or why market forces behave the way they do.)
Rhythm/music-based game mechanics go down better when they’re more abstracted from actual physical music instruments. The recent release of Amplitude for PS4 (and imminently PS3) is a stellar example; you get the satisfaction of building a song piece-by-piece from its individual instrument stems with next to zero downtime, by wielding a normal videogame controller like a three-button MIDI fighter. In fact, for my money, controller-based games like this benefit from removing the play-acting component of games like Rock Band entirely. I don’t want to discount the added benefit of the tactile feel of a guitar in your hands (the use of the whammy bar on sustained notes feels fantastic, after all), but that can be accomplished in other ways:
Rhythm/music-based game mechanics go down better when they’re actual musical instruments themselves. There’s a reason why Rock Band’s drums and vocals resonated more with me than the five-button guitar/bass; it’s because, by framing game mechanics around the real thing, it felt like I could take the talents I was developing elsewhere. Phen’s been playing Rocksmith 2014 on a nightly basis over the last year-plus; I was initially negative about this game, but seeing it in motion alongside the progress he’s made has me completely turned around on it. It almost makes me want to get a guitar myself, if I wasn’t so physically and emotionally invested in ukulele play! This segues nicely into...
I want to learn to express myself musically without having to depend on a game’s timing mechanics. One of the biggest flaws with Rock Band 3′s Pro Instruments mode -- really, with the game in general -- was how unforgiving it could be with regard to timing your hits. But when you learn a song with an actual instrument, you usually do it by playing a simplified version of the melody at your own pace and practicing and adding things onto it until you have your own expression of it down pat. Rocksmith gets this, at least to an extent, but it’s not quite the same thing as learning to play on your own, following tablature or sheet music.
"Classic Rock” music has stopped resonating with me. Full-stop; I’m the person whose eyes glaze over whenever I hear AC/DC, Aerosmith, the Beatles, and various other bands from the ‘60s, ‘70s, and ‘80s that correspond to the remaining 24 letters of the English alphabet. The rock music I like these days is from the ‘90s, and now played on classic rock stations; it’s often classified as “Adult Alternative” (Gin Blossoms, Matthew Sweet, Sheryl Crow, Toad the Wet Sprocket). Realizing this has only strengthened my desire to avoid hearing the kind of music you’d hear headlining an Expendables movie whenever I can. This isn’t to say my musical tastes have been stagnating; just that my personal palate is better served by genres where the artists are slightly more diverse. (I do this by flipping back and forth between two Minneapolis top-40 and GLBT music stations on my iHeartRadio app, which surprisingly does the job relatively well.)
So, I personally hope Harmonix interprets this campaign as a sign that their talents would be better spent elsewhere. I’m not sure where that might be, though. The market for the genre definitely exists, but who knows; it might be too small for them to effectively capitalize on without some significant changes to the way they do business.
This caught my attention last night. Beamdog, a studio headed by ex-Black Isle/Bioware people devoted to improving older Infinity Engine RPGs, have created a new expansion pack to one of the most influential games ever made. They’ve created substantial additions to the lore in Enhanced Editions of the first and second games; now they’re focused on putting together entirely new entries. First, an expansion for the original that bridges the first and second games. Next -- hopefully eventually, at least from their perspective -- a new Forgotten Realms game altogether.
People on Steam are outraged, and they’re letting that outrage be known in the reviews: not because of the new lore, but because a writer was quoted in a Kotaku article as wanting to address things that don’t mesh well with modern audiences, like the amount of jokes in the original that were at the expense of women. There are optional gay and bisexual party members, and a cleric you can talk to offhandedly mentions, if you pry, that she was designated male at birth. There’s even a recruitable monster, which I’m super jazzed about! Representation, on levels that numerous games refuse to touch!
The fact that THIS has people writing in angrily is what has me writing angrily in return. Especially given that it takes place in the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons framework, a format specifically devoted toward letting people create and tell the stories they want to tell! You can’t tell me the things I’ve listed are impossible in the setting; it’d be like barging into a private roleplay session, shouting “UM, ACTUALLY,” and slamming a pile of rewritten character sheets onto the table.
What are the vocally outraged sexist, racist, GSRM-phobic among us crusading for? They want games to be the way they were in the ‘90s: created by and for an audience of straight guys. They don’t want any effort whatsoever to be devoted to acknowledging people who don’t fit their mold, because that’s effort that could be used to cater directly to them. They want to live in a sad little bubble, where everything is male-focused, hetero, and “safe”. Even though digital distribution has made games globally-accessible and available to anyone with a smartphone, those fans want underprivileged people to stay away and create their own media. Preferably not games. Books, indie films, webcomics, maybe? Nothing that’ll show up on a Steam homepage, at the very least. And if women, gay people, trans people, non-white people end up playing those white/male/hetero games, and express their enthusiasm for them -- much like I did with the original back in 1999, when it became one of my favorite games of all time -- the fans not in an American minority will hold those players up as proof of how welcoming and diverse their hobby is.
Anyway: If you catch this behavior in anyone you know, please call them out on it. The fact that it’s proliferated to this level is utterly ridiculous.
I finished Persona 4: Dancing All Night's story mode last week! Having finished Arena and a bit of Ultimax and Q, I went into it with basically the lowest expectations possible. Everything after P4 proper -- even the added material in Golden -- has felt like the people responsible for it were only interested in providing caricatures of the original cast as the fans visualize them: with their most defining qualities cranked up to 11, commonly known as the Flanderization effect. Despite this, I was pleasantly surprised and only disappointed in the ways you'd expect to be disappointed by an Atlus game.
So, the story is about Persona 4's idol character, Rise Kujikawa, having pulled some strings in her parent company and getting her friends involved in an entertainment festival: the Love Meets Bonds festival, where she and a competing idol group plan to debut a brand new song from an idol who had committed suicide years earlier. Rumors surface in the weeks leading up to the show, however: if you visit the festival's website at midnight, a creepy video will suddenly start playing, after which you'll fall unconscious and be taken to the "other side." After practice one evening, Rise, Naoto, and Ricky decide to collectively try it out. They're immediately taken through a shimmering portal to a shadow world where violence is prohibited, and emotions are made all the more powerful.
They're surrounded by cheering nightmare creatures, who all attempt to drain their energy; just when it seems all hope is lost, Rise drops her phone, causing one of her favorite Shoji Meguro songs to play. Ricky gets the bright idea to dance to it using his choreographed moves, to express his emotions to these wayward spirits as powerfully as he possibly can. And despite the dramatic leaps in logic that engineered this goddamn ridiculous situation, IT WORKS.
At this point, you can imagine me celebrating last year's decision to not support games that treat murder as a panacea solution to problems, or as an endorphin-releasing button to press every few minutes. This is what I want out of video games. It's silly to watch and bizarre to comprehend, but if it's fun to watch and play, where's the problem? Gameplay consists of hitting buttons rhythmically to make your favorite P4 characters dance well; watch them interact with each other; listen to them cheering each other on. It's enthusiastic, positive, and satisfying in ways many rhythm games simply aren't.
The story isn't bad, either! I mean, it's not great -- it's implausible, contrived, and goofy even by the terms the series expects you to approach it, and at times even acts as a plot-twist derivative of P4 proper -- but it contains some good character moments, lets you hear some great dialogue from the cast, and has excellent production values for what it is. It also introduces a whole new cast of characters: the idol Kanami Mashita and her backup group, as well as their manager, and all of them have their own problems that the story explores in the usual Persona 4 style. It also give a fair amount of screen time to Ricky's extended family (his uncle Dojima and cousin Nanako) in a way that develops them a bit. I'll definitely be collecting all its trophies, and possibly even start collecting other games by its developer (the Project Diva folks).
I do need to point out that the requisite Atlus homo/transphobia shows up in full force halfway through, with the introduction of an okama character simply named "Coach". It's incredibly frustrating; the Persona series gets so much right -- seriously, very few JRPGs get anywhere near as much right as it does -- but every single fucking time a gay or trans character is introduced the story decides to take constant dehumanizing potshots until the moment they leave the screen. I can't understand why this makes it to retail the way it does. Atlus's localizers have been told time and again how awful this stuff is. And yet the writers in Japan keep doing it, and Atlus USA chooses not to tweak it to be more socially acceptable over here (which at the very least I would totally support). I don't want to believe they have specifically homo/transphobic intent, but at this point, what can they possibly tell me to make me believe otherwise? Is their commitment to authenticity really so important that they're willing to expose every GSRM person (and their allies) to extremely uncomfortable content with everything they release? Are they worried about being labeled as censors? Are they worried about losing the 4ch/subreddit crowd? I don't care. None of that matters. There is always a choice, and in this specific type of scenario, they always seem to choose poorly. I am dreading the moment when this inevitably shows up in Persona 5.
Anyway, P4D: definitely worth getting if you're into rhythm games, as long as you A) are fine with over a fourth of its 27-song soundtrack being duplicated within itself in remix form and B) skip through the aforementioned garbage.
Wishing at this point that I could be completely disconnected from the election news cycle. I know enough; I can’t deal with the histrionic supporters and the tension of waiting for results to come in; with receiving reminder after reminder that so many people vote against welfare, against wealth redistribution, against tolerance of the non-white/non-Christian/non-hetero/non-cis among us. Turn off the filter the day before I can cast my vote, so I can catch up on the scandals and debate results; turn it back on the day after, leave it on until midterms.
I realize this filter wouldn’t be productive for everyone to have, since the political process is dependent on a real-time reaction from the public. Maybe just give it to people with chronic anxiety? I don’t know.
I just finished Life Is Strange, which turned out to be a fantastic exploration of episodic storytelling mechanics! I appreciated its little messages, like how most of its antagonists still have sympathetic qualities; like how the minor interactions between you and those around you are capable of adding up to major consequences, both good and bad. I'd 100% recommend it if you're interested in seeing the multifaceted lives of a cast of private-school staff and students. It's also great at letting you explore little moments in lived-in environments; about allowing you to view the narrative of people's lives through environmental storytelling. It also acts as an interesting Undertale-ish criticism of game-playing mentality, which I'll go into later. I'd call it worth playing, and I'm definitely looking forward to seeing what Dontnod does after this, whether it's a second season or something else entirely.
The premise: Max Caulfield, a high-school senior, has a nightmare about a massive tornado approaching the town of Arcadia Bay, Oregon (where she grew up before leaving for Seattle at age 13). She wakes up in class and decides to head to the bathroom to splash water on her face. While there, she witnesses a murder: the murder of her best childhood friend, Chloe Price. She raises her hand to stop it and time starts rewinding, until she's sitting at her classroom table immediately after the nightmare. She can reverse time! She retraces her steps and pulls a fire alarm before the murder happens, rescuing Chloe and reuniting them.
The two then go through a massive sequence where they look into the disappearance of another high-school girl, six months prior: Rachel Amber, who was Chloe's best friend before she vanished. They use Max's time powers to do some legitimate detective work: collecting evidence and connecting it together until a culprit and a crime scene are located. And then... well, I'll be unpacking that after the jump. (Spoilers for LiS, as well as minor ones for The Walking Dead Season 1 and NieR follow.)
I should mention, before I move on -- the game explores issues of suicide, abuse, and mental illness, but even though it does this carefully and thoughtfully for the most part, it uses its content warning in a dramatically cheap and, frankly, distasteful way in one of the between-episode cliffhangers. Specifically, it takes a gratuitous lingering shot that puts a female character (who previously had agency) in horrifying danger, and it uses that shot to promote the next episode. She's about to be lethally dosed! Will you, the player, be able to rescue her? Tune in and find out, I guess!
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In episode 5 you use an ability you discovered halfway through the game -- the ability to enter any photo you were present for and change the past -- numerous times in a row to ensure that the right people are punished and that Chloe remains alive. But Max's time-travel powers come at a cost: her nose starts bleeding (a cinematic way of establishing brain trauma if there ever was one). She passes out and is taken to a dream sequence where she relives a twisted version of the episode's five-part story: a version where its characters antagonize you for the negative choices you've made. She comes across a version of herself who chides her for using her time powers in a manipulative way. And then she wakes up on the hill overlooking the town, where her original premonition took place, with the tornado steadily approaching.
As the tornado -- the latest in a sudden line of bizarre and unexpected natural phenomena -- is about to swallow the town up, killing virtually all its residents, Chloe realizes something: given that all this started with Max rescuing Chloe in the first place, it could be that the very act of altering time itself is responsible for this looming tragedy. The final episode's only major choice is this: Do you allow the tornado to swallow Arcadia Bay and all its residents so Chloe can live (for the time being, given the amount of times you've had to save her life in the past week), or do you travel back to the moment that gave Max time-travel powers and allow Chloe to be shot and killed, under the assumption that the town will survive if you choose not to alter time at all?
At this point you might be thinking, "Well, this is obvious. Who in their right mind would trade an entire population center for a single life, no matter how valuable?" According to the post-credits summary screen, the answer is this: Slightly less than half the game's entire player base. You might think that's ridiculous, but I'm starting to think that the ratio might be the reason the story forces you to make such an asinine decision in the first place, if that makes any sense.
So, I chose the option where the town survives. Max heads back to the beginning of the game and lets Chloe die. The right people are punished, and a memoryless Max mourns the loss of an estranged friend. But when I was confronted with that choice, I immediately felt resentful of the entire game leading up to it. Because it was obvious what would happen if I did the right thing and let Chloe die: every single choice I'd made the previous five episodes would be completely undone. So I can see some players either thinking “There must be a happy ending waiting behind the choices I’ve made,” or “But they’re in love! Love conquers all, right?” (that’s if their response isn’t “fuck this”, which is justifiable, given the circumstances.)
Back when the first Telltale Walking Dead game came out (back when this specific style of game was new), people were complaining about how little effect your choices had on the story. A common justification was that your choices aren't about changing the outcome of the story, but instead the kind of character Lee turns out to be. Is he a caring father-figure or a sociopath attempting to make the most out of a bad situation? I'm starting to think that Life Is Strange was driving at the same goal, except it's about you. Not just about what choices you make -- but how do you approach games like these? Why do you play them? What satisfies you about them? And are those morally justifiable reasons to be satisfied by? One of the selling points of this game is the ability to undo the major choices if you dislike the outcome, which I made prodigious use of in my playthrough. But when you fuck up a choice in a game like this, what does rewinding (or loading an earlier save) actually accomplish? Do you want to experience a story, to see the consequences of your personality reflected back from the game, or do you want the game to massage your ego for ten hours?
NieR has a final choice like this as well, where you can sacrifice your ability to continue playing to ensure one person survives. And as much as I adore NieR, Life Is Strange makes its statement in a much better way: instead you're choosing whether or not to acknowledge the discovery that the entire ingame world would've been far better off had you not started influencing it in the first place. The game gives you plenty of opportunities to convince yourself otherwise, but by the end, it's still obvious; the game even all-but-explicitly makes that statement near the end. Think about the financial investment, the emotional investment, the time investment an enthusiastic player would have committed to this, an episodic game that ran the length of a year. After all that, would you be that committed to the notion that you HAVE to leave some sort of mark in Life Is Strange that you're willing to leave it in the worst state imaginable? More than 45% of Xbox One players think so, apparently, and I think I actually see why.
Of course, this all only works as a recommendation if you enjoy games that step back and ask probing questions about the gameplay experience. And even though this handles itself better than, say, Spec Ops: The Line (this game presents that sort of twist as an endgame discovery rather than yelling at you for your participation throughout the campaign), it's completely understandable not to! But I definitely enjoyed it; I'll be going back to collect the optional photos and listen to the director’s commentary, and it has my recommendation regardless.
I started digging into this game, and I’ve decided I really like it! It’s meant to be an arcade game from the early ‘80s, which plays as a tweaked version of Popeye. So you can fire it up, press Start, and enjoy a quarter’s worth of fabulous predator/prey platformer action as an otter kid collecting paper airplanes and running away from an aggressively wacky cartoon alligator, all to avoid being scandalously devoured. Try and set some high scores, and see how long you can last!
It took me a few sessions to understand what you’re really meant to do in this, however.
Adjacent to the arcade machine are a few trinkets: promotional fliers, circuit boards, a chalkboard of all-time high scores, and a notepad. The notepad labels you as an arcade attendant who has been ordered by their manager to figure out how to bump up the machine’s take; one neighborhood kid has mastered the game’s pattern and exploited its extra-life system to the point where he can play all day on a single quarter. So Gon’ E-Choo immediately tells you that its inner layer is exploitable, and that to find the answer to this mystery you’ll have to learn the game’s static AI patterns well enough that it gives you extra lives faster than you lose them. The fact that the game’s focus is on this strikes me as totally novel.
Additionally, every loop of the game’s three levels displays a full line from a mysterious prose letter you assemble character-by-character with each ingame item you pick up. The Steam store page directly states that there’s something waiting for you at level 255′s kill screen -- and if the game’s global leaderboards are any indication (I’m #60!), very few people have actually seen it. (The comic itself has its own cryptic elements, though as I understand it, they’re not meant to be its focus.)
Anyway, I’ve been looking for games to fill my Quickshots category (something you can easily pick up and put down if you have 20 minutes to kill) on Steam, and this seems like a prime example! If I get significantly further I’ll let you know what comes of it, but you should know that regardless of whether the mystery is worth pursuing, it’s already provided me more than the amount of entertainment value I expected at $2.
(edit: oh! Turns out one “exploit” is obvious if you’re familiar enough with old games. The game still requires skill to get anywhere near the killscreen even if you do this -- I still only made it 15 levels in -- which means it provides a different experience depending on whether you approach it as a player from the era, or as a player with more modern expectations. Rad!)
