Various thoughtpieces over different multimedia art-things I encounter, as well as general diary stuff. Not going to write on politics or use profanity (partly for employment reasons) so it may not be that funny. Comments only show on desktop mode. Twitter: @Will_Salsman
The following is a short story that I had written in basically one-shot... [Continued]
The following is a short story that I had written in basically one-shot. A couple of the details contradicted themselves in my initial draft, namely that I had written the scottsman as having a dialogue with himself twice. This is what it is; I may eventually polish this further, but I feel like this draft is still worthwhile. The above is a very scrappy drawing that I quickly sketched just a little while ago, as a type of placeholder image to fit with the story. As always, please feel free to share any questions or comments.
The last train on the road to Belhezidor had already left. The scottsman seated languidly, the other, on a nearby perch, and his bird-friend kept pace, its coos the distinct and subtle likeness of a motor whirring.
"And same to you."
"The damned taxes, the damned taxes I say. Vampires in the east and the valley to the west. The last frontier for what's ours."
And it was, in a sense, how the layman put it. Expansion had kept pace only with tyranny. It was only a time until it came in or they went down. Qricktown bordered a gorge, really.
The bird's eyes wavered unsettlingly. "I think," said the Scot, pausing, then realizing something was caught in his throat, he hacked into the silence for some time and then reanimated himself. "I think our mistake, was the children."
"Wasn't any of mine." The scot was correct in this, though were he talking about the ownership of mistakes or children, neither spoke further clarity. "A right sort. The mistake came in the neighbors. You used to have rights to solicit favorable neighbors. Would've been wiser... well, and the Old Heads. For a time it looked like they were going to be something."
"History is more complex than a ballad of presidents. Perhaps that'll always appeal more to those who haven't lived in it."
"Humph. But here is is, the bus-of-the-train"
And so it was. The means to build another train were no more; of that much, it can be sure. Heavy equipment was elsewhere, but the means and the men were permanently divorced. Now, a hobbled and ramshackled bus sails forth on the same tracks the train-age left. Roads are too badly paved these days to parallel the routes. But it wasn't for people.
The strong-armed once-trappeesman; a sad troupe, in the car, did the recognized motion of hitching up the shutters. A speck of pipe-smoke followed. The two others (Rámon de Rome, known for being a gas station attendant before the Fall of Spite, and Raxfield Donter, who had some scholarship at a demolished academy and edited literature. Before the Fall.) made their presences known with their eyes. New stuff.
The spread was held out on the board, lit up by the blinking of railway lights and the soft glow of the marque sign positioned above their stop ("rest going," "we'll drive the rest" in smaller print below, a sign very much not belonging to the monotrain and much less about the state of the line.)
A confusing hubble of baubles. That's how they glowed when the scottsman trudged up. "Well, Simeon, see you haven't sold much today."
"Always more to sell" was the trappeesman's acknowledgement, not meeting his gaze. "Tokens of the dream glutton, this day."
"Ridiculous competition."
The name almost registered something in the scot, but he declined. He turned over item after item. A gilded clock, a set of cards, a toy town, a clay crown.
"What's this?"
"Oh, a pawn. Some estateman's given the last of his mines for the last of my drinks-stock."
"That bad, huh?" A dead key that was. Likely enough the industrier had snuffed its lights out already. Nothing left to it, or him. Drowning himself in a dying age.
"Had more value in capable hands. Probably a nice tomb, now. Do you know the mine instustry?"
"I do," reminded the other layman, as he got up. The mottled patchwork darkness smoothed itself into a fuzzy pale blue.
"I'll take your key. Likely it opens up one more door than that."
"That so?"--and a quick change of currency followed. Faces of presidents scrippled over with the stamps of thieves. Recognizable when the Font gets absorbed. But its own until then.*
"Hm." And the grummy face at the end of the traveler's barter was not met. The key was puffed into his trousers. "I'll be off."
"Safe travels, Simeon."
The other man, and his bird, was now lonely-met with the merchant-machine.
"I think... this mirror will do."
An unamused response was given. "Oh yeah?" with almost a croak.
"In it, I will build a city. One that can only be found through the glass. Too small an entrance to those looking to push in. But live for longer, if for just a bit."
"Most I see are broken these days. You weren't the first to try that."
"It's just as well. We wouldn't know it, about the ones that work, now would we Simeon. Elsewise we wouldn't be here."**
The bird undulated its throat. Landing on the counter, it picked at some other items.
A bag then met the counter, as the needful layman sifted his equipment. A jar of honey, two blue-jay's fins, and a map of what he's known. A quizzical look as if the deal was rotten was what appeared on the trappeesman's face. Then the bird became limp and silent.
"It'll work. safe dreams, sir."
And the man straightened forward, Rome giving a tip of his hat, and--shut, the windows buckled down, the bus clattered off.
And there, that evening, the mirror lie, between the gorge and the gone-contenant, on the rocks which the tracklayers lay. And so, it shall, until destroyed [usurped?] by something bigger.
*Original Margin Note: "Font meaning, some landmark at that place. Into the territory of the bloodsuckers."
**Original Margin Note: "a sick draw on afterlife-visions intersecting with post-life escapism, I guess."
***Additional original postscript notes: [but where had the layman gone? can one go so far as to go into
-
the bird had his heart, something he needed. Ticking of the bird matched the other stranger's rhythym. but the layman was cold.]
[In the sense, perhaps like the trajedian from The Great Divorce by C.S. Lewis. The {material and dutiful} engine of himself was separated into the bird, the soul of himself residing in the body. Not sure. So what he had on the table, was of high worldly weight. The honey, fruits of many small labors. The fins of bluejays, an improbable mutation. The map, guidance in a self-explanatory way.]
****Additional footnote for alternative title suggestion; "Dying age" (personal, environmental)
This movie's like my first post back on my blog--over-easy.
9/18/22
Gif taken by force from this blog, which recorded it from somewhere else. Some rights reserved.
Hey everybody. Lots has happened since my last activity on this blog--new job, I beat Spelunky for real, and my greatest writing influencer has died. Maybe I'll write extended posts on those last two things, but, the hole that I repeatedly find myself in, is that any creative energy towards these things, I often flow into other outlets.**
Case in point here. Apparently over a year ago now, I watched an avant-garde foreign film titled "Angel's Egg," and wrote down my thoughts on it assumably immediately after on my phone's memopad. To give a little more activity here, and also to place this review somewhere for posterity's sake, I wanted to go ahead and post my examination in its entirety from that time. I did not rewatch the film recently to prepare for posting this--I haven't even watched it once since. It's a commonly praised film, and it's likely worth watching at least one time as its name comes up often in the anime scene. Additionally, this is a film that's best watched blind.
That said, the following will include heavy spoilers. I've attempted to nest the review between two sets of dotted lines that you can quickly scan with your eyes, so feel free to skip to the postscript below if you choose.
[Angel's Egg] positions itself as if it were an objective view of its world, but it necessarily isn't. It's from the P.O.V. of the boy, which is important, in part because he's intentionally positioned as not the main character and is also the only character remaining at the end of the film. There are effectively only three characters in the film; him, the female, and the "mindless soldiers." The depiction on them is simple, it's supposed to be some brash commentary on "religion" or the Abrahamic religions destroying things as people chase shadows from the past, basically Plato's shadow cave metaphor-allegory.
The egg represents someone else's hope. Only false hope if you choose to buy into it totally, or perhaps something else wishy washy. The opportunity (for the boy to destroy this) manifests itself so quickly because other outcomes would literally break the creator's dream dellusion etc.,
[Towards the end of the film,] the idea of the resulting eggs resulting in more hope created is a cynical wash. Perhaps that represents more hope created for someone else. Perhaps had he [the main character, the boy] stayed with the girl, some type of egg or wisdom would appear for himself. There would be no waking up after its deconstruction, time could not be worked with so instead one is a slave to it. The statement about needing to destroy an egg to see what is inside of it is supposed to be a revealing view of that character.
There are no more people, so unnestled hope hardly matters. Someone else could carry that on. Does he smash those, or would it be meaningless as they are not valued by anyone. In any case, it has little bearing on our character.
The girl could be stated to be equally cynical as only him and her encounter a world such as that. "There are no fish," later tells us god's (capital G I guess) promise is dead and that she [the girl] will reforge it with time, or rather, raise something that will take on that burden. Does the next day come when she wakes up, no, she simply wakes up, as that's what this scenario necessarily must dictate.
It's a worldview well mapped out but that doesn't necessarily make it profound. You basically have to see its message as unique to appreciate it. Angel, "that which is to help heaven," what is heaven. That which is a servant to someone else's plan, that which is treasured by it, and an individual's willful destruction of it, I guess that's how it's supposed to be seen. Mostly it's vaguely interconnecting imagery. I'm starting to repeat myself.
_____
If the boy's viewpoint and actions were any less congruent with the world, the author, if he was any less of a solipsist, perhaps you could trick me otherwise.
And, those were my thoughts! It looks like I really didn't like that movie, but it is a good period piece, if nothing else. A good juxtapose that I've noticed and noted (but also not recently, as per a phone note on June 18th 2022), is that, production values aside, I would argue A Poet's Life holds much more meaning than Angel's Egg. A Poet's Life is a shorter film, with messaging that I had placed as, "that the product of others' hopes and dreams is what one becomes in time, and others collect those, hoard those, within an unhealthy lifecycle (and some of this is comparable to Berserk's scene with the "Bonfire of Dreams").
I don't particularly laud myself as being a "good writer," although if the right circumstances occur I can stream out some articulate thoughts. With circumstances as they are, I don't see myself posting regularly on here yet; perhaps after my living situation improves once more*** then I could find a workable rhythm on posting things I myself would also enjoy reading. All that said, I may return here occasionally (or periodically) to post unpublished drafts, and other pieces as they come up. Thank you for returning, and as always, please feel free to share any of your own thoughts.
**These being, Reddit burner accounts (yes, I know), Twitter, and phone notes, primarily.
***At least one interuption was made in the middle of this post. I only point this out as to say; I *can* write even better than this.
Just to throw some life into my very-quiet blog I figured I'd discuss some thoughts off the most recent Nicholas Cage movie, the direct-to-pay-per-view "Willy's Wonderland." Its runtime is an hour and thirty minutes, and currently costs about $20 to stream it on Redbox On-Demand, Prime Video, and several other sites, or about 20 minutes of your time if you decide to try and figure out how to pirate/unofficially stream the thing.
It's ok. I think I'd be doing any and all readers a disservice even in just saying what *isn't* in this movie, so if this looks like a fun movie you'd be interested in seeing, then consider this as a spoiler warning. You should be able to know where to find this film, and here's the trailer if you haven't seen that yet, so maybe check those things out first. Last warning!
Willy's Wonderland apparently ran on a budget of 5 million dollars, and in my experience, it showed. This review from The Irish Times pointed out the obvious in that almost the entire budget was probably spent on Nicholas Cage's contract and in securing the rights to using the Lynyrd Skynyrd song Freebird during a sequence towards the end. Another quick google search reported back that Nicholas Cage receives anywhere between 1 and 12 million dollars per film role, and an article from 2018 from Yahoo entertainment quickly comes up describing how Nicholas Cage has pivoted his career into taking Video-On-Demand acting roles to help pay off accumulated debts. I mostly knew of him from teachers back in middle school repeatedly playing the National Treasure movies on movie day, and I'm not really an expert beyond that.
What is mystifying however is that Nicholas Cage, for the full movie, doesn't feature a single speaking role. None. Somewhere when Googling this film I saw a hopeful fan considering this film as a cross between Five Nights at Freddy's and John Wick.
Why would this decision have been made? Nicholas Cage, from what I can tell, has the acting chops to elevate any script he's given. He apparently even has a producer credit on this film, so it should be assumed that he had a great amount of input on this creative decision. Could it have been more cost effective and saved Nick Cage from having to perform multiple line readings, in ensuring he has no dialogue? Maybe that's possible. Could it have helped film distribution, similar to John Wick, in that little dialogue needs to be translated in order to maket this film overseas? This sounds possible too, though it's worth emphasizing, many other characters seem to talk in place of Cage's character, which seems to poke holes in this theory...
For a film that intrinsically is marketing itself as a fun and cheesy "horror" movie with Nick Cage acting as the hero, it's incredibly stiff and serious and doesn't seem to leave any room for Nicholas Cage to act. Of course he's the main title credit, but he isn't even actually given a name in this movie, other than "The Janitor."
Willy's Wonderland notably stifles potential improv at another point as well, towards the beginning of the film when our legion of extended cast members--there's six of them by the way--break into a trailer to rescue the Main Supporting Girl (Liv, played by Emily Tosta), and one of these characters (Dan, played by Jonathan Mercedes) begins to recite a story on why he wants to see the ghost-possessed animatronics burn, but is immediately cut off by the main girl.
It's a shame. Movies that have ascended their modest or even shoestring budgets (like One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest as an example of a film with a somewhat-similar budget, or Night of the Living Dead as an even better example) tend to know when to play to their strengths, and fill time with very human and organic actions. In an otherwise pointless scene (included to perhaps attach us somewhat to new characters so that when they're put up against the upcoming scary main conflict, that we're scared for them too, and also to emphasize to us that the police officer lady is not-good), it could have at least felt less controlled and more fun. The feeling that comes off is that this movie is a pulp-horror movie that can't decide on if it wants to be pulp-horror.
Commenting back on the idea of Willy's Wonderland having an extended cast, Nicholas Cage faces no fewer than 8 animal-robots. It features an almost-nameless cast of six supporting characters (which is expanded upon somewhat later on) so we can revel in seeing them get picked off and killed, and we get 8 animal-robots so we can revel in a bunch of action sequences with Nick Cage.
Silent Nick Cage. Seriously. A grumpy and tough and illiterate Hispanic or Romanian guy might've been casted for the lead and it'd have hardly felt different (and may have been funnier.)
These were most of the thoughts that came to my mind in watching this film, but some minor criticisms--it is kind of a shame that sexual references and sexual scenes were in this movie. The ones that were included (and even the foul language) didn't add much to the film, and also, in effect, limits the audiences I at least would want to watch this around.
Also the handcuffs scene towards the half hour mark was a little stupid. Do these even look like real handcuffs? Sure there's no safety latch on them but they ought to be a little weighter, or maybe double-locking or something. When we are gratuitously shown the hairpin used to pick the locks, I fully expected this knowledge to be revisited later as a sort of trick one character remembers and uses to face a different situation, but this doesn't happen.
But, that's Willy's Wonderland. An action movie disguised as a horror film, a fun watch in its own right, but also a movie that you almost-immediately know what the ending's going to be as soon as you start it. Half of it seems to be just a silent Nick Cage cleaning up an abandoned Chuck-E-Cheese. It's still fun in some ways, and I found it worth my time, although I hardly find it worth a rewatch. It takes a concept that's *almost impossible to fail* and just barely pulls it off.
These were my impressions though, and by no means is this an all-encompassing analysis, so feel free to comment and let me know if you thought differently! Thanks for reading--be sure to keep an eye on this blog and my mirror blog for any future posts!
Rating: 5/10
Would I recommend this movie to a friend?: Sure. It teeters on being worthwhile and a lot of its entertainment-value is pretty surface-level, but it executes a unique concept in at least a passable way. Points are deducted out of feelings of missed potential but it should be an engaging film, at the very least.
Afterword: I sat on this blog post for an embarrassingly long time in part because, when posting this, the pictures would all jumble up, at least on Tumblr's end. Thanks for your patience, regular-ish uploads should be coming soon-ish. :-)
Pillars of Eternity - Definitive Edition: Impressions, Criticisms and Review
Published by Obsidian Entertainment. Original release date: March 26th, 2015. Definitive Edition release date: November 15th, 2015.
Price: $29.99 MSRP. Current Steam Sale: $7.49. Current Epic Games Sale: $9.99 (with coupon.)
This article has also been published on Blogger.com (Mirror Link)
12/23/20
Over the past week or so, as a part of the Epic Games Free Game of the Week promotion, I’ve picked up Pillars of Eternity - Definitive Edition for free and have been playing it on its Normal difficulty almost nonstop ever since. This being the second video game by Obsidian I have played (the first one being Outer Worlds--releasing four years after Pillars had its original release), I felt it appropriate to share some of my thoughts over the quality and experience of this game, comparisons I have made, and some other miscellaneous observations. It’s worth prefacing this with that I have not fully completed a run through this game and haven’t actually completed the game’s second act as of yet (more on this later)--however, I’ve put close to 70 hours into this, and while others have spent thousands of hours on this video game I feel I can write on this with some authority.
Starting with its strengths, Pillars of Eternity is engaging. There is a lot of content to delve into. Much of its characterization is convincing, and the voice acting that it does have is well-performed. Another YouTube channel that I watch, “Should You Play It,” estimated in their review that “25%-30% of the game is voiced,” which seems like an accurate assessment to me. Regarding its story writing, its overall plot and characters themselves are very reminiscent of a decent or good Dungeons and Dragons campaign. Some tropes can be expected, but overall the plot runs smoothly enough, and the characters themselves are generally rather fun to interact with, even in cases where they're not very original.
The game does suffer from a variety of flaws, many of which aren’t immediately apparent to the player and that bear mentioning. The talent pool that Obsidian recruited to do their voices is incredibly small. Half of my party, as it turns out, was voiced by Matthew Mercer--possibly the most distinguished voice actor of the bunch--with my main character (using the “sinister” voice effects), the story character Aloth, and the story character Eder all being voiced by him. Kana, a character that comes later on, is voiced by Patrick Seitz (famous for many different television, video game and anime roles) and also does a character at the beginning of the game (Sparfel), the voice for the commander of the Crucible Knights, and multiple other additional voices. To my own ears, Richard Epcar had to be the most frequently-appearing voice actor in the game, voicing the Caravan Master at the beginning, Raedric’s voice, the spirit of Od Nua (whom I haven’t encountered yet) and the forge master Dunstan in Defiance Bay, along with other additional voices.
Sadly, Pillars of Eternity’s Credits page as well as the Full Cast and Crew IMDB Page only provide incomplete insight on who voiced which character within this game, and while some message boards exist on the subject I’ve not found a comprehensive resource over this topic (maybe I’ll attempt a full list for myself later on.) It’s a massive rabbit hole to go down nonetheless. The Outer Worlds handles this limitation as well, although that game’s execution of this I’d be inclined to say was a little more successful. Only 1% of Outer Worlds's entire production team were actually voice actors, which strikes me as interesting; the NoClip documentary series discusses details about this as well as how the writers had to plan questlines ahead of time to prevent characters with the same voice actor from interacting with each other, when possible. No definable moments of this happening in Outer Worlds come to mind off memory, although there were a couple of occurrences in Pillars (e.g. Kana and the Crucible Knight commander) where it wasn't avoided.
One of Pillars of Eternity’s major problems is interestingly a feature of its design--its Kickstarter rewards implementation. When you visit the first town, you are effectively bombarded with a number of uniquely-named NPC’s--and when you approach them, you get the opportunity to “look into their soul” or walk away. As a new player I was pretty befuddled by this, thinking that these were details I needed to memorize for some upcoming puzzle, when in actuality it wasn’t anything more than crowdsourced product-placement.
Some games can pull this off with success--LISA The Painful, for example, had a majority of its character names sponsored and selected by Kickstarter backers. As an RPG, this worked; you had a name on-screen detailing who it was that you were going to attack (on a black border above your characters), you kill them, and you move on. Other donor rewards involved creating a party member or a boss battle character, but these were done cautiously, and at least in my own experience, they didn’t hinder the game enough for me to discover that these were Kickstarter-donor characters on my own.
It’s the opposite case for Pillars. In many cases it’s special snowflake-ish. You’ll enter a bar and encounter 5 people named “commoner” and Archduke Franz “Quickfeet” Elfenhein, with a two-paragraph set of memories that mean frick-all to the actual experience. If you read all of these, you *might* encounter one or two funny ones, but what’s the point? You can expect that these were written before a finished product was released. It’s a dilapidated experience. Later in the game you’ll visit a house, with one of these pointless O.C.s effectively “standing guard” for no other purpose than to nick you town reputation points for trying to steal something.
Outer Worlds includes a stealing mechanic as well but it was implemented more fairly. Your character didn’t have to dump a bunch of points into a nearly-useless Stealth skill--instead, it was dictated by NPC line-of-sight. Stealing in Outer Worlds, for the most part, is actually *fun*, in Pillars, it was worth me avoiding entirely.
This may as well serve as a segway into the leveling system--on which I don’t have much to say about it, other than (maybe not relative to other ISO-RPGs, or in comparison to, say, Dungeon and Dragons) that it’s a headache. The story characters that the game gives you access to all have unoptimized and relatively-mediocre starting-stats, so to use all of them (exclusively, without hiring an unvoiced “mercenary” NPC) some creative planning is needed. You’ll also effectively want to min-max your own character’s build to help compensate for inevitable party weaknesses--the game (similar to Outer Worlds) offers a releveling system should you level up the wrong stats, but anything set at character creation is basically unchangeable--which is when the greatest number of character traits needs to be decided. Wizards are good, a priest or two is required (otherwise your party is without a healer), Chanters are bad--but you wouldn’t know this unless you looked it up ahead of time, or unless you’ve played the game before.
And this description leads me to my strongest point--Pillars of Eternity has a habit of setting up unclear rules, punishing players for breaking them, and calling that “replayability.” To be clear, if these “unclear rules” were drawn across moral lines then it wouldn’t be an issue. Fallout: New Vegas has a few main factions that the player could side with and give control of the main world to; all but maybe one of these choices could be argued as potentially being the “best outcome.” Pillars of Eternity (and Outer Worlds to a similar extent) is lacking in a lot of this--*and* game mechanic-wise, the game punishes you for doing normal, explorative stuff and so often sets up inconceivably unwinnable scenarios where you have to be so deliberate about your actions and game mechanic options to actually achieve a (clear-cut) best outcome. Outer Worlds is better with this.
A small example; in the beginning of Pillars, your character encounters some rioting townspeople accosting the owner of a grain mill. If you go inside, the mill owner notes that he is fair in his dealings, although he prioritizes the best of his grain stores to townspeople who need it the most (like pregnant women)--this quest being strikingly similar to one in Outer Worlds’s beginning. If you pass a resolve check of 14, the mill owner will allow for his grain stores to be seized by the rioters. Only if you pass a intelligence check of 12 does he actually lower the prices--and you can postpone solving this quest for an absurd amount of time, waiting until you have the right items and buffs to pass that speech check.
Another example; when exploring the docks at Defiance Bay, your character can notice a shining purple light. If he/she interacts with the light, your character will encounter the memories of a dead child. Should you trigger this innocuous interaction, you will have locked yourself out of being able to talk with townspeople on the disappearance of this boy, which includes the boy’s father, who has since become an alcoholic at the local bar. If you had spoken with the mother first, and then him, and passed a speech check, the man would go back home--otherwise, he’s stuck at the bar forever.
The worst example, *by far* of unfair, “gotcha!” game mechanics has to come from the quests within the game’s DLCs, The White March 1 and 2. Moderate spoilers ahead (warning to anyone concerned with those): you either have to outlaw the study of animancy, make certain dialog choices that lead to a companion becoming an evil crime boss, or lose out on a speech check at the end of DLC 2 when trying to teach mercy and compassion to a “god,” instead getting railroaded into one of two lesser outcomes, *OR* deliberately not finish the game’s second act, do all of the DLC stuff, and then come back if you want all three good endings.
Surely, however, it’s for “replayability.”
It’s punishing in the stupidest ways. Outer Worlds had a few negatives similar to this; you have two major factions that you can ally with, one being cartoonishly evil, and one quest exists where if you neglect to open up some unsuspecting dialog on a computer terminal (and instead delete it straight away) you permanently lock yourself out of a speech check and are then forced to genocide one (or both) of the other factions (or ignore it and get an even worse outcome.) Outer Worlds is metagameable in the sense that you can discover which decisions affect the ending slides ahead of time, and it encourages you to take advantage of its game mechanics a couple of times (particularly with how you can cheese an ending for a certain quest and with how you can cheese stealing a certain poster on Monarch that, by all accounts, an NPC should see you stealing) but certainly nothing to Pillars of Eternity’s scale--and it isn’t as demanding on the player’s time investment, either.
Another criticism--the amount of text present in both games fringes on ridiculous. To quote Philip J. Reed’s review on The Outer Worlds, “ Obsidian’s [writing] tends to be long, meandering, and packed with characters who will never use six words where a twelve-page monologue would suffice.” Pillars of Eternity is no exception to this claim; your character will frequently encounter lore books that most players will pick up and forget where they received them from (their placement usually being an inconvenience to immersion) and I as a player quickly had to learn to tune some things out--especially considering that I was already “metagaming”/looking up other quest analyses beforehand and had more-direct information about the characters on-hand.
A quirk in the dialog that’s consistent in both games is its style of integrating companions into your interactions; both games follow a formula of having an NPC talk to your character, followed up by a companion making some side remark that is hardly ever acknowledged by the NPC--as if your companion is whispering it to you (although the voice acting negates this), or as if it’s a theatrical aside, the companion characters doing a fourth-wall break to react to the events with you--and only you.
One aspect that Pillars of Eternity is stronger than Outer Worlds in, I would say, is in its combat scenarios. Early on in Pillars, the player is encouraged to storm a local leader (Lord Raedric)’s fort. The player has three options on doing this; climb up the side of the tower (using the grapling hook and some small skill checks) and fight through a small number of guards, go in through the main gates and fight most of the guards head-on, or sneak in through the sewer grates and fight monsters after using a strength check. Each approach has its own strengths and weaknesses, as this is early on enough that the loot you would acquire from fighting actually matters and each route can be fun in its own right.
Compare this with The Outer Worlds, where you have a similar fortress assault involving a sewer, a temporary disguise, or direct assault option, where the sewer entrance leads you straight to your objective, the combatants are innocent, non-soldier people (or robots), the disguise you would have falls off after every ten steps you take, and it’s late-game enough that attacking enemies won’t give you any worthwhile loot. Or compare it to the quest “The City and the Stars,” in which you can either stealth through a whole building, or kill the building’s guards and lose town reputation points... or pass a simple skill check where your character can acquire a permanent disguise and not set off any of the enemies whatsoever, allowing you free travel to loot and make it to your objective. Or again, compare it with the quest “Passage to Anywhere” where you as a player are either tricked into spending all of your money on opening up a shortcut, fighting and beating two overpowered enemies (which I did), or blitzing through an alternative route, outrunning all of the enemy characters and potentially bypassing a third of the game in the process (the easiest, by far, to do.)
Maybe these deficiencies are easier to see in hindsight, after a finished product exists, but these are negative aspects of game design.
The combat mechanics themselves are pretty fun. Sometimes the pathfinding glitches out (or A.I. will inhibit your characters from automatically attacking a new enemy), and the lack of a single button to change your entire party’s weapons is a small inconvenience, but for the most part it works well. The design choice of having this be a game where you repeatedly “pause” the game to issue new combat instructions (rather than feature a turn-based system) can be fatiguing over long play sessions, and Pillars being that style of game might be a dealbreaker to some players, but I generally enjoyed that feature.
A final point on the writing--Obsidian is a little “woke.” There’s really no getting around this one. I’d like to revisit the idea of certain (reasonable) dialog choices not being included in Obsidian’s games, either out of laziness (e.g., in Pillars of Eternity, my character, a priest of Berath, encountered a small chapel to Berath... and all of the dialog choices amounted to “Who is Berath,” “I’ve never heard that title of Berath’s be used before,” even though other dialog checks take your background into account) or from lack of playtesting and feedback (e.g. in Outer Worlds, not having the option to transport a certain character to a different planet on this early quest’s third outcome) but certain decisions and design choices by the studio don’t have that excuse.
In Pillars, for example, the only way to get a good outcome on one quest and thus significantly raise your reputation in the town, is to lower the price of black market birth control. No moral qualms are raised and no ways for your character to roleplay against this are made available. Prostitutes also exist in Pillars of Eternity (although that feature remains partially broken), and the only way to get a (stackable, temporary) +2 enhancement on your resolve is for your player to solicit a male prostitute in the game. Outer Worlds also features a major quest, where you’re expected to assist one of your companions in getting into a lesbian relationship; again, no way to repel or address any disagreements or differences through your player character’s roleplaying are present. The mentality is like the equivalent of the show Arthur’s episode on gay marriage; “if we don’t address or allow representation for our opposition, it doesn’t exist.” It’s ironically closed-minded and annoying when the game that frames the weight of your moral decisions is so detectably and consistently biased.
Minor spoiler alert, but both games also feature a priest support-character that (at some point in the game) hates their god, and the character leading the not-evil main faction in Outer Worlds was directly inspired by Rick from Rick & Morty--if that speaks anything as to the mentality of this studio. Other choices, such as (in Pillars) winning reputation points by buying and freeing slaves as opposed to killing the slaver and freeing slaves, and winning reputation points for forgiving someone of manslaughter and allowing the person to keep his secret, also speak a little on Obsidian’s morality and inhibit player freedom in additional annoying ways.
ALL that complaining aside... there is a lot to enjoy. It’s a big world to tap into, and it does have a sequel where you can import data from this game into that and have some of your major decisions be reflected in that game as well. It also features a stronghold (a Kickstarter stretch goal) that the player can manage--some meta knowledge of the game’s upcoming events and mechanics helps a lot in this, but it’s certainly a unique addition to this type of RPG and is genuinely a fun thing to work with. The combat mechanics are fun, although in many situations, it felt far easier to cheese the opponents’ pathing A.I. by luring a single enemy away, murdering him, and saving the game (note: both Pillars and Outer Worlds will likely leave you with a mess of save files after one playthrough), rinsing and repeating, and it would have been a welcomed feature had there been a button to change all party members’ weapons at once (which is helpful in that strategy, where you shoot a character, run away, and then beat on him/her/it as a group with swords) but the combat was still overall fun (albeit perhaps tiring and a monotonous after long hours of play.) The player economy is relatively punishing, with found items typically holding around an eighth of their sale value when you resell them, but this too is manageable (especially if you exploit a money glitch like the one from the first town.)
Obsidian can make a good game. It’s just disheartening to see that many of its flaws are systematic.
List: Free Animal-Crossing Inspired RPGs with Horror Elements
An ongoing list! All edits will be recorded here.
8/20/2020
Info:
This is a list of roleplaying games that feature some sort of animal community/commune that the player interacts with, with usually some sort of unique spin or twist on the genre. Horror elements are present in many of these, however, a couple of the games listed below may not have any horror in them at all (and are "wholesome," etc.) Many of the games listed are only supported for Windows. I will likely add to this list as other games of this criteria are released or come to my attention.
Animal Village
Released: January 2016
Cost: Available Free
Store Page, Video Source
Desolate Village
Released: 2016
Cost: Free
Store Page, Video Source
Townlore
Released: 2014
Cost: Free
Store Page, Video Source
See also: Townlore 2.0
Released: 2015, Cost: Free, Store Page
Patty and Mr. Miles
Released: 2014
Cost: Free
Store Page, Video Source
Parsnip
Released: 2018
Cost: Available Free
Store Page, Video Source
It also has a sequel game (priced at $5.99), although Parsnip ends conclusively.
This necessarily won't be a comprehensive review of Matt Margini's latest book, Red Dead Redemption, but rather an overview of my experience in reading it and descriptions of some parts that especially stood out to me (and why.)
At the beginning of the book, Margini makes a humble disclaimer that apart from two brief trips, he himself has not been to the west. He corrects the notion that this would immediately disqualify him from writing this book afterword by opening into his central idea; the book is about Easterners' perceptions on the West, and is specifically about a videogame that brings these differences into the limelight, Red Dead Redemption by Rockstar Games.
I give all this exposition because I have never played Red Dead Redemption (or its sequel), I have never been west of Chicago, I've only read 4 western books and I've watched maybe one or two western movies. Beyond watching some beginning and ending cutscenes on YouTube, I went into this book fresh on the series. Besides playing through GTAV, I am still fresh to releases by Rockstar Games.
These factors should immediately disqualify me from writing a review, so I'll amend the notion by stating that my review is largely on the merits of Red Dead Redemption (the book) as a standalone piece.
As a standalone piece Red Dead Redemption functions flawlessly; it's written remarkably well. I was curious and a little skeptical going into this book on how Margini would approach this game, given Rockstar Games' notoriety in being tight-lipped on their development process. This already puts him at a disadvantage, but Margini makes up for it--profoundly--by picking apart every detail in the game and citing it to similar works in film, literature, and in other games that most definitely served as inspiration. Any developer interviews or relevant community reactions towards the game are cited and implemented into the book as well.
Red Dead Redemption by Matt Margini serves as a fascinating index over the western genre, and this is just one of the many things it accomplishes. It bears a strong amount of re-readability (as a small example, the first chapter begins with something the author was told 4 years ago. On the acknowledgements page, the first sentence states how he began scheming this book out four years ago) and contains a lengthy section of citations for extended reading (which also seems to be a feature in all publishings by Boss Fight Books.)
Matt Margini accomplishes multiple smaller things across writing this book--at its core he analyzes the western genre (and the death of the western genre), the mechanics of Red Dead Redemption, and the spirit of Red Dead Redemption (which is roughly a combination of the two.) But a number of related subjects and asides are discussed as well; personal connections to the game and Matt Margini's father are frequent, historical connections being made are not uncommon, and comparisons to other video games and their storytelling are prevalent. One of my favorite sections of the book was when Margini referenced and explained the idea of a "map game," the repeated pattern of modern video games to be open-world, expansive, and then inevitably claustrophobic as the player gathers his or her bearings. "Virtual tourism" is another term he uses here.
The most difficult portion of this book to read, I found, was the longest chapter, "Cowboy." Large sections of this chapter I found myself disagreeing with. In this chapter Margini identifies Owen Wister and his novel The Virginian as what "gave the cowboy his shape as a quintessentially American icon" and proceeds to illustrate him and his novel in a less-than-flattering light. This is discussed to serve as a reference point, as many western works released after The Virginian, Margini argues, carry similar ideological flaws.
Margini follows on this by comparing Wister's ideals to his friend Teddy Roosevelt's ideology and the value he saw in individuals adopting this western ideal. Margini states that Roosevelt's modification of the frontier thesis definitively transitioned its hero from the "humble yeoman farmer" into the chaotic "Daniel Boone, a Davy Crockett... a 'man who knows Indians' but takes their land by force," a character, to paraphrase, who lives outside of society, whose actions serve society, but who does not value society or its rewards itself.
Margini states that Roosevelt's ideals held "deeply racist implications" because his ideal man subjugated or was complicit in subjugating Indians, and also because it roots back to Nietzsche's Übermensch. If his beliefs were this way, I didn't find the book's connection towards this to be very effective. Margini uses very racial language when describing Roosevelt's beliefs, but from what is shown, it doesn't seem like this virtue in subjugation was drawn across racial lines.
Later, in "Cowboy," in closing off the same interlude and in making present-day connections, he alludes to the structure of the game of Red Dead as implicitly strengthening racial prejudices, in that your character, a white man, is able to function at a higher capacity than the other, robotic characters in the game. He concludes this in saying, "Everyone else [in the game] is just--to borrow a term weaponized by contemporary white supremacists--NPCs." Although this is meant as a brief point, Matt Margini either fundamentally misunderstands, or is being disingenuous to, the "NPC" pop culture phenomenon. The idea of the "NPC" and using it as a derogative began by a broader right-wing dissident movement--it was significant for symbolizing an opposition to consumerism, hedonism and nihilism as opposed to anything racial. It's a pretty egregious mischaracterization and show-of-the-hand on where Margini aligns his personal views--he uses a very serious subject (white supremacy) as a boogeyman in referencing a topic his audience is likely ignorant on.
In spite of that and even in other places in the book I feel prone to disagree with, Matt Margini makes his cases very well. Red Dead Redemption would make for an excellent book to read within a book club or even within a filmmaking class due to its wide scope, its excellent analyses and its thought-provoking subject material. The language used within it is stunning as well--such as in the following quote about the ideal of the cowboy, "The way he's 'seen trouble' that the East Coast man hasn't seen, crystallizing a purer kind of virtue that lies beneath a life of vice," the imagery Margini evokes here of an unmoving, bedrock virtue being forged under the pressures of vice is near-perfect. In reading Red Dead Redemption I ended up writing down close to a dozen new words that I had not heard before to look up. And Matt Margini accomplishes all of this in under 200 pages.
As I began with this review, this is in large part a discussion of my personal experience with this book. In keeping with that spirit, I'm rating this book a 4/5 here, however, I went ahead and left smaller reviews on Goodreads and on LibraryThing with full 5 star ratings just to help data analytics. It's gripping, it's seamless, and it's a better book than I could write. It's a book that deserves to be read.
Easy to Binge-Read?: I read it in three sittings (reading through the first four chapters, then reading chapters “Cowboy” and “Violence,” and then finally reading the remaining three chapters), although some might finish it in an afternoon.
Review: 4̶/̶5̶
EDIT, 10/17/20: Too little too late, but attempting to diagnose this book on a 5 point scale was petty and stupid of me. My disagreements with the book cover about half of my review, but only around 2% of its pages. From its discussion of map games to its identification of "every signifcant tourist attraction in Florida [being] the remnant of some early-20th-century megalomaniac’s quasi-utopian passion project," I've cited this book a number of times on other things ever since finishing it.
Spelunky: Criticisms and the Downsides of RNG Prep Stages
Spelunky HD: Released August 8th, 2013
Cost: $14.99, Disc Space Size: 200 MB
Spelunky World Website Steam Page
Review
8/17/20 7:34 PM CST
I'm aware that I'm drafting this from a sense of entitlement, having never designed any games or anything creative myself as of the time of writing this. For full disclosure, I'm also in the process on reading this game's autobiography (Derek Yu's Spelunky from Boss Fight Books) and I have also yet to beat the final secret-level boss.
Although I did come the closest towards doing so earlier today.
Take note of that Total Deaths count and the session play time (31 minutes, and 3273 total deaths at time of screenshot. We'll come back to this later.)
All that said, I'll likely revisit the subject in the future once more. With all that out of the way:
At least by today's standards, Spelunky is not a great game. I would hesitate to call it "good;" it's a decent game with some phenomenal features. The physics in the game are fun. The controls are tight, there's enough variety that replaying through stages isn't tedious from lack of variety, the graphics are nice. The soundtrack for Spelunky is good (and at times excellent) but once you reach a certain point in the game you will likely turn it off for redundancy. The story that exists is great, with a surprising number of cultural and mythological tie-ins that constitute the main story elements. Some sense of progression even exists (in fact, writer and literary genius Philip J Reed's article on the Tunnel Man Key inspired me to pick this game up in the first place), and achievements are also present (I didn't experience these firsthand, as I played a copy of the game not within Steam, the PSN or XBLA.)
So what's wrong with it?
Spelunky suffers from a host of small issues, oversights and bugs that were never fixed in the official game. Some of it may be by design; skeletons and other monsters cannot be jumped on-top of underwater to kill; damage is taken. Cobras will often spawn level with the shopkeeper, at a depth where you're unable to defeat it before it aggros the shopkeepers for the rest of the game. Other parts might purely be bugs; the secret item "hedjet" doesn't always pick up, and on one occasion, I encountered a level with no clear path through the mines to the exit without using a bomb or a rope.
These are just some of the issues I encountered--the Spelunky Wiki has listed several more bugs on their webpage.
The biggest issue in Spelunky is in how it handles the ghost.
The ghost appears in each level of Spelunky after two minutes pass. Once this condition is met, the ghost will appear level with the player from either the left or the right, depending on which side the player is closer to when it spawns.
Each gem in the stage that comes in contact with the ghost turns into a diamond that is worth $5000. For reference, gems in the first world will range between either $800, $1200 or $1600 when picked up normally.
And the ghost is incredibly easy to avoid, especially if you are already prepared.
To revisit an earlier point, I have died over 3,273 times at the time of writing this. The majority of those attempts were sessions that were 0-5 minutes long. Waiting 2 minutes for the ghost to appear per stage, so you can gain enough money to buy the necessary items from the secret shop, is excruciating. There's no reason that the player shouldn't be able to summon the ghost early with a button (maybe with the option toggle-able from the settings menu, or unlocked after the first player win.) Once the player identifies this as the most effective playstyle, half of the game becomes waiting for the ghost and running an obstacle course. There's only so much of that you can do before you're sick of ghost runs.
And yet... the game will punish you for not taking every gem you can carry. To clear the game's secret route, a 30-40 minute playtime would not be uncommon. If you don't have enough bombs, Olmec will likely kill you, breakout-style. If you don't have the paste item, Anubis is likely to kill you. Without the Kapala, you're likely to have low health for the Temple stage. The compass will save resources and health after exploration no longer matters. The jetpack is a lifesaver.
Having to spend those two minutes waiting to avoid those headaches later on is poor game design. Regardless on if the ghost run playstyle was originally intended, it sometimes feels like the game expects more thought and patience than what was put into it.
A similar shortcoming in game design might be found within 60 Seconds! Reatomized. 60 Seconds! Reatomized is effectively two smaller games stitched into one; controlling either Ted or Dolores, you rush through your 3D-rendered house grabbing everything you can for your fallout shelter in 60 seconds, and then spend half an hour or so playing a text-based strategy game using what you grabbed.
Its hardest difficulty, "Tsar Bomba," is comically difficult. I've completed it only once (with the siblings ending), and from my experience you're at a vast advantage if you play as Ted, and either the suitcase or Mary Jane spawn right beside the trapdoor. In doing so, you're able to pick up 3 items while barely having to nudge inside the "safe zone" as the time expires.
Receiving this map load-out to make this gif took me about 15 minutes of resets, as per my recordings. But this is still the quickest and "least-frustrating" method of beating the game.
For 60 Seconds! Reatomized, aside from toggling that specific object's RNG, no easy remedy comes to mind. For the Spelunky ghost run, all that would need to be done is to enable a hotkey (or a menu button) to skip a timer.
Another complaint that seems trivial but is surprisingly irritating after 3,273 deaths is the lack of an "exit game" option on the Game Over screen. To exit the game, you either have to respawn on another attempt ("Retry") or warp back to an almost-entirely-useless hub area ("Continue"), and then find it through the pause menu. It's a patronizing annoyance, at least on the PC version, and I've found myself "Control Alt Deleting" myself off the game multiple times out of frustration.
Underneath these massive inconveniences there's a fun experience to be had, despite all these criticisms.
As a form of self-motivation to write more, I intend to use this Tumblr to write thought-pieces on various types of media that I encounter. Some of these beginning posts will be written in one-shot, over ideas that have been floating around in my head for some time, so bear with me! During the Coronavirus lockdown I've binge-watched several shows, so I may write about those over time.
Gankutsuou: The Count of Monte Cristo (the English dubbed version) is an anime series that I watched a couple of weeks ago and found highly enjoyable. I would label it as one of the few Japanese-animated productions that I would feel comfortable watching in a living room with, if that makes sense. Typically an anime will have some kind of disqualifier in it to make it an awkward viewing experience with others (Hunter X Hunter, for example, has a recurring gay clown character. Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann has one of the characters always in a skimpy outfit--etc.), and in this regard I would say Gankutsuou is unique.
As a point of comparison, I found it very much similar to the anime "91 Days," so much so that I mistakenly thought they might have been created by the same studio.
91 Days (and Gankutsuou) is best to go into blind, but both series share similarities in their main plotlines, their central character relations, their wide cast and the audience's perspective over these events (both shows could be considered ensemble pieces to an extent), as well as in artstyle, in their opening and closing songs, and in tone.
As far as which of these series is superior, or a better viewing experience, up until about the 18th episode of Gankutsuou, 91 Days surpasses it. By design, 91 Days is more captivating; 85% of the character suspense isn't tied with how a single character chooses to act. The pacing in Gankutsuou suffers in some regard up until this point (a truth that is alluded to by the series breaking itself up into "acts" rather than episodes--Gankutsuou might also be considered a slow-burn thriller).
Around episode 18 and everything afterwords, Gankutsuou's waiting pays off enormously.
Unfortunately, I've not actually read The Count of Monte Cristo at the time of writing this. From what I've gathered from discussion boards on the subject, some notable characterizations were made stronger in the book rather than in this series. I can't speak to that, although the end result was highly enjoyable and did not feel lacking on its own.
A final point; Gankutsuou's art carries an interesting design choice.
Everywhere in this series, be it in hairstyles, attire, objects, or wallpaper, a distinct, multi-layered pattern technique is used known as unmoving plaid. More information on it could be found in this article, but this is basically accomplished by giving characters a transparent layer over the desired patterned area, and by placing a motionless layer underneath it. Gankutsuou seems to have been the first series to utilize or at least popularize this technique in anime; they use it everywhere. I personally loved it, however, it could be offputting to some.
I would highly recommend this series to anyone on-the-fence towards watching this.
