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ghostlymonade · 1 year ago

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Three Hopes, The Best Way to Experience Fódlan

That might be a pretty bold statement, especially given the rather lukewarm response most Warriors-style spinoffs inspire in fans. However, I'm here to tell you exactly why I think, (writing-wise anyway), Fire Emblem Warriors: Three Hopes is the best way to experience the world of Three Houses. Note: This post will be based on my playthrough of the two Blue Lions routes for the most part, both for brevity and fairness!

I’m assuming if you did choose to read more, you’re familiar, at least in passing, with Fire Emblem. But for those who don’t know, a brief summary: the Fire Emblem series is a longrunning tactical RPG franchise which finally found a well-deserved audience with the thirteenth game, Fire Emblem Awakening. Since that overwhelming success, Fire Emblem has been cementing itself, game after game, as one of Nintendo’s exclusive heavy-hitters. And I would argue the entry that truly brought Fire Emblem to its current status is the first Switch title, Fire Emblem: Three Houses. While it retained many of the popular features of prior games, there was a notable tone shift. This was Fire Emblem’s big Switch entry, and it was definitely a bold swing. Fódlan feels storied, complex, and rife with intrigue in a way I haven’t really found a Fire Emblem setting to be since the Tellius duology. At every corner, there’s more to learn, and you can feel the weight of that history bear down on everyone in the Officers’ Academy. While there are definitely aspects of Three Houses that feel rushed or glossed over, few would argue the worldbuilding isn’t up to snuff. Where I feel Three Houses misses the mark somewhat is two key aspects: the character writing and trajectory of the story. These sound like huge, thorny issues, but hear me out; Three Hopes does it better. Everyone who’s played both games is certainly in consensus that Hopes learned from its predecessor in some important ways (namely, no more spending three hours between levels running around the monastery), but I rarely see discussed how the writers handled Three Hopes’ story, and I think I can guess part of the reason...

Ah, well. I can’t force anyone to play it through, but I would argue the writing of Three Hopes is a lot more thoughtful than most give it credit for, and that between the two games, it’s the better way to experience the excellent world of Fódlan. We’ll go through two key issues that I, and quite a few others, had with Three Houses, and how they’re tackled in Hopes. What do you see in him, girl?

Despite Byleth having the approximate appeal, charisma and personality of a damp sock, all of Fódlan falls over itself to tell them how amazing they are. It’s been a recurring problem with the player avatar in recent Fire Emblem games, but I argue it feels more egregious with Byleth than any other. They’re the Ashen Demon, a mercenary with inhuman skill. They’re a capable professor, there’s something about them that draws in all three lords, instantly... Lacking any demonstration of the why or the how in action, it feels like the worst kind of player pandering, almost nonstop. And what bothered me most was the talk of Byleth’s mercenary prowess, constantly. Given we never see them in battle acting like their Ashen Demon namesake, I hated hearing every single character in supports and cutscenes speak of their mercenary prowess with such quivering awe. So when this trailer dropped?

Consider me hyped. And the game’s intro did not disappoint. Not only did we see Byleth earning their title, I also appreciated the intro truly establishing Shez as a mercenary. They’re part of a company, they actually talk about having to work for a living...it’s still the Fire Emblem brand of mercenary, complete with Honour™️ and hard limits on what they’ll do, but they felt more of a mercenary in the first ten minutes of Three Hopes than Byleth did in ten hours of the first game. And that persists throughout the game, too. Shez talks about sleeping outside, about the reality of working a job where people can die any minute- for lack of a better term, they show a real mercenary attitude. Behold, My Edge-elgard! (Credit to Kotor for the meme)

Three Houses has a tone issue, at times. What I definitely enjoyed was its refinement of the fledgling idea that Fates played around with: War sucks, actually, and it sucks for everyone because these are real people killing each other. Having three nations that aren’t ‘The Nice Ones’ and ‘Nightmare Before Christmas-themed War Crimes’ certainly helps, and I think introducing the player to each nation through getting to neutrally meet and grow close to some future key individuals before they launch into any huge conflict is a much better setup than Fates’ attempt to make Nohr’s leadership seem less evil through Corrin’s family being nice...to Corrin. However, I believe that at times, it swung a bit too far into Angstland, and lost its way home. Azure Moon is a great example of this, often feeling as though things get worse, then they get worse, then they get worse. Contrast this with Azure Gleam, the Three Hopes route. While war does, indeed, still suck, there’s a distinct feeling that things can and will get better, so long as the team can pull together and keep fighting. They have victories and losses. One moment that particularly stuck out to me was this conversation with Felix:

He’s always critiquing Dimitri to his face, but it’s clear that Felix holds a lot of concern for him, even if he conceals it as purely being concerned about the future of Faerghus. And Dimitri does need that voice, to an extent. When you look at the rest of his circle: Dedue will die for him and follows Dimitri more or less anywhere, regardless of what he does or the reason why. Sylvain and Ingrid both know he’s been through a lot and try to take it easy on him. Felix is the only member of this close circle who seems willing to say anything negative to his face. In this sense, you could say Dimitri has the healthiest circle of any of the three lords. Claude has a goofy group of chill friendos, and Edelgard has Hubert, who is ride or die no matter how often she tries to kill God. It was a sweet little moment, and a fascinating insight into where Felix sees himself in this group. Azure Gleam is full of this kind of thoughtful writing, and it makes playing through the darker periods of the story feel like it’s worth doing, rather than giving the impression that the only good choice is to put the game down and take Byleth’s horrible influence three million miles away from these poor kids. I don’t just say that for comedic effect- it’s tacitly implied by the two games’ radically different stories that Byleth chasing support ranks and engaging in waifu-motivated war crimes is part of why Three Houses ends up so much darker than Three Hopes. Shez has a distinct, headstrong personality, and they aren’t afraid to offer their opinion. Not falling down a canyon for five years helps. In a sense, the two issues play into each other. If Byleth was better defined as a character, it might be easier to understand and believe their motivations throughout the war arc especially. If the war arc finds its way out of the angst, even for a day trip, it’s easier to believe Byleth can have a real, positive impact on how things turn out. This is a big part of why I think Three Hopes is the best way to experience Fódlan. The title is, admittedly, clickbait-y, as I think Three Hopes truly shines in the context of having played Three Houses first. But when taking both games together, it’s fascinating to see how differently things can go, when the writers had a chance to explore their world from a new angle, and I for one, look forward to seeing more of this alternate timeline style writing in Fire Emblem in the future! Hey, they’re already doing it in Heroes.

#fire emblem #fire emblem three houses #fire emblem three hopes #game discussion #fódlan #fe3h shez #byleth #fe3h

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spinningbuster98 · 8 months ago

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youtube

Here we start with the infamous Krauser knife fight!

So perhaps the only aspect of RE4's gameplay that hasn't aged the best is its overuse of quicktime events. This is one of the games that, in the mid 2000s, popularized the usage of QTEs, the main reasoning behind their inclusion according to the devs is to increase the amount of tension and paranoia that the player would feel, making them feel in danger even during cutscenes, in a "I can't take my eyes off the screen for a second because danger lurks everywhere" sort of way. I guess I can see it, but in practice this means that you'll likely find yourself dying suddenly with little foresight

To be fair: RE4's QTEs are actually simpler than what we're used to nowadays. There are no long, complex button combinations to input, they usually come in 3 flavors: having to push both trigger buttons at the same time, square and X at the same time, or having to mash a specific button for a few seconds.

The knife fight is the exception however, as it's one long stretch of QTEs which, while cool looking, will get you killed if you fail even once

Similar deal with the laser room right afterwards. It's so random and out of nowhere too, I love its goofiness

The first boss you fight is U-3, this...horrifying abomination that you'll first have to avoid while navigating a very narrow maze, making for a very tense and horror filled experience, and after you get out you can finally bring the fight to it

As for the actual fight against Krauser well...

I like the idea, but the execution is far too clunky

Having to go around collecting puzzle pieces while Krauser springs traps on you all military style is cool, but this is one instance where the game's tank controls genuinely feel at odds with the enemy, as Krauser is way too quick when compared to Leon, and after he transforms and starts protecting his face with his "bone shield", forcing you to either shoot at the legs (which are, again, moving very fast) or be insanely quick in dealing damage to him during those brief moments when he drops his shield to attack you, all the while having a timer ticking down, yeah it's very awkward. One way to cheese the fight is to actually, and I shit you not, use the knife! What is normally the weakest weapon in the game actually deals major damage against Krauser, I guess as a reference to the earlier knife fight, making the fight go by very quickly like this. Still, you probably won't know this without looking it up on the Internet as it's supposed to be a secret

#resident evil 4 #my gameplay #Youtube

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sleepdepravity · 1 year ago

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DISTRUTHS - general character notes

alright this post is about character backgrounds, character hangups, character developments, and the ideas i had for character dynamics. very many of these were not very developed, i will be honest, but here i go.

Actually, getting into some school stuff first. the students were chosen in terms of "being future leaders," and then they have some weird talents. But part of the concept i had in my head involved, their talents themselves aren't necessarily the leader traits, it's that their leader traits the headmaster saw exhibit as the talents they got assigned? i'm not sure if i'm explaining this right, maybe i'll explain more as italk about each character. but there's sort of the more "physical" traits, the "social" traits, and the "intellectual" traits. Akane, Koizumi, and Yuu (and to a certain extent, Katashi) are on the physical side, where they provide important...i guess you could say infrastructure stuff. (medical, mechanical, agricultural, and. extremely intense jack-of-all-trades.) quite a few of the others fall into the "social" sphere: Yamaguchi, Matsui, Minoru, Kotone, Oshiro. Yamaguchi is a good team player. Matsui is actually quite good at gaining a following, in terms of blogosphere (she really doesn't thrive in death game though, i guess). Minoru, Kotone, and Oshiro in particular are tuned into people? This is the reason why i said (way long ago) that Minoru and Kotone have max relationships with everybody else. Minoru, although tagged as a spirit medium, is really adept at easing people and understanding what others are going through. Kotone understands people to the point where they can mimic them, and that's how they can get into their roles. Oshiro, as a magician, is good at knowing how to direct people's attention. The "intellectual" group is K-1 (arts counts as intellectual), Tsubame, Noboru, Shinobu, and Megumi. Who may seem out of place, but part of the intellectual aspect is having a body of knowledge, and she's particularly good at sniffing out knowledge.

Anyways.

Mori Tomiko

The fake main character. I had always wanted her to be the second culprit, and I had always wanted to pull the trick of just quietly adding the knife to her inventory without telling the audience.

Her first cover story, being "SHSL Charisma," is honestly not far off the mark, given that she had been able to orchestrate a whole movement against her own mom's school project. She used Yuu to be able to get close to the school itself and influenced Seki to turn against everybody else. She held a lot of hate for the school and its ideals (which is completely fair) and then it sort of spiraled out of control for her. (I think you can kind of see some hints about this sort of obsession in the beginning and in her interactions with the others.) Since she was the fake main character, I don't have anything about what her free time events would have been like.

K-1

Chill guy. He doesn't particularly care much about music as his talent, probably because he used it as an outlet for dealing with his sister's supposed death and then it took off. I think he feels caught between the expectation of turning his hobby into a career and the fact that, this hobby was born out of grief that he doesn't quite feel like he's escaped yet. I think his free time events would center around feeling assured that he can just keep music as a side thing in his life, or even just drop it entirely if he feels like it.

Oshiro Haruki

Very much a guy with a mask. I...am not sure if I developed much for him...especially since I knew he'd be out of the way very quickly. I think his free time events would lean heavily on the theme of misdirection, but other than that, I don't know.

Kobayashi Minoru

Strangely enough, Minoru was originally going to be a survivor. Yuu was actually going to be the second victim, but then...i don't know when, but somewhere along the way I decided it might be more interesting and less straightforward for Yuu to survive and be roped into Mori's scheme. (The original murder was going to be more like Mori finding the note on Tsubame's door, being the one who almost died, then killing Yuu when he follows her.)

I do feel bad for Minoru dying. Their free time events would center around death and grief, showing off that they see the art of spirit medium as first and foremost a way to soothe the living. And also, showing that they have a keen sense of other people, able to pick up details...it's just that they believe it has to do with spiritual power. Other than that, they're quite sensible and practical. (which, thinking about it, i guess shows by the way they were able to leave hints to their murder.) They get along with everybody, even though not everybody gets along with them (Akane). In particular, I suppose they would get along with K-1 and Yuu. Back when they were a survivor, I had imagined them as grouping with Kotone and Noboru.

Nakayama Megumi

Enjoys being the villain, knows how to spin stories, and as a result also may sense when stories are being spun. She believes that being a bearer of the truth inevitably means being the villain, which is why she leans into it, especially since it means she can unabashedly say whatever the fuck she wants.

This does mean that she doesn't consult anybody else, which I suppose in a way led to her downfall. Without someone else to bounce off of, she focused on her own conclusions and pursued it, falsely thinking that Shinobu must have been the mastermind, or at least on the enemy team. The investigative journalist walks a lonely road...

Her free time events would have probably peeled back her life philosophy about truth and her isolation. and maybe potentially start getting her thinking about including other people.......right before her untimely death, lol. Of course, she enjoys needling Matsui. I remember vaguely thinking that she would like hanging with Shinobu too, at least until she thought he was literally part of the death game scheme? I'm not sure why.

Yamaguchi Nakazawa

Straight up a guy who has no secrets. He tries doing whatever he thinks is best for the group, and he's pretty good at it, even if he's overall uncertain about himself. Honestly, I don't think I had put much into his development either...

Koizumi Ren

He seems shy, but it's more that he doesn't like people. He says very harsh and snide things in such a gentle way that it often goes under the radar. Plants are much easier to deal with, and also cuter.

I think my concepts for his free time events would probably focus around his frustration with the image he puts off, or at least the image he thinks he puts off. Despite not liking people, he also can't help but not like the way he seems to be overlooked in the conversation too. He's got a lot of pent-up anger.

Wakahisa Shinobu

Part of a family of critics. Since his area of focus is video games, he ends up feeling embarrassed about it when he compares himself to the rest of his family, who are all about movies, art, music, books, all the "higher arts." At the same time, he has a lot of pride in his own opinions (as critics tend to be), and thus he keeps waving back and forth between supercilious and embarrassment of his own interests.

I remember specifically choosing the name "Shinobu," because it was a gender neutral name and I guess I was considering the plot point of "oooo maybe Shinobu is the name of that unknown girl from the opening cutscene and this guy is secretly replacing her" and I guess his execution scene is sort of a sly reference to that? but I don't think that would have actually gone anywhere.

Him and Yuu end up bonding. Yuu thinks he should really just talk with his family about his interests instead of assuming that they look down on him.

Tsubame Nihiri

I...honestly have a very personal bias to Tsubame. She's the character I created for the RP all the way back when, before i sort of took the RP and then developed a whole bunch of concepts into DISTRUST, so it was probably inevitable...and I also made her a philosopher so...but also, I wonder if I would have given her a different backstory if I had made DISTRUST later. Ah well.

Right at the beginning of her first year in high school, Tsubame attempted suicide, because she felt life was meaningless. She was rescued, but her parents preferred to keep her institutionalized rather than bring her back home. She quietly recovered for two (or three?) years, mostly reading and chatting with other patients before being discharged, and then got selected for the school, starting at the first year since she hadn't finished it before being hospitalized. (No idea what the first encounter between her and K-1 would have been like...)

In any case, she talks like an old man (which is why she calls everybody "-kun") and is logical to a fault, pursuing thoughts that most people would just toss out immediately due to them being...probably socially inappropriate. Her free time events would probably focus on her feeling too out of place with everybody else? In terms of her design...half of her hair has been cut short, but then the other half has been left long. I think...I did that to signify "indecisiveness" but...she turned out to not be indecisive...oops...

After the third case, when she realizes that she's actually like two years older than she thought she was, she also realizes that, well, she's an adult, which is why she starts working very hard to try to find a way to escape. It became very important to her that the kids make it out and she felt like it was her responsibility. Although she asked Kotone and Noboru for help, she didn't tell them her full plan, just said that she "had a plan" when they asked how she was going to outrun Monobear. I think one of the very earliest ideas was that she'd be waffling on whether she should go through with this plan when she talked with Matsui, and Matsui says something harsh which leads Tsubame to realize, yes, she wants these kids to be able to leave, and so she goes through with it.

I should probably also mention that the reason why K-1's ID was missing was because she found it first and hid it, and had a lot of private angst about the idea that she literally tried to murder her literal brother.

Tsukino Kotone

Someone who doesn't feel like they have a sense of self, and instead mimics others or inhabits characters that, of course, do have developed selves. An extremely wide range. Could potentially even mimic animals, I suppose. Even in the school pictures, they dress up the way they do during DISTRUST. Maybe that was just the major role they were voicing for at the time and, with the induced amnesia, that was the role they latched onto for now.

Along with Minoru, Kotone has full relationship bars with everybody, due to being very good at understanding other people. They do really have a lot of individuality, just unable to see it. Since Kotone keeps using other people as a marking point, they sort of measure themselves as "not like this person," "not like that person," and that results in a sense of self that seems to be "not anybody." Free time events would probably focus on the sense of self, and hopefully starting to recognize their own empathy and compassion as something that is real.

Matsumoto Matsui

Matsui is.....very much the product of. the '00s–'10s tumblr blogger stereotype. I do think of her as extremely competent in the blogosphere, able to communicate ideas very well to different audiences. Too bad this death game isn't a blog. She's also inflexible, of course, mainly seeing things in black and white, preferring a simple worldview because, well, that also makes things easier to communicate. But I think she probably could use her communication skills to great effect if she had been given some time to mature.

I imagined her engaging a lot with Tsubame, in terms of trying to barrel her with social justice issues and "defeating" her in rhetoric, but then gets frustrated because Tsubame will always run with it and absolutely will say "yeah, sure, i don't believe in gay marriage, because why should the state even be able to define marriage in the first place, maybe marriage doesn't even exist, what is marriage actually? why don't we try to define marriage? is marriage defined by love? what is love? what if by our current definition of love, nobody actually—" and then matsui throws a hissy fit and leaves.

her free time events would probably get her to actually show off her talent in the way that the main parts of the story can't, letting her really flaunt her knack for knowing what to say, in. like. normal circumstances. and also, hopefully, the free time events also will help push her towards some amount of flexibility.

Mizushima Yuu

Guy who was supposed to die early and then ended up surviving. I got accidentally endeared to him after I figured out in the middle of case 1 how his brain works, which is. essentially, taking basic knowledge and just smashing them together in bizarre ways that you can see the logic in but it's clearly wrong. (I still really like "well, i've seen cats that have two colors like that, and i heard a dog say "i love you" once, so maybe Monobear is an actual bear") I mentioned that he bonds with Shinobu, but now that I think of it, he'd probably bond with Tsubame too, just because she'd have fun playing with the way he thinks. I didn't intend for this until I started writing out these summaries, but I think he ends up bonding with Katashi, through sheer persistence and also because it turns out they have the same energy. Which.......i guess means all of the attempted murderers all like each other..............wow.........

Ryukana Katashi

Guy who would have probably been the hardest to really get a bead on, given how much he kept avoiding everybody. The main idea behind him was that, as intense as he is, he thinks everything he does is actually just the bare minimum anybody should do, which is why he doesn't even want to be in this school of "exceptional" kids. In his mind, he's just average, and he has an intense dislike for the idea of "talent," and an immediate distrust for everybody around him because they're associated with "talent." Or something like that. At the same time, he's........incredibly competitive. And he loves competition. From the beginning, I thought of him as a combination between Togami and Ishimaru. But I think...given the way I had him act, I don't think this would come across very often. He just wouldn't stay around anybody long enough to really show his full colors.

His main hang-up is that attributing things to "talent" feels like dismissing his hard work. And he works hard! At the same time, because the others have been labeled as "talented," he ends up looking down on everybody else, who didn't "work hard." His free time events would probably dig into that and get him re-thinking his biases. From the beginning, i did think that he'd end up hanging out with Tsubame a lot because of how she would just go with his flow. And, unlike Matsui, instead of getting frustrated, he'd go all in on a debate and absolutely relish the perceived challenge. They'd probably just be in a perpetual state of debating, having to put a pause on it to do other things. I think that would be funny.

Noboru Sato

The amnesiac. No matter what, his relationship status with everybody would be "zero." I'm not sure if I really had considered the full implications of having him be an anterograde amnesiac. I probably hadn't put in the full research I should have back then either. However, thinking on it now, the idea is just. kinda hilarious.

He lost a leg after the riots, which means he is in a constant state of "wow, what happened to my leg???" He has to keep refreshing himself on what's going on, and despite recording everything, it's not like he constantly checks his notes or can reread all the pertinent information, so. in all likelihood. for most of the story, he probably isn't fully aware that he's in a death game. His prosthetic leg was made by Yuu, who...apparently never fixed the length, but that might be because Noboru never brought it up.

However, as a historian, I figured that he'd be extremely good at piecing things together all the time. Hopefully this came across during the first trial. In my mind, what made him stand out as a historian was about his ability to make certain leaps of logic in how event A turns into event B, and making sound reasoning as to what people would be thinking or how they would maybe react during the time, given such and such circumstances. However. He truly would have just been going around just. not aware. Which is why Akane would trust him the most. He just doesn't have the capability of keeping the idea of murder in his head. Or even that there's a reason to murder anybody in the first place. I have absolutely no idea what his free time events would even be. The only reason he wouldn't treat each meeting as the first time is because he would be consulting his notes of every previous meeting.

Yukimaru Akane

The only one who remembers everything that happened. She really. Has a time of it. Having spent years with classmates and then they just start KILLING EACH OTHER. God. How wild.

I'm sorry, I don't have much else to say about her. I just keep thinking about how her perspective is so insane. Wow.

Seki Yumiko

The mastermind, SHSL luck. I don't think there's much more I can say about her that I hadn't in previous posts. (also, i'm tired.) I think Katashi would understand her the most, though, which would probably horrify him a bit. Which is a fun characterization thought.

#dangan ronpa adventure #okay hiiiii thank you DISTRUST is over now bye #thanks guys #also sorry

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z-cerulean · 2 years ago

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Shin Megami Tensei (1992) (but it's actually the 2001 PS1 version)

So I've played a probably above average amount of Megaten, but despite that I hadn't gone really far back into the series. I think the oldest game in the series I'd played before now was Soul Hackers 1, and even then that was it's 2013 3DS version. So after getting too deep into thinking about it, I was eventually swayed to go back to the start of the series' modern identity.

This is Shin Megami Tensei, the third game in the overall Megami Tensei franchise. The first game, Digital Devil Story: Megami Tensei, was an adaptation of a light novel series released in 1987 by the same name when ATLUS obtained the rights to an adaptation. In 1990, ATLUS used the namesake again for Megami Tensei II, a sequel with a lot of the series' modern aspects such as the post-apocalypic Tokyo setting, rather than following the plot of the second book in the series. For the next generation of consoles, with presumable intent to make a cleaner break from the book license, Shin Megami Tensei was released for the Super Famicom in 1992.

History lesson aside, this is the game from which the series' modern identity sprung forth and personally, I was curious. Coming in from the later games in the series, just how much was different from the series in its modern incarnations?

This will be an overview and my opinion of the game's 2001 PlayStation port, which received a translation patch midway through 2022. There are other versions of the game, which I'll give mention to later on. As far as main differences, the PS1 version renders dungeons in 3D, provides a CD quality version of the soundtrack and adds a couple button macros for accessing the map and such. While I'll try to avoid major spoilers, there may be some details you'd rather avoid if you're invested enough to play this game yourself, so fair warning.

Setting and Plot Overview/Summary

The game kicks off with you being dragged down a dream sequence which, I have to mention, because this game's atmosphere in this early stretch is absolutely phenomenal. It's completely surreal in a not quite describable way, and needs to be witnessed to be described. This dream sequence introduces you to the Law Hero and Chaos Hero, who can be named whatever you want, like your player character, The Hero. Later on in a second dream sequence, you also get introduced to the Heroine, who can also be named. For my run, I was streaming this game for some friends, and we took a Three Houses theme, with the player character Alois partnered with Law Hero Cyril, Chaos Hero Emile (Jertiza) and the Heroine F!Byleth. (yes, the 'F!' part was included, because comedy).

After the dream sequence, your mother wakes you up in Kichijoji, where you go to the shopping mall to get her coffee, see a guy get killed by a demon, take the knife he had and leave to go back to sleep. Average day. Also, a dude named Stephen e-mailed out a demon summoning program, which you download because viruses and malware just aren't considerations, I guess.

This culminates in meeting the Law Hero in a hospital you get kidnapped to, the Chaos Hero as he gets bullied in the shopping centre after breaking out of the hospital, and then find out a demon ate your mom. Average day.

The game then leads into you and your intrepid band of protagonists meeting with the Heroine, then speaking to the American military led by Ambassador Thorman (Gee, I wonder who he is) and General Gotou, in charge of the Japanese national army. This culminates in Thor(man) nuking Tokyo, sending you and the Law and Chaos Heroes to the afterlife, and then returning in a post-apocalypic Tokyo 30 years after the ICBMs fell.

The outcome of the game differs depending on your actions, whether you support the Messianic Church, of whom praying for the return of God, the Gaian Church, who praise the Demon Lord Lucifer, or forge a third, neutral path against both of them.

Characters

Character development in this game, regrettably, is very much an afterthought. The Heroine, while a leader of the neutral factions in the early stretches of the game, barely gets anything to do in the later parts besides be a non-demon party member. The other two do get scenes relevant to their characterisation, but they're not given any sort of weight whatsoever and it really means these scenes kinda fall flat.

Plus side, the character designs are pretty cool, and the PS1 version's redone art is pretty great to look at.

Gameplay - Dungeons

The dungeon crawler series, surprisingly, has dungeons. Overall I found these pretty much fine, though I would argue they're kinda lacking compared to the later first person games where the main distinction is what colour of wall you're looking at rather than any particular gimmicks, for the most part. They work by all means, but if you're not super invested in this game I could see someone maybe getting pretty tired of them.

You also fill out a map with each tile you stand on, which is cool, but in the earlier versions there's not enough buttons for it on a controller, apparently, so you have to go through like three menus to bring it up. The PS1 version just makes L2 a macro for bringing up the map, which probably helps my opinion there.

Gameplay - Battles

The battle system is pretty simple this game, enemies have weaknesses, resistances, maybe they null or repel certain attacks, the works, but there's not something like Press Turn backing it up. Overall it does the job. Your MC doesn't get magic access (so magic is a completely useless stat for them, don't invest in it), unlike the other three named characters, and each character will also get a melee weapon and a gun as choices of weapons.

The game has pretty sporadic availability of the other party members, and you can only have three demons summoned at once, until later in the game where you can get another upgrade from Stephen that lets you summon up to four.

There's also the series staple of demon negotiation which is simpler this game, you lead by being friendly or intimidating and then just pick which you think is better of two options to try to win them over. It's pretty up to chance as always, so expect some inconsistency.

Demons this game use Magnetite as a maintenance cost, like most games of this era, where it drains as you walk around with them summoned. I didn't much care for it in Soul Hackers but here I ended up with so much of it it wasn't really a factor by the end for me. Demons this game also don't get EXP or level up, and skill inheritance from the Cathedral of Shadows isn't real yet by this point in the series, so their base kit and stats matter a lot more than other games.

Though, my main complaints with all this are: 1) The game's encounter rate is up the ass. It's not uncommon to end a fight, take two steps, and then you're in another 7 map slap fight. 2) This game is really easy. The game is pretty notorious for Zio skills stunlocking the opponent, and Bufu skills can do the same with freezes. Later in the game you can get charm bullets for guns which, Charm turns your attacks against your own party, and is a pretty useful ailment to give the enemies, especially through just attacking. Once you have permanent access to the Heroine as well, she just has Zio skills, and you have complete control over all the player characters' stat allocations, so her speed is likely a complete non-issues. At the end of the game, I was regularly able to get through things with absolutely no issues, especially compared to something like Nocturne.

I was able to deal with it, but I could see people thinking this is just tedious and monotonous and putting the game down.

Also not quite combat related but I'm not sure where else to put this criticism, revival costs if something/someone does die are like, US health care level, you are going to be grinding cash to afford that and it ultra sucks if it's the MC because then you're locked out of demon summons and negotiation because the others don't have access to the COMP apparently.

Gameplay - Alignment

Naturally, the series' traditional Law and Chaos alignments come into play. In terms of gameplay, this mostly factors into your attitude going into certain tasks, usually who you choose to help out. For instance, saying you'll help Thorman deal with Gotou skews you towards Law, and certain questions throughout the game can skew you one way or another. Depending on how far you are down Law or Chaos, this can also affect certain interactions later, where more neutral aligned players will be given the choice to help out either side, strongly Law players might be obligated to the Messianic faction and refused time of day by the Gaians, and vice versa. Past a point, whichever alignment you are locks in and you're obligated to that ending of the game.

This is pretty much fine, it's likely that strong law/chaos players are probably aiming those endings anyway, though if you make one misstep it would suck to be too far down another route.

This game does also give you other ways to adjust a mismatched alignment, through a late-game minigame and healing at opposite alignment church for a marked up service fee. Not many other games do this, and it's nice to have the option, though you could argue it takes weight away from your decisions.

Soundtrack

This game's soundtrack is pretty solid overall, there's some tracks I could do without like the final dungeon theme, which is just a 10 second loop, but the battle theme and Castle of the Four Gods is pretty solid. The PS1 version redid the soundtrack, and I'm pretty mixed on tracks I prefer more in one version or the other, like I think the SFC battle theme is better, but the PS1 Castle of the Four Gods is above the SFC one.

Overall

While I can't say I didn't enjoy the game, it's an increasingly hard sell. If you're going to play any part of it, I recommend trying out the pre-ICBM section at the very least and seeing if it sticks with you, also because I do find the game's tone and atmosphere there completely unlike anything else I've seen, even within later series entries. Past that though, is going to depend on your tolerance for older games like this and some monotony. One of my friends I streamed this with mostly found it an uneventful thing to spectate and got tired of looking at doors in dungeons. My main pitch would just be for if you're already pretty deep into SMT and want to see how it started out, anyone getting into the series with this game probably wouldn't have an overly great impression.

If I was throwing this game on a tier list, I think it's something like a high C or low B. I definitely enjoyed it's atmosphere a bit more than a lot of the other games in the series, and I found it ok enough to play, it's definitely an acquired taste and I would hesitate to put it above anything more modern in the series (though fortunately I think it has aged a bit more gracefully than some other games from this era).

also didn't mention before now but I really like the Hero's design, the cobbled together outfit with the wired in COMP really does it for me.

Other Versions

As promised, besides the SFC original and the PS1 version I played, there's a few other ports of this game.

The game got a Sega CD port, which notably redid a lot of the game's art and added some voice acting, and is one of the more interesting iterations of the game for it. The PC Engine port of the game did similarly, though without the art adaptations.

The more relevant ports these days, however, is the Game Boy Advance port.

The GBA version made a few game balance changes to my knowledge, and added a few extra bits of content. The downside, however, is a soundtrack conversion that makes the GBA versions of Final Fantasy soundtracks seem masterful. This version does have a patch, anyway, so it's an option.

Though that would be because, in 2014, ATLUS officially localised this game... on the iOS store exclusively.

This version is effectively the GBA version, with a reduced encounter rate, with the PS1 version's soundtrack. This would be an ideal way to play the game... if it was still available, instead of updating it for modern iOS systems or porting it to Android or an actual system that doesn't have screen buttons to suffer through, ATLUS chose to delist the game. This is effectively lost media at this point, so hopefully ATLUS decide to port this to Steam or something at some point.

Thanks and some other stuff

Anyway, thanks for reading my hopefully comprehensible summary and review of SMT1. I have been meaning to do one of these for Engage, but I'm doing a second run with the DLC currently so I'll do it after I'm done with that most likely.

See you around.

#shin megami tensei #megami tensei #playstation #atlusfaithful #atlus

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multitrackdrifting · 2 years ago

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To be fair in wow its more of a two faction struggle, both populated by players, with "real" impacts and consequences of "canon battles" played out by players while ff14 only more recently got pvp and everyone is still "on the good side".

And later in wow you do get to be "the lead champion of (insert faction)". Which is funny because there are thousands of "lead champions".

I guess the adversarial conflict aspect of the story would make it hard to make one player character the sole tide-turner in that regard, like you're in the midst of a raid and there's like a 30 foot tall important npc (for visibility I assume) saying some cool shit but you're just some person (which isn't necessarily bad, I like a lot of the wow writing for the old xpacs).

Pvp is a wash in FF14, it's so far gone that it's more of a niche activity that people do for clothing pieces more than an actually competitive mode because of the lack of good SBMM. Even battlegrounds from the older xpacs of wow clears anything FF14 has by far

It's just funny to watch the big figures duke it out, I know your mc doesn't say anything in FF14 either, but I guess the perspective of the story is much more personal so it's easier to tug on the heart strings so it's a bit of an unequal comparison. That said I really liked wow's story (somewhat) until after Legion, it may sound ignorant but it reads like a reddit theory in shadowlands

#asks

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supercantaloupe · 4 years ago

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okay yeah actually, i’ll bite. i’ve got some of my own thoughts about the unsleeping city and cultural representation and i’m gonna make a post about them now, i guess. i’ll put it under a cut though because this post is gonna be long.

i wanna start by saying i love dimension 20 and i really really enjoy the unsleeping city. i look forward to watching new episodes every week, and getting hooked on d20 as a whole last summer really helped pull me out of a pandemic depression, and i’m grateful to have this cool show to be excited about and interested in and to have met so many cool people to talk about it with.

that being said, however, i think there is a risk run in representing any group of people/their culture when you have the kind of setting that tuc has. by which i mean, tuc is set in a real world with real people and real human cultures in it. unlike fantasy high or a crown of candy where everything is made up (even if rooted in real-world cultures), tuc is explicitly rooted in reality, and all of its diversity -- both the ups and downs that go with it. and especially set in new york of all places, one of the most densely, diversely populated cities on earth. the cast is 7 people; it’s great that those 7 people come from a variety of backgrounds and identities and all bring their own unique perspectives to the table, and it’s great that those people and the entire crew are generally conscious of themselves and desire to tell stories/represent perspectives ethically. but you simply cannot authentically represent every culture or every perspective in the world (or even just in a city) when your cast is 7 people. it’s an impossible task. this is inherent to the setting, and acknowledged by the cast, and by brennan especially, who has been on record saying how one of the exciting aspects of doing a campaign set in nyc is its diversity, the fact that no two new yorkers have the same perspective of new york. i think that’s a good thing -- but it does have its challenges too, clearly.

i’m not going to go into detail on the question of whether or not tuc’s presentation of asian and asian american culture is appropriative/offensive or not. first of all, i don’t feel like it’s 100% fair to judge the show completely yet, since it’s a prerecorded season and currently airing midseason, so i don’t yet know how things wrap up. secondly, i’m not asian or asian american. i can have my own opinions on that content in the show, but i think it’s worth more to hear actual asian and asian american voices on this specific aspect of the show. having an asian american cast member doesn’t automatically absolve the show of any criticisms with regard to asian american cultural representation/appropriation, whether those criticisms are made by dozens of viewers or only a handful of them. regardless, i don’t think it’s my place as someone who is not asian to speak with any authority on that issue, and i know for a fact that there are asian american viewers sharing their own opinions. their thoughts in this instance hold more water than mine, i think.

what i will comment on in more depth, though, is a personal frustration with tuc. i’m jewish; i’ve never really been shy about that fact on my page here. i’m not from new york, but i visit a few times a year (or i did before covid anyway, lol), and i have some family from nyc. nyc, to me, is a jewish city. and for good reason, since it’s home to one of the largest jewish populations of the country, and even the world, and aspects of jewish culture (including culinary, like bagels and pastrami, and linguistic, like the common use of yiddish words and phrases in english colloquial speech) are prevalent and celebrated among jews and goyim alike. when i think of nyc, i think of a jewish city; that’s not everybody’s new york, but that’s my new york, and thats plenty of other people’s new york too. so i do find myself slightly disappointed or frustrated in tuc for its, in my opinion, rather stark lack of jewish representation.

now, i’m not saying that one of the PCs should have been jewish, full stop. i love to headcanon iga as jewish even though canon does not support that interpretation, and i’m fine with that. she’s not my character. it’s possible that simply no one thought of playing a jewish character, i dunno. but also, and i can’t be sure about this, i’m willing to bet that none of the players really wanted to play a jewish character because they didn’t want to play a character of a marginalized culture they dont belong to in the interest of avoiding stereotyping or offensive representation/cultural appropriation. (i don’t know if any of the cast members are jewish, but i’m assuming not.) and the concern there is certainly appreciated; there’s not a ton of mainstream jewish rep out there, and often what we get is either “unlikeable overly conservative hassidic jew” or “jokes about their bar mitzvah/one-off joke about hanukkah and then their jewishness is never mentioned ever again,” which sucks. it would be really cool to see some more good casual jewish rep in a well-rounded, three-dimensional character in the main cast of a show! even if there are a couple of stumbles along the way -- nobody is perfect and no two jews have the same level of knowledge, dedication, and adherence to their culture.

but at the same time, i look at characters like iga and i really do long for a jewish character to be there. siobhan isn’t polish, yet she’s playing a characters whose identity as a polish immigrant to new york is very central to her story and arc. and part of me wonders why we can’t have the same for a jewish character. if not a PC, then why not an NPC? again, i’m jewish, and i am not native, but in my opinion i think the inclusion of jj is wonderful -- i think there are even fewer native main characters in mainstream media than there are jewish ones, and it’s great to see a native character who is both in touch with their culture as well as not being defined solely by their native-ness. to what extent does it count as ‘appropriative’ because brennan is a white dude? i dunno, but i’m like 99% sure they talked to sensitivity consultants to make sure the representation was as ethical as they could get it, and anyway, i can’t personally see and glaring missteps so far. but again, i’m not native, and if there are native viewers with their own opinions on jj, i’d be really interested in hearing them.

but getting back to the relative lack of jewish representation. it just...disappoints me that jewishness in new york is hardly ever even really mentioned? again, i know we’re only just over halfway through season 2, but also, we had a whole first season too. and it’s definitely not all bad. for example: willy! gd, i love willy so much. him being a golem of williamsburg makes me really really happy -- a jewish mythological creature animated from clay/mud (in this case bricks) to protect a jewish community (like that of williamsburg, a center for many of nyc’s jews) from threat. golem have so often been taken out of their original context and turned into evil monsters in fantasy settings, especially including dnd. (even within other seasons of d20! crush in fh being referred to as a “pavement golem” always rubbed me the wrong way, and i had hoped they’d learned better after tuc but in acoc they refer to another monster as a “corn golem” which just disappointed me all over again.) so the fact that tuc gets golems right makes my jewish heart very happy.

and yet...he doesn’t show up that much? sure, in s1, he’s very helpful when he does, but in s2 so far he shows up once and really does not say or do much of anything. he speaks with a lot more yiddish-influenced language than other characters, but if you didn’t know those words were specifically yiddish/jewish, you might not be able to otherwise clock the fact that willy is jewish. and while willy is a jewish mythological creature who is jewish in canon, he isn’t human. there are no other direct references to judaism, jewish characters, or jewish culture in the unsleeping city beyond him.

there are, in fact, two other canon jewish characters in tuc. but...here’s where i feel the most frustration, i think. the two canon jewish humans in tuc are stephen sondheim and robert moses. both of whom are real actual people, so it’s not like we can just pick and choose what their cultural backgrounds are. as much as i love stephen sondheim, i think there are inherent issues with including real world people as characters in a fictional setting, especially if they are from living/recent memory (sondheim is literally still alive), but anyway, sondheim and moses are both actual jewish people. from watching tuc alone you probably would not be able to guess that sondheim is jewish -- nothing from his character except name suggests it, and i wouldn’t even fault you for not thinking ‘sondheim’ is a jewish-sounding surname (and i dislike the idea/attitude/belief that you can tell who is or isn’t jewish by the sound of their name). and yeah, i’m not going to sit here and be like “brennan should have made sondheim more visibly jewish in canon!” because, like, he’s a real human being and it’s fucking weird to portray him in a way that isn’t as close to how he publicly presents himself, which is not in fact very identifiably jewish? i don’t know, this is what i mean by it’s inherently weird and arguably problematic to portray real living people as characters in a fictional setting, but i digress. sondheim’s jewish, even if you wouldn’t know it; not exactly a representation win.

and then there’s bob moses. you might be able to guess that he’s jewish from canon, actually. there’s the name, of course. but more insidious to me are the specifics of his villainy. greedy and powerhungry, a moneyman, a lich whose power is stored in a phylactery...it does kind of all add up to a Yikes from me. (in the stock market fight there’s a one-off line asking if he has green skin; it’s never really directly acknowledged or answered, but it made me really uncomfortable to hear at first and it’s stuck with me since viewing for the first time.) the issue for me here is that the most obviously jewish human character is the season’s bbeg, and his villainy is rooted in very antisemitic tropes and stereotypes.

i know this isn’t all brennan’s fault -- robert moses was a real ass person and he was in fact jewish, a powerhungry and greedy moneyman, a big giant racist asshole, etc. i’m not saying that jewish characters can’t be evil, and i’m not saying brennan should have tried to be like “this is my NPC robert christian he’s just like bob moses but instead he’s a goy so it’s okay” because...that would be fuckin weird bro. and bob moses was��a real person who was jewish and really did do some heinous shit with his municipal power. i’m not necessarily saying brennan should have picked/created a different character to be the villain. i’m not even saying that he shouldn’t have made bob moses a lich (although, again, it doesn’t 100% sit right with me). but my point here is that bob moses is one of a grand total of three canon jewish characters in tuc, of which only two humans, of whom he is the one you’d most easily guess would be jewish and is the most influenced by antisemitic stereotypes/tropes. had there been more jewish representation in the show at all, even just some neutral jewish NPCs, this would not be as much of a problem as it is to me. but halfway through season 2, so far, this is literally all we get. and that bums me out.

listen, i really like tuc. i love d20. but the fact that it is set in a real world place with real world people does inherently raise challenges when it comes to ethical cultural representation. especially when the medium of the show is a game whose creatures, lore, and mechanics have been historically rooted in some questionable racial/cultural views. and dnd is making progress to correct some of those misguided views of older sourcebooks by updating them to more equitably reflect real world racial/cultural sensitivities; that’s a good thing! but these seasons, of course, were recorded before that. the game itself has some questionable cultural stuff baked into it, and that is (almost necessarily) going to be brought to the table in a campaign set in a real-world place filled with real-world people of diverse real-world cultures. the cast can have sensitivity consultants and empathy and the best intentions in the world, and they’ll still fuck up from time to time, that’s okay. your mileage may vary on whether or not it’s still worth sticking around with the show (or the fandom) through that. for me, it does not yet outweigh all the things i like about the show, and i’m gonna continue watching it. but it’s still very worth acknowledging that the cast is 7 people who cannot possibly hope to authentically or gracefully represent every culture in nyc. it’s an unfortunate limitation of the medium. yet it’s also still worthwhile to acknowledge and discuss the cultural representation as it is in the show -- both the goods and the bads, the ethically solid and the questionably appropriative -- and even to hold the creators accountable. (decently, though. i’m definitely not advocating anybody cyberbully brennan on twitter or whatever.) the show and its representation is far from perfect, but i also don’t think it ever could be. still, though, it could always be better, and there’s a worthwhile discussion to be had in the wheres, hows, and whys of that.

#sasha reviews #sasha speaks #the unsleeping city #unsleeping city #long post #dimension 20 #gd i stayed up way too late to write this #tuc #the unsleeping city chapter 2 #the unsleeping city 2 #tuc2 #antisemitism

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bloody-hearts-lane · 4 years ago

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How the Slashers Would: Play Among Us

sorry it has taken me approximately a million years to start writing again! i hope the stuff i have in store might make up for it. but to kick it off, something a little bit goofy. c:

Amanda Young

rating: 9/10, upsettingly good.

she probably mains red or black.

amanda is a menace in this game. shes the kind of player that, no matter how good you or anyone else is, you can NEVER tell if she's the imposter or not.

she's just so good at hiding it! half the time, she absolutely carries her imposter team, and you never even know.

she always kills you last, though, if she has to kill you at all. so thats nice, i guess–

she really enjoys setting up games so every aspect can be exactly the way she wants it. she also prefers playing in one imposter games, because she thinks its more challenging that way.

Billy Loomis

rating: 8/10, so..... suspicious.

for SURE mains black.

he's the kind of player who can pull of the weirdest, most confusing series of kills. probably shockingly good at setting up and executing stack kills. how?? how does he do it so smoothly????

he's usually pretty okay at hiding that he's the imposter.

but he will loudly complain if he doesn't get imposter often enough for his liking. he will also get personally offended if you (or stu, or both) get imposter a lot in one game, and he doesn't.

when you get a round where the imposters are really bad, no matter what the reason could be, he critiques the hell out of them and complains about how they are no fun to play with.

he loves when the two of you are an imposter team. even better, on bigger maps, he loves when you, him, and stu are all imposters. it happens rarely, but its his favorite thing.

you know he's considering killing you when he gets weirdly quiet in the middle of a round. just stay away from the vents, you might be fine.

Stu Macher

rating: 7/10, very fun, very chaotic.

never has a main color. switches it up every round. he also likes to wear the pumpkin on his head, or the fried egg.

stu is a good talker, so a lot of the time, he manages to talk his way out of being voted off. you've even seen him manage to talk his way out of being voted off when someone saw him kill another player in front of them.

he's considerably more chaotic than billy, so his kills aren't as smooth, but he has an unnatural knack for knowing when people are alone and taking them out.

he brings a lot of energy to games.

even when you play with him, you make it your number one goal to never be alone with him in a room, just in case.

he assures you that he would never kill you!! (spoiler alert, he won't, until he cant get anyone else alone and he asks you to come watch him do a visual task, only to kill you and win the game. how rude, stu.)

Bo Sinclair

rating: 3/10, girl..... calm down.

feels like a dark blue main.

have you ever seen someone rage quit among us? you're about to!

has a bad habit of getting aggressive in chat, so people tend to vote him pretty quickly even if he isn't imposter.

he fully exits the game the second his poor little character gets shot into space, and then you get to hear about how stupid everyone is while he watches you play over your shoulder.

to be fair, he was usually correct about who the imposter was, so he is a LITTLE justified about being angry, but. homeboy has some Anger Issues and the rage is very real.

as the imposter, he's usually pretty good at not getting caught.... until someone asks what he's been doing or where he was, and he gets a little too defensive.

you can see it coming from a mile away, and if you don't want to hear about him losing for the next three hours, feel free to tell everyone he's been with you the whole time.

Brahms Heelshire

rating: 5/10, stop hiding!!!

mains dark green or dark blue.

dude. get out of the vents.

everytime he kills someone, he will immediately hide in the vents until someone reports the body and the next round starts.

the only time he breaks this pattern is if someone is standing directly over or in front of the vent, at which point he pops out to kill them and then pops right back in.

i mean it works??? i guess??? but come ON–

he has never killed you when he was the imposter, and he gets mopey if you kill him, so i advise against it.

whenever he isn't imposter, he follows you around for like 90% of the game, just watching you complete all your tasks before he even starts his. and he expects you to stay with him while he does his!

Carrie White

rating: 6/10 so pure. so good.

genuinely dislikes being the imposter. she isn't good at lying to people, so she always gets herself caught, and she usually ends up lowkey freaking out and either self reporting the body or not running away fast enough and getting caught.

mostly, when she's imposter, she will close doors and sabatoge things in the hopes that her partner will do the rest.

she usually mains white, and either has the little flower on her head or the the little sprout. gives off very sweet vibes.

as a crewmate, she is very dutiful in getting her tasks done. she always vouches for people, especially you, and will always volunteer to watch someone do a visual task. (sometimes you go with her just to make sure this doesn't backfire on her...... no murdering carrie on your watch).

she talks to everyone in chat too, both in the lobby, and in deadchat. she makes friends everywhere!

she may not be the best at the game, but she is sO fun to play with. just a good wholesome time.

Jason Vorhees

rating: 2/10....... he tried.

do NOT let him set up the game, he will make the walking speeds so slow.

but, okay, first of all, how did you get him to play??? how did you convince him to agree to this??? are we sure he knows whats going on-

i suppose it doesn't matter, he would probably do anything you asked him to do anyway, and if he thinks you would really have fun playing with him, then heaven forbid he say no!

either way, he is dead. silent. for the whole game. he doesn't even type in chat, except for the very occasional 'yes' or 'no.'

he would probably be the person who just said 'yes' if someone asked if he was the imposter.

he also doesn't have a main color, but mostly because he either doesn't know HOW to change it, or doesn't care enough to do it. if you ask him/do if for him, though, he would like either dark green or brown. (you could even give it the cute little hockey mask!)

The Lost Boys (+Star)

rating: 4/10, children please.

this is a group thing. if you convince one of them to play, then they're ALL playing. hell, you might even manage to convince Star to play.

paul is the single most untrustworthy player you have ever seen. even when he ISNT the imposter, his absolute buckwild energy just makes him seem so suspicious. he sabotages everything, and he probably seeks you out just to kill you first.

marko is probably a yellow main, and he always wears the weirdest shit available. he gives me the vibes of someone who would probably get lost a lot on the bigger maps or be the person who pretends he's lost so he has an alibi

dwayne is the one you have to watch out for. he's so good at faking you out, you never know if he's the imposter until he stabs you in the back. he won't even feel bad about it.

sidenote, dwayne lets laddie co-pilot when he plays. laddie makes the decisions, so if someone dies, it was probably not dwaynes choice. these are the rounds where you probably won't die right away.

star is a very casual player, super noncommittal. she is both good to have on your team, and awful, because she will absolutely turn on you and vote you out to save herself as a last resort. shes the only one who won't immediately seek you out to kill you.

when all of them are crewmates, its a hot mess. no one can communicate with them spamming chat, paul never does his tasks, dwayne camps on cams, and marko ABUSES the emergency call button.

The Man

rating: 8/10, actually really good???

he mains red, with the classic hockey mask.

he gets like.... a little too into planning shit. its just a game, its not that deep, pls sir–

but that makes him a very capable imposter, and hes soo good at keeping up the facade and talking with you like nothing is wrong, and before you know it, he's killed three people in the first round.

its really a toss up on whether or not he'll kill you at all in the game. if he does, he saves you til last.

there are times where he gets a little too heated if someone catches him or his teammate turns on him, and he will be fuming until the game ends and he gets to rant into chat. thats usually when you need to step in–

other than that, he's pretty chill about the whole thing. he likes to experiment with kills, like stack kills and taking advantage of glitches or hiding spots.

hes also a MASTER of sabatoge. he's so good at using those tools.

Vincent Sinclair

rating: 8/10, friendship > everything else.

likes to main white, which is interesting, because he is NOT the typical white main.

as an imposter, he's actually pretty good.

he seems like the kind of person to lead you away from everyone, and vent in front of you to let you know hes an imposter, and then ruthlessly kill everyone except for you.

most of the time he will just follow you around to make sure no one else kills you while you do your tasks.

a lot more talkative in chat than you might think, too.

catch him highkey shit talking people with you

hes also a good teammate to have as a crewmember; he always remembers where everyone was, who he passed, who was in a room with who, etc.

just very cool to play with in general.

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britesparc · 3 years ago

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Weekend Top Ten #497

Top Ten PC Games No One Talks About Anymore

Blimey, Quake is rather good, isn’t it? Have you heard about it? I really hope so, because it’s only twenty-five years old. I mean, Jesus. What’s up with that? Quake is meant to be the future. It’s full of true-3D polygonal texture-mapping and real-time dynamic light-sourcing. Fancy it being a quarter of a century old. That’s ridiculous. “Old” is for things like, I dunno, Space Invaders or The Godfather or I Wanna Hold Your Hand. Stuff that our parents heard about before we were born. It’s not – it’s absolutely not – used to describe something that people bought 3D accelerator cards for. It’s not used to describe a game that popularised online gaming.

But old it is, getting silver anniversary cards and everything. No longer the angry, hungry young tiger, devouring its ancestors and growling at upstart rivals like Duke Nukem 3D – sure, you’ve got non-linear levels, interactive scenery, and toilet humour, but we’ve got grenades that bounce with real physics – Quake is now an aged beast of the forest, resplendent, battle-scarred, weary with gravitas. Quake is the game that shaped the now, but it does not represent the future anymore. In fact, arguably its greatest rival – Unreal – is the game with the lasting, living legacy, its progeny building the next generation of gaming with one of the most popular and impressive engines around, the framework underpinning everything from Gears to Jedi to Fortnite. Quake blew us all away, but arguably it ceded the conflict, secure in its status as one of the most important and influential games of all time. Quake II got plaudits for actually having a proper story and an engrossing single-player campaign (and coloured lighting!), and its immediate descendants such as Half-Life changed the nature of what FPS games could do, but in a funny way it feels like Quake has long since retired. A sleeping titan. It got old.

So it’s great that they rereleased it on modern systems! The version of Quake released last month is basically the game I remember, but tarted up a little around the edges, with texture filtering and dynamic shadows and other stuff that I couldn’t manage on my Pentium 75 back in the day. It plays great – it’s slick as anything, and you go tearing round the levels like a Ferrari with a nail gun, blasting dudes and ducking back around a corner before you get hit with a pineapple in the face. It’s the first game I’ve played in a long, long time that evokes the feel of classic PC first-person shooters of that era – which, y’know, kinda makes sense as it is a first-person shooter of that era. But that style of fast-paced run-and-gun, circle-strafing gameplay has gone out of fashion now, with FPS games usually favouring slow, methodical, tactical combat, or larger-scale open-world warfare usually involving vehicles. Whether it’s a straight-up no-frills blaster like Quake, or a game that takes you on more of a linear, narrative journey, like Quake II, or even just a multiplayer-focused arena shooter, like Quake III Arena, it does feel like a dying artform, like a style of gameplay that could do with a resurgence (and, to be fair, there are games on the horizon that look like they’re harking back to the era, so that’s cool).

But it’s not just first-person shooters like Quake that I feel have slipped from gaming’s shared consciousness. Maybe it’s my age (it’s definitely my age) but there seems to be quite a lot of games that were a big deal twenty or so years ago that are utterly forgotten now, whereas some – Doom, Duke Nukem, Command & Conquer, Age of Empires – are often namechecked or rebooted (even before the full-on 2016 reboot, Doom must have been one of the most re-released games of the last thirty years). But there are lots of others where sometimes I feel like I’m the only one that remembers it. And that’s where this list comes in: inspired by the excellent re-release of the Quake franchise, here are some other great PC games of that general era that I feel still need shouting about, even if I’m the only one doing the shouting. Maybe they don’t all need a full-on remaster or whatever, but it’d still be nice if they got a bit of modern gaming love.

No One Lives Forever (2000): coming at a time when most FPS games were still Doom-style blasters with little in the way of real plot, NOLF was different: stylish and funny, genuinely well-written (as in the dialogue), with interesting objective-based missions and a cool female protagonist. It skirted similar ground to Bond and the then-white-hot Austin Powers franchise. Two games were made and then, as far as I’m aware, it evaporated into a mess of tangled rights, hence no sequels or remakes. A shame, because it was great.

MDK (1997): the next game from the people who made the multimedia phenomenon that was Earthworm Jim, MDK was a really cool slice of sci-fi style, all sleek level design and intriguing features. It had a supremely bonkers plot which bled through into a game with a sense of humour, but mostly it was the run-and-gun gameplay and innovative use of a scoped weapon – possibly (don’t quote me on this) the first sniper rifle in a videogame. An even wackier sequel followed, but despite its cult status, that was it.

Star Trek: The Next Generation – Klingon Honor Guard (1998): it’s probably fair to say that Star Trek has not had as many great videogames as Star Wars, perhaps because Trek’s historically straightlaced earnestness just didn’t translate as well as bashing someone up the chops with a laser sword. Honor Guard shook things up by casting you as a Klingon, showering levels with pink blood and going Full Worf. It was the first game to licence the Unreal engine, and had a cool level where you walked along the outside of a ship like in First Contact. Also: shout out to the Voyager game, Elite Force (2000), which was another really good FPS set in the world of Trek, with intriguing gameplay wrinkles as you fought the Borg. It also let you wander round the titular starship between levels. Trek deserves more quality action games like these.

Earth 2150 (2000): the nineties on PC really saw RTS games come down to those who liked Command & Conquer or those who liked Warcraft, but as the decade drew to a close other titles chased the wargame crown (including Total Annihilation, which would have made this list, except I feel like the Supreme Commander franchise is a sequel in all but name). 2150 was notable for its Starcraft-like mix of three factions with contrasting play styles, and its use of 3D graphics and the ability to design and build weapons of war that could lay waste to armies and bases with spectacular results. I think the genre has ossified into something more hardcore, and this was probably an inflex point where idiots like me could still get a handle on things.

Midtown Madness (1999): Microsoft has a history of building up great racing franchises and then abandoning them, but their “Madness” line of games in the late nineties/early noughties was terrific and much-missed. Back when tooling round actual 3D cities was still new and exciting, this was a no-holds-barred arcade racer, with some gorgeous shiny chrome effects on the cars, and very nippy handling. It was great fun smashing up VW Beetles and the like. It was surpassed, I guess, by Project Gotham on the Xbox, and sadly the whole franchise was then forgotten, despite the ascendent Forza franchise mostly shunning city driving.

Commandos: Behind Enemy Lines (1998): part tactical war game, part puzzler, Commandos was famous for its gorgeously intricate graphics and its difficulty – I mean, it was way too hard for me. But its beautiful top-down design and its slow, methodical gameplay was compelling, as you evaded Nazis and solved missions with a team of unique units with special skills. Sequels followed, and western spin-off Desperados, but there’s not been a true follow-up for quite some time, despite promises; and few games have echoed its style or look.

The Pandora Directive (1996): okay, so really this is just a placeholder for an entire subgenre of game that appears to have been forgotten: interactive movies. I know, there are flirtations with this from time to time; and many of these games featured obtuse puzzles and relatively little gameplay strung between FMV scenes. Pandora was great though; a first-person 3D game with loads of old-school adventure aspects, as well as FMV, it was a noir-tinged detective story but set in the future. The Tex Murphy series (of which this was the fourth instalment) has had sequels – the most recent one was sadly cancelled only this year – but many other games of a similar ilk, such as Phantasmagoria and even Wing Commander – have fallen by the wayside. With in-engine graphics now allowing the fluidity and expression of cinematic renders of old, shooting movie inserts doesn’t seem like it’s worthwhile; but I still always loved a point-and-click game that featured digitised actors milling about. Toonstruck, anyone?

Marathon (1994): before Halo there was… Marathon! Back when I used to lug my Pentium round my mate’s house so we could play different games on different machines side-by-side, he’d bang on about this Mac-first series of games, like Doom but better, with an intricate plot and complex levels. And y’know what? He was actually onto something. There’s a style and an earnestness to the Marathon franchise, along with many concepts that would be refined in Halo years later. With Bungie now seemingly committed to Destiny, and Halo in Microsoft’s hands, I’m not sure what could possibly become of this, their forgotten FPS forebear, especially as it shares so much DNA with its offspring.

Outlaws (1997): LucasArts are famous for two things, really: their Star Wars games and their adventures. But they made loads of other stuff too – including this intriguing Western shoot-em-up. Back when Western games were rarer than Western movies (which were rare at the time), this quirky and difficult cowboy-em-up saw you rounding up outlaws in typical oater locations such as saloons, trains, and mines. It had great music and a really intriguing set of weapons, including (don’t quote me on this) the first sniper rifle in a game. Sadly Outlaws’ success could be described as “cult” and it never got a proper sequel. and, weirdly, despite the success of Red Dead Redemption, we’ve never had a bit Western-themed FPS again. Which is really odd.

Soldier of Fortune (2000): I pondered whether to include this one, as if I’m honest I’m not sure I want this licence brought back. But I can’t deny the game was a huge deal and has seemingly been forgotten. A relatively gritty and realistic combat game with a huge variety of excellent real-world weaponry, its big hook was its incredibly detailed damage modelling, that could see you blowing limbs off enemies, or splitting open heads, or disembowelling them. Whilst its OTT violence made headlines, the granularity of its systems meant you could be more tactical, shooting weapons out of hands. But really its biggest controversy should be its association with a big old gun magazine.

There are many, many other games that nearly made the list - I almost had a Top Ten of just FPS games, for instance. Little Big Adventure was here, till a sequel was announced the other day. Hexen and Heretic I think still have a place in FPS history. Toonstruck, although without a sequel, was only really a cult hit at the time, and I feel the people who’d love it already know about it. I do tend to overthink these things, y’know.

So maybe not all of these could make a comeback, but all the same I don’t think they should be forgotten, and it does make we wonder what games will fall by the wayside twenty or more years from now. That game about the big green space marine dude in a mask – what was that called again…?

#top ten #games #pc games #fps #shooter #strategy #1990s #2000s

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creacherkeeper · 3 years ago

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How is the cowboi doing? :) I’d love to hear about some of their recent adventures.

OH WELL IT'S ME + ALSO MY DICE HATE(/love) ME SO YOU KNOW THEYRE GETTING WHUMPED CONSTANTLY LMAO

there have certainly been some Events Unfolding so those are under the cut, casey since youre in our campaign now NO PEEKING

fair warning this is .... long ..... you have asked me to talk about my dnd character and you simply CANNOT stop the floodwaters now. enter at your own risk

okay so basically the first arc of the campaign kind of kicked off with them getting a vision from their goddess (the grain goddess/goddess of agriculture) saying that she was trapped in a fey gate and that they needed to come rescue her

so erley immediately Rallied The Posse and set off to do that. they NUMEROUS times tried to pray to her, commune with her, basically just get ANY sort of communication or guidance from her, but the dice like to tell their story so i literally never got above an 11 (paladin with only +2 to religion my beloved) and they never heard from her, which was making them. pretty nervous. when it seemed like everyone else was able to talk to their gods just fine

well we eventually figured out that there was a huge gathering of fey in the woods (me: this might be too big for us to fight. what if its like 30 fey? / my dm, glancing at his notes where he has 2000 fey written down: (: ) and basically the fey like. had captured and were trying to kill what was left of the pantheon so they could bring back gaia as the One True God

we found all this out because it turned out several members of the party had been lying about how much they knew of the fey and had personal connections to the fey they'd kept hidden. and erley, who is ALSO HIDING A LOT from the party like. immediately went on the offense and was just generally very unhappy about this

there had been this fey merchant who kept popping up wherever we were trying to sell us magic weapons that seemed tied to us specifically. erley was always VERY suspicious of her and did everything in their power to stop the others from buying her weapons (which we literally had to buy with -5 to a skill point, not money, v sus) to mixed results. but basically when we got to the fey gathering (we called it gaiapalooza) erley rolled a 1 on their survival check to get through the magic field and like. got teleported to her. and they really wanted information from her so they basically were like LEORA I DONT KNOW WHO TO TRUST I THINK MY PARTY HAS BEEN LYING TO ME, CAN YOU TELL ME ANYTHING ABOUT THEM CAN YOU SEE US WHEN YOURE NOT THERE? and basically pretended to need a therapy session in order to milk her for information lmao. she also seemed like. REALLY interested in erley and i was also very nervous about that

and i was RIGHT to be suspicious of her because we found out she WAS ACTUALLY THE BIG BAD and we had to fight her in the arc finale. and several of our party members had rl stuff and were not there, and in game our druid was away casting an 8 hour long spell to try and stop the palooza ceremony, so our party was SUPER nerfed and also as soon as erley realized it WAS actually leora who was behind all of it and she WAS trying to hurt them with those weapons (the weapons were tethers to the gods to be able to kill them basically), they got .... a little angry

and my party found out after irl a year of playing these characters that erley's first level is barbarian :))

so erley raged and did frankly a staggering amount of damage in this fight, and also only stayed up because of rage because they took a LOT of hits. but also. they dont rage FOR A REASON so it sort of took them over and when leora dropped, one of the other pcs ran over to stabilize her as she was making death saves and erley :) maybe :) drove a spear through her heart and killed her :)

and her body immediately just like. overgrew with plants and vines and flowers and basically wrapped the spear in a bed of plants and it was very cinematic and cool

(we have since found out that leora was like. actually an aspect of gaia so. that is. interesting)

of course then erley popped out of rage and was like FUCK this is why i dont do this, i went too far, it always goes too far, THIS is why im ashamed of this, and just got very emo boi about it. so they used their last spell slot to cast restoration on the space they had fought in and reached out to their goddess, having just saved her and the rest of the pantheon like she had asked them to

and i rolled a nat 1!!!

(the dm was like "you have committed this violent act, you feel so low and so bad and in need of guidance, and reach out to your goddess. and the absolute lack of a response just makes you feel empty inside" and i was like :) oh :) okay cool :) you love to see that with your paladins huh)

at this point the druid came back in and, instead of erley like. examining any of their own shit immediately lashed out at her and was like "why did you lie to me about the fey, why did you lie about why you were here, why ARE you here because i realize now it wasnt to help me"

and at that point ONE OF THE FEY QUEENS WALKED IN and the druid was like "... mother ..." and we were all :O

so it turns out the fey queen is her birth mom but had like? kidnapped one of the children of her firbolg tribe and was holding her hostage and the druid was on a quest to find her and bring her back

so erley :) felt :) even more bad about that :) and very shamedly pledged their help to her, and basically was like "as long as youre on this noble quest i will follow you if you'll have me"

so we're on our second arc now, which is traveling across the country to go meet the fey queen and get this kid back. as we were traveling my dm had me roll religion and a luck check and i got a 21 ON RELIGION FOR THE FIRST TIME EVER and a 6 luck. and he was like "you dont usually dream, but you have a nightmare. you know this nightmare was given to you, it was divinely inspired, but you dont know who sent it" and it was just erley killing leora over and over and over again. so they were like. well fuck

(my dm also messaged me privately and we talked and he was like. yeah you can get rid of your oath of devotion and change it to oath of the ancients, i am not telling you or erley why the subclass has changed and you also might get nerfed later. also level up barbarian for the next fight)

so erley was. feeling PRETTY DANG BAD and very guilty and stressed and all that. they did also realize their barbarian side was getting stronger which, considering their backstory is all tragic barbarian shit they were NOT happy about. i was fully prepared to have them be more ostracized from the party and go into full angst mode, but then the druid actually like. pulled them aside and explained why she had hidden information from them, and had a very sweet conversation with them and held their hand and it was VERY touching (she also had the baller line "you think your goddess can hear you and she's not answering. but maybe you're talking in a whisper and she needs to hear you scream")

we had another fight (we're level 7 and my dm told us after it was a cr 32 fight like. dude??? what the fuck?????) and once again erley didnt go down only because of rage

THEY ALSO UNINTENTIONALLY CAST MISTY STEP (which is an ancients spell they didnt have before) and were like WELL NO TIME TO UNPACK WHAT THAT WAS RIGHT NOW, HAVE TO NOT DIE

after the battle was over i asked to roll a check to figure out why i had access to that spell and got :) yeah you guessed it :) another nat 1 :) so erley has literally no idea how they cast that or what it could mean. we just had a new pc introduced who is a sorcerer so erley is definitely going to talk to her and see if she knows anything. because they are FULLY IN THE DARK about their subclass change or what that means in game

we're also (because of the fucking cr 32 fight) going to be leveling up again soon, and babey you KNOW im leveling barbarian. after rage kept me up and then rolling another nat 1 religion check, and also me the player not knowing whats up with their goddess/magic, i simply cant level paladin rn. so im BETWEEN A FEW SUBCLASS OPTIONS and ive been thinking them over but i think it really depends how the next few games go

my FULL ANGST option was to make them level into zealot barbarian like their awful dad, but i thought that made the least sense in universe rn

secondary angst option is to level into berserker, which i think fits pretty closely with how i've been roleplaying the rage so far. trading off an extra attack for a level of exhaustion fits pretty closely. also whump central

the NICE option is to have them be a totem warrior barbarian, and have both their paladin steed and their totem be a bull :) (they are a cowboi after all) i think thats the closest i can marry their two classes and potentially have some healthy growth for them, let them see that the rage doesnt HAVE to be a bad thing, that being a barbarian isnt something they HAVE to be ashamed of. reskinning the bear totem would give them resistance to all damage but psychic while raging, and im planning on taking the tough feat, so theyd pretty much be ... an unstoppable tank. plus i can still divine smite while in rage so theyd be VERY powerful

and now youre all caught up on my very special boi :))))) bet you didnt expect quite that much of an infodump but. listen. listen im simply obsessed with dnd i cannot help it. any chance to talk about my characters i WILL TAKE IN A HEARTBEAT (thank u for prompting my ramble lmao)

#ERLEY RYZER THE COWBOI MY BELOVED <333 #god this is literally SO long im sorry lmaooo #i have several friends not even in our party who are like 'will you PLEASE be nice to erley stop whumping them'#and im like #no <3

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theuniversitychallengereview · 3 years ago

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UC 51.03 - London Business School vs Hertford, Oxford

Since it was introduced at the 1988 Olympics, every single Gold Medal in the Women’s Team event in the Archery has gone to South Korea. Including yesterday’s win that’s nine straight victories, and their period of unparalleled dominance continues. The men’s team have also won six of the nine they have contested, and a mixed team won the first staging of that event in Tokyo too. Adding their success in the individual events, South Korea have won 26 gold medals, and 42 in total, in the 43 archery events which have been thus far staged at the Olympic Games.

As Twitter’s own @tarequelaskar pointed out in the brilliant article which alerted me to this story, this is a perfect example of specialisation, an economic concept whereby countries or companies focus intensely on one particular aspect of a given industry and come to serve that niche in such a specialised fashion that they become the ultimate experts and nigh-on irreplaceable. This is done in government and business by providing companies with incentives to specialise, and supporting those who succeed at it.

With respect to Korean archery, similar forces are at play. There are a bunch of professional teams and leagues in the country, giving archers financial stability while they focus on their training, something not as common across the world. Said training involves such things as practicing in live baseball stadiums and replicas of the Olympic venues, to mimic first the atmosphere and then the conditions that will be present on the day of the actual tournament.

This philosophy of marginal gains - the same system used by Team Sky and Chris Froome to win multiple Tour De Frances on the trot - puts their preparation miles ahead of the competition, which goes some way to explaining their dominance. It is not the only reason. Before the fine-tuning of the elite shooters comes the discovery of the promising young ones, and the inspiring nature of past success (along with a historic national love of the sport) helps to create a virtuous cycle which give Korea a far larger number of archers to choose from than any other country. This greater choice means that there is a greater chance of finding the next Gold medallists.

Making the argument that professional footballers are at a higher level than other elite sportspeople, Michael Cox used this same argument in a recent article for The Athletic. To summarise, he stated that because there are a far higher number of people who wish to become professional footballers, that must mean that the ones who do make it are at a higher standard than those who make it in other sports. Initially, I was drawn in by the pure maths of this point, but having thought about it some more I’m no longer sure to what extent I agree.

Now, the fact that hundreds of millions more people play football than rugby, or basketball, will certainly confer some level of “eliteness”, but only up to a certain point. Because football has been so popular for so long, the general standard of the play, relative to what it used to be, has had longer to improve. In the same way that if you transplanted a 100m runner from the Olympic final in the early 20th century to now they probably wouldn’t even qualify for the games, a footballer from the 80s would stand less of a chance of making it were they playing today. Many other sports don’t have that level of natural progression, afforded by decades of technical and tactical advancement - at least not globally.

But the numbers argument only goes so far, as can be demonstrated by the Korean archers. Yes, there are more archers in Korea than anywhere else, relatively, giving them a higher chance of uncovering those with a natural aptitude, but the reason behind their bow and arrow dynasty is the specialisation. The hyper-detailed level of training and focus which allows them to be the best they can possible be.

Now, archery is unique in that there is a theoretical maximum score (I understand that this is to some extent arbitrary, and related to the rules of the game as defined by some human being, semi-randomly, but it works in terms of this argument, because it gives a percentage score of how good the archers are based on the agreed-upon parameters of the sport), which, at the Olympics, is 720. The Olympic record is 700 (held by Korean Kim Woo-jin, giving an implied “eliteness level” of 97.2%.

The best player in the history of football (don’t @ me) is Lionel Messi, and few would doubt that he operates at or above that level of perfection in his sport. But I also don’t think you could doubt that Novak Djokovic, or Serena Williams in her pomp, were similarly magnificent at tennis. Cyclists on the Tour De France put their bodies through more in three weeks than most people endure in a decade, and have every aspect of their training and diet strictly controlled so as to bring them as close to perfection as possible. There will certainly be a higher number of these elite performers in football, because there are a higher number of paying jobs for said elite performers, and because more people attempt to become elite performers, but I don’t think that it follows on from that that they are better at their sport than other elite athletes, all of whom have undergone years and years of specialised training to get them where they are.

Does any of this matter, in terms of how each sport should be enjoyed? Probably not, but its interesting to think about, and kind of awe-inspiring to try and appreciate just how good those at the top of their respective games are. And if there is some discrepancy in the level of eliteness between the different sports it doesn’t detract from the fact that they would handily dispatch any civilian challengers without breaking a sweat. The joy comes from watching people who are good at stuff doing that stuff - and, as evidenced by the crowds which gather for non-league football, it doesn’t matter whether or not they are at the absolute pinnacle of said stuff. They’re still going to be much better than the rest of us.

Competitive quizzing is different from the activities previously mentioned in that any normal person can have a guess at pretty much any question, with a chance that they’ll get it right. What sets the contestants apart on shows like University Challenge is the speed of their recall under pressure - the quickness of their knowledge as well as the knowledge itself. But there are plenty of armchair quizzers who think they could wipe the floor on the show, so just how good are the actual contestants? (Compared to an elite footballer or archer on an imaginary scale that accounts for relative skill in all disciplines?). I don’t know (and in case you hadn’t noticed by now I’m just fascinated by people who are really good at anything, and wanted to share some of that fascination with you all), but I’ll try and have a go at answering it anyway.

So, the World Quizzing Championships have been dominated by British and Irish quizzers since its inception in 2003, with 16 of the 18 winners coming from either Britain or the Republic of Ireland (who have four wins courtesy of The Egghead Pat Gibson). This, in my mind, makes this neck of the woods comparable to South Korean archery. It is a hotbed of talent, and the infrastructure is in place to encourage and aid talent maximalisation. Indeed, if you scroll down the list of highest ranking players at the WQC in any given year you can see a significant cohort of UC alums, so clearly there are a number of elite quizzers who have passed through the show.

This specialisation can be seen in microcosm with the preponderance of top-level quizzers produced by Oxford and Cambridge, who both have a long-standing culture of competitive quizzing far beyond other Universities. The debate is there to be had on the fairness of each institution having so many teams, but clearly they produce enough elite players to compete with far bigger Unis when entering as (sometimes tiny) colleges.

In conclusion, I think it is pretty obvious that UC is a breeding ground for world-class quizzers, and though no one has won a World title straight off the bat after appearing on the show, there are top-50 and top 100 finishes abound, which is still greatly impressive, and helps to give an idea of just how good these students really are.

Hoping to justify the 1000 words I’ve just written about their exceptional talents are two teams from the London Business School and Hertford College, Oxford. The Oxford side have never made it beyond the second round, but LBS reached the semi-finals in 2006, their only previous appearance on the show. Anyway, there is quite literally no time for me to recite the rules; here’s your first starter for ten...

Paxman mentions that LBS were in the show in 2006, but doesn’t mention that they reached the semi final, which is lazy imo. A bunch of them are studying for MBAs, which makes sense. He doesn’t mention Hertford’s previous appearances either, but that’s more understandable.

Hertford’s Hitchens takes the first starter with Kennedy, and the Oxonians added a full set of bonuses on words made up by authors - including a couple of educated guesses. LBS hit back with the next question, but can only manage one bonus on famous scientists. One of the two they miss is Rosalind Franklin, and Paxman teases them for not spotting an apparently obvious clue within the question.

The first picture round is on national emblems, and LBS are first to recognise that of Vietnam for the starter. They don’t know Laos or Belarus, but do know that Mozambique has a machine gun on its one. Butterworth then jumps the gun with argon on the next starter, giving his answer just as Paxman says it in the question. Butterworth makes up for it with the music starter, recognising Fat Boy Slim before anyone else, and LBS know Primal Scream and Wu Tang Clan too. They’re still fifty points behind though, and will need a big second half to turn things around.

This task gets more difficult for them, as Hitchens takes another starter. Lloyd adds a second in a row for Oxford and they are nearly one hundred points clear. LBS really need to get some points on the board, and Ruess duly obliges, knowing that there is a massive sculpture of a spider called Maman, which sounds needlessly scary, to the extent that I’m not even going to google it.

The comeback is ended before its even begun as Oswald takes a starter for Hertford, which gives them the picture bonuses - the starter having been dropped by both teams. Lloyd produces another excellent guess of Reuben, demonstrating how useful it is to have vague knowledge as well as specific knowledge. This is one of probably five questions he has answered in a throwaway manner, but which turned out to be correct.

By this point LBS seem to have accepted defeat. Ruess takes another starter, but there is little to no urgency on the bonus questions. They’re right, granted, to have none, they have no chance of winning, but if they gave it a go they might scrape a high scoring loser spot. Ruess is the only one who seems bothered, and bags himself ten more points. They have an amusing discussion about methods of poisoning in Agatha Christie novels (’it was used as a curry ingredient?’, Ruess wondered aloud, trying to figure out which spices could be poisonous, before Butterworth pointed out that it wasn’t something commonly used as a curry ingredient, prompting respectful mirth from the audience) on the bonuses, but still languish miles behind.

Lloyd grabs the last starter of the night for Hertford, who win by eighty at the gong.

Final Score: London Business School 100 - 180 Hertford, Oxford

At the end, Paxman mentions Hertford’s stellar guesswork, which means I wasn’t chatting nonsense (at least on that front, the jury is out on the rest of it), and says that they’ve done a really good job. Incredibly effusive praise for a score of 180. He really is going soft in his old age.

Phew, that was a long one. If you made it through the intro you deserve a prize. And that prize is that you get to come back next week for the next episode of this blog!! Woop woop!

And if this wasn’t quite enough UC content for you then you can subscribe for extra blogs on my Patreon, which features Retro Reviews from the 2015/16 series of the show. Ta x

#london business school #hertford #oxford #bbc2 #quizzy mondays #jeremy paxman

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jafreitag · 3 years ago

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Grateful Dead Monthly: Gaelic Park – New York, NY 8/26/71

Fifty years ago today, on Thursday, August 26, 1971, the Grateful Dead played a concert at Gaelic Park in New York City.

Gaelic Park is located at West 240th Street and Broadway, five miles north and east of Yankee Stadium, in the Bronx. In 1926, the Gaelic Athletic Association purchased it to host the Gaelic Games. What are Gaelic Games? I’m a sliver Irish (just learned that a few years ago from a cousin who did some DNA stuff), but I didn’t know about such games until I asked the Google machine. Here you go, from the Wiki:

“Gaelic games (Irish: Cluichí Gaelacha) are sports played in Ireland under the auspices of the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA). They include Gaelic football, hurling, Gaelic handball and rounders. Women’s versions of hurling and football are also played: camogie, organised by the Camogie Association of Ireland, and ladies’ Gaelic football, organised by the Ladies’ Gaelic Football Association. While women’s versions are not organised by the GAA (with the exception of handball, where men’s and women’s handball competitions are both organised by the GAA Handball organisation), they are closely associated with it.”

Some to unpack there. What’s Gaelic football? It’s basically rugby. (The rules are probably way different, but this is a music blog, so don’t judge.) And hurling? Rugby with a small ball and sticks that look like sporty pizza paddles. (Again, don’t judge.) Gaelic handball? Racquetball, except you use your hands and you’re outside, not in some bougie health club from the ’80s. Finally, rounders? It’s actually alot like baseball. Pretty cool.

Why were the Dead there? A 9/2/71 piece in the Village Voice by Carman Moore, now archived on the Grateful Dead Sources blog, said that Gotham promoter Howard Stein, a Bill Graham competitor who booked the Dead to play at the Cap Theater in Port Chester, NY and the Academy of Music in NYC, had turned “the drab little Riverdale soccer field … into a summer rock mini-festival.” (Check out the poster above.) Moore’s writing has an early-70s sizzle, and he refers to his colleague, now-legendary rock scribe Robert Christgau. Here’s an excerpt:

“Last week’s Grateful Dead concert up at Gaelic Park was a usual Dead session, meaning that the band-to-fan-to-band electro-chemical process for which rock music is famed was on like high mass at Easter. Although I think I know most of the time what they are doing musically (Christgau will like this notion); I don’t quite understand them electro-chemically. Like the New York Knicks of two seasons ago, they can do excellent things together though they are not a group of deathless superstars. Garcia gets his songs across, but he can’t sing, and Bob Weir’s voice rises to about average…maybe better when he gets to screaming and the music sweeps him along. I still find it difficult to recognize the Dead songs that aren’t “Truckin'” or “St. Stephen” one from the other. I am not one of their fans, but seem to be one of their admirers. Their music speaks in a special language to their live listeners, and that language has the vocabulary of everybody else, but a convoluted syntax all its own. The note sequences are not completely dependent upon musical factors but are also dictated by how involved the band feels and also upon what kind of heat the audience is giving off. I’m trying to get to some essences of this thing.

The drama of a Dead concert revolves around the fact that wherever the band plays they know that a certain number (several tons) of their partisans will be there and that their crowd knows the Dead potential to excite them, but they also know that the Dead may not get into gear until the crowd begins to apply some heat, and so forth. Both parties also know that the concert will be long enough and informal enough for anything to happen on either side of the footlights, and so audiences improvise (smoke, go to the hot dog stand, kiss and snuggle, cheer, dance, listen like star-struck fools) just like their musician friends on stage (who play light and funny for awhile, retire backstage awhile, stand around, or get lost in a piece and turn on the heavy jets). Like good lovers, the Grateful Dead know the secrets of good foreplay, taking your time, surprising the partner for awhile, and then just reacting for a spell.”

The timing of the show seems odd. The band was on the East Coast in July, but began August back in Cali – LA, SD, Berkeley – before a three-night run at Chicago’s historic Auditorium Theater. Then they trekked back to NYC. Our resident Deaditor ECM explains that aspect: “This show was supposed to be played the day before the Yale Bowl concert on July 30, but some issues with the equipment trucks and/or weather prevented it from happening from the scheduled date. There are a few stories on the web about people who didn’t get the message (no twitter back then!) and dropped some acid only to show up to an empty stadium. Haha!”

Moore said that the show reminded him of “a high school stadium I used to know – low stands, unfulfilled infield grass, mud holes here and there, beer sold at one end in some quantity.” He continued:

“The formal shape of the concert was a general crescendo, light at the beginning and heavy-groovy at the end – not a shooting-star, call-the-law finale, just a heightened physical-emotional climate…the goods delivered as promised…sort of like good preaching in a church known to be a happy place. I did not enjoy their country-westernish opening tunes; maybe they didn’t either, because the pieces were awfully short. But by the three-quarter mark they had involved themselves, the crowd, and me too.

First they got the rhythm engaged and finally, courtesy of Jerry Garcia’s lead and interplays with Lesh and Weir, they went into the soloing and jamming which are the real magic music territory of this band. Much is made of the Dead soloists, but it became clear to me by last Thursday that bassist Phil Lesh plus those two drummers create the atmosphere that makes the Dead thing possible. The drummers were exceptionally understated, but Lesh kept bopping and thrumming away, heavily at all times, until his patterns were consistently getting the other players off. In the middle of “St. Stephen” there was a special coming together: Lesh had found a nice ambiguous but compelling set of licks; Garcia eased into a solo; Weir strummed a cross-time lick over all of it; it built; it quieted; Garcia started to play strange classical kind of lines; the drums dropped out; the audience got quiet; nothing at all could be predicted for a minute or so; then Lesh began to grope his way out with two chords and rhythms which began to regularize; audience began to jump and then to clap; guitars began to straighten out; the band came home to the cheers of the fans. Good music-making. The listener goes home without a little tune to whistle, but he hears music. As if they were finishing off some personal solos based over the last riffs heard, the fans went out of Gaelic Park without a thousand encores and without a lot of fuss on the streets outside.

It’s all very interesting, surprising, and I guess mystifying as before. All I know is that the Dead, or their fans, or the combination of both lure you into planning to return when they’re all assembled and back in town again.”

Apparently, there was some grief about bootlegs at this show. The GD Sources blog has a post that archives a 10/6/71 piece by the excellently-handled Basho Katzenjammer (Basho, the 17th Century Japanese haiku master; Katzenjammer, the German word for hangover) that gripes about an army of 200# “muscle freaks” at the direction of tour manager Sam Cutler liberating a handful of tapes from 100# weakling Johnny Lee. It’s a truly fun read. An excerpt:

“The biggest piece of shit spewing from Cutler’s mouth is about the reasons the Dead have for being so pissed off: they don’t like the quality (remember Garcia’s line in “I Got No Chance of Losin”? He says, “I’m only in it for the gold.” Yeah, music has a way of being more honest than the artist intends it to be at times…) The “quality”? Anyone who has bought a bootleg recently will know and agree that the bootleg stereo album called “Grateful Dead” is one of the best underground products yet. The tape was taken from a concert the group did at Winterland, on the coast a few months back. Yeah, Garcia fucks up a bit on “Casey Jones,” and Pigpen’s ego may have been deflated a bit by his voice coming over poorly on “Good Loving” but that was a concert. You do a concert and you stand by your performance, good or bad. That’s show business.

This effete artistic bullshit doesn’t matter anyway … When you’re out to get all the money you can out of your gigs, like the Dead seem to be (like all the groups seem to be) you might be accused of being a bit piggish; when you use strong-arm shit to insure that you get every last penny that you deserve — by making Amerikan standards — you are a Pig. Jerry Garcia, is that you?

Nobody buys that anti-bootleg shit about the artistic integrity of the artist in saying what goes out. One, you stand by your performance; two, even if you don’t want to, Jerry, somewhat, and say “all your private property is fair game for your brothers (especially when they sell records of concerts that don’t compete with coming releases) and your brother (who’s gonna continue to dig you as we live off your comets we’re gonna keep ripping you off because it is possible. As simple as that.” If you and Cutler and Stein continue your shit, though, we’ll just have to sing the song the same old way, you guys being put in the position of being the same old reactionary establishment that we’re all ripping off. It’s all around. You break your back playing gigs for ten years and suddenly success is staring you in the face. Bread: lots and lots of bread. You turn your back on your poor, ripping ’em off roots and start to tighten up. You’re in the biggest rip-off industry around, but no one cares as long as they’re having fun.

Money. That’s the whole story, isn’t it? If these were other times, in another land under a different set of rules maybe you could justifiably complain about the people who want to give your recorded performances out free because you didn’t screen them and pick out the sections you didn’t like and do them over for the cat, ’cause no one charges for their music, and because the means of production belong to the people, and they can turn out all the good sounds they can, and you have a natural right to screen all releases. But we’re here. Now. You guys are making millions — or soon will be. Money is power, especially as the concept of money is crumbling nation-wide and power freaks like Stein are cornering the market on it. The channels that the green-power the Dead bring in travel aren’t the healthiest for the generations of revolution to come. Stein is one of these hopeful images of a freak with a chance to change things positively gone sour, who uses all his power to consolidate his power; who’ll go to any extremes to insure the natural expansion of that power. Fuck him. Fuck you.”

Speak, Basho! Quaint that the beef about bootlegs back then was sound quality, rather than copyright. Stuff got figured out at some point, I think. Like when Bobby shut down the LMA, lmao.

Ed featured part of this show in the 2016 edition of his epcot 31 Days of Dead project. Here are his listening notes, which are typically spot-on (and better than than the not-quite-on-the-bus commentary from Mr. Moore):

“Less than three weeks after Pigpen’s definitive performance of Hard To Handle at the Hollywood Palladium (8/6/71), the Grateful Dead play the final date of their summer tour in 1971 at Gaelic Park in the Bronx. It will be Pig’s last show until December and the last time the band will ever perform in their original quintet configuration of Jerry, Phil, Pig, Billy and Bobby. By September, Keith will be rehearsing with the band to assume a full-time role on the keys. Perhaps anticipating his absence, Pigpen leads the band through 6 of his songs including the rarely-played Empty Pages and the last Hard To Handle. It is also one of the last performances of Saint Stephen, until the band revived it in 1976 with a major facelift, never to be played the same way again. When you consider these historical milestones along with the departure of Mickey Hart and the closings of the legendary Fillmore East and West earlier in the year it makes you realize that this concert carried a little more weight than anyone could have ever foreseen at the time. It truly was the end of a chapter in the life of the Grateful Dead. As you listen to each song you can’t help but feel a certain degree of nostalgia.

For me, the hidden gem of the show is the outstanding version of Uncle Johns Band. Jerry’s first guitar solo is an absolute joy to hear. His notes sing with irresistible melody and happy sunshine which perfectly capture the nostalgia of those carefree early years. If you listen closely you can hear Pigpen playing the wood claves.”

Speaking of Pig, this show features the second and final performance of Empty Pages. The NYS Music blog, which has a nice write-up of this show, describes it as a McKernan original that “pairs his traditional crooning style with a slow blues jam that’s nicely peppered with fiery guitar licks from Garcia. It’s a true rarity and a shame that the band wouldn’t be able to further develop this one.”

youtube

I feel like this was a try-hard post. It might be tl;dr, idk. Here’s the true goodness…

Transport to the Charlie Miller remaster of the soundboard recording HERE.

More soon.

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bladekindeyewear · 4 years ago

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HS^2 bloggin’ mainline 2020-08-06

♪ HS2 HS2 is baaaaack ♪

♪ HS2bloggin here we gooooo ♪

♪ Structural changes on their team but I don’t caaaaare ♪

♪ Already resooolved myself that its NOOOT gonna beee as good ♪ with inattentiveness to details characters like Terezi forgetting-what-they-used-to-know and an obsession with dwelling on traaageeeDEEE without relief-or-considering how weee’d feeeeeeel~ ♪♪♪ --so just gonna enjoy-what-i-caaaaaan about iiit~ ♪♪♪

Okay time for bankruptcy

> CHAPTER 11. History's Most Notorious Haters

Let’s see how effectively my perky new lowered-expectations attitude lets me enjoy this comic *click*

wut

Oh. so is this Dave drawing comics about current events or Regular Calliope doing so for our very first lanky look at her presumably-grown-up-more cherub form

> Knight: Keep it real.

HOLY SHIT IT’S DAVEBOT AND ARADIA

so we just get to SEE them?! just like that??? no buildup or anything? :D

Okay I’m marking out a little that’s a good sign. Also what a nerdy cop-out to turn the roboteyes into glasses that’s barely passable which is perfect, the rest of his outfit looks pretty cool tho

DAVEBOT: and thats reason four hundred nineteen why despite my mans many accomplishments i will never acknowledge big skateboardings contrived message that tony hawk is the quintessential skater of our generation ARADIA: o_o DAVEBOT: not in these trying times

Good to see Ultimate Dave is being true to form with regards to the core of his personality

DAVEBOT: beep boop ARADIA: i have told you several times that i was a robot before and i know for a fact you dont have to say beep boop DAVEBOT: hm that sounds fake does not compute ARADIA: david DAVEBOT: mom

I was with this conversation until the last two lines what the fuck

(I’m reading into it aren’t I, Aradia was trying to be atypically proper -- even though she wouldn’t have the frame of reference to know without being specifically told that “Dave” was considered nickname shorthand for the human name David, and thus if she DID know there’s no reason she’d use it except to troll him -- and Dave’s just mocking her response. Without any shame about his continued weirdness of calling people Mom, and by without any shame I mean he made the choice EXPLICITLY to intentionally evoke the awkwardness. Wow I got a lot out of two lines.)

(Oh, also alt!Callie’s true Jade-body incarnation here probably prompted her to start using “David” by example. There, various mysteries solved via a pile of assumptions probably to be disproven in the next couple lines I read.)

The Knight and the Maid stare at each other briefly, having exchanged enough meaningful glances over their time together to know when to drop it.

Would Time players have an easier time gelling this way, like this particular smoothness? Dropping it just before it gets weird or excessively irritating?

(Overclasspecting)

ARADIA: i think we have exchanged enough meaningful glances over our time together to know when to drop this DAVEBOT: what i enjoy about our conversations is that you just say things like that

OKAY I SNRK’D AT THAT. That was funny.

Initially. And now I’m concerned whether Aradia is being controlled by the narrative-speak, or whether they’re both just humorously referencing the meta-text they can both see, or--

ARADIA: oh is that what you enjoy ARADIA: well we are both an infinite number of years old living countless lifetimes at once but thats no reason to waste any of our...

WHAT??!? She’s an Ultimate Self too?!?

Um, okay! Yeah! So they’re BOTH just riffing on the narrative then. But... why would Dave need a robot body to accommodate his Ultimate Psyche without getting sick but Rose not need it? I can understand Dirk not needing it because the merging of the full breadth of his multiversal individuality gels well with him being a God of the aspect governing the power of his multiversal individuality, but Aradia?

Were the robot bodies not necessary after all, and the sickness Rose suffered and Obama thought Dave would have suffered some sort of ruse? Are there shenanigans afoot? (Or are we going with the “troll biology is better” cop-out?)

She knows how this will play out, having undoubtedly tried this joke on her friend in some timeline or another. Their rapport reflects a unique combination of their matching aspects but greatly differing classes. One a passive but powerful servant to time, the other wielding the aspect like a honed blade.

WHAT????

PASSIVE SERVANT OF THE ASPECT?!? WHAT THE FUCK

Okay if that means anything like it sounds like I guess my class chart is finally blown up, sure, they only waited (*checks last edit date*) SEVEN AND A HALF YEARS TO BLOW THAT GUESS UP, SURE

Wow. Okay, I feel some obligation to jump to conclusions and say the whole class chart is wrong, but let me stay strapped in to see if “passive” is as literal as one would expect alt!Callie to mean, or it just means “an active class passive compared to other classes”. And, serving the aspect? Oh dammit, now people are gonna come at me advocating a Maid / Page dichotomy about actively serving the aspect versus allowing the aspect to be served... or Page / Maid even, jesus

I wish I had enough energy to have those chats anymore. I’d rather hold on and see the whole ridiculous chart scheme they have in mind... which is definitely (and hopefully) the one Andrew really drew up at the time and not made up by the staff, even if it throws away plenty of my old work... I’ll just stop thinking about it and keep reading.

...

--no, I don’t think I can just stop thinking about it yet. Dammit, brain.

So um. Maids serving their aspect. There was a whole “Maids serve” thing going on throughout the whole plot of Homestuck, but despite how prevalent it was, I wrote it off as the story riffing on the classical definition of Maid when the actual stuff Maids accomplished was something different and more specific, just like Knights constantly got riffed on for chivalry and the like. Furthermore, service seemed like a really shitty class definition, when class definitions are the verbs one uses to interact with reality through Aspects to change the way reality unfolds, and “serving” isn’t really an action that results in change, implying a distinct deficit of agency that I wouldn’t have viewed as fair. (Especially since you originally think “meant to serve others” and not “meant to serve the aspect”, implying even LESS agency.) Furthermore, MOST passive classes from their descriptions seem to have a propensity to act “as if by the will of the aspect”, so even with the nuance of “serving the aspect”, devoting an entire class verb to service would just step on the territory of other active/passive class pairs’ passive sides, right?

But... IF we were to take this for granted as what it SEEMS... then concentrating on that angle of “serving the aspect” implies a whole lot more agency than a service class might sound on its surface. The definition fits with the story better once you contextualize all the Maid-y references to service around Jane, for instance, with the additional idea of “serving Life” by baking prolifically and creating more of its symbols in food and--

--fuck. “Serving”, like serving to others. Serving the aspect as its attendant AND serving it out to others that need it. Maybe this still IS part of the Additive class pair! Whoa. :O

Okay okay so, what I/we thought before was:

Create/Add - Maid / Sylph

Destroy/Reduce - Prince / Bard

But “additive” really isn’t an elegant verb compared to the “Destroyer” classes, so... could it be the “Servants” and the “Destroyers”? Like Maids cleaning up and healing the broken wreckage strewn through the halls by a bratty Prince’s tantrum???

It’d certainly be weird... and it’d CERTAINLY be a wild twist where I was partially wrong in some fascinating ways but not entirely off base?

One a passive but powerful servant to time, the other wielding the aspect like a honed blade.

And yet, I can’t bet on this being the situation yet; not at all. First, it relies on the idea that alt!Callie’s explicit narrative here is slightly misleading, which would be a pretty extreme thing to commit to, even for a technical truth like “she was saying it was passive relative to other classes even though it’s technically “active””. Second... it would mean that Muses are even more wildly defined than the previous insinuation of hers, that the Sylph -- what we thought was the passive additive class -- was not enough like a Muse compared to a Witch. Muses not being that Additive? I could grudgingly understand that, but Muses not being anything like passive Servants?! That would be EXTREMELY weird!

So... there’s not a whole lot of chance that I’m not dramatically wrong somewhere about these classes! In a way that throws the entire chart into disarray!

I’m... oddly excited? Huh.

That’s a pretty nice surprise that I actually feel that way.

(Don’t hit me up all at once to discuss this Classpect development over Discord, I’ll still need a few days without talking about Homestuck to recharge as usual. Like... maybe wait and come at me as a group chat? So I’m not talking about the latest developments separately with everyone? No that wouldn’t work, how about... guh I dunno, look my outlook’s a little more positive right now but dealing with Homestuck still takes emotional energy okay?)

Okay the rest of this page...

ARADIA: ... DAVEBOT: time then make a weird face ARADIA: ........ DAVEBOT: waste time DAVEBOT: time ARADIA:............. DAVEBOT: i experience all points of time simultaneously please just say time and make a weird face

This is true.

ARADIA: .................. DAVEBOT: cmon megido youre killing me clocks ticking ARADIA: ... ARADIA: time o_o

The Maid casts a furtive glance around the empty crew quarters, as though to search for someone more sympathetic to her bit.

ARADIA: tough crowd

Dorks.

> ==>

(Lazy fruit-throwing sword-training I won’t bother to screenshot but looks fun)

(I mean, really lazy looking, these people really don’t have Andrew’s knack for action composition that would make the same amount of gif-creation effort feel like a microcosm of the event they’re depicting, unfortunately. Again, I don’t blame them; Andrew was just too good at it.)

DAVEBOT: ok heres one DAVEBOT: how old do you think you are ARADIA: emotionally? ARADIA: that is a pretty heavy topic DAVEBOT: you know damn well thats not what i meant ARADIA: you know I have been through a lot dave DAVEBOT: ok ARADIA: its just so kind of someone DAVEBOT: ok i get it ARADIA: to finally ask how i feel ARADIA: i am beside myself with emotions ARADIA: i want to open up DAVEBOT: jesus christ ARADIA: shall i open up about my past traumas to you ARADIA: would you enjoy that ARADIA: to think even a frog like me can work through their pain with a dear friend ARADIA: you have truly blessed me on this day dave strider

Is Aradia JUST trolling here or is her Ultimate Self grappling with a ton of real unresolved trauma too that she’s bullshitting around Dave-style?

DAVEBOT: times fun when youre having flies

Okay that’s a damned good frog pun.

Alright now Davebot’s rapping

DAVEBOT: lacking tact i stay stacked while i breach contract DAVEBOT: sacred vows disavowed got divorce fever DAVEBOT: i leave her DAVEBOT: dont look back dont perceive her ARADIA: do you want to talk about it :( DAVEBOT: about what ARADIA: would you say you are hung up on leaving your wife and friends behind

Goddamnit is DAVE’S ton of real unresolved trauma leaking into his raps unintentionally Dave-style?? I knew we had to address it when we cut to Davebot but how about LESS TRAGEDY IN THIS COMIC MAYBE

DAVEBOT: arent you even a little guilty about ditching your boyfriend ARADIA: what ARADIA: oh fuck

But she knew what she was doing when she did it she explicitly did it didn’t she? Epilogues quote:

DAVEBOT: what about your boy DAVEBOT: eyepatches ARADIA: oh sollux is in one of his moods ARADIA: this was all getting to be a bit much for him ARADIA: if i go ill probably just cut him loose DAVEBOT: good move

And then they stepped through the sky hole more or less. Did like, distracted Ultimate Aradia not realize exactly how long she was leaving Sollux for, ie forever? Or did she “ascend” to Ultimate status later and hadn’t thought back to the full consequences of her actions within this timeline? Or both? From the looks of the link we’ll probably find out on the next pa--

--Wait. Something else I just thought of, unrelated.

If Aradia is an Ultimate Self, that’s another coincidentally Ultimate version of someone hanging around that happens to be on the prospective list of Soul-Powered Jujus that might have their creation loops closed in the coming story. Could those two things play into each other somehow? Like instead of their souls getting stuffed into the items, their “Ultimateness” is? Or as if that’s a necessary component, or... no, I’m probably overthinking things.

> (Months in the past, but not many...)

Uh huh. Is that flashing because he’s “watching” Aradia leave? But I thought Aradia SAID she was leaving--

> (==>)

--and that black hole portal doesn’t look as cool as it sounded in the Epilogues. But why was Aradia acting surprised, she said “I’ll probably just cut him loose” mere MOMENTS before entering the portal, did she mean “cut him loose” as in “I’m going to talk to him before leaving” and then just IMMEDIATELY forget that she didn’t say anything to him because she cared so little???

Wait. Waaaait wait wait. I think. I think maybe I missed some subtext. Lemme do some fuller quotes here:

ARADIA: oh sollux is in one of his moods ARADIA: this was all getting to be a bit much for him ARADIA: if i go ill probably just cut him loose DAVEBOT: good move

His gaze remains fixed on her. She blinks and looks away, unsure what to say next. He’s standing perfectly still, presumably waiting for her to say something. She met him... what was it? Once, twice before? She can’t remember. But she knows this is a very different Dave. Aside from the metal skin, he seems implacably confident. But then, people go through changes. She’s been through more than her share. She cocks an eyebrow, recalling her own stint with a metal body.

DAVEBOT: hey earth to whats your face ARADIA: oh ARADIA: its aradia

[...]

DAVEBOT: youre coming DAVEBOT: better decide quick i doubt that dank fuckin hell funnel is staying open for much longer ARADIA: yes i suppose so ARADIA: thats where all the action is right? DAVEBOT: all the action that matters yeah ARADIA: off we go then :) DAVEBOT: word

He holds out his hand. She looks around, and assumes he means for her to take it, so she does. She didn’t know someone could fly this fast. He nearly yanks her arm out of its socket. She considers reminding him that maybe this isn’t necessary, since she can fly too. But she doesn’t want to risk saying more embarrassing stuff around this outrageously cool dude. Besides, they’re through the wormhole before she can even finish the thought. It vanishes the moment they’ve crossed.

...this was a SHIPPING thing wasn’t it. She’s impressed as hell with Striderbot, she SAID she’d cut things off with Sollux, and then she was so busy being swooped off her feet and into the portal that she forgot to actually say anything to him. Is that what happened????

Ultimate Self Davebot x Ultimate Self Aradia. Huh. Didn’t see that coming. (Though, again... they could make it SLIGHTLY clearer that this wasn’t just a blatant continuity error.)

Anyway, a rare-don’t-get-used-to-it [S] page...

> [S] (Gaze.)

...Okay that was kinda funny.

> (==>)

SOLLUX: h0w the fuck am i g0ing t0 get d0wn fr0m here.

HAH! Okay, he’s taking it pretty well. :) --and THAT’s what she realized she forgot, giving him a flight down from the tower before leaving.

GOOD. KEEP THINGS HUMOROUS EVEN WHEN LITERAL ABANDONMENT IS HAPPENING. THAT’S the Homestuck I was missing. :) :) :)

> Back to reality.

(Since the black hole is outside “canon” reality.)

Those are some cool poses-AHAH JESUS CHRIST ALT!JADE YOU LOOK ABSOLUTELY TERRIFYING XD

COULD YOU MAYBE HAVE CLEANED UP THE DRIED BLOOD AT SOME POINT OR IS SOME OF THAT FRESH FROM EATING MORE RAW MEAT

(Lord English’s blood leaving permanent timeless bloodstains would be a cool new thing to squeeze into canon i admit, i wouldn’t blame them for taking the excuse even if you could find small canon counterexamples I’m not sure of but dimly think might exist)

((ALSO SHE’S GONNA BE TINY NEXT TO THEM I DUNNO IF THAT MAKES IT MORE TERRIFYING OR LESS, PROBABLY MORE))

DAVEBOT: so youre telling me you dont even feel a little bad that you ditched him to be a weird death acolyte ARADIA: no i think he found my wiles both charming and irresistible DAVEBOT: not even an ounce of guilt or self doubt huh DAVEBOT: just like that DAVEBOT: no conversations about the greater good DAVEBOT: no revelations about your feelings

Is Aradia a jerk or weird? Can’t decide.

ARADIA: do you often find your faith in yourself shaken like this or is it a new experience now that your mortal coil has been left behind DAVEBOT: what ARADIA: do you think now that all that is left of you is a literal ghost inside of a machine you are more or less likely to embrace finality DAVEBOT: oh dope more cult of one shit DAVEBOT: immortality changed you ARADIA: could it be that you are projecting your feelings onto my situation DAVEBOT: does not compute rose jr ARADIA: ... ARADIA: we dont have to talk about it DAVEBOT: thanks

Wow, I actually can’t follow this conversation at all. Let me stare at it for a sec...

...okay, the first part she’s talking about DAVE’s faith in HIMself being shaken, not her own. She’s not asking if he relates to HER experience, she’s contrasting it.

Then, asking if he’d be more likely to embrace death, or... Time? Death. Whether his self-worth has changed because he might view himself as “less real”, something Aradia doubtless struggled with when she was a robot who already had so many excuses to devalue herself at the time? And then Dave talks about “cult of one” shit what does that even mean-...

OH. Like she’s a death cult. Gooot it. Because Aradia’s of the position that death and ending should be celebrated, and Davebot understandably isn’t entirely bought in. This is as hard to parse down as one would EXPECT conversations between two Ultimate Selves to be hard to parse down, unlike Rose and Dirk where their insane missions and glaring flaws shine bright enough through it all that you can follow their conversation flow easily.

JADE: They sit in each other's presence, the silence between them as meaningful as any words they could exchange. DAVEBOT: its always really cool to hear how meaningful my silences are DAVEBOT: especially while DAVEBOT: CALCULATING DAVEBOT: CALCULATING DAVEBOT: especially while i am attempting to experience them

Alt!Callie pulling a narrative-text AFTER a talk-identifier like “JADE:” is really hilarious in my opinion.

JADE: i do not need your approval. the story will continue how it must. DAVEBOT: beep boop hater detected ARADIA: wow is that true JADE: i am not a hater. DAVEBOT: classic hater line DAVEBOT: i know this because i am pouring through genuine actual quadrabytes of information on historys most notorious haters JADE: no, you aren’t.

Pffffff. This is pretty fun.

DAVEBOT: you are the exact opposite of a hater ARADIA: a liker DAVEBOT: ok DAVEBOT: perfect example your tolerance for whatever is going on with DAVEBOT: all this ARADIA: i think she looks quite lovely covered in the viscera of the all-powerful enemy she consumed ARADIA: floating lifelessly in our periphery ARADIA: observing our every action and noting its relevance :) DAVEBOT: uh huh thats what i mean

I was gonna note “liker” as additive for pointless classpect purposes, but really more quoting it just because I really enjoy this conversation. I’m starting to get sold on the chemistry of these two a lot faster than I expected.

JADE: even though I understand that it must happen, i am growing frustrated with the direction of this conversation. DAVEBOT: do you want to talk about something else stinky JADE: what would you suggest?

How long has that dried fucking blood been on her

DAVEBOT: ok hear me out DAVEBOT: kanaya DAVEBOT: but like DAVEBOT: wearing huge jorts

That explains Homestuck’s twitter earlier

> Weeks in the future, relative to the original point of interest...

Wait wait which point of interest? This time we were just viewing? *click*

I love what must be this shitty imagination-ship they’re using to cross the substrate of reality

> ==>

Whoaaaa. So they DIDN’T stay in those outfits for long? It showed them in a bunk bed earlier, it showed CallieJade still going around blood-covered afterward-- dammit, I’m having a hard time gauging exactly how much time is supposed to have passed between their entry into the black portal, their earlier conversation, and this moment. And as likely as some are to call this poor scene composition, I can’t think it’s anything but intentional, given we’re dealing with a couple of Ultimate Time players bullshitting with each other.

Moments like these are not rare, and serve a valuable function to the story. They are able to show a passage of time with the bulk of the emotional labor of a lengthy bonding process happening off screen. How did we get here? What have they been through? These questions are often better left open to individual interpretation and can give the one interpreting a sense of ownership of the story.

See? We’re being trolled is why. (Even if the authors are pulling the trick Alt!Callie describes maybe a little too damn often, because a cut like this where we’re supposed to fill in the emotional gaps and intervening events ourselves as readers depends on readers’ faith that sensible events and decisions for these characters would OCCUPY the gaps, as if readers don’t have faith that what intervenes WOULD make sense to their understanding of the characters the way the authors are writing them... it just seems like an excuse to do whatever you want without adequately explaining yourself, when in reality if you’d spelled out the events that led to it we’d all cry foul at the mischaracterization.)

...okay, maybe I’m a BIT bitter. Sorry. Where were we?

JADE: As a point of curiosity- ARADIA: oh shit!!!!

The dead Cherub possessing the body of an equally deceased Goddess of Space pauses at the interruption.

She doesn’t talk much, then? Too busy doing whatever talking you’d do as your other possessed Jade body? Just how temporally related is you controlling THIS Jade compared to when you were controlling the other? When that Jade pegged you as enjoying contact with friends, are these two just not enough for you, or did you “experience” the trips entirely separately? I don’t THINK the alt!Callie possessing either Jade is a separate entity from the other, but...

Were she to voice her opinion, it would be that --actually-- it is not unusual for those whose primary concern is The Grander Scheme to have a passing curiosity about the insignificant. So when one really thinks about it, any annoyance with the attendant’s small mindedness is both understandable and warranted.

She pissed

...also, “the attendant”. Even if “serve” is really the verb here, that phrasing really irks me as if she’s talking down to her. Which, I mean, makes sense for alt!Callie’s character, but doesn’t make me feel better about this new definition being foisted on us.

ARADIA: :( JADE: as a point of order, you never answered dave’s question. ARADIA: which one he is very chatty JADE: you experience time in a way that is woefully unfamiliar to me and it has... piqued my curiosity enough to learn more. ARADIA: ?_? DAVEBOT: shes asking how old you are

Wait a minute, is Alt!Callie asking a question about a dropped topic from WEEKS ago?! And is Davebot so in touch with Time and the meta ordering of topics that he actually CAUGHT ON that fast to what she was actually wondering about?????

This is getting more disorienting by the minute.

ARADIA: in this form our bodies stop aging once we reach maturity i think ARADIA: the god tier keeps our physical form locked in a state of undying ARADIA: even in death the bodies do not decay ARADIA: only lay dormant

THAT LAST PART IS FUCKING IMPORTANT. It’s being brought up intentionally to tell us that JOHN’S DEAD BODY can still be in the wallet Terezi’s carrying around RIGHT NOW without having decayed over the past years. I remember remarking in SOME previous HS^2 liveblog post of mine that I was alarmed by the decay that would have happened there (can’t find my remark on short notice and don’t really care to), so this explicitly dismisses it so we won’t be surprised by the fact that she could keep it in just-dead condition.

DAVEBOT: like how long have you been alive JADE: yes, that one.

[...]

ARADIA: oh maybe a few hundred years or so DAVEBOT: what JADE: what? ARADIA: well if i had known you were going to be so judgy about it DAVEBOT: when did this happen ARADIA: oh i spent some time in other doomed realities and timelines and came back before anybody could tell i was gone

Hm!

We knew she spent a LONG time in the dream bubbles, enough to talk to “pretty much all of the Nepetas”, but she was actually able to access a universe or universes and hop between them? That’s not something any time traveller we’ve seen has been explicitly able to do intentionally before, quite like she’s describing.

DAVEBOT: oh just out for a bit of fun then DAVEBOT: just hopped on over to a different reality DAVEBOT: real casual like DAVEBOT: oh hello dont mind me just popping in to see if it really is as doomed as they say it is DAVEBOT: did not disappoint ARADIA: yes almost exactly like that :) DAVEBOT: who did you hang out with are they cooler than me ARADIA: it is complicated to explain DAVEBOT: oh ok nevermind then DAVEBOT: all clear

Yep, he’s kinda bewildered. Is this Pesterquest stuff she’s referring to? Did she stop by Pesterquest?

DAVEBOT: a whole alternate universe ripe with the coolest motherfuckers imaginable ARADIA: you were there too i threw your air conditioner into the sun DAVEBOT: wow thats fucked up DAVEBOT: thats not where that goes at all JADE: these events are not-canonical. ARADIA: rude

Ah! Yeah, almost certainly Pesterquest. (Still haven’t played that and have little inclination to now that I’m more sure we aren’t being gaslit with intentional continuity errors, just disappointed by actual continuity errors.) Oh! And that makes a bit more sense because I imagine that’s Black Hole territory, and that territory outside of Canon seems pretty rich and easy for time-travellers to hop between stories and timelines willy-nilly. As they’re apt to in fanfics, which is the most appropriate way for things to be in that realm!

DAVEBOT: is that the trope of being hundreds of years old but looking young forever patently sucks ass DAVEBOT: a plot device an asshole would write ARADIA: :( JADE: that is not what i am trying to say at all. DAVEBOT: hmm wow yeah thatd really be a sort of pot/kettle situation i guess DAVEBOT: i cant believe im the only woke one here DAVEBOT: its hard being such a visionary AND such a fine metallic specimen DAVEBOT: but im an altruist first and fucking foremost ARADIA: so selfless JADE: yes, the greater narrative is truly blessed by your beneficent presence. DAVEBOT: oh so you got jokes now huh JADE: i have always had the ‘jokes’ of which you speak, but i have heretofore exercised restraint in laying you low. JADE: i possess knowledge of many of your iterations, as the scope of my powers allows me to exist in several narrative structures at once. DAVEBOT: but can she see why kids love the sweet cinnamon taste of cinnamon toast crunch JADE: i do not know, or care, what that means. ARADIA: neither do i :)

I’m actually really enjoying this conversation

JADE: its cultural significance to you as an earthling is wasted on the two of us entirely, as we have not conflated the misguided notion of clinging to nostalgic cereal advertisement trivia with socially relevant conversation.

Pff she literally checked her meta notes just now to learn what the cereal ads were after admitting she didn’t know what it meant and pretending not to care

> ==>

Oh, closer look at Davebot. Are those actual SHAPED shades over his robotic eye bulges? Weird, I thought it was just a lazy line drawn between them with red sharpie at first, Sans style. That would’ve been funny.

> ==>

Ohh, I get it. I was gonna say that was an unwarranted reaction... but he just realized that the Time-wait puns will be coming from BOTH his shipmates from now on. That’s gotta be a downer. :)

> ==>

HOLY

FUCKING

SHIT

IS ALT-CALLIE LAUGHING!??!?!?!??

That’s REALLY, REALLY GOOD!!! SHE’S ALREADY LAUGHING OCCASIONALLY THAT MAKES ME SO HAPPY

“BEST NARRATOR” COFFEE CUP

SHE’S ADORABLE

> ==>

Ah, was that Jade kicking you out? Or just the multiverse punishing you for being briefly happy :(

--oh, end of the update. Guess that’s it for now!

...

Alright I know I’m A BIT BEHIND on covering the HS2 commentary,

But

I really would rather wait on that a bit longer if that’s alright. Real busy and stressful week or two. (Found out my hair is starting to thin noticeably at age 31! Quite suddenly, too. Blood test looks fine so it’s nothing serious... gonna see a doctor to check if anything can be safely done about that, it’s really hurting my self-esteem more than I thought it would. Didn’t think it would hit my emotions that hard when it eventually happened, knew it was likely but not so SOON... really messing with my anxiety every time I accidentally touch my hair, now. I’ll deal with it.)

If I sound really aimless in this post, I think it’s cause I am? My mental and emotional energy’s REALLY drained. I’m glad that June/July break in HS^2 happened when it did, and I’m definitely glad there’s apparently plenty in HS^2 I can really enjoy, if this update is anything to go by. Maybe this comic can help lift me up instead of knocking me down. :)

See y’all later! More Patreon commentary blogging catchup after some other upd8.

#Homestuck #hs2 #Homestuck Liveblog #upd8 #Homestuck^2 #Homestuck Theories #Homestuck Theory #spoiler #spoilers #Classes and Aspects #Space and Time #Aradia

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