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scoutception · 4 years ago

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Ys V: Lost Kefin, Kingdom of Sand review

The SNES was a console with many great RPGs. From popular classics like Final Fantasy VI, Chrono Trigger, Secret of Mana, and Earthbound, to hidden gems like Live A Live, Terranigma, Secret of Evermore, and Shadowrun, it’s a library with a lot of enjoyment to offer. Of course, not every RPG on the system fared so well, with quite a few mediocre and forgettable games scattered about, and unfortunately, Ys V, Falcom’s second attempt at revamping their classic series, after Ys IV backtracked to using the original bump combat system, is among these. Even today, about the only notable thing about Ys V to a modern fan is the current lack of any remake, unlike IV, or the similarly flawed Ys III, which was enough to rouse my curiosity and drive me to give it a fair playthrough. While I did have some fun with it, there’s certainly a reason there were no new Ys games for nearly a decade afterwards, and the specifics on why that is is what we’ll be looking at today. Note that while Ys V was never released outside of Japan, it does have an English translation patch, courtesy of Aeon Genesis, in what was apparently one of their most difficult hacking jobs ever.

Story: About 4 years after the events of Ys I & II, Adol Christin, or, as he’s come to be known, Adol the Red, arrives at the port town of Xandria on the continent of Afroca (yes, literally just fantasy Alexandria and Africa), rather suspiciously without his constant companion Dogi, and on an intact ship, at that. The normally aimless Adol has been lured to Xandria by rumors of a mysterious Phantom City, said to contain amazing riches. After being contacted by a wealthy merchant named Dorman, however, Adol is given the truth: the so called Phantom City is actually the lost city of Kefin, a prosperous nation that wielded tremendous power five hundred years ago through the power of alchemy. Recently, the Kefin desert has been expanding, consuming many towns within the area, and monsters have become numerous and aggressive, leaving Xandria at threat of becoming a barren waste. Wishing to gain access to the secrets of Kefin’s alchemy in order to halt this desertification, Dorman hires Adol to find six elemental crystals that are said to have the power to unlock the way to Kefin. Unfortunately for Adol, he really has his work cut out for him this time; many of Afroca’s citizens are fearful of him, due to ancient legends telling of a red haired man that will bring great havoc upon his arrival, and he’s harassed by a band of thieves called the Ibur Gang, who are out to take all the crystals for themselves. Though Adol makes several allies as well, such as Niena, the adopted daughter of the great adventurer Stein, who disappeared three years ago looking for the crystals himself, Massea, a woman who possesses knowledge of alchemy matched by few others, and Stoker, the spirit of a man who lived five hundred years ago, he also comes to find that several other forces are conspiring to use Kefin’s alchemy for their own destructive purposes, and that his client may be less trustworthy than he initially seems.

While most of the classic Ys games had quite cliche stories, if understandably considering their age, Ys V is actually a fair bit more original, with some pretty decent moments toward the end of the game. Unfortunately, before that point, most of the story just consists of just wandering around finding all the crystals, with the random interferences Adol encounters being the only things spicing it up, such as being forced to undergo a series of trials, or being blown off a raft by a sandstorm and washing up in a different town, keeping the tradition of boating accidents in Ys alive and well. Despite the amount of important supporting characters around, most of them barely even show up for most of the story, which makes for a pretty underdeveloped and forgettable cast, with only Terra of the Ibur Gang sticking out thanks to reappearing in Ys VI. It also just feels very disconnected from the rest of the series, with Dogi completely missing, and a lot of plot elements that feel out of place for Ys. According to the book Ys Complete Works, a lot of plot elements had to be left out of V, which certainly explains why it feels so underbaked, and leaves a lot of potential for improvement if a remake ever materializes, but until then, while a neat step forward for the writing of the series, Ys V’s story ultimately just doesn’t fare very well overall.

Gameplay: Here’s where things really start falling apart. The bump combat system is gone once and for all now, with Ys V using a dedicated attack button like Ys III, a system that remains in place even today. Unlike Ys III, however, the general gameplay is still much more similar to the other titles, overhead perspective and all, with the change in combat instead feeling a lot more like the 2D Zelda titles. Along with swing his sword, Adol can also now use his shield to actively block attacks. There’s also a jump button, though there’s not much platforming to be done. In theory, this isn’t a bad change at all, but in practice, combat is extremely stiff and awkward feeling. Unlike in Zelda, where Link always swings with a nice, wide arc, Adol is stuck jabbing things for most of the game instead. Each sword has a different range, with exactly one that actually has a proper swing, and the ones you’ll use the most, the second and last swords, only being capable of stabs. Annoying as this is, it wouldn’t quite be a deal breaker, if it wasn’t for how frustratingly precise you need to be when attacking. If you’re even slightly off center, you’ll just whiff. Meanwhile, attacks from enemies are given far more leniency, and even using the shield, you need that same level of precision in order to block anything. Needless to say, this gets very frustrating.

Aside from just attacking physically, magic, or to be more accurate, alchemy, is also available, with spells being made by collecting elemental stones and having an alchemist combine three at a time, with six different elements and eighteen possible spells, which can then be attached to Adol’s weapon and slowly charged up until the magic meter reaches 100, at which point attacking will cast the spell and drain MP and spell charge. While a neat idea in concept, in practice, almost everything you can make is downright awful. Not only are many spells nearly identical to each other, but most of them are just really, really bad, with absurdly long casting animations, during which enemies are free to continue moving around and out of the spell’s range, wasting both your time and MP. About the only useful spells are the ones that hit everything on screen, which take an absurd amount of MP, and the basic fireball, which has no casting animation, and is mandatory to get anyway. Several enemies will also just absorb magic entirely and gain HP, so using it can often be an outright detriment. Even worse, the game basically forces you to use magic by separating EXP into two different types: physical EXP, obtained from defeating enemies with the sword, or from bosses, which boosts physical power and defense and magic EXP, which is gained from killing enemies with magic, and boosts magic power and defense, meaning if you ignore magic, any enemy using magic attacks will quickly wreck you. The stones needed to make the spells, along with a few other items like coins to be sold, are also mostly hidden across the different areas, and can only be found by rubbing up against every wall and object in sight, which is really annoying, and you really can’t afford to miss any of them if you want to make most of the available spells.

Bosses are pretty dumb too, with a lot of them just coming down to standing in one places and stabbing until they die, chugging heal potions until they die, and considering the most basic healing item heals 60% of Adol’s HP, it’s not hard to do, either. In general, the game is overly forgiving. While still pretty annoying, the level system means it is pretty easy to end up overleveled with physical and magic levels combined, and rather than just dropping a set amount of gold, enemies instead drop gems, which can be sold to merchants for varying amounts. While this wouldn’t make much of a difference on paper, the gems are worth so much, and certain merchants have high enough exchange rates, that you can make a lot of money pretty easily, and considering the third and second best weapons in the game are sold in the first two towns, it’s even easier to break the game wide open. Most areas are also really short, with several dungeons literally just consisting of three or four small rooms, so you’re rarely ever in serious danger traversing them, with most of their length just coming from forced backtracking. While an improvement from how grind heavy most of the early Ys games were, the easiness just makes the experience even less engaging, to the point Falcom had to make a second version of the game, titled Ys V Expert, due to complaints.

Graphics: The visuals of Ys V, to put it bluntly, barely even resemble the rest of the series, to the point it’s basically indistinguishable from any other SNES RPG. It doesn’t look outright bad, but whereas Ys usually uses a super deformed style with lots of colors, Ys V uses a more realistically proportioned style with really dark, dull colors, to the point that Adol’s usual distinctive bright red hair looks more brown than anything. Most areas are pretty forgettable, with pretty generic caves and ruins, but there are a few neat areas, like the rainy marshlands, which actually carry a pretty strong atmosphere, and the bosses look kinda cool, if a bit samey. You also get to customize Adol a bit, being able to change the color of his clothes and armor in the menu, along with his hair color, if you find a hidden NPC fairly late in the game, with the default option actually giving him his usual hair color. Overall, though, the visuals are still pretty unspectacular.

Music: In yet another change from series tradition, Ys V forgoes the usual rock style of the soundtrack, and instead takes a much more orchestral approach, again making it stand out even less from its competition, only retaining a few traditions like the item collection music and the Theme of Adol. In this case, however, I can’t complain that much about the change, because the resulting soundtrack, in usual Falcom fashion, is still fantastic. From the peaceful Foresta Village, to the melancholy Misty Lake, to the mysterious Oasis, to the dark Sand Castle, to the adventurous Wilderness, there are a lot of great tracks to be found, and it’s absolutely worth looking up the soundtrack even if the rest of the game would drive you away.

Conclusion: Overall, Ys V is not recommended. It’s not an outright bad game, and can still be decently fun. It’s short enough that it’s not much of an investment to play through, and it was still an important step that allowed Ys VI to fully modernize the gameplay of the series. As a whole though, it’s still a pretty underwhelming and clunky experience that’s almost completely divorced from the rest of the series. You’re not missing much by leaving it alone, and perhaps with the release of Ys IX, a remake of V could be next on the schedule. Either way, that’s about all I can even say about this game. Till next time. -Scout

#snes #falcom #ys #action rpg #game review #jrpg #long post

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sceptilemasterr · 4 years ago

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MW Act 2, Scene 2 - Dinner Confrontation

Title: Most Wanted: The Hollywood Killer (A CIU Screenplay)

Main Pairings: Dave x Sam

Other Pairings: N/A

Genre: Full Rewrite

Rating: PG-13 for violence, blood, swearing, alcohol, and sexuality

Summary: Dave, Sam, Rhea, and the analysts go out to dinner for some team-building... and obtain a clue from a surprising source.

Previous Scene: Off-Duty

Masterlist: Link

INT. ELLIOT’S RESTAURANT - EVENING

A waiter, whose name badge simply reads ‘DANIEL,’ stands at the entrance to Elliot’s, which is clearly an expensive, upscale restaurant. He smiles at an unseen group standing behind the camera.

DANIEL THE WAITER: Welcome to Elliot’s. Do you have a reservation?

DAVE (O.S.): Yep, should be under ‘Reyes?’

Daniel glances down at his clipboard, flipping through it for a moment. Then he looks up.

DANIEL THE WAITER: Ah, yes, I see it. Right this way, please.

Daniel turns and walks further into the restaurant. One by one, the group follows him, in order: Dave, Reza, Mirasol, Nikhil, Rhea, and finally Sam. All but Sam are dressed in formal outfits. As they take their seats, Daniel shoots a brief look at Sam but does not comment.

DANIEL THE WAITER: I’ll be right back to take your orders. Enjoy!

He walks away as everyone opens their menus. Sam scowls.

SAM: He gave me a look.

DAVE: To be fair, I did warn you to dress up. “Texas Shootout Chic” isn’t exactly the usual dress code at Elliot’s.

SAM (defensively): Look, I didn’t exactly bring a change of clothes with me-

RHEA: Hey! I did offer to lend you one of my dresses, you know...

REZA (teasingly): Looks like you aren’t talking your way out of this one, Sam.

Sam shrugs.

SAM: What can I say? I have my style.

NIKHIL: Well, I approve. Dress codes are unnecessary and overrated, after all.

MIRASOL: You’re dressed up.

NIKHIL: That is entirely irrelevant.

The banter is halted for a moment when Daniel returns and starts pouring everyone water.

DANIEL THE WAITER: Can I interest any of you in some drinks?

SAM: Hmm. I’ll have a whiskey. Neat.

Dave raises an eyebrow. Sam shrugs.

DAVE: Could you stop being such a cowgirl for five seconds?

SAM (smirks): Couldn’t turn this off if I tried.

As the others place their drink orders, Daniel eventually gets to Rhea.

RHEA: I’ll take a martini.

DANIEL THE WAITER: ...Very funny, miss.

RHEA (indignantly): I’m twenty-three!

She hurriedly pulls out her I.D. to hand to him, as the rest of the group laughs good-naturedly. After Daniel checks the I.D. for a moment, he hands it back to her and leaves.

RHEA: Do I seriously look that young?

EVERYONE EXCEPT RHEA: Yes.

Rhea sighs. Reza pats her on the shoulder reassuringly as the conversation resumes for a few moments. Eventually, Nikhil leans toward Dave.

NIKHIL: I don’t see Rebecca here. Is she coming?

Dave shakes his head.

DAVE: I offered, but she’s staying late at the precinct. Says she’s got a big new lead on the La Huerta case to follow up on.

Sam sighs in frustration.

SAM: We’ve got a big new lead on our case, you know. Wish we could be workin’ on it right now instead of wasting our time here...

RHEA: Wait, am I missing something?

DAVE (to Sam): Learn to relax a little, would you? We’ll get a lead sooner or later. Just gotta be patient.

SAM: Easy for you to say. At this rate...

As Dave and Sam continue to argue, the sound of the restaurant door opening and closing can be heard.

DANIEL THE WAITER (O.S.): Welcome to Elliot’s. Do you have a reservation?

The sound of cash rustling is heard.

LI (O.S.): We do now.

DANIEL THE WAITER (nervously): Right, right, of course. This way, please.

Daniel enters the main dining room, nervousness clearly showing even through his professional demeanor. He starts crossing toward a table in the far corner of the room, followed by three individuals. First is the enigmatic woman known only as LI, who strides powerfully through the dining room with a distinctive, unshakable confidence. Behind her is her right-hand man, RYE, dressed impeccably in a suit and tie, surveying the area with a scowl on his face as though everything he sees is a potential threat. Finally, trailing the two of them is ERIS, tense and agitated, clearly uncomfortable in her dress and looking as though she’d rather be anywhere else.

DANIEL THE WAITER: Your table will be right over here.

Dave, Nikhil, Reza, and Mirasol all tense up, immediately turning their gaze to their table and trying as hard as possible not to notice the newcomers. Sam, however, does not follow their lead, and Li gives her a glare.

SAM: Hey. What’re you lookin’ at?!

RYE: You. You’d better watch yourself...

Gazing curiously at Sam, Li turns her gaze to the other occupants of the table... until she notices Dave.

LI: Wait. I know that face. Reyes?

Dave and the others all groan, knowing that Sam has inadvertently given away their position. Dave reluctantly faces Li.

DAVE: Congratulations, it’s me. What do you want this time?

Li crosses her arms, scowling down at the group.

LI (annoyed): I want to have an enjoyable evening out with my friends, Reyes. But of course you’d just assume I’m up to no good. Without any proof.

MIRASOL: Can you blame him? After everything you’ve--

Dave gives her a look, and Mirasol falls silent.

DAVE (casually): Believe it or not, sounds like we’re here for the same reason you are. So how about we stay out of each other’s way tonight, huh?

SAM: Sorry, am I missing something? Dave, you know these people?

DAVE (sighs): Unfortunately, yes.

ERIS: What was that?! Li, can I--

LI (sternly): Eris.

Throughout the exchange, Rhea has been studying Li intently. Suddenly, she lights up with excited recognition.

RHEA: Oh! Wait, I know who you are! You’re Li, aren’t you? The criminal mastermind? The master thief, the genius behind the Geneva Job and the Monaco Heist, the international woman of mystery who--

Her eyes go wide and she covers her mouth as she realizes what she is saying. Li laughs as Rhea visibly shrinks in her seat, mortified by what she has just blurted out.

RHEA: Oh God, I’m saying too much again, aren’t I? I should probably just be quiet.

DAVE: Yeah. That might be a good-

Before Dave can finish his sentence, Sam abruptly stands up, charging roughly toward Li.

DAVE: Wait, Sam! Stop!

Sam ignores him, only to find herself grabbed by Rye and Eris. Mirasol, Nikhil, and Reza tense, but Dave waves them down. Li smiles.

LI (laughs): Picked up a new partner, have you, Reyes? I gotta say, I like her.

SAM: You’ll like me a lot less as soon as your goons let me go! Now tell me, where can we find Tull?

LI (genuinely confused): ...What?

SAM: Don’t play dumb! Doesn’t take a genius to figure out a criminal mastermind might be the one behind all of this!

RYE (to Li): Want me to punch her?

LI: Let’s not make a scene.

The camera pans around the group to reveal a large group of restaurant staff watching the incident. Sam notices this as well, and after a moment’s hesitation, she relaxes and steps back. Rye and Eris let her go.

LI: You people are all the same: jumping to conclusions with absolutely zero proof. For what it’s worth, I had nothing to do with the Tower Murders. Trust me.

SAM: Bullshit.

Li shrugs innocently.

LI: Hey, don’t get me wrong, we aren’t above criminal activity: stealing here and there, a little fraud, a little extortion... but murdering innocents? That crosses a line. Believe it or not, we do have standards.

RYE (angrily): If we ever got our hands on Tull, we’d kill him ourselves.

DAVE (to Sam): Gotta admit, she ain’t wrong. Li’s record speaks for itself.

SAM (skeptical): Alright, then... if you hate Tull so much, care to give us any leads?

LI: Ha! Like I’d ever help out a cop.

She frowns, thinking for a moment. Then she looks over at Rhea, who somehow manages to shrink even further in her chair under Li’s piercing gaze.

LI: You... you’re not law enforcement, are you? And you’re definitely too innocent to be a celebrity. What’s your angle?

RHEA (nervously): Me? Oh, I’m nobody, just--I’m just a journalist, that’s all! Honest!

Li smirks, and her gaze softens slightly.

LI: Huh. Well, you seem like the genuine type. (to Rye) That ticket stub. Would you kindly?

After a moment’s hesitation, Rye fishes in his pocket, then pulls out a small, torn ticket stub and hands it to Li. She holds it out to Rhea, who takes it.

RHEA (curiously): What’s this?

LI: A clue. From one neutral party to another. (smirks) Give Tull my “regards” when you catch him, would you?

RHEA: Oh! Wow, uh, thanks-

Li, Rye, and Eris turn to continue toward their table. As they walk away, Li turns back toward the group, gazing at Dave.

LI: Reyes. Tread carefully. Tull ain’t just some psychopath. The people he runs with... This is bigger than you realize.

Li continues walking toward her table.

DAVE: Wait! Li, what do you mean? What’s--

LI (firmly): This conversation is over.

Dave turns back toward the others at his table, shrugging. Sam looks curiously at Rhea.

SAM: What is it? What’d she give you?

Rhea holds the ticket stub out, and everyone leans in to get a closer look.

RHEA: I’m not sure... but it might help us find Tull.

_______________________

Next: Technicality

CIU Tag List: @brightpinkpeppercorn @endlesshero1122 @bbaba-yagaa @acidsugar0

MW Tag List: @griselda1121

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kunrendeotaku · 4 years ago

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Chapter 12

I’m not sure how much longer Star drags me along before I finally look up, thinking that surely we should surely be home by now. To my surprise, I can’t immediately place where we are, but I think I see the mall fairly close by? That’s halfway across town! How far has Star dragged me? Ugh. I guess I have to put my own personal pity party on hold to ensure I can end up in my own bed tonight. The sheer amount of despair that thought provokes nearly makes me give up and lay back down, but I guess I’ve become more tired of sitting in this wagon than I thought, because the shaking now feels unbearable.

I roll out of the wagon and land on the concrete, but Star continues determinedly pulling her load along. I pick myself up, brush myself off, and rush to catch up with her. It causes a litany of aches and pains to run over my body, unfortunately, but I guess that's what you get for fighting above your weight class twice in the span of two days. Professional fighters usually spend months between fights, but I sure ain’t a professional. Still… they remind me of what I’ve been up to since I met Star. I fought monsters, I just finished fighting a fuckin demon! And I literally haven’t been bored even a single moment, the whole time. In spite of my grief for Rodrigo and his many brothers, I find a smile on my face.

“I see you finally decided to get up.” Star sounds completely miffed, perhaps understandably so. She must have been dragging me for miles. A twinge of guilt runs through me, she protects me (Mostly?) from Janna while I’m unconscious, then carries me away from the queen of creepiness herself? And I respond by making her drag me miles in a little metal wagon. I chuckle a bit nervously, scratching the back of my head. “Yeah, well, sorry about that. Janna… really gets to me. Where are we going anyway?”

Star glances over towards me with her lips pursed, but after only a few moments her gaze softens. In addition, that flush crops back over her cheeks and she looks away. Suspicious. I might have to find out if Star has anything to be guilty over herself. “Uh, yeah. We can call it even I guess. We’re heading to the school! We came out for your bike, we’re gonna get it.” Star declares, before pumping her free fist vigorously to punctuate her statement.

“Star…” I look at her in pity. “Did you take directions from Janna?” She blinks, tilting her head. “Yeah, why?” I grimace and rub the bridge of my nose. Stress levels rising. “Janna will literally never give you correct directions. Something about a middle school dare. We’ve been heading in the wrong direction for like, two hours.” I’m treated to my second view of Star’s cheek marks shattering in the same day, though unfortunately far less enjoyable this time. She groans, tossing herself back into the wagon to take my place. Her gigantic mass of blonde hair cushions her fall and honestly makes the thing look much more comfortable.

“C’mon. We’re pretty close to McDonalds, let's just grab some lunch.” Only unintelligible muttering comes from the bed of the wagon, and so I decide it's my turn to drag her around. I grab the handle and begin wheeling her along the sidewalk, wondering how in the world she’d managed to pull me for so long. A person is crazy heavy! Stupid warrior princess muscles. Probably the very same things making it so heavy for me. Luckily I don’t have to drag her nearly as far, but it's still going to be a grueling ten minutes of exertion all the way to our McDonald’s parking lot. “Listen, Marco, about earlier. You’re my guide to all Earth stuff, right?”

“Urgh. Yeah, that's right.” I answer, grunts of effort sometimes leaking out. Are these wheels even turning? “Well, you’re really smart about Earth stuff, but like… crazy dumb about magic. In the future, I’m gonna need you to follow my lead on that stuff. I’ll be your guide to the weird and wonderful magic of the multiverse!” Talkative when she’s not the one pulling, huh. I take my time to think that over, pondering what that would mean. On the one hand, that means I’m putting my safety and sanity in the hands of someone I’m pretty sure would classify as crazy. On the other hand, I really do have no clue what I’m doing when it comes to magic. That demon could have killed us, and it was all my fault. If we’re gonna keep seeing things like that…

“Alright, alright. That makes sense. We’ll just have to *gasp* teach each other.” Star bounces up onto her knees with a manic grin, shaking the whole wagon. “Great! First rule from your magic teacher: Unless I say otherwise, everyone who claims to be an Earth magician is doing real magic.” I slap my free hand into a vigorous facepalm, already feeling that that particular misunderstanding is definitely going to come back to bite me. “God-fine, sure Star. Every wacko who claims a mastery of voodoo or card tricks is a real wizard.” I hope my heavily slathered sarcasm makes it through that glitter filled skull of hers, but if so, she doesn’t react to it.

“Great! Also, I think we’re here.” Star jumps out of the wagon and points up at the building in front of us, done in beige and yellow. McDonalds written out in nice big letters, guess she’s right. I wonder if her dimension uses English in their writing as well, or if she learned before coming here? She does have a weird accent, now that I think of it. Something distinctly European, almost like a British accent's weird hyperactive cousin? About the best way to explain it. I of course park our wagon perfectly in the center of a parking space, finding myself compelled to click an imaginary electronic key. “Beep beep.”

I feel a hand snag my hoodie and drag me violently towards the door. “Hurry up, Marco! I smell food!” We blast into the door, which is thankfully push, rather than pull. I honestly think we might have busted the glass the other way around. Star thankfully releases me after I give her an affronted glare. The nerve, going after my hoodie. It could have stretched! She herself is bouncing up and down giddily, eyes swerving from place to place at lightning speed. I can tell the only reason she hasn’t gone any further into the room is that she simply can’t decide which to explore first.

“Earth Guide, rule one. When you find yourself in a place you don’t understand, do exactly as I do-or what the majority of others seem to be doing.” I gesture to the line of people getting ready to order, and step into line myself. “Oh, oh yeah. I can do that. No problem.” Star slides into place beside me, rather than behind me. Close enough, I guess… I’ll be paying for her food anyhow. “See that sign above the counter? Some of the items have pictures, some don’t, but that's the menu. Pick out one item from there, and a drink size.”

Star responds only with a few rapidfire nods, eyes already locked onto the menu. I wonder how she’ll do at her first time ordering a meal in an Earth restaurant? Unfortunately she’s not the most observant. I doubt she even hears how everyone else makes their orders, focused as she is on picking out her items. Eventually it comes time for us to make our orders, and she glances at me first. Good girl! She can learn! I step up and make my order quickly. “I’ll take a number three with a large fry and a large drink.” She asks if I’d like to make it a combo, which, obviously. I nod, then glance over at my new friend to see if she can follow along.

Star takes a deep breath, then holds up her wand and points it at the employee taking her order. It begins glowing with a menacing pink light. This isn’t exactly a promising start. “I don’t know what any of these are! I’ll just take the corn nuggets with the largest drink you have!” I quickly elbow her and shake my head, the poor confused lady just staring at us. “Star, there aren’t any corn nuggets on the menu!” She blinks, suddenly seeming just as befuddled as the rest of us. “What kind of food place doesn’t have corn nuggets?! I didn’t even bother looking for them, since I figured they weren’t one of the items with pictures!”

I sigh. Of course she only looked at the pictures. I slowly move Star’s wand arm down towards the floor so she can stop threatening the nice lady taking our orders, and thankfully she lets it stop glowing shortly after. “Look, she’ll take the 8 piece nuggets, large fry, and a large drink. Yes, Combo, whatever. Listen-thrown in a kids meal toy and she’s less likely to cause another scene.” The look of sheer exhaustion on my face must have clued the employee into something, as she suddenly gives me a look of sympathy and nods. I snag our two cups and lead Star over to the drink machine, a confused look on her face.

“Star. Can you tell me what you did wrong there?” She blinks, then frowns, thinking back over her actions. “Well, I greeted the lady, asked her for the food, and told her my drink size. Honestly, I think I did great. Pretty much the only one in the wrong is this place for not having corn nuggets.” Star scoffs, clearly unrepentant. We have a lot of work to do here. “No, Star. You threatened an innocent woman, demanded food instead of asking, and didn’t read the menu. At all. Worse, you didn’t observe anyone else to figure out the right way to do it-even me! You could have literally only repeated what I said and been fine!”

“Ohhhh. I just figured princesses behaved differently, so I never really think about how other people do things.” Star begins holding up fingers in turn as she lists off “Always meet a new person vigorously and with your weapons at the ready, from Dad. Never ask for anything as it makes you look weak, from Mom. Annnd both of them always said it was other people’s responsibility to match my demands. I did it all right! Three boxes checked, woo.” Star pumps her arms, a proud grin on her face.

I simply shake my head, wondering where this spoiled side of Star has popped up from. I mean, when she said she was a princess, it was always kind of hard to see-she treats me like an equal, along with my parents, and even Janna. But I guess service people automatically ping as ‘peasants’ for her royal upbringing? I wonder if it's even possible to overwrite fourteen years of habits built while considering yourself one of the most important people in your country. “Second Earth Guide rule: Marco’s orders supersede princess training. You can’t be a normal Earthling if you follow all the crazy rules of being a princess at the same time-heck, I find it hard to believe you follow them even half the time anyway, so this should be easy!”

#svtfoe #star vs the forces of evil #marco diaz #rating: mature #fanfiction #fanfic

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wahbegan · 5 years ago

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Red’s Retro Reviews - Condemned Criminal Origins

Hello and welcome to the tag where I use my otherwise useless and time-consuming habit of taking very old classic games that I’ve wrung all the enjoyment out of like a troubled child with an injured bird and turn it into entertainment! Maybe one day the editor of some chic magazine will hire me to talk about how much I know about Batman: Arkham Asylum and how much I hate myself for it.

Anyway, this week I thought I’d start off with an overlooked little gem that had a bit of cult notoriety and good critical reception, but which otherwise nobody gave an ounce of rat shit about: the Condemned series. More specifically, the original game.

Now, when I ask you who started the extremely lucrative habit of live-streaming themselves hilariously over-reacting to horror games, you might be tempted to say the Game Grumps, or Markiplier if you’re younger, or Pewdiepie if you’re the kind of person who unironically uses the phrase anti-white racism. But you’d all be wrong and stupid. Also possibly nazi sympathizers, but I digress.

NO! The first college-age white boys who decided it would be a good idea to beam them fucking up a video game to thousands and thousands of people online are..........lost to history because archiving of the exact history of internet trends is such an enormous clusterfuck that for years people were convinced, and some still are, that Slenderman was a real urban legend and not something some dickhead made up for a photoshop competition circa 2009

But ONE of the first was the 4 Players Network, or 4 Players Podcast, or 4PP. I know very little about these guys, so if they all turned out to be nonces and serial killers please don’t @ me, but what i DO know, is that they uploaded a video that changed my life forever. This video was “Holy Crap That’s a Bear !” Certainly not a name that would stand out in today’s massively oversaturated Let’s Play market, but this delightful video documented these two dumb assholes losing their shit over a game. The game of course, being Condemned 2: Bloodshot. Specifically, the level in which you are chased through a hunting lodge by a rabid bear. As an aside, I looked it up, having never heard of the phenomenon, and apparently it’s very rare, but yes bears can and do get rabies, usually with just about as fatal results as you would expect. So sweet dreams!

Anyway, watching this couple of dipshits get jumpscared and mauled to death by a poorly rendered bear again and again as they were repeatedly outwitted at every turn by an entity with a few lines of programming instead of a brain was, in y’know the year 2008, the absolute most fun a 14-year-old boy could have. Clearly it still is, but you always remember your first time, particularly when the only LPs i have watched since were a handful of markiplier videos with a girl in college who liked to get me very stoned and then put them on because she thought that counted as courtship.

A n y w a y, apart from the unfortunate and definitely a mistake innovation of streaming video games, the sequence of being chased through a claustrophobic environment by a bear which can rip down doors, break through walls, run faster than you, shrug off 15 shotgun blasts to the face without so much as sneezing, etc. seemed incredibly tense and original, an amazing concept for a game. Once again, this was circa 2008 before “Run for your fucking life” had become the norm for horror games.

So then why the fuck are you not reviewing that game?? You might be thinking if you’re still reading this which someone clearly is or my narrative voice would have ceased to exist by now in that tree falling in the woods kind of way. Well, dear reader, while Condemned 2 was better than the first game in a LOT of ways, it’s always worth taking a gander at the one that started it all. Also, Condemned 1 is, if only slightly, probably better known. Also, Bloodshot commits the cardinal sin of over-explaining the first game’s mystery and a result making it kind of goofy and ridiculous see also the entire history of the Halloween franchise, and as a result the ending is....well, a bit shit, to be honest. Finally, and most importantly, it’s not on Steam for 3 dollars, so shut up

The thing about Condemned is that while Let’s Plays and seemingly inanimate objects moving only when you’re not looking at them and unstoppable juggernauts of wanton death have now become the norm for video game horror (and thanks a fucking bunch, Doctor fucking Who, for always being what people say started the inanimate object fuckery even though Stephen King did it in The Shining in the FUCKING 70s and let’s be honest it’s just a primal universal fear and i’ll be in the cold fucking ground before that bloody show sees one ounce of credit where it isn’t due), Condemned as a whole has remained remarkably unique. Not wholly unique, the developers have heavily borrowed from genre-straddling crime horror movies like Silence of the Lambs and Se7en and in fact almost beat-for-beat stole the most infamous jump scare from the latter, but if it still ends with shit in my pants, and it does, I can’t really call it a failure.

Most of the creativity the game DOES have is in the gameplay itself, or rather one aspect of the two aspects of the gameplay. It’s the combat I’m talking about the combat, seeing as that’s basically all there is. Let’s just get this out of the way first, the forensic investigation shit is........well, it’s a bit shit. Oh yes, there’s a couple crime scenes you have to “solve” in a cursory almost a cutscene sort of way, where you have helpful premonitions about where you’re supposed to look and, as your lab tech helpfully informs you, “the system will choose which tool you need for you, so don’t worry about that!” Well, Christ kill me, thank God YOU know between the three fucking tools I have, one of which is an everything sensor and one of which is just a fucking camera which I’m supposed to use, God knows I wouldn’t have liked to have solved that mystery myself. It’s a shame because some of the crime scenes are quite intricate and yes, I would have liked to have put together myself that “wait a minute there’s a handprint in the paint here that matches the killer but the UV light shows an old blood spatter on the wall right above where he’d be sitting to make it, THAT MUST MEAN-” but nope. No you just have a premonition of the guy getting clobbered over the back of the head because the game is so terrified you won’t be able to put two and two together that it points out both the twos and hands you a multiplication table and nudges you and looks meaningfully at four every few minutes if you hesitate.

Anyway, that’s all the whingeing about the gameplay out of the way, because the rest of it is just delightful. Condemned is the rare first person game that focuses almost solely on melee combat and the almost unheard of one that does it well. In fact, it is the only example I can think of that’s not shit. Weapons all have individual stats to do with their heft and how far they can reach and how much of a man’s skull you can cave in at once with it and you have to choose between the plank with nails sticking out of it you can swing three times a second but you have to beat a man so badly with it it’s tiring just to watch and the sledgehammer, which demands a two weeks’ notice in writing if you’re planning on hitting someone with it, but will basically render every living thing in its considerable swing arc sent to the fucking Shadow Realm upon impact.

Something about the sound effects and the way the weapons in this game control really gets under my skin, I was killed by a 300-pound Subway-dwelling crazy survivalist wielding the aforementioned sledgehammer, and when I went down, I was sure I was familiar with the sound effect that played when it struck my skull, a sort of distant, muffled ringing of bone hitting metal. Wait a minute, I thought, I know I’ve experienced this in real life, how did they get this sound effect? Did they kill a man with a hammer to get this sound effect? Was I killed with a hammer in a past life? Killing people is equally fucking unpleasant as even the most vicious and inhuman looking ones don’t go down easily, and you can see them spit gobs of broken teeth and blood and god knows what, hear the lovingly researched impact noises, and almost feel the impact as you necessitate years of reconstructive facial surgery with one swing of your mighty chunk of concrete attached to a rebar. Then some of them have the gall to shakily get to their knees, not quite dead, trying to mumble something and you’re required to hit them AGAIN, which is always harrowing. To quote another underappreciated piece of media about the joys of gruesome murder: Why won’t you just die?! This is hard enough for me!!

The guns you do get are absolute balls, generally having about three bullets in them, you can’t reload them even if you find the exact same type of gun later, you can’t hold them in your inventory, and if you want an aiming reticle you have to actively turn it on in the options menu, and you can almost hear the game laughing at you for being such a shameless pussy.

Well, you now might be thinking to yourself, cheers for making the effort, but I’m not an insane person and therefore do not think the idea of a brutally beating people to death simulator sounds very enticing, but that’s the thing, it’s not really supposed to be. It does have a strangely addictive quality after a while, but for the most part it’s panicky and harrowing and grotesque and you really don’t want to do it but you have no choice, which is absolutely the best kind of survival horror. See, the combat in survival horror is always a bit of a sticking point, isn’t it? Because if you give the player too much firepower it just becomes an action game with spooky set pieces, but if you give them none at all, as is chic today, you better have loads of other surprises in store buddy boy, because the sheen on that trend has died and now you’re just likely to get slapped with the dreaded WALKING SIMULATOR sticker.

No, the best kind of combat for a horror feel is exactly the kind Condemned delivers, so of course they never FUCKING did it again. You leave every fight low on supplies, exhausted, badly wounded, and a bit sick at what you just reduced a human being’s skull to. Too often, the combat in games is, even that word “combat” it’s clean, it’s cold, it’s detached, it’s a very unique euphemism for butchering God knows how many people. I play this little game in my head when I go through games sometimes trying to keep track of how many unique, thinking, feeling entities I’ve just reduced to a mess for the janitor to mop up, and I always lose track around the third level. Condemned isn’t like that. Its violence is violence: horrible, awful, terrifying violence, and it doesn’t let you forget it.

The graphics also add a lot to the horror if you can get past the dated polygonal weird-ass xbox 360 at launch faces and cutscenes, which is actually pretty easy once you get used to it. The level and character design is fantastic, and really adds a lot to the whole feel of the game. Everywhere you look is dark and labyrinthine, crumbling with rebars jutting out and exposed paneling and plumbing beneath holes rotted in the walls and grime and blood and god knows what just staining everything. This game is really nihilistic in tone, and you get the sense just from the graphics that you’re somewhere nobody gives a shit about, in a part of a city that’s just been left to die and rot. One almost gets the feeling moving around the fourth or fifth condemned (ohhhhh I see what they did there) building that the whole city is just a ghost town full of nobody but violent lunatics, and also that if you keep playing for too long you might get hepatitis just from exposure.

Plot-wise, I could fill another twenty paragraphs with petty gripes. It’s a bit Kill List which i’m sure is a reference you all understand in that it starts as a crime thriller about catching a serial murderer and ends in some bizarre insane bullshit halfway between Hereditary and Hellraiser, and leads you into it gently enough that you never really notice a sudden lurch.

You play as Ethan Thomas, a very boring and generic FBI Agent called in to investigate a serial killer case by two cops who are REMARKABLY blithe about murdering people, and it’s a bit jarring in today’s political climate. Though distrust, fear, and hatred of the police isn’t exactly new, and violence amongst police officers is brought up at one point, albeit in a loading screen, so honestly I can’t be arsed to speculate on what level of self-awareness we’re operating on here. Regardless, it’s bothersome.

“Oh yeah, this place is full of addicts, hopped up on something, I think, just shoot ‘em. What? Lost your gun, eh? That’s fine here’s a fire axe go nuts, kid, we’ll deal with the paperwork later”

Anyway, you are ambushed by a man you believe to be the killer for.......no real reason, really. He was spying on you checking out the crime scene, but we just established this place is full of squatters, what if one of the 8 people I murdered on the way into this ambush was the killer??? Case solved!

Anyway, needless to say, without wishing to spoil, the dude IS the main antagonist the yellow eyes are a helpful giveaway, and he takes your gun and swiftly shoots Generic Beat Cop and Generic Dick with it, then throws you out a window, whereupon some other asshole whose main role in the game is to be enigmatic and plot-convenient, you know, one of THOSE characters, spirits you away from the scene, making it look like you just killed two cops and fled.

Now, in real life, as we all know, a cop can’t be indicted for murder even if 50 people saw him do it, but in this world, it means you have to go on the run from the FBI (not your lab tech, though, who is somehow assisting you from the lab and sending confidential data to your phone unnoticed??) while trying to solve the murder.

Meanwhile, in the background, in an “I’m sure this isn’t important and will in no way inform the last level of the game going batshit bonkers” kind of way, all of the people, including the cops, in certain dilapidated and neglected areas of the unnamed City City appear to be going what is medically known as balls-to-the-wall kill crazy, and birds are dropping dead from the sky by the thousands. Even you, protagonist, are prone to horrible screaming nightmare visions coming right the blazing blue fuck out of nowhere and that you never feel the need to comment on or go take a lie-down. I’m sure it’s nothing.

The voice acting is what you’d expect from this era of video games i.e. not good and the writing has an absolutely DESPICABLE habit of having characters tell Ethan things he should already god damned well know for the sake of gameplay or exposition, leading to my current theory that Agent Ethan Thomas has some kind of horrible head injury and can’t remember anything from over 2 minutes ago like Guy Pearce in that pretentious movie where he accidentally kills his wife and then runs around for two hours terrorizing random-ass people about it.

The game never full-on plays the AND THE MAN YOU’VE BEEN PLAYING AS WAS CRAZY THE WHOLE TIME card and leaves things a bit ambiguous, but after caving in the 15th vagrant’s head and the 7th vision you’ve had of being murdered by some Cenobite-looking motherfucker while conducting an unsanctioned investigation during a suspension prompted by you presumably murdering the shit out of two guys, you start to think this may not be standard FBI protocol.

It’s all a bit hard to swallow is me point, a bit hard to sympathize, and a bit muddy if we’re supposed to or not. But you know what? It certainly isn’t boring, and I’d be lying if I told you it wasn’t effective. This game is now one of only two to have genuinely given me nightmares, and I think it’s rather telling that after I played the hallucination part I had the nightmare about, I was having genuine trouble remembering if something happened in my nightmare of it or in the actual version.

Condemned is batshit crazy, hilariously easy to write off as “that game about killing hobos”, and very, very dated. But it is genuinely harrowing and unpleasant, and was clearly genuinely made by artists with the intent of saying.....errr i’m not exactly sure what, but SOMETHING! It’s about as far a cry as you can get from the Triple A crawling with microtransactions like your MCM is with crabs milk-you-for-money-until-your-udders-bleed look-at-how-shiny-we-are games, and even a lot of indie horror games who think it’s a measure of a masterpiece being able just to constantly trigger your fight-or-flight response again and again and again so you can make a hilarious Let’s Play out of it not to name any names Five Night’s at Freddy’s. It’s a relic of a different and i think a better time in gaming history, where big-name publishers were still taking chances and hadn’t quite yet worked out the formula for how to distill games into their most skeletal, malnourished, corporate, addictive, glorified gambling form.

Also it’s 3 dollars on Steam and you can finish it in like ffffffffucking...two days? So really why the fuck not. I have no idea how to assign numbers to things i’d probably give ir a 7 or 8 or 4 out of 5 stars but i’m bad at systems like that, just play it if you give a shit. If nothing else, a bunch of people snapping it up out of nowhere will really fuck with marketing, which is always a noble pursuit

#game reviews #Condemned Criminal Origins

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oneunicornaway · 6 years ago

Text

Date Night

I did the whole spiel once already, but the gist of it is: Jupeter date. Heist. Mafia. Juno is a badass, and Peter is horny.

Thanks a lot to @chyww, @tackyjackpack, and @tinyplanetss for the emotional support, willingness to correct my grammar at times, and general awesomeness <3 <3 <3

This is pretty long and might be better on AO3

"I promise you, Juno, that this will be the best date anyone has ever taken you on."

Juno had sputtered and fidgeted and had been damn close to hanging up the phone right then, but in the end he couldn't deny that the idea of having Peter Nureyev, best thief in the galaxy, concentrated only on him for one whole night, was a very enticing one. Which is why he had listened to Nureyev when he had given him a time and place and had accepted to 'dress up a bit'.

It's not exactly that he regretted it... not really, it's just that he felt utterly ridiculous clad in his favorite jumpsuit and jacket and light make up, as he waited at the corner of Fitzgerald and 6th.

Just as he was considering leaving, date be damned, or at least removing his earrings, to feel a bit less out of place, someone came up behind him. Without thinking, Juno turned on himself, fist at the ready, only to strike at empty air, merely displacing a bit of Peter Nureyev's hair with the movement.

The thief's smile was wide and amused. Juno's heart missed a bit.

"I'm happy to see you're as vigilant as ever, Juno."

His movement was slow but sure as he approached Juno, and the PI was torn between slapping the smile off his face and leaning into his embrace.

Peter's hand curled around his waist and Juno considered the fact that no one cared if he spent his life smooching Peter Nureyev's face off. Nureyev made the kiss last and linger and yet he couldn't get enough of it. It felt as though the world stopped every time the thief kissed him, was near him, as though Juno could feel the universe expand outwards, as if suddenly, he wasn't only Juno Steel, former garbage cop, beat detective and one-eyed loser. Peter Nureyev made him feel as though there was more to Mars, more to the stars above that didn't shine through the dome, and Juno didn't ever want it to stop.

Peter gently ended the kiss, and it took Juno some efforts not to cling to him. Nureyev didn't seem to have the same reserves, and he let his hand linger in Juno's hair, lightly caressing his cheek with his thumb.

"I missed you."

"Yeah... I... me too."

Feelings were dumb and he had a lot of them. Benzaiten would have made so much fun of him.

Peter let his hand fall to take Juno’s.

"Shall we?"

"Sure."

As it was, Juno wouldn't have minded staying alone with Peter Nureyev in a random, dark street. Here, besides the thief's side, the shadows seemed almost welcoming. But Nureyev had promised a wonderful date, and Juno Steel didn’t get many of those, and so he was rather curious of what the thief had imagined for him.

"So, what adventures have you been part of lately? My wonderful detective."

Juno scoffed.

"I don't think I would call them 'adventures'. The life of a PI is not as interesting as it sounds, you know."

Nureyev smiled fondly and pressed lightly on his hand, making a soothing motion with his thumb that left Juno’s skin tingling with heat.

"I beg to differ, considering our history together - Nureyev sounded positively gleeful at being able to say 'our history'. Besides, as long as it's about you, I wouldn't mind hearing boring stories."

That was... annoyingly smooth.

"Well then, brace yourself for the riveting story of the thousand cheating spouses, with a side of tax evasion and one very badly executed museum heist."

Nureyev chuckled, and Juno went on to tell the preposterous story of one cheating wife, who had managed to put together a whole scheme to keep the identity of her famous lover a secret.

As he talked, he could feel the tension leave his body, Nureyev's presence going from a burning furnace to reassuring fireplace embers, which warmed him up to the core without burning his skin. He was halfway through explaining the extensive mailing system he had found out, the key to solve the case, when they arrived at their destination.

"I have a reservation for Duke and Dahlia Rose." Announced Nureyev, seemingly completely at ease with suddenly taking up Duke Rose’s personae.

After the internal roller coaster that the names provoked in Juno - Nureyev never gave his name in public places, and Juno got an alias most of the time as well, but Duke and Dahlia were married and it always felt as though Nureyev was pushing him over an edge of sentimentality that he wasn't ready to cross by himself - he took in the place Nureyev had brought him in. It was a restaurant, and despite being in one of the shadiest part of town, it seemed to be rather upper class. The walls were richly decorated with dark red hangings and some precious looking vases on their own small tables. The restaurant was only half-full, and the people already seated wore discreetly rich clothes and pieces of jewelry, a rare occurrence in Hyperion city, where people either showed you how poor they were, or fled you for not being rich enough.

There were a few waiters, but they didn't seem to be entirely overcome with their clients. One of them didn't even seem to take care of any of them, and was instead carrying some boxes to the kitchen. Apart from the mild murmur of ongoing conversations, the place was eerily calm. There was no yelling bartender, no singing group of drunk friends, no drunkard by the bar and no greasy meat that looked like it had spent four year in a cryogenic fridge. This was a place for Duke and Dahlia Rose, world class thieves and art collectors.

Juno felt like a fly on the wall.

"Do you like it, love?" Asked Nur... Duke Rose after Juno had absentmindedly followed him to their table.

"Um? Yeah, sure."

Was this the best date ever Nureyev had promised him? Did he think he liked this? Worse, did he expect him to like this? To be just as elegant and refined as a Dahlia Rose?

There was a pit in his stomach, growing by the second, and it tasted like bitter disappointment.

The same waiter passed by them, hefting once again an unlabeled package, and paying them no mind.

Wait.

Juno followed the waiter with his eyes, until he disappeared in what didn't quite look like a proper restaurant's kitchen.

What.

He lowered his eyes to his menu. At first glance it seemed like a normal menu for a restaurant of this kind. Looking closely however, there wasn't much choice for such a refined place, and a good third of the dishes were annotated in pencil with notes that indicated they weren't served at the time, or that the kitchen didn't have one ingredient anymore. All in all, Juno was growing increasingly more convinced that this place wasn’t, in fact, what it pretended to be.

Juno looked up at his companion. Duke Rose had one elbow resting on the table, cupping his face in one hand as he smiled up adoringly in the perfect picture of an enamored idiot. And below that surface, Juno could see the sharp edges of Nureyev's enjoyment.

What a beautiful bastard.

"Duke, darling" Juno said, trying his best Dahlia's voice, "who did you say owns this restaurant again?"

"Oh, a very respectable constable of Hyperion city, love. Their name is Rosamund Lorland I believe."

Of fucking course.

Peter wasn't restraining himself much anymore, offering a smug smile that made Juno want to strangle him. He settled for kicking him under the table, but it seemed the thief had anticipated the move, and his foot only met air.

"Good evening."

A waitress interrupted Juno's attempts, looking young, sweet, and ready to murder for a pay raise.

"What can I get you tonight? Do you want to start with some drinks?"

Before Juno could say anything, Duke Rose ordered what seemed like a full menu for himself and Dahlia. As he said the last part of their order—some kind of "boeuf bourguignon", whatever that meant—the waitress' demeanor changed. It was subtle enough that Juno only caught it because he was still looking at her, but her eyes focused, and her stance adjusted slightly.

"I'm sorry, but this order is no longer available. The shipment for the ingredients of the dressing is late."

They even had a decent excuse. Peter had not only led him to a front, it was even a good one.

Charming as ever, Duke did not back down, insisting instead.

"Surely, something can be arranged? I promised my husband he would get to taste this delicacy you are known to provide."

Juno ignored the sudden drop in his stomach to try a Dahlia smile at the waitress. She looked defiantly at the two of them, but ended up conceding:

"I'll try and talk to my manager, see what he can do."

She left, and Juno went back to glaring at his so-called husband. Peter smiled sweetly and it took a lot of effort for Juno not to leap over the table and commit marital violence

"There are no bugs in here, so you can talk freely as long as you make sure that you look as charming as ever." Peter finally said, with a small, fond smile that was as much his as it was Duke's.

"What the hell, Nureyev?!" Juno tried to keep up a Dahlia smile. "First of all, I thought this was supposed to be a date. Second of all, if this is one of your heists, I will actually turn you in this time, and faster than you can say my name. And last but not least, why the hell did you just give the mafia a good reason to kill us both?!"

Peter Nureyev, because he was a scheming, lying bastard, didn't have any problem keeping up his persona as he responded.

"Well then. To respond in kind, here are my points. First of all, this is a date. Did you really think I expected you to be satisfied with a boring dinner and a quiet evening? I did say it was going to be wonderful, and I know how much you like solving mysteries and being a hero, especially with your recent string of boring affairs, and so I delivered."

Damn that bastard, but he... wasn't exactly wrong. Despite Juno's annoyance, this was more interesting than a simple dinner. Peter obviously saw the resignation in Juno's face because he gave him a smug eyebrow waggle, disguised as Duke presenting the jug of water to Dahlia. Juno grumpily went back to glaring and Duke served him some water before resuming the conversation.

"Second of all, this is... well, this isn't only a heist." For the first time, Peter seemed somewhat bashful and Juno straightened to give him a piece of his mind. "But, love," - that man knew how to silence him much too well - "Rosamund Lorland is, I believe, a very dangerous man, and his recent drug deals are on the brink of starting a war with the Triads. I do believe this little... adventure could give us what you need to convict him. As for turning me in..." Peter offered a sly smile "I think we both remember how that turned out last time. And while I wouldn't exactly mind, I think we both can think of better ways to spent our late evening... don't you?"

Juno could feel his cheeks burning up. There was more he wanted to ask, more questions Nureyev had to answer to, but by the time he was recovered, the waitress had turned up again.

"The manager wants to see you. Come with me please."

Juno stood up at the same time as Peter, and the waitress didn't protest. She led them through the restaurant to the kitchen. If any other customer was surprised at their passage, none of them showed it and, as far as Juno could tell, watched them go by placidly.

Inside, the cover was dropped. There was a chef of course, but it seemed like the dishes he was preparing weren't nearly as delicious or as varied as the menu made them out to be.

And then, of course, looking prim and awesome, stood Rosamund Lorland.

Juno recognized them from the picture that used to hang in the precinct of the HCPD. Lorland was young for a crime lord, younger than most mafia leaders, and younger than Juno himself. They were the former commander of a Triad squadron. Impatient and hot headed, they had been quick to cause more trouble than the HCPD usually saw in organized crime. It wasn't clear whether they had been kicked out of the Triad for making too much trouble or if they had abandoned ship to pursue their own, private goals, but one thing was certain: one year after Lorland began getting a name for themselves they founded their own mafia family, in direct concurrence with the Triad and all drug trafficking groups. In a sense, Lorland was far from the worst of the criminal to roam the street of Hyperion City. They sold drugs to anyone that could afford it, including kids and homeless people with enough cash to forget their radiation poisoning, and they commanded a full-fledged underground militia made out of all the outcasts, the ones nobody wanted to see employed in their shop or near their children, the worst of Hyperion City. But then again, in that, they weren't straying from your usual mafia boss or crime boss, and while Juno didn't have to like it, but he knew that wasn't why Rosamund Lorland was a big fish to catch for the HCPD.

The thing was, Lorland was ambitious, and Lorland was a firm believer of doing things their own way.

Lorland had begun selling their various drugs in Triad, Kanagawa and Adichi territories. This had already led to several open fights between Lorland's factions and the older, more institutionalized mafiosi. Nobody in their right mind appreciated the fact that there were mafias in Hyperion City, but anyone could recognize that they liked to keep the peace almost as much as the city's police department. Lorland, was, for all intent and purpose, the troublemaker that threw a wrench in the balance Hyperion's civilians had found amongst the chaos that was the city.

It was obvious that this new mafia lord was more than ready to start a war, and Juno, amongst other, found Hyperion's streets animated enough already. He stole a glance at Nureyev. That bastard really knew how to manipulate him. He did want to put Lorland in a prison cell, and Nureyev was nothing if not freakingly good at stealing pretty much anything from whoever was stupid enough to buy into one of his various personae. After all, there was, really, no technical difference between stealing evidence and any precious artefact.

Juno was going to go along with this, wasn't he.

Duke Rose smiled pleasantly at Lorland, and it seemed as though it had a triumphant edge to it. Juno had to suppress a smile of his own. One had to admit Peter Nureyev was good at what he did. Even when what he did was convince beat-up PIs to bend their morals, it seemed.

"I heard you requested to see me." Lorland extended a hand for Duke to shake. "Duke Rose, is that it?" Their voice was exceedingly melodious, in a very deliberate way that sounded immediately pompous to Juno's ear. That was good, the more full of themselves they were, the easier it would be to make them think the Rose couple didn't represent any kind of threat. However, Lorland had successfully managed to put together a business despite being threatened by Hyperion City's largest mafia families and they were far from stupid. It would do no good for Juno to overlook them as simply what they appeared, and he resolved to keep a close eye on them.

"Duke and Dahlia Rose, in fact" At this, Lorland looked at him. Dahlia would have been smoking a cigar or something along those lines; as it were, Juno's lungs were shit, so he had to settle with giving what was supposed to be a haughty glance. "As you may know, my husband's family is of a certain... importance throughout the galaxy" - at this, Lorland gave the slightest nod, which made Juno wonders if Nureyev had managed to give his fictional relatives enough substance that they actually had a reputation, or if Lorland merely didn't want to admit to not knowing them - "and we would be interested in dealing with you, and to buy... merchandises... from your organization."

Juno had to make an effort not to roll his eyes at the unnecessary dramatic tone.

But then he realized Dahlia Rose didn't give a shit about speaking his mind or being rude.

"What my husband is trying to say is, we'd like to buy your coke."

Lorland smiled at the deadpan voice, and nodded.

"Of course. Our product is of very high quality. Would you like to try it?"

Dahlia arched an eyebrow in what Juno hoped to be a pointed way.

"No. I have a strict policy of never sampling the product. It makes one slow, and I can't have that."

Lorland laughed, softly and politely like a politician.

"Well then, I think this deserves you visit the parlor. Candis? Would you mind telling Val to come up? I'm going to need her."

Juno and Peter's waitress nodded curtly and swiftly left the room, while Lorland gestured for them both to follow.

Juno took the opportunity to steal a glance at Nureyev, only to see that the thief was already looking at him intently. When he saw Juno looking, though, his intense demeanor dropped to break into a smile, and Duke reappeared on his face.

"I have to admit I'm quite surprised you're coming to me with this. Don't me wrong, I would say we are the best suppliers on Mars, but I doubt an enterprise such as yours needs to go so far to get its merchandise."

"Oh, the problem is not with the merchandise itself," Peter intervened, to Juno's relief. "But we've been having what you could call... legal problems. I'm sure you understand."

Once again, Lorland nodded, eager to seem all knowing, and Juno relaxed slightly. For all their obvious smarts, they also seemed to be a very proud character, which—Juno had observed it in the past—made them an easy target for Peter's manipulation.

Not that he approved of the thief's methods.

Lorland led them through unmarked corridor for what seemed like several minutes. They climbed down some stairs, then up others, and up again, turning several times. By the time they arrived in front of a simple, unlabeled door, Juno was thoroughly disoriented.

They entered in what seemed to be an office, and Lorland began talking about prices, schedules, meeting places. Peter responded in kind, apparently fully prepared to deploy an entire fictive market for the Rose network. Juno tried as best as he could to appear bored rather than lost, and scanned the room whenever he felt secure enough in the knowledge that Lorland was concentrating on Peter. The room seemed like the normal desk room of any businessman, although it was a bit barer that Juno would have expected. No pricey paintings hung on the wall, and while the room was decorated, it was in a comfortable way rather than a showy one.

Eventually Juno spotted something interesting.

The walls weren't entirely bare, as it was. There were several bookshelves artfully stacked behind the desk, and besides one of them... a patch of paint that reflected the light emitted by the ceiling lamp slightly differently. It was so discreet Juno might not have spotted it... were it not for the fact that he had a similar spot in his own office, from clipping a wall after one drink too many. Rita had put plaster which hid the hole almost flawlessly, but looking closely at it, you could see a faint difference in the paint’s color where the light hit it. Somehow, he doubted this was the result of one of Lorland's burst of anger—the oman seemed exceedingly composed—and if there was an emplacement for any kind of valuable object Peter was after, it would most likely be there.

Juno was really going through with this, wasn't he? Somehow, he couldn't find it in himself to mind.

Someone knocked at the office door, and Lorland, looking unsurprised, called them inside.

"Val, there you are! I need your help to draw a contract for those gentlemen."

"I'm a lady, please." Juno corrected out of automatism.

Lorland rolled with this without breaking a sweat, and went on to point out some of the specifications Peter had given. Val looked like death had warmed over. Pale, and bone-thin, with deep, purplish shadow under her eyes. She wasn’t that old, from what Juno could tell, but she looked as though a slight breeze might break her in half.

"I suppose you will want to go over the legal matters with Val?” Finally said Lorland. “She’s my main jurist." Duke Rose agreed with a flourish Juno blocked out.

"Then, shall the lady and I go and oversee the merchandise? I know you said you didn't want to test it, but surely you want to take a look at it."

Juno shot a discreet glance at Peter, who near imperceptibly (or so Juno hoped) nodded.

"Your desire for honesty honors you. Duke!"

Duke Rose was like an overeager puppy, Juno decided, as Peter bounded over to him.

He took hold of Duke's collar and brought him in for a kiss, silently gesturing towards the patch of wall with his eyes.

Even inside enemy territory, kissing Peter was like drinking rejuvenating water, and Juno would probably have lost himself in it, if he hadn't felt Peter's hands roaming his body. First, he could feel the thief testing the give of his hip, where he kept his holster —and god, was Juno happy for his paranoia at this moment – and checked for the presence of Juno’s blaster. Then, he carefully pressed something under the flap of Juno's jacket, where it would be hidden from Lorland's eyes.

Juno heard a cough from behind him and detached himself from his wannabe husband. Duke seemed ready to chase after him, looking desperate and glazed for an instant. And Juno was sure it was a mask, the face of a man Peter only pretended to be, but this look of open desire, of near neediness, made it hard for Juno to remind himself they were technically still doing business.

"Be good." Dahlia finally said, in his imperious voice, and Duke nodded, obedient and star-struck. Juno didn’t dare to send a glance towards the frail Val to make his point across. He just had to trust that Nureyev knew him as well as he pretended to and would understand the meaning behind his words.

Then, he abruptly looked back at Lorland, who bowed their head slightly, letting Juno get out of the room before them and following him in the corridors.

As the mafioso led him through the complex, he discreetly put a hand to what Peter had stuck into his jacket. It seemed to be a small electronic device, probably an audio recorder or a camera, but Juno couldn't be sure. In any case, this was genius. All Juno had to do was to follow Lorland directly to the evidence of his drug deals.

This time, the way was rather straightforward, and, considering the number of stairs they had to take, the hall in which Lorland led him was underground. It was large and well lit, and seemed to be working like Juno would have assumed a standard factory to. Juno counted a dozen workers in chemistry goons and white masks, which protected them from inhaling too much of the substance they were working with. They also—Juno noted with a twinge of annoyance—hid their face from their eyes down. Lorland led Juno to the end of the hall, where a person, made anonymous by their working clothes, was closing small packages full of white powder and tidying them up into neat piles. Lorland pointed at the display.

"Those would be the type of merchandise we would sell you, as per our agreement."

Juno nodded, trying to get closer to the bags. He hoped the device contained a camera because it didn’t seem as though Lorland was ever going to talk without euphemism, and he needed the evidence to be as tight as possible.

"Would you mind if I took a look for myself?" Juno could feel Dahlia's persona slipping, slowly, away from him, but he desperately needed something that would actually incriminate Lorland.

"Of course, go ahead." The oman responded pleasantly, but Juno was acutely aware of the pair of pale eyes drilling holes into him.

He didn't really know how to recognize good coke. Coke, sure, it was part of the training as a cop, and you had to be able to say whether you were arresting someone for poorly labeled flour or for actual crack. But he had never taken a hit himself, and he didn't know how to assess the quality short of snorting the stuff.

He looked at the little bag quizzically, trying to look as though he was examining it from different angles so that he could put it under what he hoped was a lens. He was almost sure he had the evidence necessary—provided Nureyev did give him a camera—when Lorland spoke again.

"So, would you say you got a good look at my premises, milady... Dahlia Rose?"

Lorland's words sounded slow, careful, almost deliberate. Juno froze, and turned his head minutely, to look back towards them.

"Beg your pardon?"

Lorland took a step towards him, and Juno instinctively took a step back.

"I know my circuit is far from the most developed on Mars, let alone in the universe, but you should have known not to underestimate us."

Lorland kept advancing, and Juno kept retreating, to the point where he'd soon hit the wall behind him.

"It was clever using the name of the Roses, but I doubt you are in any way related to them."

Around them, the employees had dropped their initial task, and were looking in his direction. Several of them had lowered their mask and opened their lab coat to reveal a variety of weapons.

"I have to admit, your lackey was rather well-prepared, but you got too arrogant in the end. Did you really think I had noticed nothing?"

Juno had no moment to consider the hilarity of Peter Nureyev being anyone’s assistant, much less his, before Lorland produced a gun out of his jacket.

Juno was sure the mafioso was about to give him dramatic parting words, but he didn’t have that kind of time. Before Lorland could say anything, Juno did the only thing he could think of and threw the bag of coke at Lorland's eyes, before diving to the side.

Lorland sputtered and tried to shoot at Juno, but the surprise and the powder exploding in his face made them flail and the shot missed Juno by a mile.

Juno wiped out his own gun and blasted the employee closest to him, the one still standing besides the table full of coke packagings. The man dropped down, stunned and unlikely to get up again for a while. Juno dropped behind the table with his slack body.

He accepted the rest of the mafia to drop down on him as soon as they could, and for him to be quickly overwhelmed, but after a few seconds, he realized the room was oddly silent. Risking a peak, he realized the dozen mafiosi—including Lorland, who seemed to have somewhat recovered despite puffy red eyes—were looking a him warily. More specifically, they were looking at the table in front of him, full of fragile coke packagings.

Oh. Seemed like Rosamund Lorland needed a lesson in where to pick their battle. Juno couldn't help but smile as he picked up several white bags. Nobody dared to shoot him and the precious merchandise, but he was sure they were going to come up with some kind of plan quickly. He had to be quicker.

Thing was, Juno had never been that good at planning. Doing, he was okay at, but planning was an entirely different game.

He did the first thing he could think of. That is, to throw the handful of bags he had towards his assailant and shoot one of them before ducking back behind the table. The bag exploded, and a confused scuffle rang out. Several shots hit Juno's table and soon the air was full of coke dust. A cry rang out, and Juno instantly knew they were coming for him. In a moment of clarity, he took the mask of the passed out mafioso to put it against his own mouth and nose, and scrambled along the wall, trying as well as he could to stay hidden from view. But the steps behind him were fast: it wouldn’t take them long to find him, and then one shot would be enough.

Suddenly, an alarm rang out. Juno only had the time to be surprised before it stopped, just as the lights above him abruptly went off, with a resounding “CLACK”. In an instant, the whole hall was shrouded in darkness, and Juno listened to the confused silence around him.

A muffled cry of pain rang out, breaking the silence, and something heavy and fleshy dropped to the ground not too far from Juno, and suddenly the whole room exploded in the confused and angry orders of Lorland’s underlings trying to reorganize themselves. A smile forced itself on Juno's smile and he called out to the darkness.

"Be nice."

"You know me, Dahlia" said Peter, "I'm always nice."

Juno heard what could easily be interpreted as Peter putting another mafioso in a sleeper’s hold, muffling their cry of surprise somehow and letting their body fall down to the ground once they were unconscious, and Juno had to refrain a snort.

Peter didn't seem to have any problems navigating through the darkness, and when he took Juno's hand, it was to guide him firmly towards a source of dim light, making him bend down and crawl before him in a narrow space. As Juno's eyes adjusted, he realized it was an opened air vent that led directly outside. He didn’t recognize the street, but it was large, and dimly lit, and he could only assume they weren’t too far from the restaurant in which Peter had led him earlier. They were probably in one of the outer districts, those who were battling against the Martian desert and were full of decrepit, abandoned building. Far from prying, witnessing eyes.

As soon as they were both through, Juno turned to Peter.

"Do you have everything you need?"

The thief smiled, and pulled Juno against him, delicately pushing the protective mask down.

"I do."

Juno flushed, and was about to protest when a door he previously hadn't seen opened, revealing several goons sputtering as they tumbled outside. The light seemed to be back in the factory, probably thanks to an emergency generator.

Juno cursed, and he and Peter began to run, from a common, silent accord.

"Here!"

Peter tugged on his hand and Juno ungracefully tumbled behind him, under some kind of electric generator, emerging from the uneven ground. The shouting didn't stop behind him, and the streets in front of them didn't offer for much cover. Neither Nureyev nor him said anything, but Juno knew they had to find a way to distract Lorland while they were escaping, or they would end up the evening with more holes in them than Juno was personally comfortable with.

From their barely hidden spot they could see the narrow windows of the factory, who were obscured by a faint, pale sort of mist, and they could hear the coughing fits of Lorland's employees and associates. The commotion must have kicked even more of the drug into the air, Juno noted.

And he had a sudden, terrible, stupid idea.

"I'm going to regret this" he mumbled, as he straightened his back to try and make the shot.

"Juno! What are you..."

"Shush." Juno said firmly, with a very Dahlia like confidence. Lorland and company hadn't spotted him yet, but it wouldn't take long before they did, and Juno only had one shot at this. He pictured the blast's trajectory; breathed, in, and out. And fired.

For some reason, he expected it to be delayed, to take a few instants. Instead, as soon as the blast tore through the glass widow, the room exploded. Juno winced, but as far as he could tell, the explosion wasn't too violent, and the screaming didn't stop so he assumed (hopped, desperately) nobody had actually died from it. However, he was willing to bet Lorland's precious refinery equipment was done for, and it seemed the explosion had started a small but rapidly growing fire, making the mafiosi thoroughly distracted.

"Come on, let's go." He took Peter's hand in his, leading him away from the scene and in the nearest dark corner. As he walked, he dialed one of the memorized number in his phone.

"Hello? Yeah, I'd like to report a fire down..." he squinted at the street sign "Terrienstreet." He hung up before anyone could ask for his name. Maybe Khan would recognize his number, but by then he'd have caught a whole mafia ring, so Juno figured he was in the clear.

A taxi was passing by and he hollered for it, getting in it quick and fast and rattling off an address not too far from his place, while Peter climbed in right behind him.

And just like that, they were gone.

Juno was still holding Peter's hand as they made their escape through the city, squeezing it harder than he really meant to, adrenaline still coursing through his veins. He looked up at the thief, and met dark eyes, staring into him with intensity.

"It seems as though you had fun."

Juno then realized the grin tearing through his own face. He thought about Rex Glass’ foxy smile, smug and full of sharp teeth, and wondered if it was how he looked to Peter at the moment.

"Yeah, I..." he had to admit, "I think I did actually."

Peter smiled, looking way too charming and smart for it to be soft, but Juno thought he could get away with calling it fond.

The thief used the hand that was still intertwined with Juno to drag the lady towards him, making him lean in the car from one side to another.

"I'm truly glad you did."

And then Peter Nureyev pulled him down to kiss him.

The taxi driver had to throw them out in the end, and Juno would have said he was ashamed to have been making out with his boyfriend like a goddamn teenager, but he really, really wasn't.

Peter's hand didn't leave his as they made their rather hurried way towards Juno's flat. When Juno opened his door, however, he felt compelled to stop his momentum to turn and face Nureyev.

Peter stared back, looking neither surprised nor worried.

"Do you want to come in?"

Peter stepped closer, until their chests were a hair away from touching each other.

"I would very much like that, yes."

There was more to Juno's idea, there really was, but not kissing Peter Nureyev at this moment would have been a task he wasn't strong enough to undertake.

When he detached himself from Peter, the thief looked very much like Duke Rose had earlier, dazed and wanton, and it sent a shiver up Juno's spine.

"I really think it was, you know." Juno ceded to the temptation of running his hand up and down Peter’s neck. The thief seemed thoroughly distracted by the touch, and his response was a bit more delayed then Juno would have excepted.

"That it… was what?”

"The best date I've ever had." Peter’s half-lidded eyes shot open at the words, and Juno, for the time since he had met him, thought he may have managed to tear through Peter Nureyev’s cool composure.

"I... Thank you."

Well, this was rather out of character. Juno couldn’t help but chuckle in unexpected giddiness.

"What? I don't get a smug, smooth response, from Peter Nureyev, best thief in the whole wide galaxy?"

Peter’s smile, this time, was almost bashful – although Juno didn’t miss there was still a sharpness to it, dormant behind Peter’s pliant demeanor.

"I guess Duke Rose's rubbing of off me."

Peter crowded closer.

"Yeah,” Juno let his grip grow more imperious on Peter’s neck and throat, guiding the thief where he wanted him. “I guess Dahlia's rubbing of off me too."

When Juno kissed him, Peter felt soft and wielding under his lips. The feeling was intoxicating, as if Peter Nureyev was finally ready to drop his final mask with him by, just this one time, yielding control over to him, and Juno nearly drowned in it, crowding Peter until the thief had to cling to him to keep his balance. When Juno finally managed to detach himself from silken - soft and sharp lips - Peter was still relaying on him to defy gravity, and his eyes bore through Juno as if they could reach directly into his soul.

"How long are you staying this time?"

"A few weeks, most likely."

It wasn't forever, maybe, but for now it was enough.

#jupeter #juno steel #peter nureyev #dear god im so bad at endings #tpp #the penumbra podcast #me #my writing #date night #duke rose #dahlia rose

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pscottm · 3 years ago

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Noted local criminal Mark McCloskey played host to a barbecue/political rally on Sunday afternoon, drawing tens of admirers to the sweltering parking lot of a closed outlet mall in St. Louis County to celebrate the one-year anniversary of the time he pulled a gun on a crowd of people who otherwise would never have noticed or cared he existed.

Despite the fact that none of the big names who had been billed to speak at the June 27 event showed up, and despite the fact that ticket sales were so dismal attendance was opened to the public for free at the last minute, St. Louis' most gun-surrendering lawyer plowed right ahead with the First Annual Pink Shirt Guy BBQ and RINO Roast in the St. Louis Mills parking lot.

Grievance and untethered delusion topped the menu at the event, with McCloskey and a roster of speakers largely unknown outside the fever swamps of the far right taking turns condemning everything from critical race theory (their newest and most nonsensical bogeyman) to "cultural Marxism" (George Soros' fault of course, but how dare you level accusations of antisemitism) to the "radical left" agenda of (hahahahaha) Joe Biden. The whole gun-and-pony show was in service of McCloskey's deeply stupid run for U.S. Senate, because if there's one thing that qualifies a man for public office in the Republican party in 2021 it's a willingness to point a firearm at those with whom you disagree politically.

Initially, fellow criminal and proponent of armed coups Michael Flynn was scheduled to speak, but he was subbed out for North Carolina Congressman and notably dumb guy Madison Cawthorn, who also did not show up. But the show must go on, as they say, and so we were instead primarily treated to the emcee abilities of former radio host Jamie Allman, who lost his longtime job back in 2018 after taking to Twitter to pontificate about ramming a hot poker up a teenager's ass. The event kicked off around 2 p.m. with a pig roast and photo op with the McCloskeys, Mark clad in his pink-shirt finery and Patricia sporting the Hamburglar costume for which she is best-known. At least one man brought his rifle for the pair to sign, which of course they did, after which the man could be heard excitedly discussing how much money it was now worth.

After a sound check with local Deep Purple cover band Perfect Strangers, whose singer Terry Luttrell was the original vocalist for REO Speedwagon before parting ways with the band over its earlier, more politically motivated lyrics, the show kicked off with the singing of the national anthem, followed by a recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance, followed by a moment of prayer. With all the hits out of the way, Allman brought up a parade of speakers of varying infamy, one of whom (who can remember who) walked us all through the Declaration of Independence as an encore for good measure. There was federally charged St. Louis chiropractor Eric Nepute, best-known for recommending Schweppes tonic water as a COVID-19 cure early on in the pandemic; JeffCo gun store owner Ian McFarland, who recently sold McCloskey a new gun when the latter handed his over to the state after pleading guilty to the crimes he'd committed; and State Rep. Nick Schroer (R-O'Fallon), one of the legislators leading an effort that failed in the Senate to defund Planned Parenthood in the state. Pillow magnate and unhinged lunatic Mike Lindell piped in a prerecorded message of support, as did war criminal Oliver North, probably as a consolation prize since Flynn was presumably too busy plotting out his own future crimes to make an appearance. There were others as well, but this event suffered from the rookie mistake of having too many openers, which led to some noticeable fatigue in the small crowd who had gathered to gawk at the spectacle. All of the above took turns rattling off the exhausting culture war talking points that dominate right-wing media nowadays, with fevered rants against critical race theory, cancel culture, cultural Marxism and good old-fashioned communism as practiced by noted leftist Joe Biden (hahahahahahaha) being the order of the day. Allman also tossed out bracelets in support of rioter Ashli Babbitt, who was killed in the U.S. Capital on January 6 after refusing to comply with the commands of officers, and who Allman claimed was "assassinated by her government." That would seem to fly in the face of the usual "if he/she just complied he/she would still be alive" script of the allegedly pro-police crowd, but Babbitt was on their team, so naturally the very concept of ideological consistency is thrown right out the window. At long last, after a gushing introduction in which Allman described Mark and Patricia as "everyone's favorite neighbors" (a characterization with which their actual neighbors whole-heartedly disagree), McCloskey took to the stage to bask in the adulation of the not even half-full seating area of his adoring fans. He insisted gravely that the crowd of people who were walking past his house that fateful day a year ago would have murdered him and his wife and their dog and then burned their house down had he not waddled his ass outside barefoot to threaten them with a rifle, which is pretty confusing seeing as how literally none of McCloskey's neighbors did the same and yet they all somehow came out unscathed. It also doesn't fit with the findings of special prosecutor Richard Callahan, who noted in a statement upon the McCloskeys' guilty plea that: "The protesters on the other hand were a racially mixed and peaceful group, including women and children, who simply made a wrong turn on their way to protest in front of the mayor’s house,” noting further that absolutely no evidence was ever found to show that any of the protesters were armed or intent on harming the couple.

But that didn't matter to McCloskey, nor did it matter to the sparse crowd who had come to watch him hump a gun on a Sunday afternoon. Naturally, McCloskey used his speech to heap praise on the likes of Donald Trump, Josh Hawley, Mark Meadows and others, while directing scorn at the likes of Kim Gardner, Cori Bush and Rasheen Aldridge. That the former group is a bunch of white guys and the latter are Black probably didn't have anything to do with McCloskey's opinions of them, and how dare you even think such a thing. McCloskey ended his speech by bringing his wife up on stage, and the two of them posed with a gun to the cheers of the crowd. One gets the distinct impression that those cheers were more for the gun itself than its owner though, and that more likely than not the crowd would probably prefer to vote for an actual firearm to be senator instead, if only there was some way to get one on the ballot. Honestly Mark is just a mascot, not unlike Ronald McDonald. As the main event wrapped up, Allman directed everyone to the merch tent, where McCloskey was selling bottles of barbecue sauce for $20 a pop. With the crowd thoroughly cleared out and a storm rolling in, Perfect Strangers took to the stage and started serving up Deep Purple cuts for the enjoyment of about ten people. Lightning cracked in the sky during the classic track "Stormbringer," adding a fun bit of synchronicity, if also a sense of foreboding. Equally synchronized and foreboding was one of the lines from the 1974 track, delivered as it was at the McCloskey-led event: "He's got nothing you need." Here's hoping Missouri's voters are smart enough to see it that way too.

#missouri #mccloskey #republican #gun nut #asshat #river front times

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randomidiocyncrazies · 7 years ago

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Got the game over the weekend, and boy is it a real treat! Chapter 1 leaves me eager for more, and it was a blast to explore the world and its characters. There are nice plot hooks and intriguing worldbuilding tidbits, and it's clear the devs gave it a lotta heart :V

MAJOR SPOILERS FOR LONG GONE DAYS EARLY ACCESS/CHAPTER 1

Art: Yoooo the art is breathtaking! The sprites are so cute, and the walk cycle is really smooth! The animations and backgrounds are really beautiful -- this is a game with gorgeous graphics y'all!

Characters/Narrative/World: The Core has a lot of potential as a setting, and it seems like we will learn more about it later in the game, which I’m really looking forward to. Adair really grew on me, so I’d really love to talk more with him, especially since conversations between Adair and Rourke has the potential to give us more insight into life at The Core -- the tidbits we get are really good hooks!

It is a little abrupt when Adair decided to thrown in his lot with Rourke though, since he was fine with the true nature of the operation and said things like "I'm not risking my life just so you could have your vacation." He seemed like he just wanted to do his job well in the beginning, so his decision to desert The Core for real seems rushed... unless he's a double-agent of some sort??

I’m really intrigued by the characters and want to know more about them! Lynn in particular has a mysterious past, and it’s nice to get to know your party members and see what makes them tick. I enjoyed talking with the gang at Ivan’s house a lot, and I hope there are more opportunities to hang out with party members to know them better.

Speaking of Ivan, the Interpreter class mechanic is a really neat idea, and with the gang travelling to Germany I’m looking forward to see who our German-speaking friend will be! I'm curious about whether Interpreters have their own skills they could use Morale to activate -- they are non-combatant characters so I wonder how it’d work, and when they could put those skills to use... Also, the Core is known to work with multiple surface nations, esp on military operations, so it seems likely that officers do recieve language lessions; the only reason Rourke and Adair can only speak English is because they have not gotten a commission yet, or that being an officer was never in the cards for them.

Now, I do think there are some missed opportunities in LGD to increase player engagement and/or explore its themes in a meaningful way. In particular, the endinng of the boss encounter of Ch.1 would be a lot more meaningful if the final choice between pulling the trigger or leaving Lt Gareth to his own devices was given to the players instead of scripted imo.

Rourke’s arc is about him making his own decisions, no longer blindly listening to orders without question. A scenario where he has to weigh the potentially disastrous consequences of showing mercy against his moral judgement and conviction would have been a significant opportunity to really get into the game’s themes regarding moral quandaries in warfare and authoritarianism, because it forces the player consider these things too. The framing of the scene was also rife with tension, since Adair and Ivan were against the idea while Lynn was for it. Depending on the player's choice it has potential to shake up party dynamics, which would give players agency and encourage them to invest even more into the narrative.

Combat: Okay so like... the battles are really frustrating, since a lot of it comes down to random luck. It’s really disheartening to have 6-7 misses in a row (not aiming for the head) and watch as the enemies gun you and your party members down.

Since there are no random encounters it feels unfair if the mechanics are "meant to be representative of how combat irl is not fun and games" because it kinda comes across as punishing the players for not quitting the game? It’s fine to make the battles frustrating if there is a way for the players to avoid combat as an incentive to reflect the game's/Rourke's philosophy that combat is not enjoyable, but since most encounters are scripted there’s no way to disengage from fights. (There are like 2 optional encounters I think.)

It also feels a little silly to shoot enemy combatants multiple times in the head only to have the game proclaim “[enemy] has fainted” upon getting their HP bar to 0. For a game dealing with the ethics of warfare, why was such an innocuous word chosen to represent killing/death?

That said, I enjoyed the occasional switch to sniper mode in combat to keep it fresh, and the implementation of Morale doubling as ‘spell points’ and combat effectiveness was an interesting system. The animated cut-ins look Really Nice -- made me feel like spending Morale on a skill was significant when I needed to use them.

Being able to choose your reward at the end of battles is quite refreshing. It forces you to be strategic in Morale use and think carefully about what equipment you want. Healing items are quite generous in the first chapter, though a huge chunk of it is used up thanks to a streak of unlucky battles...

Controls: Simple but not very intuitive imo, pressed the wrong button by mistake a fair bit especially when accessing the menu. I’d also really appreciate it if there’s a button to ‘pause’ the game, since you can’t interact with your desktop even in windowed mode when you’re playing the game?

Music: The music suits the atmosphere of the scenes and surroundings really well! The night battle scenes are a little eerie, and I really like how each part of the town has its own theme to reflect the different cultures/cliques that hang out around each area. The battle theme is my jam yo!

Quests: Some of those quests are pretty hard to finish -- some of them are hard to start! Still haven't been able to start the ones about the underground bunkers and the shed in the forest on my 3rd playthrough... I am dumb...

It’d be nice if all multi-part quests had an indicator to see how much you’ve progressed. I’ve only seen an indicator with the Stray Animals quest, but I could’ve really used it for Breaking News. It’s also a little frustrating that quests can be abruptly cut off if you’ve progressed too far in the story and can’t double-back to collect items, but it makes narrative sense so I'm not that annoyed about it.

All in all this is a really good game, with interesting themes, gorgeous artwork and nice atmospheric tunes. Game control and combat can use some polish, but it has some neat mechanics as is.

#long gone days #lgd #ric reacts #reviews

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gamerszone2019-blog · 5 years ago

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Decay of Logos Review

New Post has been published on https://gamerszone.tn/decay-of-logos-review/

Decay of Logos Review

There’s an old Wile E. Coyote cartoon where he gets in a racecar to chase after the Road Runner, and as he’s speeding along the car begins to fall apart piece by piece until he’s left holding nothing but a busted steering wheel. That’s what it feels like to play Decay of Logos, an open-world action-adventure RPG that strongly invokes The Legend of Zelda but is missing the crucial pieces that make the genre so beloved.

Drawing inspiration from Dark Souls as well, Decay of Logos places emphasis on challenge and exploration, though it rarely sticks the landing. Across its roughly 10-hour campaign you’ll travel through haunted battlefields, crumbling castles, and mysterious woods – all while fighting the same handful of generic enemy types over and over again in one of the most infuriatingly repetitive and buggy games I’ve seen in a long time. Whether it’s the choppy framerate, equipment that disappears from your inventory, the world not loading in time for you to step foot on it, or the whole thing crashing entirely, you’re only ever a short time away from something that will hinder or completely shatter your enjoyment of a game that otherwise has a lot of potential.

You play a bland, white-haired silent protagonist named Ada, who looks like an off-brand version of The Legend of Zelda’s Link. Accompanied by your equally silent companion, a white elk of unknown origin, you’ll set out on a cliché and low-stakes quest for revenge after your village is burned to the ground. Despite the generic plot, the worldbuilding in Decay of Logos is expertly done, making heavy use of environmental storytelling that gives you a taste of a dystopian fantasy setting and asks you to fill in the gaps. The colorful, Breath of the Wild-esque art style shows off some pretty stellar areas that beg to be explored, though doing so almost invariably ends in touring samey dungeons, filled with repetitive monsters and puzzles that you quickly become all too familiar with.

The Breath of the Wild-esque art style shows off some pretty stellar areas that beg to be explored, though doing so almost invariably ends in touring samey dungeons filled with repetitive monsters.

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At the best of times, Decay of Logos simply runs poorly: The framerate bounces up and down wildly and makes gameplay choppy during combat encounters that require precise timing, and some nasty screen tearing can make the world look like a piece of abstract art. But where Decay of Logos really suffers is in the frustrating, intermittent critical glitches and bugs that completely halt progress. Traveling across long stretches of the open world without resting usually results in the framerate going from bad to nearly unplayable. Oftentimes areas of the world took too long to load in under my feet, resulting in me falling through the map and dying due to no fault of my own. Sometimes dying or resting to restore my health had the side effect of causing all my potions or one of my weapons to disappear without explanation.

These kinds of glitches were so commonplace during my playthrough that I had to come up with workarounds, like not pausing for more than a minute or two to avoid an inevitable crash that always seemed to follow. In another particularly maddening instance, I began to recognize that an extreme drop in framerate was a warning sign that the floor was moments away from disappearing – in moments like this I would race to a save point to avoid losing progress, often only to fall through the floor and die mere seconds from salvation.

And unfortunately, even when everything technically works, many of Decay of Logos’ design troubles rear their heads. The RPG systems that govern the world and its characters are vague and aggravating. For example, your character’s level, which greatly impacts how powerful you are and your ability to compete with enemies in certain parts of the world, can be found in the menu, but there’s no information on how much XP you have, how to get more, or how much you need to the next level up. This is particularly annoying because most enemies in the world arbitrarily become much stronger once you accomplish certain milestones, like killing a major boss, which leads to some really frustrating encounters.

Even when everything technically works, many of Decay of Logos’ design troubles rear their heads.

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At one point I powered through an army of the undead and killed one of the major bosses without so much as a scratch on me, only to be killed by those same low-level minions on my way back to base, because the act of slaying the boss had leveled up every enemy in the world. This means that every time you beat a chapter, you go from powerful badass to near-useless dreg and have to grind until you level up a few times and become strong again, relative to the rest of the characters in the world. It’s a routine that’s far more irritating than it is fun, and made me feel cheated out of my hard-won progress at precisely the moments where I should have felt most accomplished.

Combat in Decay of Logos is also deeply flawed in that it pits you against the same handful of enemy types for hours on end. Each area has just one or two unique types of enemies that appear in large numbers, and in most cases they can’t be realistically dealt with in groups greater than two or three at a time. So victory becomes a matter of drawing the attention of a few enemies at once, killing them, and repeating. And because the leveling system often artificially makes enemies much stronger than you, combat can drag on for long stretches of time as you whittle down the health meter of an enemy that you might have been able to kill in a few seconds just a short time ago. The dynamic here is even worse when it comes to the world’s optional bosses, all of which are carbon copies of one another, and have predictable movesets and obnoxiously large health bars that make for tiresome encounters.

Last week, after publishing our original review of Decay of Logos, the publisher informed us that they had mistakenly provided us with an Xbox One copy that was two months out of date. We retracted the review to make sure we fairly represented the developers’ work and began again on PlayStation 4, using a new code provided by the publisher. But after playing through the entire game a second time, the experience was only marginally improved in stability and bugs. We are told further patches are on the way, including one on launch day, but it’s unclear what issues will specifically be addressed.

Of all the design issues I have with Decay of Logos, though, the elk is what enrages me the most. As you play, you’re frequently reminded about the importance of the bond between Ada and her elk companion, especially the need to cooperate in order to overcome obstacles. But that promise is never delivered on, chiefly because the elk is about as useful as a screen door on a submarine and has the AI of a refrigerator magnet. For starters, one of the main uses of the elk is the ability to ride it to get from place to place, but doing so is frustrating and inefficient. Not only can you run faster than the elk, but directing it is treated more as a suggestion than an order, and the beast mostly wanders around aimlessly and gets caught on everything in its path.

But the worst instances involving the elk are when you’re asked to solve a puzzle in tandem with it. Simply put, this dumb thing just doesn’t follow orders. You have the ability to call it by blowing a whistle, but most times it doesn’t show up or gets caught on something on the way to you and has to be manually guided out. In one instance, I spent several minutes trying to find the elk, only to find it undulating bizarrely on the side of a cliff, and I had to jump off said cliff to restore its sanity. In another example, I spent over an hour trying to guide it out of a spiral staircase that it’d gotten itself lodged under. They say if you listen closely, you can still hear my screams of rage to this very day.

Source : IGN

#Game News #Game Reviews

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slapegg · 8 years ago

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Our review this week is for EDF 4.1 and if you give me a jet suit, I will wear it. Skirts and heels be damned!

Quick Critique: Earth Defense Force 4.1

I reviewed one of the earlier EDF games before and you can probably just cut and paste most of that review, because the games are pretty much all the same. Big. Dumb. Explosive. Cheesy B Movie Sci-Fi Fun. Although, 4.1 is laid out a lot better than the previous game. It has much better early missions and objectives and no ant hole demolition bombings (which made me despise the PS3 game), so it's a lot more enjoyable and lot quicker to get to the fun. It's oddly great at setting up a progression in the story, which is not something you'd think EDF would do better than games with some budget. There are multiple "boss" style creatures that you encounter across missions who you can't beat when you meet them. Your first encounter is usually running away while picking off small enemy forces, then you meet the boss again in smaller skirmishes where you may be able to pick off small pieces or stun it, and then when you finally get to meet the boss for the real showdown, it feels fantastic and lends an even greater sense of accomplishment to taking down a monster the size of a skyscraper, which is already an inherently accomplishing event.

The biggest problems with EDF still come mostly down to quality of life issues. You have to pick items off the ground one by one (and stages usually drop dozens of them). There needs to be a way to suck in nearby boxes or just collect all of the armor and weapon boxes at the end of the level (that way you couldn't suck in health boxes). Dead enemies count as objects you can't walk through so you spend a lot of time waiting for enemies to despawn so you can pick up the items they drop (but vehicles and debris don't count as obstructions so they already have the solution to the annoyance if they'd just use that). You need to set your max armor after every level by entering and exiting a menu (this may have been a bug because it stopped happening after a while). Beating a harder stage doesn't automatically check off the same stage at a lower difficulty, so you'd have to beat all 89 stages of the game 5 times each with each character to unlock everything. That's 1780 stages and while I enjoy EDF, I do not enjoy 1780 much of EDF. There needs to be a better way to do upgrades than just random drops. Many of the weapons are just slightly better versions of earlier weapons, so it would make sense to turn it into an upgrade rather than a completely separate weapon that's just going to sit in your inventory cluttering it up. I want to be able to research weapons or upgrade them through use, Ratchet and Clank style. This would encourage you to try different weapons and not rely on your allies to fight for you. The bosses could drop base weapons and aliens could drop upgrade materials instead of loot crates with random weapons that don't even scale to your difficulty (enemies on Hardest still drop the level 0 weapons from Easy). Ultimately, this is what sapped my desire to do anything more than go through the game with just the Wing Diver. Spending all that time walking around collecting items, only to die at the very end of the mission because the brain-dead AI characters walked in front of me as I was firing my gun causing me to take the entire shot myself and dying in a single hit, which then causes you to lose every item you picked up is horrifically frustrating. The dozenth or so time that happened, I just ignored everything and went right to finishing levels to be done with the game. And unless you do all that tedious armor farming, the harder difficulties are just one hit kills from anything. Other characters have more health and different weapons than the Divers' electroshock explosives, but every other class is paaainfully slow (and not sexy anime jet ladies). All of this is capped off by one of the absolute worst final bosses to ever show up in a video game. It can infinitely spawn enemies, has multiple forms, can hit you where you can't hit it, stun locks you on damage, knocks you down on damage, changes the color of your screen on damage, is in a crowded arena with lots of knee high obstructions that get in your way, every piece of it has absolutely obscene health, it's far away so all your normal weapons don't work, and if you die, there's no checkpoint between its forms. It's not fun, it's not challenging in an intelligent way, it's just poorly designed. The boss is more of a gate on how much time you spent farming armor drops and your luck on getting a good sniper rifle to spawn from a loot crate than a real boss.

Despite its many, many self-inflicted problems, egads this game is still fun to play and a constant rush of dumb animal satisfaction. I ran around inflicting massive amounts of friendly fire with a giant reflective laser beam, cackling like an idiot. There's a mission fairly early in the game that it's easy to cheese, so you can set the game to the highest difficulty and pull in a bunch of level 50+ weapons when the game is normally giving you items at less than 5, so you wind up playing that level dozens and dozens of times to get decent weapons. It became adorable to hear the generic soldiers talk about protecting me as they fired on the giant ants with their machine guns before I busted out an alien gun capable of firing 30 bolts of glowing neon red explosive lighting and single-handedly saved the planet from destruction. I still thanked him for being there, for I am a benevolent future valkyrie of doom.

The EDF franchise is made of bad games, but they're bad games that I support existing. I'm glad somebody can go out there and make a low budget B movie game. It feels like every EDF game has the same budget but as time goes by, it just buys more as technology or engines or plug-ins get cheaper. The series just needs some competent designers that will take care of the annoyance of item collection, enemies firing through walls, or your AI companions killing you. The ways to fix EDF aren't costly or against its low budget, it just needs people with some sense calling the shots. You should never pay more than $20 for an EDF game, but once they hit that sweet spot on price, it's some of the most fun you'll get out of $20 well wasted.

#EDF #EDF 4.1 #earth defense force

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ralphmorgan-blog1 · 7 years ago

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The Chrome Extensions We Can’t Live Without

Nearly two-thirds of internet users turn to Chrome for their browsing needs, but far fewer take full advantage of its available extensions, the add-ons that elevate it from good to great. If you're one of those plain vanilla Chrome users—or if you've only dabbled in the extensions game—check out these sprinkles of joy that the WIRED staff swears by.

The following list of Chrome extension recommendations is by no means comprehensive; there are plenty to explore and discover in the Chrome Web Store. (If you go exploring, just make sure you stick with reputable developers.) But these are the ones we depend on every day to keep our internet experience as sane and enjoyable as possible. May they do the same for you.

Wayback Machine

Have you ever clicked on an interesting link, only to be greeted by a 404 Error? Wayback Machine’s Chrome extension can help. Created by the Internet Archive—a nonprofit that preserves billions of web pages—the extension shows you what a website looked like in the past, even if has since been deleted. It can turn up the most recent version of a page it has saved, or go back to the first time the Internet Archive recorded it. That latter can be especially illuminating. For example, you can see what a user’s Twitter account looked like when they created it, or how a company’s website appeared when it first launched. One drawback: Wayback Machine doesn’t have a record of every webpage on the internet. But it can also help you prevent others from vanishing in the future: The extension lets you save the web page you’re currently visiting to the Internet Archive's database. —staff writer Louise Matsakis

The Great Suspender

You'll find many tab management solutions on this list, but the best by far for my purposes is the Great Suspender, an extension which, as the name suggests, suspends any Chrome tabs that you've left fallow for a given amount of time. As someone who keeps well over a dozen tabs open at any given time during the day—and often more—this has been an inestimable boon to my laptop and my sanity. And when it's time to revisit a page, a simple click springs it back to life. It also lets you whitelist any tabs, like Gmail, that are too precious to suspend. —news editor Brian Barrett

PixelBlock

Have I read your email? That’s for me to know and you not to find out. This Chrome extension spots and blocks attempts to track when messages are opened and send that data back to the sender. I know who’s tracking me by the small red eye icon that appears next to messages in Gmail. Sure, I’m not surprised that services like Mailchimp track when messages are opened, but I’m sketched out when professional contacts do the same. — Joanna Pearlstein, deputy editor, newsroom standards

animatedTabs

The best Chrome extensions effortlessly improve our lives in small but impactful ways. And animatedTabs does exactly that. Once installed, the extension will automatically load a random GIF in the center of every new Chrome tab you open. Sound annoying? Come on, people, this is a pure delight. It seems like the GIFs largely source from Reddit’s /r/gifs/, so you mostly get previously undiscovered gems; there's not much crying Jordan, or and shark cat on a Roomba. But what beats new? And all because you opened a tab to finally pay your three months overdue speeding ticket! The only downside to animatedTabs? You never know when it’s going to generate something NSFW or just dumb. But the real internet cred comes from not caring. —staff writer Lily Newman

xTab

Bedeviled by browser-tab clutter? Try xTab. It restricts the number of pages you can have open in a given browser window. Just set your cap and go about your business. When you exceed your limit, the extension gets to culling, automatically axing your oldest, least-accessed, or least-recently-used tab. It can also prevent you from opening excess tabs altogether. I use that last setting the most; I like to do triage myself. Plus, I'm working on killing my reflexive tabbing habit, and being interrupted in the act helps keep my fingers in check. If you've tried other tab managers in the past and found them wanting, this could be your ticket; where most encourage you to cmd-T with abandon, xTab retrains you to curate a more manageable tabscape in real-time. —senior writer Robbie Gonzalez

Go Back With Backspace

In July of 2016, the world changed for the worse. Up until that point, the backspace key on your desktop keyboard doubled as a back button in Chrome. It had been that way since the browser's launch some eight years prior. By mid-2016, this action—a simple keystroke to go back one page in your browser history—had become hardwired in our lizard brains. But Google removed the backspace action that summer, because it caused a particularly Googley problem: People were losing work in web apps. When a user typed into a browser text field and hit the backspace key hoping to correct a typo, they'd sometimes inadvertently cause the browser to jump back one page, nuking whatever efforts they'd spent the last few minutes sweating over. Sure, that's annoying. But imagine the outrage of millions of Chrome users when, upon the next browser update, the backspace key suddenly did nothing. Google had neutered one of the most useful mechanisms for navigating the web. Thankfully, the company recognized our plight and just weeks later released this extension, which restores the back-button functionality of the backspace key. Hallelujah. The preferred keystroke of Alt + left arrow is still the default in Chrome, and maybe you're used to that now. But why force yourself to press two keys when you can install this extension and press only one? —Senior editor Michael Calore

OneTab

You know when you open Chrome and the browser is like, "Are you sure you want to reopen 400 tabs?" (Yes I do, and rude!) Maybe it's a selection of news articles you're planning to read later, or the aftermath of clicking through dozens of Wikipedia pages. Maybe you don't even know what's in all those tabs. Either way, keeping them all open puts a huge strain on your browser. Close them all—without losing them forever—with the handy OneTab extension. One click of the button neatly collates all your open tabs into one list of links that you can revisit later. It saves your computer incredible amounts of RAM, speeds up the browser immediately, and keeps all those links handy for when you're totally, definitely, someday coming back to read them. —senior associate editor Arielle Pardes

HabitLab

My name is Tom and I have a Twitter problem—but I’m getting help from a Chrome extension called HabitLab. Anytime I look at the bird-logoed slot machine of trolling, outrage, and thinkfluencing, there’s now a bold banner at the top counting how long I’ve been on the site that day. If I open a Twitter tab but regain my senses and close it again quickly, a pop-up informs me how many seconds I just saved compared to my usual time-wasting visit. The message comes with a different “Good job!” GIF each time; most recently it was Jimmy Kimmel. HabitLab was developed by Stanford’s Human Computer Interaction group to help those of us suffering internet distraction disorder (most of us?) take control of our online habits. When first installed, it prompts you to identify the sites you want to spend less time on. HabitLab will then keep track of your wasted seconds, minutes, and hours and display them in neat charts. It also offers a menu of “nudges” to help keep those trend lines moving in the right direction. One of them is the timer that now haunts me on Twitter, a nudge called the Supervisor. Others include GateKeeper, which makes you wait a few seconds before loading a page you’ve been trying to give up, and the devilish 1Minute Assassin, which kills a tab after 60 seconds. —senior writer Tom Simonite

Eye Dropper

I am not a designer, and I’m sure that those who are have far better tools for pulling colors off of web pages than Eye Dropper, a mostly, but not always, functional extension that lets you eye-drop any color from around the web and grab its RGB and Hex color codes. It’s particularly handy for quick fixes that don’t necessitate slowing down your computer by opening Photoshop—like, say, updating the text on a WIRED section page to make it more readable. It isn’t the prettiest extension, and it’s all too easy to accidentally trigger the eyedropper if, like me, you’re prone to hitting alt-P instead of command-P when trying to print—but Eye Dropper gets the job done. —digital producer Miranda Katz

Ghostery

If you’ve ever seen a Google ad follow you around the entire web and back, you know just how annoying and invasive online tracking can become. Ghostery is a fascinating way to see which services websites use to track and collect data about you. It creates a little icon with a number, showing you how many trackers every site uses. Wikipedia, for example, has 0. Most other sites have at least a few. You can see what they use to monitor their website traffic and serve ads, then block services that you don’t like. It’s not perfect; sometimes it will break sites you want to visit, and you’ll have to turn it off or pause it, although the latest release uses AI powers to help minimize the collateral damage. —senior writer Jeffrey Van Camp

ProPublica’s What Facebook Thinks You Like

Facebook thinks I like arachnids because my brother writes for a TV show called Scorpion. It thinks I like Christmas Eve because Pearlstein, and it thinks I like flywheels because my late friend Eric Scott was in a band by that name. I know all of this thanks to ProPublica’s cool Facebook Chrome Extension, which helps me see what Facebook thinks about me and then lets me rate how spot-on—or not—the site’s analysis is, using the aptly named Creepy Meter. —J.P.

Pocket

I fly a lot. In the past year, I've taken roughly a dozen round trips, each with their own fun, idiosyncratic layovers and delays. To pass the tarmac time, I could watch a bunch of downloaded episodes of The Crown or The Great British Baking Show. I could read a good ol'-fashioned book. Or I could connect to plane Wi-Fi and incessantly check Twitter. Instead, what I prefer to do before leaving for the airport is save a bunch of stories to Pocket. This nifty extension allows you to stow away things you want to read later, no internet connection necessary (though if you use the Pocket app on your phone, be sure to sync it over Wi-Fi or a network connection before going into Airplane mode). Pocket also recommends stories, based on other users you follow or topics that interest you, and allows you to optimize your reading experience—I prefer a serif font with a black background and very large text to protect my fatigued eyes. But for someone who opens a million tabs with an intention to eventually read them all, it's my preferred way to dog-ear a story. If you want to start saving, here’s a shameless plug to visit WIRED's Backchannel page, chock-full of excellent long-form narratives that will transport you during your disconnected commute. —WIRED.com editor Andrea Valdez

1Password

Getting a password manager extension means getting a password manager, so definitely do that. All the major managers—LastPass, Dashlane, 1Password, KeePass—offer Chrome extensions, and they're crucial to making password managers easy to use. The browser extensions act as a quick control center to fill login forms, generate new passwords, and save new credentials into your manager. And though password managers can work without extensions, switching back and forth to a standalone desktop application can be clunky while you’re browsing online. These extensions do carry some potential security risks, but if they're what get you on a password manager in the first place, they're worth it. —L.M.

Google Calendar

You probably use Google Calendar every day—many, many times. Instead of letting it permanently squat on valuable tab real estate on your desktop, try the Google Calendar Chrome extension instead. It puts a small Calendar icon in the upper right of your browser window, right where you’d expect. Tap it, and a box drops down, showing you all the meetings you have coming up. I like the design because it reminds me of the wonderful Google Cal widget on my Android home screen. It’s just a one-shot view of the meetings and events you have coming up in the next week or two. You can customize which calendars appear, which is also nice, because if you’re like me, you have a ton of them. For more display options—or to get crazy and log in to two Google Calendars at the same time—try the Checker Plus for Google Calendar extension. It’s not official but works well. —J.V.C.

And More

WIRED editor in chief Nicholas Thompson swears by Grammarly, an extension that checks your emails, tweets, Facebook posts, and other online missives for spelling and grammar mistakes. Features editor Mark Robinson recommends Reader View, which he describes as a "one-button, rather lo-fi instant Instapaper," stripping web articles down to the bare essentials. And while senior writer Andy Greenberg has not used it and likely never would, he did find an extension called Kardashian Krypt, which encrypts your messages in images of Kim Kardashian using a technique known as steganography.

The Chrome Zone

Chrome extensions are a delight, but installing them from untrusted sources can lead to a world of hurt. (hurt = malware)

The way Ghostery has evolved ad-blocking with—what else—artificial intelligence is worth a closer look.

In 2016 we took a in-depth look at the 'Department of Chromeland Security'—the Google engineers working overtime to secure the web.