corpsephage

[corpsephage]

Surge: "Word has grabbed my tenrec ear... have a chilli dog... that you think bad guys oughta come around to bein' good guys."

Sonic: "Yeah, well, y'know... it beats being a jerk."

Surge: "Right... and your old buddy Surge - remember me? - can fix it for you. Have two chilli dogs! You wanna make a deal?"

Sonic: "Lemme guess - you 'fixing' it for me is gonna involve - "

Surge: "Rubbing you out? Ha! I'm past that! In fact, I'll lay it on the line for ya..."

Now, I'm the queen of the villains, oh

The bad guy VIP

I reached the top and had to stop

And that's what's botherin' me

I wanna be a good guy, hedgehog

And stroll right into town

And be just like the other guys

Rollin' around at the speed of sound

Oobie-doo; I wanna be like you

I wanna walk like you, talk like you too

You'll see it's true, a tenrec like me

Can learn to be a hero too

Sonic: "Well, great way of starting your hero thing off... tying me up like this."

Surge: "Now here's your part of the deal, cuz... lay the secret on me of these magic gems..."

Sonic: "The Chaos Emeralds? …I dunno if you should be using - ?"

Now, don't try to kid me, rodent

I made a deal with you

What I desire is Chaos fire

To make my dream come true

Now gimmie the secret, hedgehog

C'mon, clue me what to do

Teach me to gather the Emeralds' power

So I can be like you

*Knuckles comes in and creates a distraction; scatting ad nauseam*

----------------------

I have not been kind to the IDW Sonic comics in the past - if you ask me, I think Sonic is a concept that kind of only works as a video game. But at least they seem to finally be doing something interesting with Surge. I like the idea of her wanting to replace Sonic as a hero, trying to ape Sonic's heroism but drastically missing the point... maybe she'll start painting herself blue. It reminded me of a Disney song, and I imagined her singing it to him.

Realistically, neither Surge nor any Sonic villain would be singing anything to him, but my brain is so rotted I can't imagine a villain capturing the hero and monologuing without them breaking into song.

What I'm saying is, whatever you think of the quality of IDW Sonic's writing... just be thankful I'm not writing it.

God, their eyes are huge.

[corpsephage]

The blowback everyone's having towards Joker: Folie à Deux feels to me like a Pyrrhic victory. It's like I've won, yet I'm not happy...

You know, for arguably the world's number one villain, and certainly the world's number one evil clown... I really don't dig the modern Joker. Nowadays he's either written as an overly-edgy mass murderer or a nihilistic sad clown, but he's rarely ever... you know... funny.

Look, the Joker's quite a simple character - an eccentric supervillain with a circus theme - it practically writes itself. I think the earlier portrayals of him did that concept very well - your Jack Nicholsons, your Mark Hamills. But nowadays I feel like they're taking him too seriously. Joaquin Phoenix and Jared Leto aren't gonna be using gadgets like electric joy buzzers or poison laughing gas while someone walks behind them with a boombox playing their theme... and I feel like we've lost something as a result. Now he's less like a creative supervillain clown and more like Charles Manson in greasepaint.

What brings this on is that the Joker's become such a meme as of late, which is doubly-funny for me because the whole "tragic innocent turned to irredeemable monster" schtick is what puts me off the Joker. I'm sure Joaquin Phoenix does a great portrayal of a mentally-ill loner going down the path of violence calling himself "Joker", but I just can't see that as the comic-book Joker. And apparently the director agrees with me, because the new sequel goes out of its way to show that this guy isn't the comic-book Joker!

I don't know... I don't think my problem really is with the Joker himself. I think superhero stories in general have gotten a bit more "realistic" than they need to be. Then again, the genre's changing all the time. That's why they call it the modern mythology; different people can write it in different ways and it can all technically be "right". So Joaquin Phoenix and Jared Leto's Jokers are both no less "right" than my own interpretation of the Joker (basically a cross between the Postal Dude and Beetlejuice).

Anyway, never let me draw semi-realistically proportioned people again.

[corpsephage]

“I… I was nice today… nice to all those insipid little monkeys and their stupid restoration…

Restoration… what a joke… restoration of what? Of his world. Like the world was designed to be his playground… He’s a fool! A poor, silly little fool…

He could end it all if he wanted… with his hands… those DIRTY hands…!

They think he’s a god… but he’s as mortal as we, I know… Just one… quick… WISP…!”

A recreation of this image based on this semi-official fan comic. Though I'm not sure I'm supposed to interpret Lanolin as homicidal...

[corpsephage]

Alright, fellow weirdoes, it's September 1st. Ten-month vacation's over. Back to the grind.

[corpsephage]

(TW: drugs)

In honor of Angel Dust's hilariously-timed birthday, here's my own Hazbin OC: Angel's cousin Sherm Stick, who died attempting to shove a watermelon up his nose.

[corpsephage]

Is this you? Then here's a tutorial I made about narrative structure that'll leave you even more confused:

[corpsephage]

Now the cat's out of the bag, I'm pleased to announce my first "professional" gig as an "official" character designer for Grand Theft Auto VI (except not really, it was a scam request)!

Don't believe me? Well, here's the (obviously fake) DM I got to prove it!

Alright, seriously, I am not working on GTA 6 and haven't been approached by Rockstar to do so. I needed an excuse to draw something, and when GTA 6 got prematurely announced I thought it would be funny to dredge up this old message.

That said, I am willing to do some character commissions for anyone who wants them. My prices and further information can be found here:

[corpsephage]

You know, that Sonic Dream Team looks like just the kind of direction I was hoping they'd take in the wake of Sonic Frontiers… how come it's only an Apple exclusive?

[corpsephage]

Happy Halloween! Here's something I did for the Monster Mash competition they were having on DeviantArt.

I made my first almost-speedpaint out of this one - I say it's almost a speedpaint because the picture took 3 hours and 45 minutes to do start-to-finish (1 hour and 15 for the coloring). Have you tried fitting all that into a 3-minute song?

Music: Creature Feature - Every Day is Halloween

Made in Paint Tool SAI, last-minute oh-crap-I-gotta-fix-this alterations in Photoshop.

[corpsephage]

Anyone else catch that Nightmare Before Christmas reference in Sonic Frontiers? You know, where Sage asks Sonic what he's going to do, and Sonic says he's going to do the best he can? Then he tries shoving her in a cooking pot and Amy cuts off her leg...?

[corpsephage]

Here's me bluffing my way through making a pixelart tileset in Photoshop to use in Godot.

[corpsephage]

Here's me trying to navigate Blender enough to make a simple character model. You know, for all the smack-talk I give video game franchises... it's not like I could do any better.

[corpsephage]

It begins!

I love how clandestine the whole idea of Halloween season is. For the rest of the world it's just World Vegetarian Day, but for us, everything is haunted and we've all turned into monsters.

[corpsephage]

Sonic Frontiers Post-DLC-Three Whinefest Redux (Final Horizon Review)

After feeling left out in the cold with my divergent opinion on vanilla Frontiers, it feels good to finally share an opinion with the rest of the fanbase again. Spoilers below, but the skinny is that it's just like normal Frontiers except a lot more difficult.

I forgot to mention one thing that put me off Frontiers in my pre-DLC review: I just couldn’t handle the controls very well. I think this is just a skill issue, because I did eventually get used to them. It took my ten attempts to beat the first boss, but only one attempt to beat the last one.

So, when I fell right off the first platform of the first trial tower for the seventieth time, after spending time maxing out all of Sonic’s capabilities no less, I assumed that the problem was with me, and the game just did not cater to my ability or taste. But when I checked out Twitter – everyone else was talking about how hard it was! They were going so far as to compare it to Dark Souls. It made me feel so relieved. And a little bit of schadenfreude.

At this point I was about to turn it off and just watch a playthrough of it on YouTube to see how it ended. I’ve only rage-quitted a game like that once before with Drawn to Life: Two Realms, which is a whole other story.

But friends, thank God for easy mode. I switched the difficulty and it was smooth sailing. I don’t think there’s any shame in playing easy mode – you bought the game, play it how you want – but I had it on normal mode from when I first got Frontiers up until this stupid tower. It makes me wonder if I’d have been nicer about Frontiers as a whole if I played easy mode from the beginning.

But yes, going through the rest of the game on easy mode was a lot more manageable, except for that one part where you have to defeat those shell enemies in a certain amount of time with nothing but the cyloop. If there's a way of doing it, I don't know what it is, and I only got past it when the game took pity on me and offered to lower the trial's difficulty to something easier than easy.

But other than that, no major complaints. All my problems with the empty open world and weird plot still stand, but gameplay-wise everything was just fine. Then this prick shows up:

- and makes you fight all three non-final bosses from the base game in a row with only 400 rings to spare between them, bearing in mind your rings are constantly draining while you're fighting them, can't be restored, and if you run out it's an instant loss. Also, parries don't work unless they're bang-on perfect.

And I really struggled with the first boss in the base game! And yes, most of that was my fault, because I didn't bother to parry his attacks, and parrying is like the main mechanic that all the bosses are centered around. But I was also cocky: I thought that if Sonic ran out of rings by timeout, his super form would go away and he'd fall back to the ground along with the emeralds, and you'd have to run around the arena to pick them up again quickly before Giganto had time to heal or something. So when I ran out of rings and Giganto straight-up ate Sonic I was surprised. And I admit I got quite frustrated having to start over from the beginning every time until I slowly figured out what the boss wanted me to do.

So I beat Giganto again in this rematch, and I thought at first that was the end of it and I'd just have to fight the one boss, which was a natural step up from the other koco's challenges. But then Wyvern showed up, and it suddenly dawned on me that not only would I have to fight all of them, and my rings didn't refill between fights so I had only like seventy left, but also that if I lost, the game wouldn't start me over from the boss I was on, it would kick me back to Giganto and make me do it all again.

Obviously, there was no way I was beating Wyvern with only seventy rings, and I don't think I was quick enough to even parry it once. So I made a deal with the game and said “If I die here and the next thing I see when I respawn is Giganto, I’m turning the game off.” You can’t say I didn’t warn it.

So, yes, I actually did end up rage-quitting Sonic Frontiers: The Final Horizon, and I just watched how it all ends online. I didn't stick around to see if the game would make itself easier if you failed the bosses enough times. Maybe I would've been able to pass it if I kept trying, but since I wasn't wild on the whole game to begin with I didn't feel like it.

Turns out if you somehow finish the boss rush, the endgame comes straight after. And I wasn’t really missing much, by the look of it – first half of the final boss is the same as in the original game. It’s Giganto, except he’s got a gun. The second half is a bit different – it’s Giganto, except he’s got a big brain-drainer/puppet-string coming out of his head and several arms coming out his back. The big purple rock is hovering in the sky, but rather than QTE-ing it, Eggman fires Super Sonic clean through it after Giganto is beaten the second (third? Fourth? However freaking much) time. It’s got a lot of visual flair, but I really wish you could play as the other characters as well, so that the final fight feels more fully absorbed.

The ending sequence is the same too, except Sage doesn't sacrifice herself this time, and she and Eggman get their happy ending instead of a post-credits sequel hook. But while it might make Sage fans sleep a little easier, I think SEGA might have written themselves into a corner with her. The whole thrust of her character was a mopey AI that just wanted to be loved, and now she has it... what are SEGA going to do with her if they bring her back?

If she comes back evil, and joins Eggman in raining merry hell on Sonic and his friends, won't that contradict the canon of Frontiers, where Sonic taught her hope and heroism? And if she comes back good and on Sonic's side, won't that also contradict Frontiers and her loyalty to her father?

Would she go join all the other Sonic antiheroes on Team Dark? But even they have their motivations - Shadow started off a villain but realized he was being a jerk and tries to uphold world order. And while Rouge is a master criminal, she's not mean-spirited - she might rob you or cheat you out of money, but she'd never want to hurt you. What's Sage's motivation? She doesn't really get to develop a personality of her own by the end of Frontiers.

Imagine after the final boss, Sage comes up to Sonic and says she’s been thinking about her place in the world. Sonic asks her what she wants out of life, only for Sage to suddenly flash him the most deliciously evil grin an AI can muster and tell him what she wants most is to use his skin as a fur coat. Eggman comes up behind on his egg-mobile, gleeful that his daughter has finally come round, and the post-final boss is a blow-off match between Sage and Sonic, plus the other playable characters joining in on the fun. And behind the keyboard, I stand up and applaud. Maybe that would clash with Frontier's tone, but then at least Sage would come into her own and indicate her appearance in future games.

So, yeah - The Final Horizon - really didn't dig it. If the original Frontiers didn't interest you, this won't change your mind. However, there is one good thing I want to bring up that I hope Sega explores in the future: the other playable characters.

I really enjoyed playing as Tails, Amy and Knuckles. Each of them has Sonic's basic moveset, but also their own powers and abilities on top of that. Knuckles has the most familiar of movement, with his gliding, wall-climbing and seven different ways of punching people. His gliding controls take some getting used to, since it's more like wingsuit-gliding with wind resistance blowing you about the place than the simple jump-and-go Spyro-style gliding from the Adventure games.

Amy's moveset is centered around a deck of tarot cards she was mentioned to have been using in, like... one very early manual for Sonic CD. But still, I think the idea of her using magic cards has a lot of potential. Maybe different cards do different things in battle? Kill the enemy by changing their very future? Maybe it could be something like Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories, where the cards are all shuffled up and you have to pick which card to play at which time. There's a whole unique aspect of gameplay available to her there. Sadly, Final Horizon sticks to standard things like throwing them at people or slapping them, and doesn't take advantage of their clairvoyant or paranormal themes. Ah, well, maybe next game.

But Tails deserves special mention, because he has the most varied abilities that make use of his wacky inventions. He can launch a laser cannon at his enemies, or failing that hurl an endless supply of wrenches at them. But you know what my favourite was? His airplane. One of Tails’ abilities he can access at any time is to just hop on his plane and go off into the blue yonder. The speed and simplicity with which he could do this at the press of a button is intoxicating. I was furiously humming Ride of the Valkyries as I cruised around Uranus Island wishing it was a livelier open world. If these are the abilities we can expect from Sonic's friends, the next game could be very exciting if the level design matches up with it.

If vanilla Frontiers showed me that Sonic can work in an open world, Final Horizon showed me that his friends can too. And it's something I really hope SEGA picks up on in the future, because they really do have the bones of a great Sonic game in here, it just needs more time to cook (and a saner difficulty level).

[corpsephage]

Sonic Frontiers Pre-DLC-Three Whinefest

I couldn't really get much into Sonic Frontiers, and I thought the final boss and ending was a little lacklustre. Apparently the writers agreed with me, because they're releasing a new ending as free DLC tomorrow.

I actually had a lot of thoughts about Frontiers and this'll likely be the last time I can air them before The Final Horizon comes along and makes me eat humble pie with how good it is. But I don't want to rip on it too hard because I know a lot of effort goes into making games like this.

I think Sonic Frontiers works best for me when I look at it like a tech demo for a future open world Sonic game. Compared to the variety of stages you get in other Sonic games - here's a casino with giant pinball machines, there's a European city full of balloons, here's a mineshaft from Halloween Town - the Frontiers open zones kind of felt sparse and empty, and there wasn't much I could find to do except go from one bit of plot to the next. This is a trap a lot of open-world games fall into, when the world is wider than it is deep, and there's everywhere to go but nothing to do.

However, I did like the enemies. They kind of looked samey aesthetics-wise, but they were all unique and had their own abilities that cleverly played off from Sonic's own, like the enemy disguised as a bounce pad or the one that would steal a Chaos Emerald from you.

In terms of boss fights, I think I preferred the part where you were normal Sonic running up their bodies to being Super Sonic and frantically smashing buttons. I was a big fan of Shadow of the Colossus, so anything that reminds me of those bosses is a plus.

Plot-wise, well... usually I can take or leave Sonic game plots, but this is probably the most plot-heavy Sonic game we've had so far. It's been described as "melancholy", and while it's not exactly grimdark-edgy, I wonder if it's a good fit for a Sonic game. I think the tone that suits Sonic best would be “fun”; not necessarily “silly” or “goofy”, just “fun”. That’s not me saying the whole thing should be happy-go-lucky, I think it should take slow moments every now and then to add complexity to the story.

Sonic's friends have these character arcs where they learn important lessons, like Amy learns not to be creepy-in-love with Sonic, Knuckles learns not to be tethered to the Master Emerald all the time, and Tails learns to stand on his own two feet for the umpteenth time. Part of me feels like maybe they're overcorrecting things that don't need that much correcting - especially Tails, whose whole arc felt kind of like an apology for the whole "Sonic, help me!" throwaway line in Forces.

Then there's Sage, the new character for this game, honouring the SEGA tradition of adding at least one new character every game. Truth be told, I kind of like them adding new characters, as long as they aren't just re-skins of the same "tutorial fairy" archetype (I think that's why Blaze and Silver had the staying power they did, being headlining playable characters in their debut games and all).

Sage had a lot of potential that I didn't think they got to explore. It's an interesting idea that she unconditionally loves Eggman like a father, but learns more of her morals from Sonic, which has the makings of a really tragic character. But they didn't really go in-depth with this my-two-dads-hate-each-other hook, and when they tried to do the whole Toy Story 2 bit with her (you know the part I'm talking about) I just couldn't take it seriously.

The main villain of the game turns out to be a big purple rock, which left me quite underwhelmed considering the build-up it got. The Sonic wiki reckons it's the ultimate overarching evil in all of Sonic ("Oh my God, I should have known! The one behind all this! All this time it was a big purple rock!") which is big talk considering Eggman is right! There! I get they were trying to go for a whole Azathoth/Yog-Sothoth thing, but I think Sonic-style dark gods need some more meat on their bones than the Lovecraft "it's indescribable, just trust me bro" style. I've seen some impressive fan designs for the big purple rock that make it look a lot more malevolent.

Honestly, I think Sage should have been the final boss. That’d really put her feelings between Sonic and Eggman at the emotional core of the story. Imagine once the towers were finished, Eggman comes out of cyberspace and the first thing he tries is to kill Sonic and his friends there and then - maybe he orders Sage to do it - but poor Sage can’t bring herself to kill her Uncle Sonic or disappoint her beloved dad, so she has an emotional breakdown which allows the evil cyber-force to enter into her mind, and the final boss ends up being her piloting this super-titan made of all three of the other titans. And maybe at the end Sonic knocks some sense into her – telling her to be her own person and all that – and she uses her free will to sacrifice herself and stop the cyber-evil. Or something. Look, I still can't believe the final boss was a QTE against a big purple rock, alright?!

But if there's one thing I do like Sonic Frontiers for, it's for being ambitious. If you look around the Sonic Fanon wiki, you'll see a lot of pretty detailed Sonic game ideas, and a lot of them have pretty high stakes and expansive stages - open-world designs featuring ancient evils from ancient civilizations and stuff like that. The first thing I thought of when I saw Frontiers, right when it was nothing more than a teaser, was that it reminded me of those fan game ideas. And in a strange way it works. Kind of. Sorta. I didn't hate it. On reflection.

If nothing else, Frontiers proves that an open-ended Sonic game can work. If the open world was more lively, it'd be a magical experience. Picture Sonic running through the countryside at night, over hill and dale, past streams and forests, the flickering lights of cities in the distance. Slaloming through traffic on the interstate, running up the sides of skyscrapers and springing from the rooftops, pedestrians down below wondering what that blue flash was. That kind of freedom and openness suits Sonic down to the ground. Split the world into denser and busier areas for fast-paced reflex-testing, and wider, quieter areas for taking it all in - that's a true Sonic simulator right there, looking into his world of worlds.

The new DLC also gives SEGA the chance to prove itself with other playable characters, like back in the days of Adventure yore. I actually like the presence of other playable characters - like I say, you don't make a fox with two tails who can fly and not have him playable - so long as they're fun to play as. Honestly, I hope the new DLC does it well, because if it's a success, then the next game might be willing to expand upon all this potential. You never know, we might be looking at a proper Sonic the Hedgehog RPG in a few years, and it could be the biggest Sonic adventure since... uh... Sonic Adventure.

So, yeah - Sonic Frontiers - didn't dig it - could've done better - and I hope it does do better, because it has a hell of a lot of potential, and I'd love to see an open-ended Sonic game taking place in a living, breathing world with the groundwork Frontiers has laid. And if we can play as Tails, Knuckles, Amy and all the rest, so much the better. Bring on Grand Theft Sonic, I say.

[corpsephage]

I've been practicing Blender to help me make models for games. Who ever heard of a successful game made only out of cubes, right?

[corpsephage]

I've been trying out the Godot Engine, curiously enough for the same reason I've been trying out Tumblr. Here's a write-up of what I've learned so far: