#also the exact reasons a game is given a particular rating can vary from game to game

[sonknuxadow]

a sonic game being rated e10+ isnt really as big a deal as some people seem to think it is like yeah its the highest esrb rating a sonic game can be given but its still very much a "yeah kids can play this" rating and theres several other sonic games with that rating many of which arent the sorts of games people tend to think of when talking about games with darker storylines. but i do think its funny that sonic generations wasnt rated e10+ until they added the shadow stuff on. just how big a tonal difference are the two campaigns going to have ...

[lechevaliermalfet]

Vae Victis! – A Look Back at Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain

It was the mid-1990s.  We were in the fifth generation of video game consoles, and gaming as a medium was eager to prove that it had grown up.

This had been going on before the fifth generation, of course.  The Sega Genesis sold itself on its contrast to the status quo.  “Sega does what Nintendon’t,” and all that.  Sega’s whole image was bound up in being the cool kid, the one who’d outgrown all those pokey “kiddie” games like Super Mario Bros. or Kid Icarus or Mega Man.  Sega fans played games like Mortal Kombat and Eternal Champions.  Even a mascot game like Sonic the Hedgehog had a kind of snide adolescent streak to it; leaner, meaner, and less patient.   Nintendo themselves had to butch up a little, even.  When their bloodless version of the first Mortal Kombat got outsold by Sega’s, which kept all the gore – despite otherwise being technically superior in every measurable way – they relaxed their standards and left all the blood and fatalities intact for the second and third games, and saw a jump in sales accordingly.  

The 90s were in part a decade of cynicism and ironic detachment.  Sincerity tended to be frowned upon as being kind of silly and naive, or else a cover for motives less savory.  Strong skepticism was the default mode, and in fiction, anti-heroes were all the rage.

Which brings us to Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain, described by its developers as a Legend of Zelda “for adults”.

Of course, any self-described adult who can’t bear to play a Legend of Zelda game because they feel it’s not grown-up enough needs to sit down and re-assess their idea of adulthood, and how secure they are in it.  If a tolerance for violence (if not a craving) is all it takes, then I was an adult at about eleven, when I was single-handedly mowing down whole armies of Nazis in Wolfenstein 3D.

But those were the times, and that’s how Blood Omen got pushed.  Which is unfortunate, because it misses the more thoughtful parts of the game’s story that actually did make it material mostly for adults.

“...the first act in my theatre of Grand Guignol!”

We begin in the world of Nosgoth, and if there’s a made-up fantasy word that screams “dark supernatural fantasy” more than that, I haven’t heard it.  Our main character is Kain, a nobleman caught out at night in a town where he can’t find an inn or tavern to stay for the night.  He is cornered by assassins and murdered, whereupon he goes to hell.  Or at least, we can assume it’s hell; I don’t think even a death metal band’s idea of heaven involves being cuffed to twin posts overlooking a literal lake of fire with a sword stuck through you.  Anyway, that’s where Kain is, cursing the fact that he can’t get revenge.  Which seems a little warped, on the surface of things.  You’d think if you were stuck in hell, then getting out, however impossible, might seem more important than getting back at the people who killed you.  But if you’re the kind of person who winds up in hell after being murdered, I suppose it stands to reason that your priorities may not be in order.

While Kain is in hell, lamenting his impotent rage and generally ignoring all the fine mid-90s CG scenery, he is approached by a necromancer named Mortanius.

The necromancer offers him a way back to the world of the living, and thus a chance at revenge.  Eager to oblige his overdeveloped sense of wrath, Kain takes him up on the offer, and fails to consider that there are only a few different ways, traditionally, that a dead person can cross back through the veil.  And none of them really involve returning to life exactly as you were.

Kain rises from his grave as a vampire, stronger than he ever was in life, and only too happy to hack up his assassins when he encounters them not far from the site of his crypt.  However, as he comes down from his vengeance-high, he hears a voice in the back of his mind – Mortanius’s voice, in fact – suggesting that his assassins were “the instruments of your murder, not the cause”.  Mortanius then urges him to seek out the Pillars to find the real reason for his murder, and its true culprits.

We need to rewind a bit.

IN THE BEGINNING, there were the Pillars of Nosgoth (in fact, “Pillars of Nosgoth” was the game’s working title for a while). Rooted who knows how deep in the earth below, and reaching up to the clouds, the Pillars are a structure that should be physically impossible.  They are somehow both integral to the natural order of the world, and also the embodiment of certain elemental principles. There are nine of them, embodying – in no particular order – conflict, energy, states (of being, not political), dimensions, death, nature, time, the mind, and balance.  Each Pillar has its guardian, a human endowed with powers according to the Pillar’s defining principle, and tasked with overseeing that Pillar’s particular province.  

A good while back in the past (how long is not detailed in this game, but probably centuries) there was a genocidal crusade of sorts against vampires, who were evidently a serious scourge of some kind.  In fact, the game opens on a view of a field – practically a forest – of stakes, with a vampire impaled on each.  Vlad Tepes would be proud.  This crusade was ordered by the Circle of Nine (the collective group of Pillar guardians), and carried out by the fanatical religious order known as the Sarafan Brotherhood.

Monsters that they are, the vampires did not take this well.  One of their number, an elder vampire named Vorador, decided to strike back.  Vorador was by this point in his unlife no longer quite human looking, with mottled grey skin (later series installments would make this varying shades of green), odd three-clawed hands, and giant bat-like ears. Blood Omen never elaborates on the reason for this difference.  At any rate, he singlehandedly stormed the citadel of the Pillar guardians while most of the Sarafan brotherhood were away (presumably looking for more vampires to stake), and wound up killing several of them (one of the sequels gives the number as six).  In the process, he even managed to beat down Malek on his way out, perhaps the greatest warrior among the Sarafan, and the one specifically tasked with safeguarding the Circle.

For screwing up his one job, Malek was punished by being made to do that job for eternity.  It might seem inadvisable to take the guy who failed to guard you and then make him your guard forever, but it helps if you rip his soul out of his body and bind it to his armor, thus making him a sleepless, tireless, unfeeling, and ever vigilant warrior fueled by pure wrath.  Which is what they (or rather, Mortanius) ultimately did.  At some point between this time and the present day of Blood Omen, Malek became the guardian of the Pillar of Conflict, so evidently he was fit for his role in the end.

Now we fast-forward a bit, to a point just moments before Kain’s birth. In fact, later games place this at the exact moment of that birth.

Somewhere around thirty years before Kain’s murder outside a nameless tavern in a random town, Ariel, the guardian of the Pillar of Balance, is murdered.  This is bad news for all the usual reasons, and also one or two unusual ones.  It turns out that her lover is the guardian of the Pillar of the Mind, the mentalist Nupraptor.  Her murder drives him insane, and being a telepath (among other things), his insanity infects the guardians of the other Pillars as well. This turns them from their usual purpose of upholding the natural balance, and instead sets them to destroying it.  This in turn corrupts the Pillars, symbiotically connected to their guardians, turning them from pristine white to a pitted and cracking grey.  With both the Pillars and their guardians respectively corrupted and insane, the natural order of things begins to fall apart.  Bad news all around.

Blood Omen is somewhat unusual in that it’s one of the few probably rare instances in fiction where a woman is stuffed into the fridge at the beginning of the story, and in order to drive the villain to extremes of behavior.

So.

Now we have Kain, in the present of our story, given to understand that his death was in some way connected with the Pillars and their corruption.  He makes his way to the Pillars, where he meets Ariel’s restless spirit.  She’s the one who lays out for him part of the business about her murder and Nupraptor’s madness, and the threat posed to the world by it all.  Kain is only interested in a cure for his vampirism (now that he’s had his vengeance, he wants no part of this undeath business), but Ariel persuades him that his best bet is to deal with the corruption of the Pillars.  So Kain storms off to go take care of Nupraptor, and ultimately to cleanse the Pillars by severing their connection to their now-insane guardians, solving the problem of their corruption by reference to his sword.  Go with what you know.

It’s at this point that Kain’s personal arc begins to unfold, as he becomes increasingly alienated from humanity, both the species and the concept.  While initially at odds with his vampirism, Kain spends the story coming to grips with the hypocrisy and corruption of human civilization, all the while becoming more and more comfortable with the seeming monstrosity of his new existence.  This is a matter of some necessity.  He has things he needs to do, he has to stay alive to do them, and so a certain amount of blood-drinking and slaughter seems inevitable.  

In his travels, he comes across Vorador’s manor, situated deep in a swamp teeming with monsters.  Kain seeks his help to destroy Malek.  Vorador, for his part, spends the encounter being lordly and largely dismissive of Kain’s quest.  He advises the fledgling vampire that meddling in mortal affairs is nothing but bad news.  Better to sit back and sate one’s hunger – or thirst, in this case – and let the mortal world turn as it will.  Humans are to be preyed on, not helped or manipulated or otherwise gotten involved with.  Best to stay above such passing concerns.  Nevertheless, he takes a liking to Kain, and gives him his ring to summon him at need.

Say a word often enough, and it starts to lose its sense of meaning.  Actions likewise lose significance with repetition.  They become rote.  And as time wears on, Kain seems to begin making a turn.  There’s a certain honesty in being a monster.  You always know what you are, and you always know how other people see you.  Kain may sneer at Vorador’s decadence when they meet, but at least the elder vampire is never less than one hundred percent honest about what he is.

And as Kain goes on, it begins to seem that Vorador was right.  So much of Kain’s and the world’s difficulties seem to stem from the selfishness, greed, shortsightedness, self-absorption, and general malice of the people he runs up against.  Eventually, he winds up accidentally sparking a second genocidal crusade against his own kind.  This has mostly to do with him traveling back in time to kill a man in the past who would grow to become a tyrant in his current era.  This mistake no doubt has its roots in his not having not grown up in a world with a whole sub-genre of fiction concerned with the merits or otherwise of traveling back in time to kill Hitler.

We will have such fun with time travel as the series goes on, let me tell you.

The game ends by offering the player a choice.  Kain’s efforts to cleanse the Pillars and restore balance to the world have made him the new guardian of the Pillar of Balance.  Yet, like all other Pillar Guardians slain at his hand, he himself is corrupt, and must die to complete the task.  So the player is asked: Will Kain willingly sacrifice himself for the greater good of Nosgoth, or will he refuse the sacrifice and choose to live in an increasingly broken and corrupt world.

The sequels take the second ending as canon, and honestly, it’s hard to argue.  This isn’t a story about hope springing eternal, after all.  The few people in it who are unambiguously good are either killed (Ariel) or largely ineffectual (King Ottmar, who comes to prominence briefly toward the end of the story).  The player may feel differently, but there’s little reason to believe that Kain would.  Proud, haughty, vindictive, wrathful, and growing ever more cynical and mistrustful of the motives of those around him, tired of being used as a tool for other’s schemes...  Why would he choose to sacrifice himself?

And so, canonically, we close on a shot of Kain sitting on a throne at the base of the Pillar of Balance, with it and all the other Pillars lying in a broken ruin around him.  He drinks from a goblet, and muses that Vorador was right after all: “Vampires are gods – dark gods – and it is our duty to thin the herd.”

The End.

“Nothing is free.  Not even revenge.”

So that’s Blood Omen as a story.  What about as a game?

On the balance it’s kind of uneven.  

On a technical level, it’s fairly impressive.  In its time, it stood as a testament to the potential quality of two-dimensional graphics in gaming, even as the entire medium was leaping into the third dimension, ready to ditch and decry anything made in 2D as inferior. The result from a technical standpoint is that Blood Omen has in some ways aged better than a lot of other games of its vintage, including its first sequel.  

But then you actually play the thing, and see where it sort of falls apart.

Let’s get the easy part over with, shall we?  The load times in Blood Omen are godawful, just the worst possible combination of long and frequent. It seems almost like a joke at times: “Really?  We’re loading again?  It was one fucking room!”  Were it not for the fact that it began development as a totally unrelated game, I would strongly suspect that the sequel, Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver, used its data-streaming technology to avoid loading times altogether purely as a response to this criticism.  I still think that may be the case.

Once we dig past the issue of loading times, though, the game reveals other issues.

There are good ideas on display here.  Let’s start with that.  The game has a day-and-night cycle, and while you can walk around during the day, you deal less damage (and take more) while the sun is up.  Water is like the touch of acid to a vampire, and any time you’re in it, you’ll take constant damage.  Rain and snow will likewise damage you, and while there are power-ups that are supposed to eliminate this problem, I’m not sure they actually work.  At least, not on the PC version of the game, which is what I’ve mostly played.  

The game also requires that Kain drink blood periodically.  His health naturally drains very slowly, but constantly, so you always have to be on the lookout for a way to top yourself off.  There are some more abstract health restoration items, as well as a consumable item you can use, called the Heart of Darkness (this item will become obscenely important in later installments).  However, the game is structured such that most of Kain’s health restoration will have to come from either enemies or, more often, helpless innocents.  This ties nicely into the game’s theme of alienation from humanity, though the way the game often presents these situations –random strangers chained to walls all over the world, for no apparent reason – seems a little odd at times.  And it has interesting ideas about different creatures having blood that might actually be harmful to Kain, or inflict him with a long-term poison.

In addition to the graphics looking nice (the CG cutscenes are definitely of their time, but the in-game sprite work and lighting effects are quite nice), the game has a great soundtrack, dark and moody and ominous. And the voice work is superb.  All character interactions are handled with voiceover rather than on-screen text, and the cast knocks it out of the park.  Not just “good for the mid-90s video game voice acting”, but great, period.

The puzzle-solving is a little lackluster, though.  For something pitched as a “grown-up Legend of Zelda”, its puzzles largely consist of pulling levers and pushing buttons, and navigating mazes. Which is fine, but again, any game that’s going to self-consciously compare itself to The Legend of Zelda needs to bring its A game, especially with its puzzle-solving.

The game does offer you a lot of tools to use, in the form of different weapons, spells, and magical items.  But a lot of these boil down to more inventive yet questionably practical ways to kill enemies.  And considering that setting up a selection of these items for immediate access involves going back and forth to the inventory menu (requiring a load time both ways), it’s easier to just stick with your weapon and a handful of the most commonly used spells and items and call it a day.

Weapons themselves are another problem.  You’ll find that your iron sword from the very beginning of the game is the most generally useful. The mace will let you stun human enemies to drink their blood after just two hits, but it lacks the crowd-control effect of the sword, and also lacks the stunning effect on the non-human enemies that make up the bulk of your later-game foes.  It’s also useful for knocking down certain stone barriers, but these are few and far between, and necessary for progress only very rarely.  The twin axes let Kain cut down trees barring his path, and also let him cut down enemies by spinning like a saw blade… but this means you’ll frequently kill enemies before you have a chance to drain them.  The flaming sword burns enemies alive and leaves only ashes, preventing you from drinking blood that way.  And then the final weapon, the Soul Reaver (also an item of incalculable importance later in the series), deals massive damage as long as you have magic power to fuel it.  But while thus empowered, it detonates the enemies it kills, making them impossible to drain.  And when not empowered, it’s only as damaging as the iron sword, but slower and more awkward.

Combat in general gets frustrating at times, thanks to the iffy hit detection.  One enemy might walk right through your sword swing, while another you could swear was out of range will register a hit.  It never becomes a total deal-breaker, but it’s a point of frequent irritation as you go.

Let’s have another positive: Kain also gains the ability to transform into various other states as the game goes by.  In his wolf form, he can leap over certain obstacles, but his attack in this form has no combo ability and a long wind-up, making him vulnerable.  He can use his bat form to fast-travel between beacons and certain landmark locations, while his mist form allows him to walk on water without taking damage, as well as cross certain barriers without opening the door.  There are also two disguises he can use.  One transforms him into a peasant, while the other turns him into a human-looking version of himself so that he can pass as a nobleman.  The use of both of these is largely situational, required in a very small number of situations and then mostly pointless outside of them.

But perhaps the thing that stands out the most is its linearity.

This is to some extent mandated by the story.  Unlike The Legend of Zelda, to which this game invites much comparison, Blood Omen’s story is very much at all times front and center.  A Zelda game will leave you with bits of story here and there, and largely leave you to explore or puzzle your way forward or dick around in town or otherwise do your own thing for long stretches of time.  The story in one of those games is the starting point of the experience, a backdrop against which you play out the adventure.  Hyrule is to some extent defined by that openness, with its plains and deserts and vast forests and so on.  

Blood Omen lacks this.  Its story is the entire point and purpose of the game. The path forward is always clear and rarely has room for deviation or discovery.  There may be things hidden off to the side, but these tend ultimately to be cul-de-sacs, connecting to nothing else.  This is even subtly expressed in the game’s environments: lots of indoor areas, caves, narrow trails, canyons, and so on.  There’s little opportunity to go off the beaten path.  Blood Omen’s pathways not only discourage exploration, they often disable it. This is not your experience to own; it is Kain’s story for you to be told.

I feel like in story terms, that’s ultimately the difference.  Legend of Zelda’s story always exists to serve the game that Nintendo crafts.  Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain’s game exists to serve the story.

And just to be clear, none of this is bad at all.  It’s every bit as valid in terms of game design and mechanics as any given Zelda.  But if you’re going to compare your game to The Legend of Zelda and then fail to do the most essentially Zelda things in it – not just do them poorly, but not do them at all, missing the point entirely of what a Zelda game is about – then it’s worth commenting on.  I like Blood Omen, but I had to get used to thinking of it on its own terms.  The Zelda comparisons are easy to make. Even without the developers making them, the look and structure of the game seems to invite them.  

Like a good book, Blood Omen is a (mostly) straight shot from start to finish.  Its linearity is what allows it to control the story, to unfold its plot and explore its themes at a pace of its choosing.  The game to some extent revels in its edginess, but to be honest, it was perfect for me at the time.  I was sixteen when I first played the game.  Sixteen, and a bit of a loner with an odd and private (but intense) interest in vampires.  It was probably the perfect game for me at the time.  And it’s still ultimately enjoyable today, if you take it as what it is.  Not as a Legend of Zelda game for adults, but as a decent action-adventure game with a good story and top-notch presentation.  If you don’t mind the linearity and the relentlessly dark and sometimes disturbing story, it’s just about perfect.

Post-script the First: Likelihood of Re-release, and Current Availability

Eeeehhhhhhhhhh...

Here’s the problem: Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain was originally dreamed up and created by Silicon Knights and published by Crystal Dynamics (who also had a hand in the development, late in the process), with distribution to be handled by Activision.  Crystal Dynamics eventually got full ownership of the Legacy of Kain brand, and used it to make the first sequel to Blood Omen, titled Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver.  Silicon Knights was against this, but had less deep pockets than Crystal Dynamics, so they were ultimately the losers of the resulting court battle over the affair.  The lone bone thrown to them was that Crystal Dynamics had to acknowledge in the game that Soul Reaver was based on characters and ideas created by Silicon Knights.

By the time Soul Reaver rolled around, Crystal Dynamics belonged to Eidos.  Then, in 2005 (not long after the last Legacy of Kain game was published), Eidos was completely bought out by Square Enix, and was mostly refocused on creating western-style games under the Square Enix umbrella.  Crystal Dynamics still exists as a division within Square, where they’ve been making various Tomb Raider games almost exclusively ever since the acquisition.

The problem with any hypothetical remaster or re-release of Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain is that, for several years, it would have required some three-way legal wrangling to determine who really owned the thing, and what they could do with it (if anything), and under what conditions.  

As of about 2014, Silicon Knights ceased to exist (about which more later, because it’s a fun story), but that still leaves the rights an open issue.  Square Enix seems to own the larger Legacy of Kain intellectual property, but there’s the question of ownership regarding Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain specifically, and I’m not sure that question has ever been answered.  Silicon Knights doesn’t exist, but many of its personnel are still around in some capacity, and would presumably have something to say about anything involving it.

Venues like Steam and Good Old Games have released the every other installment in the series digitally (even Blood Omen 2), but nobody’s touched the original game.  Probably CD Projekt Red and Valve don’t have much desire to try unsnarling the ownership and licensing issues themselves, and none of the owners seem all that keen on it, either.

And it will probably stay that way.  The Legacy of Kain series in general has always been pretty solidly in the B tier of video games, from back when there still even was much of a B tier in the first place.  The fanbase for that kind of deliberately overwrought gothic supernatural fantasy was loyal, but never very big, and I’m not sure how much that’s changed.  Moreover, I’m not sure either Square is willing to bank on it having grown in the interim enough to do anything about this first game in the series.  The more time goes by, the less inclination any party has to make anything of the series, especially an early entry whose ownership may be contested. An indirect sequel, and also some kind of MMO, were both in the works at various points.  The MMO vanished after not very long at all on the market, and the indirect sequel never made it out of development.

Legal options for playing Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain are limited.  You can play the original PlayStation version on the PlayStation 1, 2, or 3.  It’s also digitally available on the PS3, although not for the PSP or Vita.  Infuriatingly, it’s one of a small handful of games that can’t even be side-loaded (a process that involves downloading a digital PS1 game onto your PS3, then copying it uninstalled to the Vita).  The PC version, meanwhile, can still be played, though there’s a special program custom-made for it that you’ll have to get in order to install it and run it on modern systems.  And this tends to run a little slow.  Music and sound are fine, it’s just the game actually moves slower than normal.  Or you could install a virtual desktop and play it that way.

Post-script the Second: The Death of Chivalry

So whatever happened with Silicon Knights?  

Well, the story is… not complicated, exactly, but not entirely straightforward, either.

Development of Blood Omen was troubled.  As we would later learn, this was not an especially novel situation for Silicon Knights to be in.  Two of their other big projects later on underwent some turbulence in production.  Blood Omen was originally to be created by Silicon Knights and published by Crystal Dynamics.  Later on, after Crystal Dynamics became part of British publisher Eidos, they were able to somehow leverage this connection to strongarm their way into ownership of the overall Legacy of Kain intellectual property.  They used it to make the first sequel to Blood Omen, titled Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver. This had begun life as a brand-new IP (originally titled Shifter), which helps explain some of the tremendous thematic, aesthetic, and design differences between the two games.  

Silicon Knights later maintained that they’d had their own ideas for a potential Blood Omen sequel, but never got around to it, and after Crystal Dynamics started making their own sequels, Silicon Knights lost interst.  I’m not sure how much of that is real and how much is just so much sour grapes.  Anyway, they went off and did their own thing for a while.  They published the survival horror game Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem for the GameCube, after having signed an exclusivity deal with Nintendo around that time.  It had originally been in development for the N64, but was ultimately moved up to the newer hardware after development delays.  For anyone who’s wondering, Eternal Darkness an excellent game, on the shortlist of must-own GameCube titles, even if you’re not necessarily a fan of survival horror.  It’s not perfect (among other things, you have to beat the game three times to see the true ending), but it does a lot of interesting things.  

They also developed the GameCube remake of Metal Gear Solid (likely under heavy scrutiny and supervision form Konami), dubbed Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes.  Much as I tend to prefer the original version of the game for its restraint (Twin Snakes has a lot of ridiculous high-flying wire-fu maneuvering in its action cutscenes), the remake is worth any Metal Gear fan’s time. Among other things, series creator Hideo Kojima has apparently declared it the canon version of events.  It also saw a re-dubbing of the entire script, since apparently when the original audio was played back at a higher sampling rate, you could hear the traffic in the background, which the ramshackle soundproofing used in the original hadn’t been able to entirely shut out.  The re-dubbed script also has the benefit of having allowing Jennifer Hale and Kim Mai Guest to ditch their put-on accents – Guest’s being particularly irritating, and borderline racist (maybe actually racist; I’m a white dude, and not totally clear on these things).

After this, they moved on to the Xbox 360 with their passion project Too Human, which had been troubled from the beginning.  Its on-again, off-again development cycle spanned a decade and three console generations.  It began development for the original PlayStation, then shifted to the GameCube when the developer did in the early 2000s.  It went quiet for a few years, then resurfaced as an Xbox 360 project that was ultimately delivered in 2008, two years after its projected release on that console.

Too Human was a notorious, news-making flop, and Silicon Knights responded to this failure not simply by pinning the blame on someone else, but by doing that and then actually suing them.  Specifically, they sued Epic Games, from whom they had licensed the Unreal Engine 3 to make the final version of Too Human.  The accusation was that Epic deliberately sabotaged developers who licensed their engine by providing an incomplete product, and that the difficulties stemming from this had caused development delays.  These delays, and the compromises they brought about, were supposedly ultimately responsible for the failure and the financial losses of Too Human.

Epic responded by then counter-suing, which was the beginning of the end for Silicon Knights.

Epic’s counter-suit stated that Unreal Engine 3 was a work in progress, and that they were making it essentially on the fly as they developed the first Gears of War.  The counter-suit further stated that it was readily and openly acknowledged that the engine was unfinished, and that when it was done, it might ultimately not turn out to be useful for the licensees.  Epic’s suit further indicated that these facts were all known and laid out in the licensing contract, and so like all licensees, Silicon Knights knew this when they signed for it.  

But it gets better (which is to say, worse, at least for Silicon Knights). Epic’s counter-suit also included the allegation that Silicon Knights had knowingly and wrongfully copied code wholesale from Unreal Engine 3 and incorporated it into their own engine without permission from Epic.  They had then gone on to use this hybrid engine on other internal projects without the permission of the people they’d cannibalized it from.  

Now, I’m not one to root for a big corporation, even (especially) a game developer.  But Silicon Knights had the misfortune of being run by Denis Dyack, a known con-man, grifter, shady bullshitter, and general ambulatory phallus.  He maybe wasn’t in the same category as a Randy Pitchford or a Bobby Kotick, but that’s less a matter of capacity and more a matter of opportunity.  Given the chance to operate on their scale, I don’t doubt he’d have fit right in with that crowd.  

As far as the court case went, the evidence was overwhelmingly in Epic’s favor. In addition to their own court costs and damages awarded to Epic, Silicon Knights was forced to recall all unsold copies of Too Human and X-Men: Destiny (another game they’d developed with their Unreal Engine 3 hybrid), as well as scrap all projects using the engine, which seems to have been literally everything they had in the works at that point.

So what happened, essentially, is that Silicon Knights sued Epic Games in an effort to offset their losses by making money out of the Too Human debacle somehow, and it backfired so comically that they broke themselves against their opponent.

But their end, one way or another, was probably inevitable in that console generation.  Looking at their release history, there’s really nothing that stands out as a hit or an absolute classic.  Eternal Darkness and Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes were both fine games, this much is true.  But Eternal Darkness was a GameCube exclusive, and the GameCube didn’t sell the way Nintendo hoped.  Meanwhile, The Twin Snakes is certainly nice, but as a remake of a different developer’s game, it has little in the way of originality, and very little of the material can really be said to “belong” to Silicon Knights, since it was someone else’s brainchild right from the start.  

They were never a hugely prolific publisher, with eight games published before they folded, and according to Wikipedia, seven known titles cancelled at various points during their existence.  These cancelled projects included two sequels to Too Human (which had always been planned as a trilogy).  Given the cold reception received by the original, both from critics and consumers alike, that seems questionable.  In for a penny, in for a pound, I guess.  But however you look at it, they didn’t have what you’d call a good ratio of finished to unfinished projects.  And while it’s worth mentioning that many of those unfinished projects were upcoming games they were forced to cancel because they’d been made (or begun) with their illegal Unreal Engine 3 hybrid, the fact is that when your business plan hinges on stealing another developer’s game engine to make your own games, you’re already in a bad place.  

Silicon Knights pretty firmly slotted into the middle tier of video games.  For my money, the middle tier is in some ways the sweet spot.  It’s more high-tech and technically involved than the indie set, yet not so high-budget that developers in it can’t feel free to experiment.  But that middle tier has all but vanished these days. It’s questionable whether Silicon Knights would have hung on long enough to find a spot in it today, even if they hadn’t destroyed themselves going after Epic, just based on the iffy reception of their games.  That’s without considering the general skullduggery it took to keep them going in the first place.  And I also tend to think of X-Men: Destiny as a bad sign.  There’s no shame in work-for-hire; it’s how a lot of major development studios (like Blizzard) started out.  But that’s the key: you start out doing work-for-hire projects to make the money to strike out on your own. Silicon Knights was moving in the opposite direction, and that’s a bad sign.

Vae Victis, indeed.

[atthetable]

Introduction

Womenomics is actually one of the three growth strategies of Shinzho Abe in order to revitalize Japan’s economy. The term was actually coined not by Abe but by a woman named, Kathy Matsui, a senior Goldman Sachs analyst. She claimed in a report in 1999 that Japan could see a 13% increase in its employment in economic growth if they were to include more women in the workforce. And this is something Japan really needs, why? Because for more than 20 years, Japan has been experiencing slow growth due to the challenge of not having enough workers. The solution to this, according to Abe, is to tap on the most underutilized human resource of Japan and that is women. The targets of this policy is to “enable women to realize their full potential” and for “overcoming the declining birth rate.” The famous catchphrase for this policy is “Japan in which women shine.”

But despite the promising targets and catchphrases, we are here to discuss the reason behind “Why Womenomics Failed Women?” There are a lot of political and cultural constraints as to why womenomics had not been as successful as expected to be. What’s quite surprising is that, in 2013, the year that Abenomics was implemented, the ranking of Japan according to the Global Gender Gap Report was at 105th out of 133 countries. And 7 years after that, in 2019, Japan’s rank had even lowered to a ranking of 121st.

Context

To provide context, one of the reasons behind Japan’s stagnant economic growth is Japan’s aging population wherein there is an increase in the proportion of the elderly population and a declining fertility rate. Japan has the highest proportion of its elderly population where 20% of Japanese people are over 65 years old. This is a huge problem because there are not enough younger workers to replace them and to support the aging population’s healthcare and pension. 

This is why they saw the importance of women in the improvement of Japan’s economy, both as a child bearer and as a worker.  His administration has taken certain steps in order to encourage more women to have children and to find jobs. With some of these steps being: making preschool education free, increasing the number of daycare centers in Japan, expanding child care leave benefits, recruiting and promoting women and government and encouraging the private sector to employ more women.  

One of Abe’s goals is to increase the fertility rate back to 1.8% percent by 2025 but by looking at the numbers you would see that Japan’s fertility rate has not been going through the exact opposite. The fertility rate has been decreasing ever since the year after Womenomics was established. From an average growth rate of 1% in the years 2011 to 2013, the growth rate had lowered to -0-0.5% for the years after. 

The reasons behind this disconnect between policy and its effects on Japanese women in society will be explored. Women in Japan believe that there is “ingrained sexism” in Japan’s politics and culture and these informal constraints make it difficult for these policies and programs to truly change the perception of women in Japanese society. 

Matahara

The discrimination against women, particularly pregnant women, manifest in what the Japanese people call matahara or maternity harassment. This concept refers to a phenomenon in which pregnant women are being bullied into resigning. Most Japanese employers view women as a liability because once they bear children, they would need more time for childcare, which means that there is less time for mothers to work. About 60 percent of Japanese women resign after the birth of their first child, and of that number, about 30 percent of Japanese women have experienced matahara, according to the Japan Trade Union Confederation (Rengo). Then, once they resign, they have no job to come back to once they’re ready because they would have been replaced by someone else. 

This mistreatment of women is demeaning. It’s in their culture to assume that mothers (or would-be mothers) have no place in the workplace, just because they cannot devote as much hours to the company as they used to. Even more, what’s shameful about this practice is that there are laws that protect women against it. The Labor Standards Act, for example, requires employers to adjust a pregnant woman’s working hours. But then, to quote the article from the Diplomatic Courier, “existence and enforcement are two different things.” 

Daycare Issue

Building upon this issue, the exact same quote and problem also pervades the daycare system of Japan. Daycares are an important part of Japanese culture as it allows working parents to focus on their jobs, knowing that their children are safe and taken care of. It’s so important that in most cases, it is an unspoken requirement for Japanese women to have their children enrolled in a daycare system before being accepted into employment. Despite the glaring need for daycares, however, Japan’s daycare system is lacking in many aspects, which all negatively affect (perhaps even impede) the working conditions of women. 

For one, the applications for public daycare in Japan are based on a point system to judge the “worthiness” of being assigned one of the rare spots in daycare. The more points you have, the more chances you have of your child being enrolled or waitlisted. The points may vary according to the location, but these usually revolve around the type of employment, health issues of the parents, and marital status. Having family members under the age of 60, for example, loses you points regardless of whether or not they are actually capable of helping you. Applying for a daycare in your place of employment but where you don’t reside makes you lose points as well, and so does starting a job within the past three months. This is a particular issue because, as we will discuss in the next few sections, you’ll see that women are usually employed as irregular workers or as part-timers--both of which can easily be terminated. With these obstacles, some couples find it difficult to get a total of 40 points, the usual requirement of being accepted, but in places like Tokyo’s Shinagawa district, having both parents working full time would allot you 40 points. In places like these, 40 points function as the starting point instead. But the point system is only the tip of the iceberg, daycare systems also require an insane amount of paperwork from the parents, and enrollment happens only once a year in April.

Aside from limited spots for children, daycare staff and daycares themselves are lacking. The problem with staffing stems from incredibly low salaries, forcing many to quit within a few years only. In fact, compared to the average professional salary in Japan (around ¥325,000 per month), daycare staff are paid with only an average of ¥214,000. Daycare staff are also pressured--even forced--to quit once they have children of their own; in this sense, matahara invades even the daycare system, despite the common knowledge that daycares are typically understaffed. 

Because childcare is in shortage and because daycares usually close at 5pm, those employed in night shifts find it even more difficult to secure this service. The demand led to the rise of “baby hotels”, unregulated and non-certified 24-hour daycare facilities which are extremely expensive and usually staffed by inadequate employees. Lack of regulation within these facilities led to fatal cases caused by inadequate care and violence, just like the death of a 4-month old baby in Hiratsuka near Tokyo. 

It is clear that the daycare system’s outdated design was made with the expectation that one of the child’s parents would not be working. However, times have changed and if Japan wants to increase birth rate and economic productivity through female employment, Japan needs to step up their game should implement change, starting with their daycare system. 

Reasons Why Womenomics Failed

Lack of Representation

The targets of Womenomics have been constantly pushed back by the Japanese government. From a goal to increase the percentage of women in managerial positions by 10-30% in 2020, it had decreased to 5-15% in 2015 and as of 2020, these goals had been pushed back to the year 2030. It was ONLY in 2015 that large companies were given a quota to increase women in management and disclose this to the public, but then there were no penalties if this was not followed. This shows that there had been a lack of conviction and action on the part of Abe’s administration to promote gender equality. The reason behind that is that there is a lack of representation for women in politics.

 The majority of Japan’s politicians are men. In Abe’s cabinet, only 2 out of 21 cabinet ministers were women and that is far from the 30% quota that they set on female representation in politics. Based on the G20 Leaders Summit, only 47 out of 463 Japanese lawmakers or 10.2%, were women. And there are numerous cases of women, being discriminated against in politics. 

One of the most famous cases would be regarding the Japanese assembly member Yuka Ogata. She wanted to make a statement about the challenges of what working women face in Japan so she brought her seven month old baby in her arms on the first day of going back to work after giving birth. She was kicked out of this assembly meeting because she showed up with a newborn baby in her arms and video clips had shown that the baby was not even making any noise and was calmly sitting on his mother’s lap. Before this, she had requested permission to breastfeed her child in the chamber and for a daycare to be constructed for assembly members, but these requests were rejected.

And such discrimination is not only perpetrated by men but by women themselves as well. The Japanese lawmaker Mio Sugita has made controversial statements by denying the existence of “comfort women” and even victim blamed the journalist and icon of the Japanese #MeToo movement, Shiori Ito for her alleged rape case saying that it was due to “clear errors on her part as a woman.”

With these cases, it’s quite obvious that Japan is not only lacking representation of women in politics in terms of number, but it is lacking representation for women. This representation refers to a specific mindset that pursues women’s empowerment in politics. It’s important to see women not just as a quota that needs to be fulfilled but actual people who want to be empowered in work and in motherhood.

Lack of Employment Opportunities

One of Japan’s primary problems with regard to gender discrimation is that their society sees women as economic units rather than individuals that deserve to be empowered. What do I mean by this? According to the 2016 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) figures, Japan’s overall female employment rate is at 66.1%. The Japanese government prided themselves on this “achievement,” however, does it truly accomplish the goals of Womenomics? 

In Japan, the quality of employment opportunities for women is questionable. Atsuko Muraki, visiting professor at Tsuda University and a former vice-minister for Health, Labour and Welfare, says female employment in Japan has increased in quantity but not in quality. According to the data, 

3.7% of executives of listed Japanese companies are women

73% of JP companies have no women at management level

57.7% of JP working women are engaged in non-regular employment

This means that, despite their strong educational background, working mothers in the workforce are mostly employed part-time and in low-paying jobs. Japanese women who choose not to work become full-time housewives instead, letting the men of the household deal with providing for their needs. In other parts of the world, working mothers are becoming the norm, but in Japan, nearly half of the women believe that women should stay at home and care for the household and their children. This is according to the 2013 statistics by the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare in Japan. The Japanese mindset regarding women is intergenerational, meaning the younger generations seem to hold the same beliefs. There are young Japanese girls that dream of being the perfect housewife -- and nothing else. 

This, in my opinion, is against the true goals of Womenomics because it was created for women to enjoy the same career opportunities that men do. Women need to feel that their children’s care is not being compromised if they choose to go to work. Women need to feel that they are allowed to pursue careers and family at the same time, and they should not feel guilty about that. 

In 2015, the government, headed by Abe Shinzo, enacted a law that requires companies to increase the number of women in management positions and to publish the results. And yet, because of the absence of penalties and disincentives, companies fail to comply. Nothing changes, and change will remain to be a far-off dream until Japanese society tackles the problems that arise from their culture.  

Gender discrimination

Gender-specific role divisions between men and women play a crucial role in the decline of female participation in the workforce. Though women’s advancement has progressed since the second world war, the informal institutions of Japan have endured, applying similar constraints upon its citizens. Japan’s Confucian roots permeate through nearly every aspect of Japanese life, especially with familial values. As the building blocks of society, familial expectations greatly influence the youth’s perspectives and notions that eventually guide their participation in society through their adult life. In particular, the difference between the expectations placed upon males and females can be gleaned from an early age when boys are immediately taught the value of professional success, higher education and providing for the family while women are expected to focus on being respectful, addressing their house chores, and taking care of their children. With these, Japanese family dynamics were historically divided between a female housewife and a male financial provider. This has been successful, with women actually saying that their greatest dream is to be a housewife and society views giving birth and raising children as the main contribution of women to Japanese society. Despite this, however, Japan’s birth rate continues to decline and the gendered expectations have caused decreasing economic productivity as a result of a shortage in employed workers. Women, being half of the population, are systemically barred from participating in quality employment opportunities but are expected to share the burden of earning income within the household. 

Still, earning income for women is limited by the gender-specific stereotypes as well, with Japanese women expected to choose jobs that are seen as “female occupations” like customer services or sales. At an administrative level, companies assign women to mere generic clerical work or other jobs with low levels of specialty to prepare for the “eventual” matahara. 

As we have seen with this podcast, it is glaringly obvious that simply changing the laws and implementing formal incentives for more women participation in the labor market cannot sufficiently address Japan’s problems in employment, birth rate, and childcare. When informal institutions, such as norms and culture, are at play, formal efforts can easily be undermined and overturned in favor of what society deems to be “right.” If Japan continues to neglect this area, then womenomics and any other form of legal solution will undoubtedly fail every time. 

Conclusion

To sum up, we talked about the “hows” and “whys” of the failure of Womenomics. We discussed some of the prevailing problems that women, especially mothers, experience in Japan. And all of that is due to the government’s weak political will, and the discriminating perspectives that arise from their culture. 

Hence, with all of our research and observations of gender discrimination in Japan, we notice how women consider this to be the SOP in workplaces; women have grown accustomed to this culture and young girls seem to grow up in a world where their greatest dream is to be a housewife. Since young girls lack role models of women in power positions, motherhood is all they’ve ever known. And while being a mother is a noble and worthy cause, it should not be the only choice for women’s fulfillment as a result of limited options. Bearing in mind that nearly half of the Japanese women prefer staying at home, this mindset begs the question: do Japanese women want things to change? 

[jmsebastian]

Controlling Your Fear: Fatal Frame IV

Fatal Frame is a video game series made by Tecmo (now Koei Tecmo) that has meant a lot to me as a player. While horror games aren’t always my favorite experiences, I owe a great deal to Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly for my personal gaming renaissance. After having purchased a used PS2 in order to start digging through the decade of games I had completely missed out on, I had an itch to play something survival horror. I had something more along the lines of Resident Evil in mind when I began my search, but Fatal Frame II repeatedly popped up on lists of the scariest games ever made. After doing a bit of research and learning about the game’s main gimmick of using a camera to defeat the undead, I was sold. I immediately purchased a copy and when it arrived in the mail, I wasted no time in sinking my teeth into it.

Much to my delight, games like Resident Evil (in their original incarnations, anyway) have not aged particularly well when it comes to eliciting terror in players. The chunky visuals, goofy voice acting, and use of horror movie style zombies as the main threat come across an pretty hokey these days. RE is a great time, but its classification as survival horror refers almost exclusively to its mechanics now more than it does the content of the game. Despite being a fourteen year old game as of the time of this writing, Fatal Frame II is still terrifying. In fact, all of the games in the series generate genuine chills at a high enough rate that it’s quite surprising that they are not more well-known and popular than they are. Given just how popular the horror genre is and the sheer number of horror games that have been made, having the Fatal Frame series be something of a crown jewel seems obvious to me.

So if Crimson Butterfly was my first exposure to Fatal Frame, why then am I skipping ahead to talk about the fourth installment instead? For one, it’s the only game in the series to have never been officially released outside its country of origin. Despite never being a major selling franchise, five of the six games were translated for foreign markets, four to North America. The fourth game did not get so lucky, and thus its English speaking player base is probably a fair amount smaller than it is for those games that did make it over. Second, the fourth game marked a transition for Tecmo away from their partnership with Sony to a new one with Nintendo. The first three titles in the series were all released for the Playstation 2 within about four years of each other, with the original published in 2001. The series went dormant for a few years before it resurfaced on Nintendo’s Wii console. Following a merger between Tecmo and Koei, the new company’s relationship with Nintendo grew significantly, with several projects beginning, some including Nintendo’s own properties.

The third and primary reason I wanted to talk about the fourth entry to this series is because it uses motion controls. Being released on the Wii meant that everything players knew about playing Fatal Frame games was going to change. As such, it is a great game to play if you’ve never played a Fatal Frame game before. The barrier for entry is somewhat high considering its lack of official Western release, but the play experience itself is about as accessible as an oppressively dreadful video game can be.

Who doesn’t love those immersion breaking but totally necessary Wii Remote prompts?

Zero: Tsukihami no Kamen, or Fatal Frame IV: Mask of the Lunar Eclipse as it has become known in the West, is made up of the same basic formula as the rest of the series. There are mysterious circumstances that compel the player character or characters to visit a haunted location to discover the truth about something. Usually that something involves some cult ritual designed to ward off evil or prevent a calamity that instead does just the opposite. Naturally, visiting haunted manors and hospitals means that the player is likewise visited by numerous spirits, most of whom suffered terribly in life, met an untimely/violent end, and are now out to exact their revenge on anyone they can. Thankfully, you have a way to defend yourself in the form of the Camera Obscura, a Polaroid style camera that exorcises ghosts by using special film to take pictures of them.

From a mechanical standpoint, the entire series is built around the Camera Obscura. For this reason, Mask of the Lunar Eclipse is one of the most interesting games in the series from a mechanics point of view. Lacking the more traditional controllers of the PS2, players must take up the Wii Remote with nunchuk accessory. The analog stick on the nunchuk is responsible for general player movement while in third person. The C button allows the player to strafe. Holding the Z button allows the player to run. Over in the other hand on the Wii Remote, the B button is used to raise or lower the Camera Obscura, while A is the general interaction button. It is also used to take pictures. To top all this off is aiming. The Wii Remote’s motion detection is used to track the aim of the flashlight the player carries up or down and does the same for the Camera Obscura when looking through its viewfinder.

You might not like what you see through the viewfinder.

The inherent limitations placed on the Wii Remote are what make this game such a curiosity. Intuitively, a player might think the game would take advantage of both the horizontal and vertical tracking that the motion bar allows. Doing so would have made aiming the flashlight around when in third person especially useful. Throughout the exploration of the game’s locales, items can and must be discovered by pointing the flashlight over them. It’s a kind of hidden in plain site approach where your Camera Obscura alerts you to objects using an indicator that glows more prominently the closer you are to the object, but those objects usually won’t appear until you pass the glow of your electric torch over them, causing them to reflect back at you. It’s a neat idea, but it is a slow process given that aiming the flashlight left or right is contingent on turning the player in one direction or the other using the analog stick rather than being able to simply point the flashlight in whatever direction you choose. If you need to highlight something above or below the character, then you can use the motion controls, but it has a delayed feeling to it, almost as if you are titling a scale rather adjusting the aim.

It’s a quirky design, and a bit counterintuitive. It lacks a lot of elegance, certainly, but it is so particular that it definitely seems  intentional. In the earlier games for the PS2, using the right analog stick would move the direction the flightlight was aimed independently from the player’s movement. This allowed for more efficient scanning of unexplored rooms and areas. Since motion controls are much more fluid for this kind of interaction, it seems as though the developers purposefully stifled the ease of use in order to heighten tension. Turning is a very slow process, and forcing players to do so in order to point the flashlight or Camera Obscura is geared toward making sure the atmosphere of the game is appropriately dreadful. After all, having to wait for a slow turn when you think a ghost is right behind you is a scenario that should induce panic. Were you able to just aim the camera any old place with a quick flip of the wrist, tracking down enemies would be trivial, and all tension in the game would be lost.

Mask of the Lunar Eclipse is not really about doing things quickly, and this is also true of its combat. The aiming in the game is methodical, designed toward fine tuning so you can get a great shot of a creepy little doll tucked away under a staircase rather than quick approximation so you can rapid fire photos at ghosts to punish them. To emphasize how little aiming matters with regard to combat, the game includes a lock on mechanism. With the Camera Obscura to your face, all you have to do to guarantee at least some damage is to aim in the general direction of the offending ghost and press Z. This will lock your viewfinder to the ghost and track them as they move about and get closer to you.

Taking snapshots of ghosts is really nothing like shooting them with bullets. It’s more of a staring contest. The longer you can hold your gaze, the closer the ghost approaches, and the better chance you have of landing some big damage. The default Type-07 film you use comes in an infinite supply since having film is required to solve puzzles. It would have been a bit unfair to leave players with no film and not enough points to get more. To compensate for the film’s abundance is its lack of power. If all you have to use is the basic film, fights can end up taking a long time, and the longer the fights go, the more varied and dangerous the spirits’ attacks become. Littered throughout the game are more powerful types of film which are limited use. The game isn’t especially generous with handing out this more powerful film, and it’s possible to miss the pickups much of the time if you aren’t feeling brave enough to thoroughly bathe each and every room in your flashlight’s glow. There’s usually enough to help take down the most powerful enemies, but it’s not a resource you want to waste.

So how do you defeat ghosts with crappy ammunition, then? By putting yourself at risk. The lock on ensures that you can reliably let the ghosts get close to you without letting the panic that is setting in throw off your aim. You can watch their faces get bigger, their expressions become more pained and threatening. Eventually, they’ll get close enough to strike, and just as they do, you press the shutter. This use of proximity as the primary method of determining damage is not new to Fatal Frame IV. The same basic scheme was used since the second game, however Mask elevates it by changing where the difficulty lies. In previous games, the difficulty was in keeping the camera aimed at ghosts while looking through the Camera Obscura. You have to use the analog stick to constantly adjust your aim. The closer enemies get, the more difficult a task this is. Sudden jerking movements leave you looking at an empty bookcase while the ghost goes in for the kill. In IV, the challenge is simply to get your character aimed at the ghosts in the first place. The over the shoulder position of the third person camera severely limits the view of the surrounding environment. Compare how the pre-determined camera angles of the first game allow for a broader view of the environment to how little you can see in Mask’s new dynamic camera setup:

Fatal Frame (2001)

Zero: Tsukihami no Kamen (2008)

If you go looking for spirits in the wrong direction, those slow turns are going to really cost you, so you better be sure of where you’re looking before you bring up the viewfinder. Once that’s done, it’s just a matter of locking on and not pushing the shutter too quickly.

The behind the shoulder view and dynamic camera probably have the most profound effects on how this game plays compared to the earlier entries in the series. One of the things that made those early games frustrating at times was how abstract the environments felt. The fixed camera angles, often chosen to make the player feel small and isolated, made creating a mental map of the areas extremely difficult. The games offered in game maps to aid players, but instead of being simple, friendly aides, they had to be used as crutches. Without an almost superhuman ability to piece 3D geography together from an odd mixture of directions and angles, you’re going to need the map, sometimes just to go from one end of a room to the other.

Mask of the Lunar Eclipse isn’t completely free of map checking, but it is drastically improved from the PS2 games thanks to the camera following the player around. Since players can view each room from any position from within it by scanning around, figuring out where rooms are in relation to each other is a much easier task. The level design helps a great deal as well. Taking place in a hospital, the layout of each floor has practical purpose. The first floor is made up mostly of a reception area, while the third floor is where many of the boarding rooms are located. The space is surprisingly believable as a functioning hospital. If not for the dilapidated state and the fact that it is crawling with spirits consumed by their lust for vengeance, it feels as if it could be used as an actual building in real life.

First floor of Haibara Hospital.

I mentioned before that turning your character in the game is extremely slow as a way to force players to keep a cool head and read the warning signs instead of flailing around. This is true, but it’s also true that the game has some built in Wii Remote gimmicks that alleviate a lot of the headache the slow controls can cause. The first is that you can actually tilt the remote outward or inward to aim your flashlight or Camera Obscura right or left independently of your character’s position. It’s not especially useful, and feels almost like an afterthought. The second gimmick is performed by flicking the remote quickly to the side. This has equal use in exploration and combat, and mastery of it can make both much easier. In third person view, the flick will cause your character to perform a quick turn of 180 degrees. This is great for when you run into locked doors or other dead ends. In combat, you can use the gesture to dodge ghost attacks when the Camera Obscura is raised. Let’s say you didn’t manage to get a lock on after a ghost bum rushes you unexpectedly. No problem. A quick flick will have you side stepping your way out of harm, freeing you to move into a more advantageous position. This maneuver is limited to combat specific situations, but since it is the same motion as the quick turn, there is ample opportunity to do one when you meant the other, punishing those players that let fear get the best of them.

On its own, the Camera Obscura is a fantastic device to build a game around and the series has done a wonderful job of expanding its role over time. What started out as a simple point and shoot style camera has evolved into a weapon of hard hitting exorcising power when wielded efficiently. There are simple upgrades to the camera’s inherent abilities, such as increasing its spirit power, increasing the rate at which that power is absorbed, and decreasing the cooldown time between photographs. There are also various lenses that can be added to the camera to give players new abilities, such as knocking ghosts back after taking their picture, or an auto lock on for nearby spirits. The more decked out your camera, the easier it is to get combos, and the more damage you can deal to end fights quickly. There’s a lot to learn about the camera, enough that were this game in the hands of lesser developers, it could have quickly evolved into a complete mess. Thankfully, the various components to it work together effectively, none really getting in the way or the others or making the basic use of it too difficult to figure out. Even if you don’t pay too close attention to all that the camera can do, you can make it through the game if you play it safe.

You can rack up some series points, though, once you get the hang of things.

Not only did Tecmo alter the way the camera worked from the perspective of player input, but they provided an entirely new weapon with which to fight off the endless spirits. When playing as Choushiro Kirishima, the player wields the Spirit Stone Flashlight. The basic principle of fending off ghosts is the same as it is with the Camera Obscura, but it behaves a bit differently. When raised, the first person view is not confined to the viewfinder. Instead, you get a much more standard perspective, with the light that the flashlight emits being at the center of your field of view. Given the wider perspective, this is not so much a problem as an opportunity for different types of enemy engagements.

Unlike the camera, the Spirit Stone Flashlight can’t lock onto enemies. Players must hold steady and aim with some amount of care if they plan on getting through encounters. The nice part about the flashlight is that it has a wider blast radius. So long as a ghost is somewhere within the light, damage will be dealt. The determining factor for dealing damage is shifted a bit, as well. Proximity to the ghosts still adds a multiplier, but the majority of the damage comes from charging the flashlight up to full power before firing a shot off. The longer you hold down the A button to charge, the more damage you’ll do, up to a point. What’s nice about this is you can do successive damage to enemies much more often as the time it takes to charge the flashlight up enough to shoot is fairly short. The trade off there is that you lose out on the combo system that makes the Camera Obscura such a rewarding device to use.

Fights with multiple enemies are much more manageable with the Spirit Stone Flashlight. Whereas locking onto a spirit with the camera results in losing sight of the other ghosts that may be around you, there is no such compromise here. The trick to these fights is simply to lure the ghosts into clusters and let them have it with your charged shots, resulting in Chain Damage. There are quite a few fights where you must take on two or more enemies at a time. This is a nice change of pace and having a completely different weapon seemingly built for multi enemy encounters makes a lot of sense. One of the most frustrating things about all of the Fatal Frame games is how limited you are in your field of view. That’s sort of the whole point, but when the game insists on putting you in small rooms or narrow hallways before throwing two ghosts that like to attack from different angles, it starts to jump from scary surprise to frustrating. The Spirit Stone Flashlight eliminates the majority of this frustration without having to alter the confining nature of some of the game’s areas.

One of many multi-enemy encounters as Choushiro.

By and large,the flashlight is a much simpler weapon to use, and it makes the sections with Kirishima feel almost like a respite from the dread of playing as the camera wielding characters, Misaki and Ruka. Like everything in this game, the Spirit Stone Flashlight does have one fatal flaw. It too, can take pictures. In order to do so, the player must swap between lens types. This becomes the source of a lot of a lot of tension when fights begin as you frantically press up or down on the D pad to switch back to your attacking lens. It becomes a source of annoyance in every other situation. Trying to take pictures of the ghosts that pop up to lead you around gets wearisome after you’ve accidentally tried to blast them into resting in peace for the tenth or twelfth time. It becomes ingrained in players to take pictures of every ghost they come across, but the reliance on this particular game mechanic seems unnecessary for Kirishima’s portions.

Getting pictures of these ghosts is not really necessary to progress through the game, but they do provide valuable points, which can be redeemed for film stock or health items. Points are easy to come by in fights since it requires less skill to fight well with the flashlight, and there are more multi-enemy encounters, drastically increasing the number of targets from which to draw. There is even an area filled with re-spawning enemies that can be used to score tons of points in a very short amount of time if players find themselves spending more than they anticipated. Mechanical reasoning aside, the very existence of the Spirit Stone Flashlight reduces some of the allure behind Fatal Frame’s lore. The Camera Obscura is supposed to be a unique item, capable of doing what nothing else can: see into the world of the dead. Its artifice becomes all the more glaring given that there are other objects taking the form of much more modern technology that can achieve the same ends.

There was a lot of opportunity to expand how Fatal Frame games were played through the introduction of the flashlight. Rather than timing blasts of energy that act so similar to how the film works, it might have been interesting to use the light emitted from the flashlight to deal a constant stream of low level damage to enemies. From far away you would only see the HP of ghosts trickle down a bit. Getting closer could increase that damage, while maintaining the light on ghosts could produce damage multipliers over time. Maybe instead of various flashlight lenses, you could have adjusted the focus of the flashlight so that you could target in on a single difficult enemy to deal out hits, or widen it to capture as many of the ghosts as possible. Ultimately, the Spirit Stone Flashlight is not a bad inclusion, it just feels unfinished and not as well thought out as it could have been. Given that its abilities were changed drastically for Fatal Frame V, it seems as though the developers picked up on the redundancy. Sadly, its later iteration still failed to provide alternative methods of dealing with enemies to elevate the game in a meaningful way.

Being a Wii game, Tecmo made sure to include some less often used, one could argue superfluous, types of motion controls. Some offer nothing of real value to the game, such as having to point at piano keys in the right order and press A to repeat a melody. It’s not a bad use of motion controls, there’s just no real reason for it. A more interesting use is how numbered dials or combination locks have to be turned by tilting the remote right or left. It’s a fun gimmick that doesn’t enhance the game to great heights, but is strangely satisfying. It’s so satisfying, in fact, that the gesture’s exclusion from interactions with door knobs feels like a real miss on Tecmo’s part. There are a lot of doors to go through in this game, so it’s likely that simulating turning a doorknob, or pulling on a door handle would have overstayed its welcome, but it’s difficult not to imagine the possibilities left on the table.

The most positive addition that the Wii Remote offered outside of combat is in its little speaker. Various effects are conveyed via this speaker that add a great deal to the atmosphere of this game. Crackling noises emitted when the Camera Obscura is raised or lowered provide a nice bit of polish with regard to representing the spirit realm. The cries of defeated ghosts can be heard emanating from your hand as they fade away. Last but not least is how phone calls are exclusively heard through it. The Wii Remote shape is quite similar to that of a home phone receiver. Putting it up to your ear to try to decipher the words coming through really is second nature and an ingenious use of the technology that the game had available to it. The eeriness of the game’s audio design is already one of IV’s high notes. Having some of that audio crackle in on a low quality speaker to add an ethereal quality is the icing on the cake. While I am not a fan of motion controls more generally, as they have never been an especially comfortable way for me to play, (left handedness makes some of this stuff more difficult than you’d think) the Fatal Frame series is in a unique positioned to take advantage of them in ways few other games are.

Playing piano with all the accuracy of typing with one finger.

It’s an incredible shame that this game was not released outside of Japan. It is easy to blame Nintendo for not putting enough effort into the series, though it’s just as likely that the series would have died out altogether had Nintendo not agreed to work with Tecmo on it. It’s not as if Sony or Microsoft were offering Tecmo big incentives to make sure the games remained on their platforms. Had it been localized, you can bet there would have been character dubbing, and frankly, the series doesn’t have the best record when it comes to its voice direction for the non Japanese cast. What makes this game’s lack of localization so odd is that four years later, Tecmo would release a remake of Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly in Japan and Europe. The European localization featured an English translation and English voice acting, yet still wasn’t brought to North America.

Still, maybe it’s better this way. There’s definitely something about playing the game with its original language voices that the localized Fatal Frames simply aren’t able to recreate. The game is so text heavy, anyway, that reading subtitles for the parts that are spoken is not much of a task, all things considered. Then of course comes the trick of actually playing the game. The original patch was intended to be used only with retail discs running on soft-modded Wii systems. Given that this game is never going to see an official release outside of Japan, checking out other alternatives that are available might be worth a look as well. Despite the hassle, Mask of the Lunar Eclipse is absolutely worth it. In many ways it’s a simpler game. Its combat mechanics are more streamlined and easier to understand, it provides a lot more direction on where to go at any given time by pointing things out on maps directly. Despite its lower default difficulty, it marks a clear shift for the series and dared to break out of and expand upon the conventions that had made it one of the pillars of the survival horror genre. When I think of playing a Fatal Frame game, Mask of the Lunar Eclipse is the game that comes to mind first.

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average 4x4 insurance cost

average 4x4 insurance cost

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average 4x4 insurance cost

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The following points are parts of betting wherever numerous punters typically get it Improper. pokerace99 My views come up from extensive individual experience and years of communication with productive and unsuccessful punters alike.

My intention here is to focus on these frequent areas of failure from the hope which i can accelerate your Discovering curve toward successful betting.

Examine the subsequent thoughts and you simply could possibly side phase a lot of the pot holes Many others have fallen into prior to now.

1) Failure to Use Betting Banking institutions

Most gamblers fail to recognize that the top method of accomplishing a healthy and sustained long-term profit from racing should be to set aside a sum of cash away from the primary finances, solely for your betting of horses.

Regardless of what system or system you are working with, whoever you happen to be subsequent or subscribing to or even so your personal bets are calculated, you are greater off with a “Betting Bank” which includes developed -in advantages that can help you. It must be impartial from your individual particular funds and should be protected from things that could threaten it. This may take many emotion out of the decision producing course of action. Emotion is an element that threatens all punters.

The scale of one's betting bank will obviously be dependant upon your personal person conditions and cost-free capital offered. An analogy to the world of shares Most likely might be that no economic advisor worth his salt would suggest you toss your cash to the inventory market on your own.

The vast majority of punters are unsuccessful to use any form of put aside bank. They bet randomly with what ever funds they have got in their pocket at the end of the 7 days or go in far too deep with stakes considerably in excess of their individual safety degrees.

A punter with a professional Angle will set aside what he can comfortably find the money for to take a position after which determine the ideal use he may make of that preset sum of cash.

With a fixed sum of funds available you now go forward to the following reason for failure.

two) Failure to Stake Properly

It is vital that you consider your betting financial institution as capped in amount. You do not have an limitless pool of resources to dip into. Betting by its mother nature carries inherent risks. These pitfalls involve intervals of very low strike prices and extended losing operates. Your betting lender and staking needs to be adapted for the tactic you utilize.

You need to beforehand, put together oneself for the opportunity of a worse than normal sequence of losers by means of adoption of the ample variety of models with your betting lender.

Appropriate methodical staking In combination with the mathematical advantage, also can aid defeat the risk of emotional response to your sequence of unusually favourable or destructive outcomes.

Go ahead and take Pricewise column while in the racing put up for instance. Long run if you might get on in the encouraged prices, it might have returned an honest earnings In general. During this time even so followers would need to have endured runs of nearly forty losers in a very row!

Regardless of the Over-all long-lasting income I think the overwhelming majority of Pricewise followers would have been terminated possibly by a failure to set aside a ample amount of factors or by failure to cope Along with the emotion read more of your losing run.

We have now extended given that founded right here a strike fee of about 35% on our greatest Guess alternatives and at a median S.P. of above 5/two for every winning bet. We come to feel in a position to shield clients banking companies as extensive losing runs haven’t took place and also the strike charge and odds happen to be a lot more than more than enough to make certain very long continual and Safe and sound growth on your betting earnings. That may be in essence The true secret to winning money. Regulate your accounts in a way that guards them as significantly as possible from the component of threat that the sport provides you.

3) Chasing Losses

Chasing losses at first sight may seem like a fairly easy way to guarantee an eventual profit however the true story is It's a sport for fools and statistically will never work Until you create an overall stage stakes income.

Chasing losses is usually a video game for that sick informed who will not choose to take the time to hunt worth in their bets. Bookmakers have to price up each individual race. Punters don’t have to Engage in in each individual race, they could decide the races they want to bet in ,and that is the primary edge that folks fall short to know. Should you have experienced a dropping working day, by seeking to chasing your losses you throw in the towel that gain and guess from the races that you need to not be betting in. You will be thus betting how bookmakers want you to rather than in just how to earn.

Numerous punters will change their stakes in the final race possibly to “chase” losses or “Perform up” winnings. Its no coincidence that the bookmakers have ensured that the last race on every day is commonly a handicap or considered one of the toughest races that day . There will be far more racing the next day as well as the day after that. The secret is looking forward to prospects and only betting after you know you may have situations which favour you and never the bookmakers. You must by no means transform your approach, or deviate from sensible staking as there is absolutely no these kinds of issues as “The final Race”.

four) Deficiency of Price Appreciation

Appreciation of “worth” within a wager is core to long lasting achievements. To gain more than an extended number of bets you have to be betting at odds increased compared to the correct potential for successful your assortment have. To achieve this nonetheless over the long run, you may need to concentrate on Each individual race independently and seek the worth bet in that race.

There's value for being experienced in each and every race. The real key to it is actually knowledge wherever that value is. Repeatedly a punter will screw up a losing betting slip and say “No less than I had some value”. There is totally NO relationship in between benefit and costs. A 33/one chance can be diabolical benefit nevertheless an incredibly shorter priced beloved might be supreme price. It doesn't adhere to that The larger the worth you are taking the better “worth” you might have . The value is usually obvious but extra generally properly hidden and it will take a skilled eye to view that.

Every person has this “Foresight” on instances, It is just a sport about thoughts In any case and nobody is always right or wrong. Price can be the most costly word in racing if you can’t wager winner. The old cliche is that value is about betting a horse whose accurate prospect is better than its rate reflects. That’s only a little Element of it. You also have to make sure that you guess in the proper way and in the correct races as that is the only way you can maintain strike prices large and guard a betting lender.

You should constantly try to extend price as part of your bets. Once you've a variety you're feeling is value do not only just take the initial satisfactory price that arrives alongside. Seek out to boost it by shopping about the varied bookmakers or try to best the most beneficial bookmakers cost by looking to the betting exchanges.

Marginal advancements on odds on Every single guess you make can have a dramatic effect on long-term profits.

five) Greed For Instant Wealth

Numerous punters look for the thrill of a daily life changing guess that can develop big gains of instant wealth for a little outlay. Bookmakers Enjoy on your own purely natural need and head out of their way to encourage you to definitely wager unique many collection bets which will in one hit, turn a small stake into a sizable sum.

Experts nevertheless seldom bet in multiples. Most experts bet singles and steer faraway from the many bets. Bookmakers relentlessly encourage a host of multiple bets with exotic names such as Yankee, Blessed 15, and Goliath. The key reason why They're seriously touted could be the financial gain margin during the bookmaker’s favour enhances the much more choices you insert to the several guess.

Say you select any random five/1 collection. In case you guess this as only one the bookmaker might have a theoretical edge in his favor of fifteen%. Getting two these kinds of picks having said that and betting them within a acquire double, the bookmakers profit margin rises to about thirty% !

Yes your earn double can produce a Substantially even larger gain from the exact same stake even so above the long run the bookmaker is having absent at your money in a considerably faster level.

It's a squander of time debating which sort of various bet is ‘most effective’. Until your prediction expertise are supernatural or you happen to be unbelievably lucky, then betting in singles is a lot more usually the best option.

You might say that lots of “Execs,” do guess in multiples in bets like The news six or perhaps the Jackpot, but that’s only given that they know You can find a lot of “Dead” funds in any offered Pool and they're betting towards folks who don’t have an understanding of the dynamics of Those people types of wager. There are occasions you ought to bet in multiples but in reality they are few and far among.

You'll be able to’t approach this for a “Get Loaded Fast ” plan. It's a prolonged gradual process of serious and sustained financial gain and never a game for Get Loaded Speedy schemers. For those who go Into any Betting store, have a look at the many posters within the wall featuring “Unique features”, “Improved conditions ” and “bonus offers”. You will notice They can be all numerous bets. Bookmakers want you betting in multiples and it is not hard to determine why . They carve most benefit from them. You in no way see a Bookmakers marketing supplying added’s with a acquire or Every way solitary. Ask

on your own why .

six) Insufficient Self-discipline

Not enough Self-control is the large hurdle for punters wanting to change a shedding interest into a successful just one. Bookmakers recognize that. That’s why in every single betting Business office it is possible to bet on numbers, lotteries, ball games, racing from everywhere in the globe with horses no one has heard about ahead of and also now Personal computer animated, or because they simply call it, Digital racing.

Bookmakers just think that its a circumstance of punters sitting down all day betting on what ever is put in front of them and Unfortunately They can be correct in many scenarios .They're only thrill looking for and don’t treatment the things they wager on, providing they are able to bet. There is no methodology in any respect and a lot of betting Business regulars are only lots of headless chickens prepared to spend long term with the warming buzz with the occasional gain.

Even more skilled standard gamblers who're savvy plenty of to show down bets that they know are stupid generally Enable them selves down by continually bleeding their gains that has a pleasurable tenner below in addition to a enjoyment tenner there.

It will require excellent self-control to NOT bet from time to time. It requires self-discipline to walk away from a horse when the price isn’t proper. It will take discipline to say no to that tiny pleasurable bet. It will take discipline to maintain your money in your pocket and deny you the emotional Excitement of watching your runner.

Punters are available all sizes and styles. Even the shrewder punters who could gain at the sport, slide in to the trap of insufficient self-discipline of study. Following a profitable interval they ignore that what created them winners in the first place, was the effort they put in. They fall target to around confidence, laziness and indiscipline.

Getting a long term profitable punter is like swimming towards the tide. It will require an effort to stay nonetheless, even larger effort to maneuver in advance and once you chill out or slack off you start to go backwards.

seven) Emotion

Betting can be a lonely sport. Its also a extremely expert video game. Emotion undermines good results in many ways . There is convenience in understanding that like a sheep when you are wrong It is far from your fault as you were being simply executing what Every person else was accomplishing. With betting, the laws of marketplace offer and demand from customers, dictate that long term, the sheep will get fleeced. Emotion neutralises self-discipline and extended confirmed thriving practices. The results of any isolated race has little if any relation to races just just before that or perhaps following that . Races needs to be viewed in isolation from each other. We are all psychological in betting even so the gamers at the very best on the tree have this down to a fine artwork and will Regulate All those emotions. Other punters have long given that been conditioned by bookmakers to Assume to get rid of in lieu of get.

They've got an in designed psychological factor which makes them sense like losers plus they happen to be conditioned to shedding by many years of doing this.

Above 95% of punters are flawed emotionally. Samples of emotive gambling involve punters subsequent a horse ,trainer or a jockey blind . The “Buzz” horses are cannon fodder for emotional punters. They might also adhere to tipsters blind since they “despise” the thought of missing out over a winner.

They pay no notice on the modifying disorders of a race that may follow non runners or the bottom shifting. They misunderstand assurance and can’t cope with an absence of self-confidence. Emotion also prevents people from advanced betting topics this sort of laying , hedging and arbitrages. Emotion forces some punters to guess horses with particular names that remind them of family and friends. Names for instance “Very long Tall Sally ” and “Susan’s Satisfaction ” attract many to them only for a name that’s appropriate to them .

Most punters Have got a grudge from their very own cash and successful and becoming thriving is alien to them. Psychological punters get rid of their heads in barren instances and fail to capitalise on successful runs. They mess about with devices and staking programs which make no perception. The more emotion you can rule out of one's betting , the greater effective you will develop into . You need to see Everybody in the sport as your enemy and as people endeavoring to choose your hard-earned money away from you in the exact same way as you'd a pickpocket . As you can grasp your feelings you have got made the very first significant move to betting profitably .

eight) The Grass is Greener

The grass is never Greener on the opposite Side. The truth is that the grass that isn’t Functioning for yourself hasn't been developed, cultivated or appeared soon after appropriately. A lot of punters change methods and solutions so quickly they don’t give any system a true examination . When they find a procedure that works they don’t continue after a number of bad outcomes . It truly is the same as gamblers who write down each wager they've got . Once they've got some losers they typically lose the heart to do this and cease doing so and proceed to another location .

They may be like small children with new toys at Xmas . They under no circumstances stay with any approach long sufficient to prosper . They constantly feel the” Grass is Greener” , when in truth the “Grass” They may be using continues to be abused and still left to deteriorate.

They need the next Big “new notion ” or “approach ” and that doesn’t get the job done possibly as being the fault lies not from the Grass, however the Gardener .

They've no long lasting consistency inside their betting and so are consistently tinkering with what wasn’t broke or transferring on on the lookout for the holy grail before a full evaluation of whatever they are at present inspecting has been accomplished.

A contest to win very best backyard will likely be received by the one who can shell out most time within the garden and master its challenges, the gardener who is prepared to treatment about his garden and invest in the applications that might help his garden improve and continue to keep the weeds at bay.

It’s a similar with betting. You are going to do significantly superior long-term if you can make a concentrated work of Studying and study in a single critical region rather then flitting from this to that.

nine) Laziness

Most punters are LAZY! They may have religiously followed a doctrine of inadequate setting up and deficiency of exploration. They refuse to review and devote hrs considering how they will gain at betting. They refuse to take a position in the game and invest in their own Understanding . You cant refuse to invest funds, just consider the racing for thirty minutes and assume to earn lasting. You simply can’t get absent with that in the hardest trade of all , Successful Money at Betting. If it had been that straightforward , then thousands and thousands would do it .It's essential to either spend money on your betting , or pay out somebody to do exactly that .

Purely natural human tendency is to test and have away While using the minimum degree of work. Lazy punters are cannon fodder for the bookmakers. They make little or no work in their range method nor make an exertion to extract optimum returns from their bets. People that set essentially the most do the job in are the more likely to be successful.

My philosophy is simple. I believe that if a bookmaker, journalist or odds compiler spends three several hours on the race then I’ll shell out 6 hrs on that race to achieve the edge.

The renowned golfer Gary Player when explained “The Tougher I Get the job done the Luckier I Get”. That may be genuine about each golf and betting .Plenty of people can’t invest 12 several hours every day studying betting as they have families, Work opportunities, commitments and guide their particular life. Which is Everything you pay back us for. We do that study in your case and re-commit funds inside our betting to ensure we can discover each individual edge achievable to assist you Acquire.

ten) Stupidity!

Incredibly most punters fail to discover from their errors. They carry on For several years producing the exact same primary errors time and time again. Pure stupidity.

Strive to transform your betting overall performance by frequently Finding out with the issues and weak spot is your sport. pokerace99

Your bookmaker may possibly have been laughing at you For several years. You've it inside your electric power even so to enhance your betting and hopefully wipe that smile from his confront once and for all. pokerace99

[felixluis]

5 Reasons Why You Are A Rookie In SEO 2019

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Besides getting social plus having a good time, your own social media profiles can favorably affect your SEO efforts. Since so many people have confidence in voice search being the tendency in 2019, I, Nicole Bermack (this article's author), am coining the word The Shocking Revelation of SEO 2019 VSO - voice research optimization. Clever brands and agencies are changing new SEO, social and content material marketing strategies to join their particular customer conversations. Search engine search engine optimization (SEO) is the art plus science of getting pages in order to rank higher in search motors such as Google. A person can audit your page's SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION health, compare SEO metrics intended for a number of pages, plus analyze both external and inner links on any given internet page. Content companies that will offer SEO content creation solutions are experts in creating content material that are not only improved for search engine rankings yet also add value for your own business in terms of brand name awareness, customer engagement and enhanced sales. Based on SEO software program company Moz's bi-yearly survey upon search engine ranking factors, the particular titles on your page are usually one of the nine almost all important considerations a search motor makes. Having an SEO method that effectively promotes your digital photography business, driving new traffic in addition to taking into consideration the requires of the site visitors although you concentrate on perfecting your current art is a really highly effective tool. SEO is Research Engine Optimization and it is usually required for make a site view-able. And you may see the section on exactly where to use keywords for even more information on integrating these key phrases into your SEO content technique. 22. Use social media in order to boost local SEO. SEO is the acronym for Seo. Even though certain techniques of SEO content material remain the same, like not really compromising on quality; there are usually definitely techniques which have developed from the past and a person should find out whether your own SEO articles writing services are usually very well aware of that will or not. SEO service suppliers are specialized in increasing the particular traffic to your site simply by increasing your position in the particular search engine ranking positions. Appeal to international people to your web sites with these SEO tips. The top challenges within organic SEO are link developing (easy-to-get links no more possess much value) and keyword study (the low-hanging fruit is lengthy gone). For instance, the phrase ‘SEO tips' is furthermore included inside the less competing phrase ‘SEO tips 2019', which usually is searched for too. The sensible strategy for SEO would certainly still appear to be in order to reduce Googlebot crawl expectations plus consolidate ranking equity & possible in high-quality canonical pages plus you do that by reducing duplicate or near-duplicate content. This can take a LONG period for a site to recuperate from using black hat SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION tactics and fixing the issues is not going to necessarily bring organic visitors back as it was prior to a penalty. The particular best SEO Guide is right here to dispel those myths, plus give you all you require to know about SEO in order to show up on the internet and various other search engines, and ultimately make use of SEO to grow your company. > > Upon Page Optimization: On-page SEO is usually the act of optimizing single pages with a specific finish goal to rank higher plus acquire more important movement within web crawlers. There are numerous websites providing pertinent information regarding SEO and online marketing, and you could learn from them. But it's perplexing why some businesses don't consider harder with analysis, revisions, plus new content with their SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION online marketing strategy. An effective SEO strategy may be made up of a mixture of elements that ensure your internet site is trusted by both consumers as well as the research engines. By taking their particular marketing needs online and employing confer with an experienced SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION agency, a business has the capacity to achieve thousands, or even millions associated with people that they would possess not been able to normally. It helps your SEO work to ensure that your key phrases are added to the destinazione description and it will supply you a ranking boost in case your specific terms are obvious in this area. Moreover, a Google Penguin update drastically changed the part of backlinks on SEO, doing it more difficult to obtain link juice to a internet site. Gone are the times of traditional SEO techniques, on the web content is changing. The cognitiveSEO Rank System offers accurate country, language plus city precision for all your own tracked keywords. Even if your URLs usually are pretty, ” if you may feel as though they're adversely impacting users and your company in general, don't change all of them to be more keyword concentrated for better SEO. ” In case Blog9T you do need to modify your URL structure, make certain to utilize the proper (301 permanent) type of redirect. In this particular post, we've broken down the particular very best SEO techniques to assist you skyrocket your rankings plus boost your number of regular visitors. An accessible URL is definitely an important SEO ranking element. Heidi Cohen: To increase 2018 SEO results, marketers will carry on moving away from disposable, as soon as and done content. They concentrate on SEO Internet marketing targets and provide top search motor rank like Google and Google. Collectively, these developments are plus can continue to have the dramatic impact on the method in which we search optimize our websites in 2019 plus form the core of our own newest SEO 2019 update briefing.

[magnificentparadisenight-blog]

Leading 10 Tips For Picking Reliable Forex Brokers

Just recently, a growing number of people are looking towards trading as a form of investment in addition to a kind of organisation. Forex Trading or Currency trading is quick becoming one of the most popular kinds of investment trading today. And with minimum start up capital required, the barriers to entry are relatively low and this has made it much easier for the man in the street to start trading the Forex market. However, unless you are a bank or big financial institution, you will need the services of a broker to be able to trade currencies. Fortunately, with a boost in the demand for FX Trading, there is a corresponding increase in the number of Forex brokers in the market. Nevertheless, with numerous brokers to select from, the issue facing most prospective Forex traders is not how to trade but ways to pick a dependable broker to start trading with. Unfortunately, not all brokers in the market are the same. You will have to find a suitable broker that deals with your particular requirements as a trader. And from experience, this could be prove to be the challenging part as not all brokers provide the exact same services or have the exact same charges and policies. Small distinctions in charges such as the pip spread will have a big influence on your profits' bottom line. Seriously, if you wish to make a living as a Forex trader, you need to concentrate on the marketplaces and not need to stress over doubtful brokers. Therefore, choosing a dependable Forex currency trading broker need to be one of the top concerns you have to do prior to you even begin trading. There are really numerous factors that make a forex broker a good one, and here's my leading 10 suggestions for picking great currency trading brokers. 1. Reputation Track record is necessary in this business as there are quite a variety of "unprofessional" operations out there in the market. Essentially, the general rule is to stick to the more established Forex currency trading brokers who have a good performance history. An essential element to note is that of their service negotiations should be verifiable. Do they have a genuine workplace with many satisfied consumers? Have they stayed in business for several years or did they simply pop up over night? You can find out a lot of details from objective review sites that talk about their experiences with brokers. If somebody got swindled before, you must probably avoid. Reputable brokers ought to be transparent in their transactions and operations. Pertinent details about how they work need to be readily available online so that possible traders can easily discover more about their reputation as well as performance. 2. Regulations No matter which country you live in, always choose a Forex broker that is carrying out business in a country where their activities are kept track of by a regulatory authority. A reputable Forex broker need to be managed and accountable to the pertinent authorities. For instance, the Swiss banking system is one of the most tightly-run ships worldwide regulated by the Swiss Federal Department Of Financing, while US Forex trade brokers must be main members of the National Futures Association (NFA) and registered as a Futures Commission Merchant (FCM) with the Product Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). Simply puts, they should adhere and comply with industry guidelines and policies. The last thing you want is some unregulated broker in the middle of no place keeping your cash. If they go under, good luck ever getting your money back. If a broker is not managed by any monetary authority, it might be better to select another broker instead. 3. Distinctions In Pip Spread Unlike stock brokers, currency trading brokers don't charge a cost or commission, instead they make their commission from the difference in the pip spread of the currency set when you trade. Unlike other monetary markets, the currency market is not traded through a main exchange, the value of this spread is hence figured out by the broker you are utilizing instead. The majority of Forex brokers release live or postponed prices on their sites so that traders can compare spread distinctions and some brokers even provide a variable pip spread. At first glance, the idea of a variable spread might appear appealing because of the volatility of the Forex Market. When the marketplace is quiet, the spread is reasonably small, however when the marketplace really warms up, the spread distinction may simply expand big enough to wipe out your earnings. Sadly, many brokers out there are referred to as "bucket shops". They don't have your benefit in mind and some have been known to change the spreads around to their benefit. The bottom line here is still to search for FX brokers with fixed and low pip spreads regardless of how the marketplace moves. 4. Speed Of Execution In my book, this is something most amateur traders seldom discover when they sign up for a trading account. Most brokers do publish live prices on their trading platform however the question here is how quickly are they able to carry out the order as soon as you click the "Buy" or "Offer" button. Speed of execution of the order is vital especially if you are a scalper trading the 5 minute charts, can't perhaps relax waiting another 5 minutes just for the order to validate right? Fortunately, the best option to this issue is to open a demo account with the broker and provided a test drive. This will allow you to evaluate trial their trading platform's speed of execution. 5. Minimum Trading Account Size Nowadays, broker leverages are getting greater and greater to cater for the small retail trader who have actually restricted capital but wants a piece of the Forex action. Micro and Nano accounts are readily available but most brokers offer the 2 standard types of trading account sizes, specifically the Requirement and Mini account. There key difference in between a Requirement and Mini account is that a Basic account trades in 100,000 systems, while a tiny account trades only a tenth of that size, or 10,000 systems per lot. Simply puts the mini account handle one tenth the size of the regular account. This allows you to run the risk of a tenth of exactly what you would be risking in the routine account. 6. Margin & Leverage Margin accounts makes up the basis framework of Forex trading, so make certain you are fully mindful the broker's margin terms prior to hurrying to open a live trading account, the last thing you want to hear is a margin call from your broker. Ensure you are fully knowledgeable about how your broker computes the margin requirements and does it change according to the currency pair traded? Is IC Markets repaired or variable at different times of the day or week? Do keep in mind that some brokers provide various margin requirements for Requirement and Mini accounts, so beware. When it comes to take advantage of, most traders recognize with the 1:100 ratio, but are did you understand that some currency trading brokers today even provide leverages of approximately 1:400. A word of care if you are a novice trader, don't utilize excessive take advantage of as this is one of the essential factors so many beginner traders get wiped out so quick. Remember, the secret to winning the Forex game is to compound little and consistent revenues. 7. Rollover Rates Rollover rates are charges that are sustained when traders move their positions to the following trading day. If you are a scalper or a day trader, this rate may not impact your trading account however if you are a swing trader or a long term trader, this apparently little figure may often snowball if you are not conscious. That is why it is very important to discover the minimum margin requirements to make on an over-night position? Is it a mere 0.5% or a shocking 2%, go do the mathematics. 8. Trading Platform An excellent trading platform ought to not just reveal genuine live prices that permits traders to "Purchase" or "Offer", but also a host of other features like charting and technical analysis tools. Some platforms even offer advanced functions like trailing stops, mobile trading as well as using automated trading softwares called expert advisors. A lot of brokers will have their own proprietary trading platform but lots of are using the Metatrader 4 platform as it is a relatively easy to use system that can accommodate all levels of traders varying from novices to specialists. In my book, the type of trading platform used can either make trading the Forex market a breeze or a real hassle, so make sure you get a feel of the platform by signing up for a demonstration account. 9. Technical Assistance Typically, the type of support can be found in the type of telephone or email support, as well as "Live Chat" sometimes. Given that the Forex market is a global 24 hours market, likewise the matching assistance offered by the broker needs to be 24 Hr around the clock too. Keep in mind, it might be 3pm in the afternoon for you, but it could also be 3am in the morning for another trader across the globe, so guarantee that there will be someone from the broker's office to get the call if something fails. An essential aspect of support that must be high-lited is the capability to close an "open" position over the telephone in the unfortunate event that your PC stalls or the internet connection fails, beware, anything can occur if Murphy's Law kicks in. 10. Extra Worth Included Solutions Most of the much better Forex trade brokers offer terrific worth included services in terms of totally free webinars, technical tools, e-books, posts and even daily market analysis and updates from their own panel of in home specialists. This may just come in handy if you are the kind of trader who trades principles. Well, that's my 2 cents worth when it comes to finding trusted Forex trade brokers, hope it provides you enough details for an excellent running start in all your Forex trading ventures. Have a safe and rewarding trading day ahead.

[marshmellowchichi-blog]

Crypto TREND aid Fifth Format

As we envisioned, since stamping Crypto DIRECTION we have been given many problems from subscribers. In this format we will remedy the most common a person.

What kind of improvements are returning that could be gameplay changers inside cryptocurrency segment?

One of the biggest variations that will affect the cryptocurrency world is definitely alternative procedure for block consent called Evidence Stake (PoS). We will aim to keep this evidence fairly advanced level, but it is extremely important to have a conceptual understanding of what are the difference can be and the key reason why it is a essential factor.

Keep in mind the underlying systems with digital camera currencies known as blockchain and the majority of the present-day digital stock markets use a acceptance protocol referred to as Proof of Operate (PoW).

Having traditional types of payment, you might want to trust an unauthorised, such as Passport, Interact, or maybe a bank, or simply a cheque paying down house to buy a home your purchase. These honest entities are usually "centralized", indicating they keep their private journal which retail outlets the transaction's history and cash of each bill. They will demonstrate transactions back to you, and you ought to agree that it's correct, or perhaps launch a new dispute. Solely the gatherings to the financial transaction ever see them.

With Bitcoin and most many other digital values, the ledgers are "decentralized", meaning most people on the community gets a replica, so not one person has to confidence a third party, say for example bank, for the reason that anyone can certainly directly always check the information. The following verification approach is called "distributed consensus. in

PoW necessitates that "work" be done in an effort to validate a different transaction pertaining to entry in the blockchain. By using cryptocurrencies, of which validation is finished by "miners", who will have to solve difficult algorithmic complications. As the computer problems be more complex, these kind of "miners" need to know more expensive and many more powerful desktops to solve the infections ahead of guests. "Mining" laptops are often professional, typically working with ASIC wood chips (Application Unique Integrated Circuits), which are more able and sooner at fixing these tricky puzzles.

Here's the process:

Ventures are enclosed together within the 'block'. The exact miners have a look at that the deals within each one block are generally legitimate by means of solving the particular hashing mode of operation puzzle, also known as the "proof of do the job problem". The earliest miner to eliminate the block's "proof involving work problem" is recognised with a a few cryptocurrency. One time verified, typically the transactions usually are stored in everyone blockchain round the entire networking. As the volume of transactions in addition to miners maximize, the difficulty connected with solving often the hashing challenges also will increase. Although PoW helped have blockchain plus decentralized, trustless digital various currencies off the ground, there are some serious shortcomings, in particular with the number of electricity most of these miners will be consuming endeavoring to solve the exact "proof with work problems" as fast as possible. Reported by Digiconomist's Bitcoin Energy Utilization Index, Bitcoin miners are utilising more strength than 159 countries, as well as Ireland. Because price of just about every Bitcoin flows back, more and more miners try to work out the problems, using even more electrical power. All of that electricity consumption simply validate the particular transactions includes motivated lots of in the electric currency room or space to seek out unique method of validating the pads, and the top rated candidate is usually a method identified as "Proof regarding Stake" (PoS).

PoS continues to an algorithm, as well as purpose matches in the evidence work, although the process to succeed in the intention is quite unique. With Detras, there are virtually no miners, but rather we have "validators. " Tras relies on have faith in and the comfort of knowing that all the those who find themselves validating orders have skin tone in the game.

Using this method, instead of working with energy to respond to PoW questions, a Detras validator is bound to validating a percentage involving transactions which can be reflective connected with his or her use stake. Such as, a validator who owns 3% of the Azure available might theoretically verify only 3% of the chunks.

In PoW, the chances of people solving typically the proof of operate problem varies according to how much work power you have got. With Tras, it depends to show you how much cryptocurrency you have during "stake". The harder the spot you have, the harder the chances for you to solve often the block. Rather then winning crypto coins, the exact winning validator receives exchange fees.

Validators enter all their stake by way of 'locking up' a portion within their fund as well. Should they seek to do something vicious against the multilevel, like building an 'invalid block', their whole stake or maybe security money will be lost. If they perform and do not breach the market, but do not acquire the right to verify the prohibit, they will have their stake as well as deposit returning.

If you understand basic variance between PoW and Detras, that is all that you should know. Exclusively those who will be miners or validators need to fully grasp all the cogs and wheels of these not one but two validation solutions. Most of the average man or woman who wish to maintain cryptocurrencies only will buy them via a exchange, without participate in the very mining or simply validating with block ventures.

Most during the crypto area believe that to enable digital foreign exchange to survive continuous, digital also must turn over to your PoS style. At the time of authoring this submit, Ethereum is definitely the second most well known digital forex behind Bitcoin and their progression team has been practicing on their Tras algorithm termed "Casper" throughout the last few years. It is actually expected that many of us will see Casper implemented around 2018, setting Ethereum when all the other sizeable cryptocurrencies.

[mikebrackett]

How Do I Calculate My Credit Score?

Credit is a mystery for many people. It’s often impossible to figure out exactly how your score came to be what it is. Part of this is probably intentional on the part of the credit bureaus – by keeping the formula secret, they can stay ahead of people who might try to game the credit system. Unfortunately, the side effect of this is that people have a hard time realizing what impacted their score.

Because the formula for calculating your credit scores is protected by the Fair Isaac Corporation (FICO®) with even more secrecy than KFC protects its 11 herbs and spices, it’s impossible for anyone outside of the credit bureaus – led by Experian, Equifax and TransUnion – to calculate your credit score. That being said, FICO is open about what factors affect your score and how much weight they’re given in the formula.

Before taking a deeper dive on select credit topics, let’s go over the types of things that affect your credit score.

Factors Affecting Credit Score

There are five major factors that affect your credit score. Let’s briefly take a look at each of them.

Payment History

This one is relatively simple. If you make your credit card and loan payments on time, this tends to help your credit score. If you have late payments, your credit score will be lower.

History and trends matter. A late payment will always lower your score, but if you have a history of on-time payments, it may not affect your score as much is it would for someone who is consistently late. On the other hand, it may take longer for someone who is typically late to build up their score with on-time payments.

Late payments, collections and charge-offs are lumped into this category. We’ll go over how to deal with these and how to properly calculate the age of these items later on in this post.

Payment history accounts for 35% of the credit scoring formula.

Credit Utilization

Representing 30% of the formula, your credit utilization refers to how much credit you’re using compared to your monthly limits. For example, if you have a credit card balance of $250 and your credit limit is $1,000, you’re utilizing 25% of your available credit.

Regardless of whether you pay off your full monthly balance, you shouldn’t utilize more than 30% of your credit in any given month. Doing so can lower your score.

Length of History

The credit bureaus also consider the length of your history, which makes up 15% of your score. This is measured from the time you open up a credit card or close on a car loan or mortgage.

The idea here is that the longer you have your accounts open, the more you can prove you’ve been responsible with credit. You don’t have to have four credit cards, plus a car and a student loan in order to get a mortgage, but a long history of responsibility doesn’t hurt.

Credit Inquiries

Credit inquiries make up 10% of your score. If you’re applying for a mortgage, it’s not a good idea to apply for three credit cards and a car loan at the same time. This is because credit companies want to know that you’re not overextending yourself with credit. For this reason, each hard inquiry made at the time of application will temporarily knock down your score a little bit.

The big exception to this is if you’re shopping for the best rate. If you get your credit pulled by multiple mortgage originators in order to get the best deal buying a house, all inquiries made within one 30-day period are considered one inquiry.

Credit Mix

Credit mix accounts for the final 10% of the credit score formula. For the creditors, this is all about knowing that you can handle various different types of credit, including both revolving accounts like credit cards and installment loans like a mortgage, student or personal loan.

Now that we know what goes into your credit score, let’s take a closer look at a couple of topics that might give you a better understanding of how your credit report and score work when you apply for a loan.

What Are Ranges of Credit Scores?

It’s hard to give a definitive answer to this question because it depends on where and how you get the score and what model is being used.

In general, most credit scoring models now score people from 300–850, with the higher number being the better.

FICO and Other Credit Scores

FICO has various versions of its scoring model that are used by the major credit bureaus to give lenders an idea of whether they’re making a good lending decision. The exact credit scoring model being used depends on the bureau and the lender, but FICO is usually the model being used.

This is an important distinction to make because most of the time when you get your credit report and score from sites like QLCredit, you get a VantageScore, which uses the same scale as FICO but was developed by the credit bureaus themselves.

There are some big advantages to the VantageScore system. Any time you view your credit report or get your score, it’s considered a soft pull, meaning you see your credit without affecting your score. You also get tips on how to improve your score in a way that you wouldn’t if you were just viewing your FICO report.

However, when it comes to the official version of your credit score, most lenders still use FICO. If you want to see your FICO score and report through AnnualCreditReport.com, you can get it for free from each of the bureaus once per year as mandated by federal law.

It’s important to note the information and score of each of the bureaus, especially before applying for a loan, because they may vary. One bureau may have information that another bureau doesn’t, or your score may be different because they use different FICO models. If you find anything wrong, you can then dispute that information with the individual bureaus.

If you’re applying for a car or mortgage loan or are worried you might have recently been the victim of identity theft, you might choose to pull all three reports at once. On the other hand, if you’re just doing some periodic monitoring, you might choose to get the report from a different bureau every four months so you can track your FICO score throughout the year.

How Do I Find Out My Credit Score?

There are various sites that will give you access to one or more credit reports and scores for free on a periodic basis. QLCredit will refresh your VantageScore 3.0 credit report and score based on TransUnion data every two weeks.

How Long Until My Credit Score Goes Up?

There’s no quick fix for credit, and it depends on what you’re doing to improve your credit. If you consistently have a good payment history and low balances, it’s likely your credit score will always remain high.

If it’s a matter of catching up with late payments and staying current, things will take a little longer, but the older the late payment is, the less it will impact your score.

Negative credit items like collections, charge-offs and bankruptcies can stay on your credit report for between seven and 10 years. When these items come off, it may have a big boosting effect on your score. That said, merely paying off a collection or charge-off doesn’t remove it from the report. You need to negotiate that with the creditor, although if you’re willing to pay the full amount off, many of them will work with you.

How Is Age of Credit Calculated?

When people refer to the age of credit, they usually mean how long it’s been since accounts have been open or since you closed on a particular loan. The longer you have lines of credit open, the better. This is important for creditors to evaluate because they see responsible management over an extended period of time.

When evaluating the length of your credit history, creditors are looking at the average amount of time you’ve had accounts open.

The other credit issue that has a timeframe component is the age of items on your credit report. Negative credit items such as late payments, unpaid liens, collections or bankruptcy can stay in your credit for between seven and 10 years. If it’s a court proceeding like a bankruptcy, this starts the day the bankruptcy judgment is filed. If it’s a late payment, it’s measured from the day you were first considered delinquent and never current again.

How Is My Credit Score Calculated for a Mortgage?

In most cases, lenders get your credit score from all three bureaus. There’s usually some variance in the scores based on the FICO model being used and the information the bureau has.

For a single borrower, lenders take a look at the median score of the three. If there are two or more clients on a loan, the mortgage lender has to go with the lowest median score of all borrowers on the loan.

In the event that only two scores are collected, the lower of the two scores is used.

Now that you know a bit more about how your score is calculated, check out these tips on how to build your credit. Do you want to see your report for free without affecting your score? Check out QLCredit today.

The post How Do I Calculate My Credit Score? appeared first on ZING Blog by Quicken Loans.

from Updates About Loans https://www.quickenloans.com/blog/calculate-credit-score

[aaronsniderus]

How Do I Calculate My Credit Score?

Credit is a mystery for many people. It’s often impossible to figure out exactly how your score came to be what it is. Part of this is probably intentional on the part of the credit bureaus – by keeping the formula secret, they can stay ahead of people who might try to game the credit system. Unfortunately, the side effect of this is that people have a hard time realizing what impacted their score.

Because the formula for calculating your credit scores is protected by the Fair Isaac Corporation (FICO®) with even more secrecy than KFC protects its 11 herbs and spices, it’s impossible for anyone outside of the credit bureaus – led by Experian, Equifax and TransUnion – to calculate your credit score. That being said, FICO is open about what factors affect your score and how much weight they’re given in the formula.

Before taking a deeper dive on select credit topics, let’s go over the types of things that affect your credit score.

Factors Affecting Credit Score

There are five major factors that affect your credit score. Let’s briefly take a look at each of them.

Payment History

This one is relatively simple. If you make your credit card and loan payments on time, this tends to help your credit score. If you have late payments, your credit score will be lower.

History and trends matter. A late payment will always lower your score, but if you have a history of on-time payments, it may not affect your score as much is it would for someone who is consistently late. On the other hand, it may take longer for someone who is typically late to build up their score with on-time payments.

Late payments, collections and charge-offs are lumped into this category. We’ll go over how to deal with these and how to properly calculate the age of these items later on in this post.

Payment history accounts for 35% of the credit scoring formula.

Credit Utilization

Representing 30% of the formula, your credit utilization refers to how much credit you’re using compared to your monthly limits. For example, if you have a credit card balance of $250 and your credit limit is $1,000, you’re utilizing 25% of your available credit.

Regardless of whether you pay off your full monthly balance, you shouldn’t utilize more than 30% of your credit in any given month. Doing so can lower your score.

Length of History

The credit bureaus also consider the length of your history, which makes up 15% of your score. This is measured from the time you open up a credit card or close on a car loan or mortgage.

The idea here is that the longer you have your accounts open, the more you can prove you’ve been responsible with credit. You don’t have to have four credit cards, plus a car and a student loan in order to get a mortgage, but a long history of responsibility doesn’t hurt.

Credit Inquiries

Credit inquiries make up 10% of your score. If you’re applying for a mortgage, it’s not a good idea to apply for three credit cards and a car loan at the same time. This is because credit companies want to know that you’re not overextending yourself with credit. For this reason, each hard inquiry made at the time of application will temporarily knock down your score a little bit.

The big exception to this is if you’re shopping for the best rate. If you get your credit pulled by multiple mortgage originators in order to get the best deal buying a house, all inquiries made within one 30-day period are considered one inquiry.

Credit Mix

Credit mix accounts for the final 10% of the credit score formula. For the creditors, this is all about knowing that you can handle various different types of credit, including both revolving accounts like credit cards and installment loans like a mortgage, student or personal loan.

Now that we know what goes into your credit score, let’s take a closer look at a couple of topics that might give you a better understanding of how your credit report and score work when you apply for a loan.

What Are Ranges of Credit Scores?

It’s hard to give a definitive answer to this question because it depends on where and how you get the score and what model is being used.

In general, most credit scoring models now score people from 300–850, with the higher number being the better.

FICO and Other Credit Scores

FICO has various versions of its scoring model that are used by the major credit bureaus to give lenders an idea of whether they’re making a good lending decision. The exact credit scoring model being used depends on the bureau and the lender, but FICO is usually the model being used.

This is an important distinction to make because most of the time when you get your credit report and score from sites like QLCredit, you get a VantageScore, which uses the same scale as FICO but was developed by the credit bureaus themselves.

There are some big advantages to the VantageScore system. Any time you view your credit report or get your score, it’s considered a soft pull, meaning you see your credit without affecting your score. You also get tips on how to improve your score in a way that you wouldn’t if you were just viewing your FICO report.

However, when it comes to the official version of your credit score, most lenders still use FICO. If you want to see your FICO score and report through AnnualCreditReport.com, you can get it for free from each of the bureaus once per year as mandated by federal law.

It’s important to note the information and score of each of the bureaus, especially before applying for a loan, because they may vary. One bureau may have information that another bureau doesn’t, or your score may be different because they use different FICO models. If you find anything wrong, you can then dispute that information with the individual bureaus.

If you’re applying for a car or mortgage loan or are worried you might have recently been the victim of identity theft, you might choose to pull all three reports at once. On the other hand, if you’re just doing some periodic monitoring, you might choose to get the report from a different bureau every four months so you can track your FICO score throughout the year.

How Do I Find Out My Credit Score?

There are various sites that will give you access to one or more credit reports and scores for free on a periodic basis. QLCredit will refresh your VantageScore 3.0 credit report and score based on TransUnion data every two weeks.

How Long Until My Credit Score Goes Up?

There’s no quick fix for credit, and it depends on what you’re doing to improve your credit. If you consistently have a good payment history and low balances, it’s likely your credit score will always remain high.

If it’s a matter of catching up with late payments and staying current, things will take a little longer, but the older the late payment is, the less it will impact your score.

Negative credit items like collections, charge-offs and bankruptcies can stay on your credit report for between seven and 10 years. When these items come off, it may have a big boosting effect on your score. That said, merely paying off a collection or charge-off doesn’t remove it from the report. You need to negotiate that with the creditor, although if you’re willing to pay the full amount off, many of them will work with you.

How Is Age of Credit Calculated?

When people refer to the age of credit, they usually mean how long it’s been since accounts have been open or since you closed on a particular loan. The longer you have lines of credit open, the better. This is important for creditors to evaluate because they see responsible management over an extended period of time.

When evaluating the length of your credit history, creditors are looking at the average amount of time you’ve had accounts open.

The other credit issue that has a timeframe component is the age of items on your credit report. Negative credit items such as late payments, unpaid liens, collections or bankruptcy can stay in your credit for between seven and 10 years. If it’s a court proceeding like a bankruptcy, this starts the day the bankruptcy judgment is filed. If it’s a late payment, it’s measured from the day you were first considered delinquent and never current again.

How Is My Credit Score Calculated for a Mortgage?

In most cases, lenders get your credit score from all three bureaus. There’s usually some variance in the scores based on the FICO model being used and the information the bureau has.

For a single borrower, lenders take a look at the median score of the three. If there are two or more clients on a loan, the mortgage lender has to go with the lowest median score of all borrowers on the loan.

In the event that only two scores are collected, the lower of the two scores is used.

Now that you know a bit more about how your score is calculated, check out these tips on how to build your credit. Do you want to see your report for free without affecting your score? Check out QLCredit today.

The post How Do I Calculate My Credit Score? appeared first on ZING Blog by Quicken Loans.

from Updates About Loans https://www.quickenloans.com/blog/calculate-credit-score

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Performs Even more Specialist In The Class Help Kids Learn?

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