#it seems the wacky adventures skip a generation

[marlynnofmany]

#Christopher Robin is a boy from the very early 1900's #ages before any of the childcare precautions we have now #CR was out in the forest with an actual knife doing things like catching hares and owls for funsies #and pondering the nature of mortality and loss #CR and Calvin would find kindred souls in each other I think #actually if my timeline math is right #CR could be Calvin's grandfather

Now that has some fascinating time-travel-encounter implications.

HOBBES vs. TIGGER cage match TO THE DEATH say goodbye to your childhood because ONE! WILL!! DIE!!!!

[son-of-rap-bear-art]

So, do y'all remember the Adventure Time Mash-Up Pack for Minecraft back in like, 2017? Me and some friends have been messing around with that map lately and revamping some of the areas we consider a bit lacking with creative mode, and for me that was the Treehouse! I got ~100 reference pics from various episodes and tried to put it all together into the most autistically accurate Treehouse I could, and I wanna share it here cause I'm really proud of it!

Feel free to skip the text and just look at the pretty pictures. Cause when I say "autistically accurate" I MEAN IT. It's MY blog and I get to choose the special interest. :p

The exterior is mostly unchanged from the official map, but I added the orange tree from My Two Favorite People, and the pond. Also the log where Finn sits and thinks in Gotcha!

Yes, I will be mentioning specific episodes like this often.

I didn't make the Grotto, because I'm not THAT crazy, but I did make the pond really deep and filled it with the sort of things you see when Finn swims down there in Beyond the Grotto.

The first thing you see when you actually go inside is the treasure room, of course! The official map's treasure room is so small and sad, but I made it more accurate to how it looks in the show, with a ton of ladders and platforms going upwards until you get to the kitchen.

Speaking of, at this point I should show the layout I based the rooms' positions on...

I put this together myself and I THINK it's the most consistently accurate layout... of course, it's a cartoon, sometimes you'll get stuff like the bathroom in the left branch for the sake of a gag in Dentist, and characters will frequently run offscreen and then teleport to another room, BUT this is what I observed to be the most common layout seen when the camera will actually follow the characters through doors and ladders and etc.

Interestingly, the ladder in the trunk actually seems to connect to the kitchen, which is HIGHER than the living room, and then you have to go down a separate ladder to get to the living room. Confusing! But it checks out.

So yeah, climbing up past the treasure room takes you right to the kitchen! Some specific details to call out here are: - The picture of PB with the two spatulas is from Abstract, and I painted it myself in-game via a mod! Unfortunately I didn't get around to other paintings yet, they're a bit annoying to make. - The urn supposedly containing Margaret's ashes, from Conquest of Cuteness, is on one of the shelves. - There isn't a single torch in this whole build! It's carefully lit up with candles, just like the Treehouse should be! - There's actually this easily missable tiny room connected to the kitchen, seen in the last pic, that has another trapdoor and also the door to the bathroom. I believe that first shows up in Incendium and then stays around forever. - The cooler is entirely full of eggs, like how Finn exclusively buys pre-boiled eggs when grocery shopping without Jake, in Temple of Mars.

The bathroom! Funnily enough, the bathroom might be the least consistent room in the whole Treehouse. It's just made up of a toilet, bathtub, and sink, but these three things shuffle around the room entirely at random from episode to episode. In this sort of situation, I consider the most accurate way to handle it to be the same as the show: just put them wherever! So I did that.

That door in the kitchen leads to this room, connected by a bridge. I just called it the "bucket room" because it has a bucket that Finn and Jake ride in in Rainy Day Daydream, although that episode has a pretty wacky Treehouse in general.

I hooked up a hand crank with the Create mod, so you can use it like an elevator kinda.

Down the other ladder in the kitchen gets you to, the living room! This room's just a small round circle in some episodes, but others have it a bit bigger.

That bookshelf is there in Jake Suit, and has Dream Journal of a Boring Man, Vol 12 on it. Since one of the decor mods I'm using lets me place down books, I copied the 3 excerpts we get to see from it down into a written book, so it's even actually there!

A really inconsistent aspect of the living room is this weird platform with a door. I can only remember it appearing in In Your Footsteps and Three Buckets, but maybe I've just always missed it? I made it lead back into the trunk, so you can use it as a shortcut up to the kitchen.

Also over here is this workbench, which to my knowledge suddenly shows up in season 8 and becomes a REALLY REALLY consistent part of the living room?? Seriously, it's in Two Swords, Horse and Ball, Abstract... It's suddenly all over the place!! But I genuinely can't recall it existing before that. Am I crazy or is this an actual thing?

Anyway, connected by bridge to the living room is the den! Surprisingly, even though it barely even shows up in any episodes, the den is SUPER messy and lived in. I tried to reflect this by jamming as many decorative blocks as I could in there.

Also for some reason this fireplace doubles as a pizza oven in Abstract? Yeah, Abstract's got a really silly Treehouse. But it was easy enough to slot in there, so I did!

Way back to the kitchen and upwards: the bedroom! I always thought the bedroom was so tiny and cramped, but a good few episodes actually show it as pretty spacious! I tried to hit a good balance.

The pictures hung up around Finn's bed are a blurry, badly taken picture of Huntress Wizard, and a clearly old picture of Flame Princess. They're both cute choices for Finn's future, and are my girlfriends' respective favorite characters, so I included both :D

I also included the attic, which as far I know ONLY appears in Dad's Dungeon. I think it's neat, though, so I put it here. It'll be nice for survival mode storage.

If you exit through the attic, you can get to the cloud that Finn and Jake have tied down for its rainwater. The dripstone on the underside looks a bit ugly, but it makes it functional! If you scoop water out of any of the cauldrons with a bucket, it'll slowly refill with water from the cloud!

We're nearing the end! Here's a back shot of things. I added the power lines, Neptr's cave, and the farm. For some reason, Holly Jolly Secrets has a second, distinct set of powerlines, but those would be ugly so I didn't include them.

Lastly, the chicken coop, as seen in BMO Noire and mentioned in Three Buckets, featuring Lorraine. Who looks like Boobafina in this texture pack, which is silly.

I'm... honestly not very satisfied with the coop's placement, as BMO Noire shows it being out on a rarely-seen branch, but this is the best I could do without a major facelift on the tree itself.

So, yeah! That's the image limit. There's a good few extra details scattered around here and there, but I'll leave it at that. I hope this is as fun to read as it was for me to write :D

[smolsidesandco]

Can have cg sides hcs? Even th dark ones plz an thanks u

Ackkkkkk i forgot to post this but,

Yeah! I would love to share some headcannons! I already have a lot for Janus just because I have written them as a cg, so I hope these are good!

Janus:

• Janus is wonderful at helping smalls when they need to be distracted from icky thoughts.

• They have many textured baby and kid toys for the smol to choose from.

• They aren't a very strict cg but they do use the techniques of gentle parenting with the smol they're looking after.

• They're the go to side when it comes to a smol having a meltdown or tantrum. They're reassure them that what they feeling is valid and calmly talk to them about whats wrong and options they could choose to feel better or could use to get their emotions out.

• They tend to be able to find loops holes in the rules depending on specific scenarios that they would happily use to be able to sneak the smol a secret cookie or candy.

• When its time for a smol to go to bed they either team up with Roman to tell a nice bedtime story, full of voices and soft things. Or teaming up with Patton to gently rock and hum smols to bed.

• Normally they don't like having their scales touched, but if its for a smol, they tend to let that slide and let any smols use the textures to stim.

• They don't change their sarcastic sassy attitude when they're helping a smol. They don't do the whole baby talking either. They don't enjoy treating a smol like they don't know how to do anything.

• They'll keep an eye on the smol and ask them if they need help or if they would like some help. Reassuringly them that if they do, they would be happy to help and that its okay.

• If the smol their watching does something on their own, you can bet Janus is proud of them.

• "Oh my, you did all this yourself? Well you did a wonderful job on it!"

• They enjoy being a cg in the same way someone would regress to get a break from the big world.

• They can also make sure a smol is taking care of themself

Patton:

• Patton is without a doubt a very snuggly and excited cg.

• They love baking for and with their smol!

• They absolutely let whatever smolntheir watching that they can link the batter off the spoon (much to logans dismay)

• They hold the smols hands and help them mix batter or cutting out cookie shapes!

• If its a bigger smol, they'll let you crack an egg and throw it away all by yourself!

• Patton falls into baby talking a lot whenever their watching a smol.

• Baby talking, plus helping the smol with most things.

• They tend to assume that the smol will need help with most things, and its almost second nature for them to help with everything.

• Patton is pretty good at watching younger smols. Older smalls tend to be harder for them to help, since they tend to want to do a lot of things theirself, but they tries their best.

• They love taking their smol kiddo outside to play.

• Having picnics and going to the park is one of their favorite activities! And they'll pack the smols favorite picnic safe food!

• Loves trying out cute pintrest food trends. And packing the smols lunch in cute themed lunch boxes.

Logan:

• Surprisingly Logan helps Patton a lot with making food, and making it look really nice.

• Their logic states that a smol will be more inclined to eat their food, including veggies and the sorts, if it looks nice.

• Maybe a unicorn themed lunch will get a smol to eat their carrots. Or a sky themed one will get thoes mash potatoes off their plate.

• Logan has done quite a lot of research on this topic, especially if it due to helping the smol.

• For every smol they know, they plan/analyze/ and write down atleast five different lunch options and themes that would work the best based on the smols pallet and what they like.

• Of course this all also means they expect the smol to eat all their veggies and if you don't eat them you don't get dessert.

• Using the excuse of not liking the veggies seems impossible as well since each meal is catered to the person.

• They create schedules for the smol to follow, filled with times to eat, sleep, play, and even watch cartoons.

• They tend to be rather stuck on what they shedual is and won't take a straight up no when they say its bed time.

• Of course communicating and making sure there isn't any other reason or deeper meaning to the smol not wanting to do something they should is something they try to figure out first.

• They love watching documentaries with the smol!

• Especially ones about space, the ocean, or how something is made.

• They have many worksheets, learning games, and puzzles for the smol to work through with them if they would like.

Remus:

• Another carer/baby sitter that loves puzzles is our favorite wacky ratboi.

• Surprisingly, seeing a smol is almost an instantaneous flip to them.

• While they're basically the same wacky fun uncle as normal, they know how unpleasant icky phrases or words can be when a safe space like this is involved.

• Its also nice for them because their brain sort of does it automatically, so its a well wanted break from all their intrusive thoughts.

• They will actively find every way they can to break the rules with a smol.

• Whether that be skipping bedtime, eating icecream for breakfast, eating so much candy.

• In their mind 'chaos needs to be chaos, and I rather the smol chaos happen around me so I can make sure the chaos doesn't hurt anyone'

• They don't mind letting the smol put glitter or whatever in their mustache.

• They work well with older smols who can jump around and do a lot of things with supervision.

• Watching horror movies or scary ghost shows is something they're happy to watch with the smol! (As long as the smol wants)

• They'll sneak any veggies you don't want off your plate and eat them for you.

• Mixing everytype of icecream sounds like a good idea right?

• 10000 percent make 'magical potions' with you with all the shampoo and soaps.

• Pranks galore

Roman:

• When the smol isn't causing chaos or watching cartoons, Roman will make sure the smol feels like a royal.

• That includes dressing up, makeup, hair, and going on adventures!

• They love setting up little quest for the smol to go on and solve.

• Helping them defeat dragons, monsters, and all kinds of things!

• They work better with older smols but can watch a younger smol and be their princely knight to protect the baby royal!

• They like going outside and letting the smol explore with them.

• Sometimes in the woods looking for cool sticks and rocks to bring home and let Logan look over.

• Other times going on the nature trail at the park and saying its a serious quest.

• They don't activatively try to break the rules with the smol like Remus. They more so simply forget that they're are rules and things like bedtime for the smol.

• Arts and crafts are another fun thing they're good at with the smol. They have so many coloring books and craft supplies.

• Pretty much prepared for simple coloring, all the way to paper mache.

• Whenever a smol is afraid of something, they try to 'defeat it' whether its needing to spar and imaginary monster in the closet and sending them back home, or vanquishing the horrible spider by taking it away to a safe place.

• They sing songs and lullabies to help the smol calm down or sleep.

• Disney move marathons galore.

• So many spinny hugs.

Virgil

• Virgil is the best with younger smols.

• They're less likely to wander away when they're not looking.

• Easier to help them when they need help

• They don't tend to want to do things by themselves. Which is good for them because just sitting there isn't good for their nerves.

• They tend to stay close by.

• Virgil is better with younger smols because they find them easier to watch in general.

• Its also a good time to wind down and focus on someone that isn't themself.

• They always have baby wipes and bandaids on hand.

• Isn't really the one for baby talking with a smol.

• They're really good with sounds and making sure the smol isn't overwhelmed by loudness or things being too quiet.

• Lives for creepy crawlies and Halloween things with their smol.

• Binge watching Tim Burton movies while eating rice crispies.

• Let's the smol cuddle up into their arms and sleep whenever they want.

• On occasion will let the smol wear their jacket.

• Is extremely careful when it comes to food and making sure the smol doesn't get hurt.

• Whenever the smol is scared they either call Roman to come be the knight or helps them feel safe by promising their fear is valid but they're safe. Virgil knows a lot about danger and scary things so they gotta know something about the scary thing

[avoutput]

Mario Mario & Luigi Mario || Super Mario Bros.

The beginning of any quest has its starting pains. In the early 90’s, Hollywood set out to begin getting a cut of that sweet video game money. At the time, video games were mostly considered toys, and they were advertised as such. As the medium grew more adult, so did its films. Still, they had to begin somewhere, and why not with the biggest gaming property on the planet past and present: Super Mario Bros. This provided an unknowingly impossible challenge for creatives, one that is still a topic of intense discussion to this day. How does one balance the adaptation of a property from a completely different format into film? At the time, other films that looked similar to what Super Mario Bros would become had succeeded despite the challenges of adapting comics for film. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and the first re-imagination of Batman since the 60’s went on to invigorate their respective properties. Today, comic book movie adaptations are the tent pole of every major movie studio. In the case of Super Mario Bros, despite its critical failure at the time, I honestly feel like the creatives succeeded. The ire this film would glean over time from both fans and the people behind the camera fuel its bad reception to this day. In my opinion, it is actually a success story in the world of video game adaptations, and a great place to start if you plan on watching every Hollywood attempt. I promise you this: it could be so much worse. And for later attempts, it was! But, does Super Mario Bros thwomp?

In my initial argument, I raised that these films should be broken down into categories including: Originality, Preservation, Construction, Delivery, and Fanservice. Originality and Preservation can be at complete odds with one another. In the case of Super Mario Bros, it turns out to be a good combination of both. They offset each other just enough to find a balance between the reality of our world and the fantasy of the mushroom kingdom. Sit back in your chair and imagine the real world of 1993, what films looked like back then, the landscape of video game culture. I think the creators had this very much in mind when they penned this movie. The very first thing that happens in the Super Mario Bros movie is the NES theme song with all the depth a stereo sound system can provide. It really sets your little gamer heart aflutter. It conjures up images of the brightly colored games. Using narration, they make promises of dinosaurs, meteors, and other dimensions. If you don’t think too hard, it kind of sounds like a version of Super Mario Bros that was advertised via the game manuals and cartoon show. If you are familiar with either, a pair of New York plumbers essentially get sucked down a drain pipe. This process is a little more drawn out in the film, but It turns out more or less exactly as good as could have been expected in 1993. In fact, the film really isn’t above sucking them down a drain pipe, they do crazier things, but I suspect that they wanted the plumbers to have a more direct conflict that would lead them to try and save princess Daisy.

The plot of the film is par for the course in a children's film and a direct consequence of the game itself, especially if you consider the 3rd entry. A good king and an evil military general, betrayals and coups, princesses sent to live in another realm only to return home with a pair of knights to dethrone the evil king. A tale as old as time, one that continues to be retold because it resonates with us. The filmmakers were really focused on this being a performance of realism meets fantasy This would come to be the major struggle that other video game movies would continue to have problems balancing. They took concepts from the game and gave them an original spin and most within the framework of the original work. Their creative license is often challenged for these choices, but in the context of making a live action Super Mario Bros movie in 1993, those challengers should check themselves. The real question you should ask yourself is, in this context, what would you have done differently? And would it really have been better? I struggled to find a way to truly make the concepts of this movie any MORE appealing, but it was surprisingly easy to make it worse. In one way, this film was a by the numbers kids adventure story, but it's being held to task mostly for failing to be a good adaptation of the game, a bar which didn’t exist when they made it, but one they set and cleared simply by attempting to do so much. All the Mario concepts are easily recognizable, which should be applauded, even in the face of them being a little wacky.

Despite its failings in authenticity, it actually packs quite a lot of fanservice into almost every frame. If you pay attention once they enter Bowser’s domain, the walls are littered with little ads and jokes all based on Mario properties. This is all in an effort to please fans, but the film does tend to leave these little things in the background, the camera more focused on the characters and plot, so blink and you miss them. If anything, this duty to fanservice seems somewhat creatively arresting. Had this film not been an adaptation of another work, they may have opted to skip a few things, like how Mario and Luigi employ the use of mushrooms. In the game, these would make the bros bigger, but this would have been a bit at odds with the backdrop of the grimmy New York City analogy they chose, not to mention technically difficult. People have been squashing miniatures for years, but I just don’t see this being a good use of the film’s time given every other decision. The film's overwhelming attempt to create entirely new flesh on the skeleton of an animated game is really only hampered by the audience's willingness to enjoy it for what it is, by questioning every creative decision. A lot of effort was taken to make the world feel cohesive, especially in its attempt to be parallel to existing New York City. They even take time on some more clever jokes that go somewhat unspoken. Everything in Bowser City runs on electricity, including the cars. The idea here is that fossil fuels do not exist because the dinosaurs of this world haven’t ever fossilized. Or maybe the dinosaurs knew it was bad for their planet? The film is constructed and delivered in such a way as to not take itself too seriously, but to appear parallel to something familiar to our own world in conjunction with the Super Mario world.

After having sat through the film with an earnest critical eye, I am not going to tell you the film is greater than the sum of its parts or that it's fantastic because it set out on an uncharted path. Instead, what I will attest to is that it was truly competent. It made every attempt to give you what you wanted and also took a few of their own twists on the formula. Bullet Bills turned into fuel for jumping, Bomb-oms wear Reeboks, shoes facilitate their ability to jump but also satisfy the boot you wear in Super Mario Bros 3. They even use the lightgun from the NES to navigate screens much like a mouse and the SNES super gun as a weapon! All this and still they found a way to make it all fit within the italian brothers from Brooklyn framing. Unfortunately, it would seem no one really learned anything from the success or the failures of this film. If the 90’s game films are any indication, the only thing they learned is that the box office is fickle and to double down on fan service even when it doesn't make sense, and in some cases, abandon everything about the game entirely and simply slap the name on a completely original film. And yet, despite all the bad press and internal struggles the Super Mario Bros production had, they came out the other end with an inoffensive, enjoyable film that both kids and adults can enjoy. Especially if they forgive the film any perceived sins, a gift that all film adaptations deserve, and just try to recognize what they really accomplished. Bringing to life a world that only existed in your Nintendo. It may not have been pretty, but damn if it wasn’t entertaining.

[iridescentides]

hi again dia! happy first day of december ❤️💚 i wanted to ask you what, in your opinion, are the 5 most underrated dcoms? i remember you saying before that you've watched all of them so i'd love to hear your opinions 😊 - 🎅🎁🎄

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHH secret santa you are so good! asking me all the best questions 💜

okay so i literally had to make a list of all the dcoms i consider underrated and then narrow down a top 5. theres lots of dcoms that i love, but that i think got the right amount of attention and care (like lemonade mouth and the teen beach movies, for example), so this list just focuses on ones that deserved more hype for their quality level.

5. The Cheetah Girls: One World (2008)

okay so even as i type this i feel like a hypocrite. i have only watched this movie one time. BUT i can acknowledge that its one of the most criminally underrated dcoms ever, tons of people didnt watch it simply because raven wasnt in it. thats why i avoided it as a child, and i didnt get around to watching it until i did my big dcom binge in 2016. and it was so good. theres a really long post floating somewhere around tumblr full of specifics on why its actually the best cheetah girls movie (my favorite is the second one purely out of nostalgia), so to paraphrase some points from that post:

its a solid example of cultural appreciation, rather than appropriation, as the girls go and learn about bollywood and indian culture together

the indian characters arent treated like props or unimportant sides, they get their own agency and storylines that are important

the songs are good!!!

basically this movie was overlooked and slept on even though in terms of role modeling and social value, and just like the first two cheetah girls movies it was important and impactful.

4. Sharpay’s Fabulous Adventure (2011)

okay so as someone whos very neutral and occasionally negative-leaning towards the hsm franchise (mostly bc its overhyped and not really representative of all dcoms), i was pleasantly surprised by sharpays fabulous adventure. this is another one that i know lots of people skipped right over and dont hold with as much esteem as the main hsm franchise, and that doesnt sit right with me.

i do not agree with the “uwu sharpay was the real victim in hsm” arguments bc in their efforts to look galaxy brained the people who say that overlook the fact that she was a rich white woman who used her power and status to exercise control over opportunities that should have been fairly and freely available for all; they were not “making a mockery of her theater” in the first movie, they were literally just kids who wanted to try out a new school activity that everyone was supposed to be allowed to participate in; and despite allegedly learning her lesson and singing we’re all in this together with everyone at the end of the first movie, she literally showed no growth in the second movie as she fostered an openly hostile environment and favored troy so heavily that it literally cost him his friends, all as part of yet another jealous plan to take things away from people who already have less than her. she was NOT the victim in the main franchise, and she did not seem to exhibit any growth or introspection either.

and that!!! is why sharpays fabulous adventure was so important. in focusing on sharpay as the main character, they finally had to make her likeable. they did this by showing actual real growth and putting her outside of her sphere of influence and control. we saw true vulnerability from her, instead of the basic ass “mean girl is sad bc shes actually just super insecure” trope (cough cough radio rebel), and this opened us up to finally learn about and care about her character. throughout the movie we see her learn, from her love interests example, how to care for others and be considerate. she faces actual adversity and works through it, asking herself what she truly wants and what shes capable of. and in the end, when she finally has her big moment, we’re happy for her bc she worked hard to get there. she becomes a star through her own merit and determination, rather than through money and connections. this movie is not perfect by any means, but it is severely underrated for the amount of substance it adds to sharpays character.

3. The Swap (2016)

okay i know im gonna get shit for this but thats why its on this list!!! just like sharpays fabulous adventure, its not perfect and definitely misses the mark sometimes, but it deserves more attention and love for all the things it did get right!

the swap follows two kids who accidentally switch bodies because of their emotional attachment to their dead/absent parents’ phones. and while i normally HATE the tv/movie trope of a dead parent being the only thing that builds quick sympathy for a young character, they definitely expanded well enough to where we could root for these kids even without the tragedy aspect. we see them go through their daily struggles and get a feel for their motivations as characters pretty well. as a body switching movie, we expect it to be all goofy and wacky and lighthearted, but it moves beyond that in unexpected ways.

the reason the swap is on this list is for its surprisingly thoughtful commentary on gender roles. its by no means a feminist masterpiece, and its not going to radicalize kids who watch it, but it conveys a subtle, heartfelt message that deserves more appreciation. the characters struggle with the concept of gender in a very accurate way for their age, making off-base comments and feeling trapped by the weight of expectations they cant quite put their finger on. we watch them feel both at odds with and relieved by the gender roles they are expected and allowed to perform in each others bodies, and one of the most interesting parts of the movie to me is their interactions with the other kids around them. as a result of their feeling out of place in each others environments, the kids inadvertently change each others friendships for the better by introducing new communication styles and brave authenticity. 

the value of this movie is the subtle, but genuine way it shows the characters growing through being given the space to act in conflicting ways to their expected norms. ellie realizes that relationships dont have to be complex, confusing, and painful, and that its okay to not live up to appearances and images. jack learns that emotional expression is good, healthy, and especially essential to the grieving process. one of the most powerful scenes in the movie comes at the end where, after ellie confronts jacks dad in his body, jack returns as himself to a very heartfelt apology from his father for being too hard on him; the explicit message (”boys can cry”) is paired with an open expression of love and appreciation for his kids that he didnt feel comfortable displaying until his son set an example through honest communication. this is such an empowering scene and overall an empowering movie for kids who may feel stuck in their expected roles, as it sets a positive example for having the courage to break the restrictive societal mold. for its overall message of the importance of introspection and emotional intelligence, the swap is extremely underrated.

2. Freaky Friday (2018)

this is my favorite dcom, and probably my favorite movie at this point. ive always assigned a lot of personal value to this movie (and i love every freaky friday in general), for the message of selfless familial love and understanding. i know i can get carried away talking about this topic; i got an anon ask MONTHS ago asking me about the freaky friday movies and i wrote a super super long detailed response that i never posted bc i didnt quite finish talking about the 2018 movie. and thats bc on a personal level, i cant adequately convey all the love i have for this movie. so i will try to keep this short.

first lets state the obvious: the reason people dont like this movie is bc its not the lindsay lohan version. and i get that, to an extent, bc i also love the 2003 version and its one of my ultimate comfort movies, and grew up watching it and ive seen it a billion times. i even watched it a couple days ago. but the nostalgia goggles that people have on from the early 2000s severely clouds their judgement of the wonderful 2018 remake.

yes, the 2018 version is dorky, overly simplistic plot wise, a bit stiff at times, and super cheesy like any dcom. the writing isnt 100% all the time. the narrative takes a couple confusing turns. the song biology probably shouldnt have been included. i understand this. but at the heart of it all, this movies value is love. and its edge over all the other freaky friday movies is the songs.

on a personal level, the movie speaks heavily to me. i cried very early into my first viewing of the movie bc i got to see dara renee, a dark-skinned, non-skinny actress, playing the mean popular girl on disney channel. that has never happened before. growing up, i saw the sharpays and all the other super thin white women get to be the “popular” girls on tv, and ultimately they were taken down in the end for being mean, but that doesnt change the fact that they were given power and status in the first place for being conventionally beautiful. so, watching dara renee strut around confidently and sing about being the queen bee at this high school got to me immediately. and in general, the supporting cast members of color really mean a lot to me in this movie. we get to see adam, an asian male love interest for the main character. we have a second interracial relationship in the movie with katherines marriage to mike. ellies best friend karl is hispanic. and we see these characters have depth and plot significance, we see them show love, care, and passion for the things they value. the brown faces in this movie are comforting to me personally. additionally, the loving, blended family dynamic is important to me as someone in a close-knit, affectionate step-family.

but on a more general level, this movie is underrated for its skillful musical storytelling and the way it conveys all kinds of love and appreciation. in true freaky friday fashion, we watch ellie and katherine stumble and misstep in their attempts to act like each other. its goofy and fun. but through it all, the music always captures the characters’ intimate thoughts and feelings. the opening song gives us a meaningful view into ellie and katherines relationship and the fundamental misunderstandings that play a role in straining their connection. ellie sings about how she thinks her mom wants her to be perfect, and her katherine sings about all the wonderful traits she sees in her daughter and how she wants her to be more open and self assured. this is meaningful bc even as theyre mad at each other, the love comes through. the songs continue to bring on the emotional weight of the story, as ellie sings to her little brother about her feelings of hurt and abandonment in her fathers absence. the song “go” and its accompanying hunt scene always make me cry bc of the childlike wonder and sense of adventure that it brings. for the kids, its a coming of age, introspective song. for katherine who gets to participate in ellies body, its a reminder of youth and the rich, full life her daughter has ahead of her. she is overcome with excitement, both from getting to be a teenager again for a day, and from the realization that her daughter has a support network and passions that are all her own. today and ev’ry day, the second to last song, is the culmination of the lessons learned throughout the movie, a mother and daughters tearful commitment to each other to love, protect, and understand one another. the line “if today is every day, i will hold you and protect you, i wont let this thing affect you” gets to me every time. even when things are hard and dont go according to plan, they still agree, in this moment, to be there for each other. and thats what all freaky friday stories are ultimately about.

freaky friday 2018 is a beautiful, inclusive, subversive display of familial love, sacrifice, and selflessness, and it is underrated and overlooked because of its more popular predecessor.

1. Let It Shine (2012)

this is another one of my favorite dcoms and movies in the whole world. unlike the other movies on this list, it is not the viewers themselves that contribute to the underrated-ness of this movie. disney severely under-promoted and under-hyped this movie in comparison to its other big musical franchises, and i will give you five guesses as to why, but youll only need one!

let it shine is the most beautifully, unapologetically black dcom in the whole collection. (i would put jump in! at a notable second in this category, but that one wasnt underrated). this movie was clearly crafted with care and consideration. little black kids got to see an entire dcom cast that represented them. the vernacular used in the script is still tailored mostly to white-favoring audiences, but with some relevant slang thrown in there. in short, the writers got away with the most blackness they were allowed to inject into a disney channel project.

the story centers on rap music and its underground community in atlanta, georgia. it portrays misconceptions surrounding rap, using a church setting as a catalyst for a very real debate surrounding a generational, mutlicultural conflict. this was not a “safe” movie for disney, given its emphasis on religious clashes with contemporary values. it lightly touches on issues of image policing within the black community (cyrus’s father talking about how “our boys” are running around with sagging pants and “our girls” are straying away from god), which is a very real and pressing problem for black kids who feel the pressure (from all sides) of representing their whole race with their actions. its a fun, adorable story about being yourself and staying true to your art, but also a skillful representation of struggles unique to black and brown kids and children from religious backgrounds.

on top of crafting a fun, wholesome, thoughtful narrative and likeable protagonists, let it shine brought us what is in my opinion the BEST dcom soundtrack of all time. every single song is a bop. theyre fast, fun, and lyrically engaging. “me and you” is my favorite disney channel song of all time due to its narrative significance; i will never forget my first time watching the movie and seeing that big reveal unfold onstage, as a conversation and a plot summary all wrapped into a song. the amount of thought and care that went into the music of this movie should have been rewarded with a level of attention on par with that of other musical dcoms.

if disney channel had simply cared about let it shine more, it couldve spanned franchises and sold songs the way that other musical dcoms have drawn in success. i would have loved for a sequel that explored and fleshed out cyrus’s neighborhood a little bit more, and maybe dipped into that underground scene they caught a glimpse of. i wanted a follow up on the changed church community once cyrus’s father started supporting his sons vision. i want so much more for these characters and this world than disney gave them in just one movie.

for its bold, unabashed representation of blackness and religion, subtle, nuanced presentation of race-specific issues, strong, likeable characters, and complex, thoughtful songs, let it shine is the most underrated dcom.

and because i made a full list before i started writing this post, here are some honorable mentions:

going to the mat (2004)

gotta kick it up! (2002)

tru confessions (2002)

dont look under the bed (1999)

invisible sister (2015)

[kob131]

So I thought about JelloApocolaypse  and his So This Is Basically series at random.

... You all have to suffer too.

The main problem with his series here is that relies heavily on base level jokes.

What do I mean? Well, take his So This Is Basically MHA video. His first two jokes that aren’t just ‘wacky names!’ is ‘some people are born with godlike powers and other people have cacti!’ and ‘Hur Dur Bakugo tells Deku to kill himself, what a hero!/s’. These are literally the first jokes you would think of if you know anything about the show and this is ALL he does throughout his series (aside from ‘WACKY NAMES!’ and the occasional bullshit). 30 seconds in and you can probably begin guessing every single joke he’s about to make a second before he makes it. Which, considering a core element of comedy is catching your audience off guard, it’s pretty bad. Hell, it even ruins the anticipation part of comedy because you know what’s gonna happen and thus you’re just waiting for the joke to happen.

Not to mention he kind of misrepresents the stuff he talks about A LOT. Taking those two previous jokes from before, Bakugo being violent doesn’t actually make him unviable for being a hero. Not only are there far worse heroes *cough* Endeavor *cough* but Bakugo shares Deku’s innate desire to do good and base altruism. Bakugo fundamentally is a good person, he just has severe character flaws.

And the joke about Quirks? Fuck, that spits in the face of one of the most compelling aspects of the manga and anime as even the most useless sounding Quirks can be used cleverly or have terrifying applications. This aspect of the show is probably what draws people in at first and is a treasured part of it’s identity and this guy completely skips over and indirectly insults it. It’s not funny, it’s nothing at best and aggravating at worst.

Oh and did I forget to mention that he slips in his own criticisms into his video? Yeah he does. This is a factual thing that happens and it throws almost all his videos off. When he makes a joke that on the surface level seems insulting, is the joke about the insult or just someone making light hearted ribing? I don’t know because most of the time he says light hearted jokes and malicious insults with the same tone. The only video this doesn’t affect is his Adventure Time video and that’s because it’s just him jacking off his hate boner in your face for three and a half minutes. And I guarantee you unless you REALLY hate the show, you’ll want sow his mouth shut within the first minute.

This doesn’t happen with his other videos but that kind of shows his limitations. With his 10 words or less video, he’s being clear and honest. With his Welcome To videos, he’s got such a broad subject that he can make generalized jokes for minutes on end. And neither require any nuance or really anything beyond a basic knowledge of the subject matter. When it is required: he’s fucked beyond belief.

[andmaybegayer]

Hello, I'm a fool who knows nothing about computers with a couple questions. For reference, I'm on Windows, for no reason other than I prefer it. I want to make a video game, a very very large video game. I'd be making it out of the love of my heart and for people to play, and not for any other reason. It would be a third-person 3D game. Now, I've heard that RollerCoaster Tycoon 1 was built in Assembly, and is thusly able to run just about anywhere, though I don't know the truth of that. 1/2

Hey yeah tl;dr you should Not try and make your game in assembly, especially as a beginner. Your best bet is to learn a modern game engine and start with that. Especially nowadays if you can get your head around Unity or Godot or any other similar game engine making a 3D game is, while not ~easy~, much easier than it ever was in the past when you would have had to roll your own engine from scratch.

The guy who made Heat Signature and Gunpoint recently started a tutorial series for “Make a game in Unity with no experience.” which may interest you. From there you’ll want to learn how to design 3D objects in something like Blender or Wings3D so that you can build your world and texture it.

I’d recommend starting small, Big Game Projects are ambitious but you’ll want to put out a few small things first, something like a game where you walk around, say, A Single Building with a garden and talk to NPC’s in the building, maybe have a combat system, etc. to really get the hang of your tools before attempting a project where it won’t seem like anything works for potentially weeks of work.

I have tons of little dead-end projects that were dedicated to figuring out simple things like “How do I create randomly generated terrain” or “How do I make Gun.” There’s plenty of YouTube tutorials basically dedicated to stuff like this, Sebastian Lagues’ Coding Adventures are basically all videos dedicated to exploring how to create common interesting things in Unity that you might want to use in a game like random terrain, portals, weird gravity etc.

You’ll have to pick up A Language but it’s honestly not that hard. One thing you will want to do if you’re doing game design is brush up on your high school trigonometry because a truly ridiculous amount of the maths you will do in the process of making a game is just finding relationships between angles and coordinates in space.

Rolling your own engine is a good learning experience if you’re interested in how to write optimized code, designing a scripting language, and writing really wacky dynamic code, but if you just want to Make A Game for your friends to play then it’s a waste of time.

The long explanation for this is:

Assembly is a very powerful but extremely specific tool that’s only useful in the modern day in a very specific handful of situations.

The lowest level of programming that you can do (more or less there are some lower levels that don’t count) is Machine Code programming, which is where you write the binary instructions to a program out by hand. This can be done and is indeed how we used to do it in Ye Olden Times but even in Ye Olden Times programmers quickly got bored of this and invented Assembly.

Assembly is a very simple mapping from raw binary code to a somewhat human readable system. Talking about what that binary code looks like without a firm grounding in processor basics is hard but needless to say that binary generally represents something like Operation, Data1, Data2, Data3, for example you might have a set of codes that correspond to Add A, B, C where that adds A to B and stores it in the address at location C. That instruction in binary will be like 0110 0001 0010 1001, but that’s a pain in the dick to write so you write a simple program that can read in you writing “ADD A B C” and convert it to the right binary code.

In contrast to more high level languages, the mapping between assembly and machine code is pretty direct, usually 1 to 1 or almost 1 to 1. You can’t really do an “if X is true then do A” in assembly, instead you have to do “Compare X to True, check if the True flag was set, if so then jump to the location in memory containing A.”

This has some advantages, like, if you’re very familiar with the processor you’re using and where you’re storing everything in memory, you can skip certain steps you know you don’t need and dramatically speed up your software. Old games, especially for games consoles like the GameBoy and PlayStation, would be partially or wholly written in Assembly so that they ran fast on very limited hardware (the original PlayStation had a stunning 2MB of system RAM) . There’s lots of programming libraries for doing extremely fast maths written partially in Assembly for this very reason.

The DISADVANTAGE is that you have to be really good to write faster code than a quality optimizing compiler. Even fairly barebones languages like C have a lot of creature comforts that make programming nicer, faster and more readable, such as having language constructs to create loops, systems to help you create structures in memory, etc., and once you put that code through a modern compiler it will add in its own very smart optimizations that can make even fairly amateurish code run extremely quickly.

in Assembly you have to do all of that by hand, and doing so requires tracking a lot of things manually. It’s not something for the faint of heart and building a modern game entirely in assembly is something you wouldn’t really do if you could avoid it.

That’s not to say it can’t be done. Since ultimately all programs boil down to machine code, there’s nothing stopping you from making a full 3D game in assembly. Rollercoaster Tycoon is almost all assembly, as you said. Indeed plenty of old 3D games are written partially or mostly in assembly for performance reasons, and if you use a game engine like Unity, some chunks of the engine will be written in Assembly for speed. Especially when it comes to things like realtime physics or very fast AI and the like.

On modern computers for even fairly complex games, the performance of well-optimized compiled code in a normal language is plenty for most games. The benefit of using Unity is that you can leave the heavily optimized engine stuff to a team of skilled programmers who’ve been writing game engines for years and you can deal with the unique things that you need to make your game happen. If you were to start writing a game in Assembly you’d first have to design your own engine, probably write your own scripting system, etc. which would require a robust basis in programming language design, parser design, and a firm view of what you want to create. Tooling around in Unity experimenting with things as you go is much easier.

Learning Assembly and getting good at it is a valuable skill if you want to write crazy optimal code and get a robust understanding of how the internals of a computer work (although not actually but I’m not going to talk more about microcode beyond linking this video lecture) and fi all you want to do is make Video Game your best bet is to learn Unity because it’s what everyone is using.

Pitches for other engines I like but that might not be for everyone:

Godot: Basically a fully open source baby unity that is a little easier to use but a lot less powerful and with a much smaller community, I really like it for experimenting

LÖVE2D: Not a 3D engine, but a really minimal 2D game engine that uses Lua for scripting. It is extremely bare bones but gives you a lot of room to program all behaviours yourself if you feel like making extremely fast demos, I mostly use it to write graphical simulations.

LÖVR: A 3D game engine heavily inspired by LÖVE with a focus on VR game design, shares the same bare-bones, lua-scripted design that makes it very suitable for quickly throwing demos and experiments together but less suitable for large projects unless you pull in some libraries.

[deltaengineering]

Fall Anime 2019 Part 2: Fanservice

Choujin Koukousei-tachi wa Isekai demo Yoyuu de Ikinuku you desu!

Here we go. We’ve had some isekai that wasn’t totally bad for one reason or another, but of course that couldn’t last. Choujin Koukousei-tachi wa Isekai demo Yoyuu de Ikinuku you desu, or Choyoyu if you want to be merciful, or High School Prodigies Have It Easy Even in Another World if you want spoilers, is so nakedly isekai that I’m actually kind of confused. You see, usually isekai is about some loser that gets transported somewhere where his mediocrity is overwhelmingly powerful. I don’t like it, but I get it. Choyoyu, on the other hand, is about a bunch of kids that are already hax and get transported to another world where they’re even more hax and also elf girls give them tongue kisses. Is this for people who are so emotionally fragile that they don’t even want to be reminded of how much they suck in their isekai power fantasies? Then again this is written by someone who also thinks that politicians (one of the kids is the prime minister of Japan... yeah) are supergeniuses, and that if you max out journalism, you prestige class to ninja. Yes, it is more or less comedic and so bizarre that it almost seems like an attempt at parody again, but lemme check something real quick...

Nah, I’m all out of benefits of the doubt and running low on fucks as well.

Azur Lane

So, Azur Lane then. I could tell you all about how it’s a gijinka thing about World War 2 warships, but then you’d say “isn’t that just Kantai Collection” and yes. Not to mention that Azur Lane seems to be more popular than Kancolle now, so either way this isn’t very surprising. So let’s just go over the differences: Azur Lane isn’t almost entirely Japanese ships, and there’s a three-way fight of Axis vs Allies vs Aliens going on. The upshot of this is that Azur Lane is mostly shipgirl(s) vs shipgirl(s) and not everyone vs mobs. And that’s it for the one difference that matters, apart from that it’s a bit more varied than the Kancolle anime was, but that just gives it an uneven tone that swings between Gochiusa-levels of fluffiness and lesbian twincest aircraft carrier villains hamming it up. Characters? We have several dozens of them, thanks for asking. If you play the game or stalk Danbooru/Pixiv religiously, you might even care about them. The (supremely silly) action is technically alright, but doesn’t reach the level of “impressive”, and of course it’s hard to follow with so many obligatory participants. I’d label this one “fans only” and even for them I’d assume it’s just decent at best.

Null Peta

This is a short about a child genius that misses her (dead?) sister so much she builds a robotic version of her. Several mishaps later and she’s stuck with something that most closely resembles Doraemon if Doraemon was all ara ara and also all mofu mofu (apart from when the spikes come out). As far as wacky children’s adventure comedy shenanigans go, this seems to be fairly agreeable, but where it really shines is how it looks. This season admittedly hasn’t had a real sakuga heavy hitter so far, but Null Peta comes the closest to one since it looks quite dope, especially for a weird random short. 5m/week and nothing too annoying make this one easy enough to follow up on.

Chuubyou Gekihatsu Boy

Here we have the example of an anime where I would admit that it’s pretty good at what it wants to be, but what it wants to be is just intolerable. This appears to be a reverse harem with the theme of all the boys having some shade of chuunibyou (if you gotta ask, you don’t want to know) going. I even like the protagonist girl, she’s likeable and shows a bit of personality when being exasperated at the gang of incredibly annoying idiots surrounding her. But that’s the problem: In particular “Red”, a genki runt with a sentai gimmick, is a show destroyer all on his own. The others aren’t quite as bad as him but I’d still accept maybe one of them per harem at most. It does alright in execution, visuals, timing and so on (DEEN’s “poor man’s SHAFT” team, cf. Meganebu, seems to be seeking a comeback), but you’d have to be embarrassingly thirsty for idiot dick to put up with this shit.

Val x Love

Just to prove that I am an equal-opportunity harem h8r, here’s a non-apparently non-reverse one and yes, it also sucks. Not only is it easily the cheapest looking show so far, it’s also reminiscent of the Conception school of harem setup: If you must know, Val x Love is about an ugly ogre of a dude whose lonely house is suddenly stuffed full of Val(kyrie)s (= 9 Japanese harem archetypes because, you know) by none other than Odin himself between cuts. He then has to fight some monsters by cuddling one of the Vals, which unlocks their super or something. Barebones, uninteresting and crappy looking, this one is a real stinker and should be of interest to nobody.

Fate Grand Order - Absolute Demonic Front Babylonia

It’s the seventh story arc of the hit mobile RPG Fate/grand order! How do I know? Because they talk about how they skipped the previous six ones, presumably because they’re boring. Or more boring, at least. It’s Fate, and I know an embarrassing amount of details about Fate (e.g. enough to know that the Rinclone that appears apropos of nothing is Ishtar), and I’ve even seen First Order (which sucked), but this stuff is impenetrable, yo. This iteration on F/go definitely doesn’t care for people who don’t play the game, rare as they may be, and at best you’re supposed to let the proper nouns wash over you and enjoy the spectacle. It’s just that it’s CloverWorks this time, and while an attempt was made, shit just blows up way gooder over at ufotable. So the spectacle is insufficiently spectacular, and Mash is still insufficiently moe. In the end this does nothing to change my opinion of F/go away from “functionally identical to every insipid homebrew Servant thread on /a/ ca. 2010, also Shiki can kill Servants, discuss″, and I ain’t watching 2 cours of that.

Mairimashita! Iruma-kun

Iruma-kun is a goodhearted boy whose scumbag parents sell him off to some demon, who then transports him to hell and enrolls him in demon school where demons try to step to him. Isekai and battle harem is my first suspicion, but not so fast! It’s not a light novel, and while the general gestalt of this setup might resemble a certain conical helix, this appears to merely be convergent evolution. In other words, it’s just a funny kid’s manga, and it’s not even bad for that. It’s colorful, moves at a decent clip and I was moderately amused by the antics of Midoriyaface trying to dodge the ol’ KILL BY DEMONS. It’s just that I also know that this is very much not for me, and while it’s better than say, eIDLIVE, I don’t think I want to stick around. Props where they are deserved, though.

[kinetic-elaboration]

August 27: A Rant

Wrote this earlier today, wasn’t going to post it at all, but I’m feeling very tired and I don’t want to think of anything else to write so!! Just gonna throw it out there.

*

Had a sudden revelation about time skips and why I generally like them but hated t100′s so much that I stopped watching in part because of it.

Usually, at least in my experience, time skips are fairly short (at least in comparison to the s4/s5 skip, and pretty much always in relation to the total timeline of the show). Yet they initially seem to shake everything up A Lot, which I think is fun. People’s styles change, they have new jobs, they have new relationships. And you get to figure out how they got to where they are now from where they were last time. BUT, critically, within an episode or two, all of those shake ups are generally undone. I mean, yes, styles may remain changed and new time-skip romantic relationships may take more than two eps to break up, but if characters were fighting, they’ve made up; if groups had broken apart, they’ve found each other again; and everything that seemed incomprehensible in the first post-skip ep has been basically explained. And whatever is still left to undo is on track to be undone. That random post-time skip relationship? Will be broken up by the end of the season. The obvious endgame ship that broke apart while you weren’t looking? They’ll be back in the same amount of time.

Time skips when the show knows its core, what it’s about and what’s lovable about it and its characters, are fun because they’re like wacky little side adventures. You get a few mysteries to unravel, a little bit of angst, a few new complications, but soon you’re back to the Comfort Zone.

I tend to think that a lot of the nonsense in t100 comes from JRoth et. al. thinking they’re being very clever and badass and breaking all the rules and doing what’s never been done--thinking they’re better than other creators who just do stuff the normal way--but generally speaking narrative rules, and media conventions, exist for a reason. And the post-time-skip world of this show is exhibit A on that because “six years passed” is now, and has been for years, an excuse for EVERYTHING. Relationship doesn’t make sense? Six years passed guys!! Character seems OOC? It’s been SIX YEARS duh!

Worse, because the time skip was itself so much longer than the total in-universe time up to the skip (or after...), the characters’ sense of time no longer has any connection to our sense of time. For example, for me, S1 was 1/7 of the total show, the total time-universe. For Clarke, it was one month, nearly a decade (+124 cryo-years lol) away from her. So every attempt to understand motivations, relationships, character arcs, etc., is distorted. And of course it’s very, very, clear that there is no core to the show, or if there was one, it doesn’t exist anymore--because the time skip wasn’t meant to be a fun little what-if excursion, before we returned to that core. It was meant to actually de-stabalize you and everyone within the show itself, to take you somewhere else, forever. What used to be important? What’s important now? Nothing. It doesn’t matter. This isn’t a narrative about anything. It’s just a series of events.

[battlersexual]

Board Game Showcase #3: Sentinels of the Multiverse

Introduction:

I mentioned in my introduction post for this series that my love of board games only really blossomed when I joined my college’s board game club. This game in particular was actually one of the major reasons why.

Sentinels of the Multiverse is a game about superheroes, but it’s not like any of the multitude of superhero-based board games on the market. Most of those just license actual Marvel or DC superheroes and put them on some other game, like Monopoly or a generic deckbuilder skeleton. Sentinels is something very different: It’s a totally original superhero game, (admittedly very much based on the Marvel-DC characters in a lot of ways) and it’s incredibly fun. Let’s talk about it!

Story:

I’m going to give you the broad strokes here, because trying to tell you the full story of Sentinels would be kind of like trying to summarize the plot of Magic: The Gathering in a single text post. Even with that, this will probably be the longest story segment I write.

In an alternate universe, instead of the Marvel and DC we’re familiar with, the comics publisher that came out on top was Sentinel Comics. Within the world of Sentinel Comics, the stories followed a similar trajectory to ours: the Golden Age where superheroes fought ordinary criminals and nazis, the Silver age with its wacky space shenanigans and superscience nonsense, the more restrained Bronze age where comics started to tackle more serious issues, a brief Dark age where everything was gritty and EXTREEEEEME, and the Modern age, where writers tried to take the best of everything that came before and just tell good stories (perhaps with mixed results, but I’m not a comic critic, so I’ll leave it at that.) The actual card game can best be described as a licensed game set in the Modern age of Sentinel Comics, which just so happens to have fallen through a time portal to our universe.

Overall, the story follows the Freedom Five, an Avengers-esque superhero team working together against all manner of villains, from the moustache-twirling to the downright terrifying. The villains in the game are all structured like crisis crossovers, with a team of supers going up against them. Each expansion to the game introduced part of the ongoing struggle as the comics progressed, culminating in the OblivAeon crisis and the end of the multiverse as we know it.

Obviously there’s more to it, but I want to move on and talk about individual characters later.

Mechanics and more under the cut.

Mechanics:

Sentinels is, technically speaking, a card game instead of a board game. That said, it still falls into the nebulous category of “Tabletop game” and most board game fans consider them board games anyway.

The game is technically 3-5 players, but can easily support 1 and 2 player games by having each player control multiple characters. Each player will pick a hero from the box, along with their deck. For example...

(Legacy is in some ways the most basic hero, so I’ll be using him as an example often.)

Each hero has a character card that gives them an HP value and a base power (In this case, Galvanize). This means the hero always has something they can do no matter which cards they get. Each hero has a unique deck of cards that focuses on their particular niche, Legacy’s being buffing the team and tanking damage.

Heroes generally work on their own, but often excel by teaming up with other heroes and complementing their own powers. Each turn, a player does three things: Play, Power, Draw, in that order. Play a card from their hand, use a power (either their innate power or one listed on an ongoing card) and draw a card. You can skip both play and power to draw two cards instead. If a hero is reduced to 0 HP, they’re not out of the fight yet: the flip side of their card has “Incapacitated abilities” that help the other team members.

(I couldn’t find a good image of Legacy’s incap side, this is from one of the other characters, Fanatic).

Sentinels is a cooperative game: the heroes work together to defeat a villain.

Each villain has their own deck, which acts as a rudimentary AI. Before the heroes get their turn, they flip over the top card of the villain deck and do whatever the card says. Villain cards are often extremely powerful, and can seriously screw over the heroes’ efforts.

In addition to heroes and villains, each game of Sentinels has an Environment. This is a third type of deck that works similarly to the villain deck, but tends to be neutral: I.E. it helps or hurts both the heroes and the villain. The environments range from the city of Megalopolis to the far-off planet Dok’Thorath to the town of Silver Gulch in the year 1883 to a far-future post-apocalyptic earth, each with unique mechanics. The turn order goes villain, heroes, environment before repeating until either the villain or all the heroes are defeated.

Flavor:

An AMAZING amount. You might have noticed that Legacy’s cards have quotes on the bottom referencing a comic he was in. Every card in the game has this, and it’s a joy to piece it all together and figure out what happened in the extensive storyline of Sentinel Comics. The game itself also presents an exciting puzzle where you try to figure out how to get past the villain’s defenses before they kill you. Each hero feels unique and interesting, and once you find your favorite, you’re all set. (Mine is Chrono-Ranger, the time-traveling cowboy).

I do have another particular favorite in terms of flavor, but I... don’t want to mention him. (Too late.) He might show up, and that’s not going to be good for anyone (Hey!) so let’s just move on.

Expansions:

The base game includes ten heroes, four villains, and four environments. This is a pretty good number, but honestly a lot of the most fun heroes arrived in the expansions. I find every new deck to be fun and interesting, so I can blanket-recommend all the expansions, but there’s a lot of them, both big boxes and mini-expansions consisting of a single deck (Like me!), so I’m not going to talk about them individually like before (WHAT?), so let’s just move on to-

No no no no NO! What kind of cop-out is that? You’re just going to tell people that expansions exist and then not explain anything? You make me SICK.

Oh no.

Oh YEAH! That’s right, I’m here to take over this showcase, so why don’t you just sit down in that corner and watch a REAL pro do his job?

Get off my post, Guise.

Not gonna happen! Take this! And this! And some a THESE!

...There we go. Hello, reader! Yep, I’m talking to you, the one reading this now. My name’s Guise, and I’m the best hero in the whole game!

Ha, I love that picture. ANYWAY, since that idiot couldn’t be bothered to cover the expansions properly, I’ll be doing that for him, just for all of you! Aren’t I the greatest? Well, let’s hop to it!

Ahhh, good old Rook City. Nice place, if you like giant mutant rats and government corruption. Which I do, because that stuff is totally X-TREEEEEEEEME!!!

Rook City was originally its own expansion, but the developers released a box that combined it with the next expansion, Infernal Relics! What nice people. Rook City includes two heroes who are almost as X-TREEEEEEEEME!!! as me, as well as two environments and four, count ‘em, FOUR dastardly villains!

Infernal Relics has plenty of spooooooky magic at play, and features another four villains, two environments, and two heroes, one of which is my good friend the Argent Adept! Here, look at this picture of us!

Ha ha, good times.

They did it again! Shattered Timelines and Wrath of the Cosmos, all in one box. How can you turn that down? If you like time travel and space adventures, these are gonna be your jam, with a total of four heroes, eight villains, and four environments, two of which are IN SPACE! Everything’s better in SPACE! Here’s a picture of me, IIIIIIINNNNNNNN SPAAAAAAAAAAAACE!

Oh, and the Shattered Timelines expansion is where that cowboy that the dumb nerd who started this post likes comes from. You know, if you cared. Which you don’t, because you’re cool! Like me! I can tell.

Vengeance added five new heroes, and introduced the TOTALLY AWESOME team villain variant, where instead of fighting one strong villain, you fight a team of weaker villains! This one can get pretty crazy. The set includes the VENGEFUL FIVE, who you can see on the box, and their decks come with all sorts of bit villains and lackeys to torment the heroes! I took a picture with my nemesis, Argentium!

Whooo, that was one tough customer! Luckily, I got him to chill out. Get it? Chill out? Because I froze him, ha ha! I’m hilarious. And awesome!

And then they did more team villains! Villains of the Multiverse has ten new villains for the team mode, four environments, and NO HEROES AT ALL! Well, lucky thing you can still use the ones from the other expansions, hey? I took a picture with a villain to commemorate this one too, but I can’t seem to find it...

Oh, there it is!

And the last major expansion is... OblivAeon! (Dun dun DUUUUUUUUN!) This one adds five heroes (formerly villains! Oooh, exciting!), five environments, and OBLIVAEON himself, with a new game mode centered around fighting him! Not to mention, you get to see ME take center stage as the big hero that saves the multiverse!

(Uh, not really, it was mostly Luminary who-)

Hey, quiet! Don’t go badmouthing me in front of my adoring fans!

Anyway, I’d love to show you my cool new form in this expansion, but that might be a liiiiitle spoiler-y, so I’ll just say I look like THIS, but WAY sexier!

Well, those are all the big expansions, but we’re not done yet! There’s a bunch of mini-expansions, little individual decks you can buy to add one hero, villain, or environment to the game. I’d cover them all, but there’s really only one you need...

That’s right, ME! Hell, you don’t even need the other big expansions when I’m so much better! Not only do you get my awesome character card, you get all the cards I’ve shown you from my deck, as well as the best card ever! No, really, that’s what it’s called!

I mean, come on! You don’t even need the base game! Just buy me, and you’ll have the best part of Sentinels of the Multiverse, all for the low low price of- hey, get off me! Ow! Stop that! HEY!

All right, that’s ENOUGH. Get OUT of my house.

...Whew, he’s finally gone. All right, let’s get on with things.

Replayability:

Sentinels is pretty darn replayable. You’re almost never going to get the same experience, even if you pick the exact same heroes, environment, and villain. If you have all the expansions, you not only get over 60 heroes and 45 villains, but you can get Variants, which replace all the hero cards (and some villains!) with new versions of the characters that have different powers. I’ve never played a game of Sentinels and felt like I’d seen it before. In addition, you can play it alone, so if you can’t have friends over regularly it’s still a good purchase.

Criticisms:

It runs into a similar problem to Cosmic Encounter where the game is SO spread out over so many expansions that the full experience ends up being an expensive and space-consuming prospect. It’s also a very fiddly game, with tons of counters and cards, so it can be a chore to play some of the more complicated characters. Both of these problems have solutions, however.

Availability:

Sentinels is still being sold, as far as I’m aware. It’s also totally available as a mod on Tabletop Sim, although this doesn’t fix the problem with fiddly counters and running out of space for cards, and in fact makes it worse. But there’s another option.

Sentinels of the Multiverse: The Video Game is an official online version of the card game. It includes every expansion as dlc, heavily marked down from its price as a physical item, and takes care of all the tedious bookkeeping for you. It also lets you earn the variant cards by doing challenges in-game, which is super fun, although you don’t HAVE to to unlock them that way. There are weekly challenge games that pit a certain team against a specific villain and environment, which often act as a cool little puzzle, (and you get to hear my amazing voice!) Shut up, Guise. I very occasionally stream games of SotM on my twitch channel, so if there’s enough interest I can show off more of the game. In general, I recommend the video game even if you already own the board game: it’s really well-done and fun to play.

Creators:

This is kind of a special segment. I normally don’t talk about the creators of these games, because they’re usually irrelevant to the final product. However, artist Adam Rebottaro and writer Christopher Badell are incredibly active in the community around their own game, and they have a podcast where they talk about the lore of the game and answer viewer questions about the characters and universe.

It’s a ton of fun, they’re really engaging and you can feel their creativity and love for comics radiating from their voices whenever they talk. They’re super funny, too.

(And if you want more of ME- ah, what am I saying, of course you do! - you can tune in to this episode right here, where I make a special guest appearance to talk about myself!)

Get OUT, Guise!

Ugh, what a pain. Anyway...

Conclusion:

I know superhero stuff is kind of over-saturated right now, but even if you’re sick of superheroes - give Sentinels a try. It’s a celebration of comics more than superheroes in particular, and despite taking a lot of cues from existing superheroes, everything about Sentinels is fresh and fun. It’s one of my favorite co-op games ever, and its story is so well-told that I genuinely feel like I need to go read the comics, which I remind you don’t exist. Sentinels of the Multiverse is brilliant and just plain FUN.

Seriously, go play it, and make sure to use all my cards!

Didn’t I tell you to get out of my house?

[audiogrizzly]

Top 5 Games of 2019

It was a little tricky to construct a top 5 for this year, though there have been a couple of surprises.  I wasn’t expecting the year to be a bit crap as we are no w on the cusp once more of a new generation.  But 2012 wasn’t all that bad of a year (PS4 and Xbox One would release in 2013) and at the moment, everyone is doing alright.  PS4 has sold through over 100 million systems, Nintendo are definitely on an “on” generation with Switch, Xbox has been able to get back into peoples good books with things like Game Pass (on both Console and PC, their PC side they seem to really be turning around), there’s even interesting things happening in the mobile space with Apple Arcade.

This won’t be the last year where my top 5 games are full of current gen titles, I am expecting the new systems to drop in around November, last time it was hard to find a top 5 specific to PS4 (as I listed each platform separately back then).  It IS however, another list of mostly AAA tier games.  If you want to know what smaller more “interesting” games I have been playing, check out my honourable mentions at the end.

Also, follow me on Melee.  It’s this new image blogging service from Imgur which you can download now on the IOS App Store (its just on iPhone at the moment) and it has seemingly been built to help people share gaming related clips and images off of places like Twitter and Instagram (and err, here on Tumblr).  I posted a couple of daft clips of me failing in Modern Warfare and Destiny 2 and it didn’t take long for them to amass a few likes and comments.

That sounded like a sponsored advert but ain’t nobody paying me for this.  Let’s get into my top 5

5. Star Wars Jedi Fallen Order

I was about to select Gears 5 to be my number 5 until I saw sense and cast my memory back to when I started playing Jedi (all the way back in November.  I was impressed by its intense action, impressive visuals and great characters.  I especially enjoyed the 4 armed pilot who always complains.  I did feel that towards the end I got sick of managing large groups of enemies so I dropped the difficulty to get through it, but I still haven’t achieved 100% of activities on all planets so I can still go back to it one day.

4. Borderlands 3

We all knew this was coming but not even I had any idea that we would have been actually playing it in 2019 way back at the start of the year.  For me, I look at the game.  I don’t care about weird magicians or their insane sounding legal woes, all I’m interested in is the work of a team who deserved better for their last title, but am still glad returned to what they do best, looting and shooting.  I enjoyed rejoining these characters I have followed over the last 10 years, all the referenced to older games, cameos from characters from Tales From the Borderlands and The Pre Sequel and was sad to see some people go.  I still have about a year of extra content to go through and I really appreciate the efforts they have made to make the game last longer than just one playthrough through in the Proving Grounds, Circle of Slaughter and Mayhem modes.  Though I have always tended to stick to Borderlands games and create builds for each and every vault hunter, so I will be doing that.

3. Mortal Kombat 11

It’s been a while since I last put a fighting game into my end of year round up.  And I HAVE fallen off MK11 a little bit, but this entry reminded me of how impressive it is for Nether Realms to pack their fighting games with some many things to do and keep people playing outside of just going into matchmaking and fighting others.  The Vault this year is basically another little adventure full of exploration and puzzle solving and the Towers of Time give you plenty of challenge and direction of many months to come.  You also have to give the developer credit for never backing down on the brutality of the game, they must have all got their heads together after DC Universe vs. and vowed never again to make watered down versions of Fatalities.  It is a game that keeps getting better and better.

2. Call of Duty Modern Warfare

I was debating whether or not to include this years CoD.  I always get the same type of enjoyment out of it each year, people complain that it never changes but I’m glad it sticks to a formula.  Of course they are not identikit games, there are new maps, new modes, new ways of building your loadout and new touches, like how in this year you can snap to edges to stay in cover while you shoot, there’s the new special equipment system where you can drop ammo or reduce your footstep noise.  Having doors you can either peek through or smash open adds another level of strategy, there have been times where I have been able to escape being under fire by closing a door, re-positioning and then wasting whoever just wanders in.

The campaign this year, good to see it back, but whatever, the co-op mode is Spec Ops again, like it was back in MW2 and 3 but on a much larger scale, I have yet to complete one of these btw.  But as always, it’s the multiplayer that does it for me and Modern Warfare deserves credit for being what must be the first AAA game to feature cross platform play, not just launch with it.  I know that games like Fortnite are popular, but I don’t see that as a AAA title, it doesn’t have the full package, it’s just a mode and it started off small.  Call of Duty is expected to be big each year, has a lot riding on it and allowing for cross play is a big step.  I especially appreciate being able to play with a keyboard and mouse on PS4 and being able to matchmake only with people playing with controllers on PC, in fact, I have never really given the game much of a shot on PC before as I know people just fall of it, there has often been low player numbers reported on the PC versions of CoD and it looks like it won’t have that problem this time round due to cross play.

Modern Warfare still has to contend with Destiny 2 and Overwatch for my time as my main multiplayer game but it’s still as fun as ever.

1. Control

Put this down as my main “surprise” game of 2019.  A game which was not on my watch list, though I was aware of it as you can’t ignore a game from the makers of Max Payne (I did skip Alan Wake and didn’t care much for Quantum break though).  Bought it at the last minute before its release, downloaded it and was wowed by the sinister nature of the environment you run around in.  This weird fictitious US government agency which looks into paranormal activity which you seem to have become in charge of because you picked up a mysterious weapon from the deceased Director while searching for your brother.  What then follows is about 12 hours of wacky powers and odd video clips as you unearth what has been going on in this strange ever morphing building.

I especially loved how the game never holds your hand too much, the map of each floor is vague enough that you also have to rely on in-game signposting to move around, as well as a bit of memory work.  There is also great humour involved too in some of the PSA posters on a lot of the walls, the antics of the caretaker and the videos you find of Dr. Darling throughout the game.

I did have a few weird technical issues with the game throughout playing, but still found it to be visually pleasing, there was this weird hitch that used to appear after coming out of the pause screen that always threw me, it would be followed by a few moments of low performance before getting back into the smooth action.  But this didn’t stop me from having a great time with Control.  Perhaps the game that will be the most prominent in my head when I think of 2019.

So there you have it, control is my best game of 2019.  But let’s look at the other new games I played throughout the year in my honourable mentions:

Gears 5

The Outer Worlds

Days Gone

Apex Legends

Far Cry New Dawn

Trover Saves the Universe

Concrete Genie

Devil May Cry 5

Tom Clancy's The Division 2

And also a special mention to these old games that were rereleased/remastered/repackaged etc in 2019:

Borderlands Game of the Year Edition Remastered

Halo Reach

And now, a look at the games I have on my watchlist for 2020:

Cyberpunk 2077

Last of Us Part 2

Ghost of Tsushima

Halo: Infinite

Watch Dogs Legion

Phantasy Star Online 2

Gods & Monsters

Doom Eternal

Overwatch 2

Diablo IV

Minecraft dungeons

Marvel's Avengers

Carrion

Streets of Rage 4

Will they all even come out?  Let’s find out, happy new year!

[tanadrin]

I think I’m starting to understand the difference in philosophies that underlies the two kinds of video game RPG better. I think of them as the Bethesda and the BioWare RPG, but more accurate terms would be the simulationist and the character-driven RPG. Which is not to say that the two categories are exclusive--they’re different points on a spectrum. The extreme simulationist RPG would be Dwarf Fortress’s Adventure Mode, where the entire world is procedurally generated ex nihilo, including attempts to procedurally generate things like history and politics and whole systems of magic. I’m not sure what the opposite would be--maybe something like the original Mass Effect, whose levels are quite cloistered, or the first Deus Ex, where you’re playing a character who is extremely defined as a person, but you still get to choose how the plot unfolds.

Each has aspects I like. I like that in character-driven games I have a strong narrative I get to operate within, and I get to make choices which affect the emotional outcome of the game. Bethesda games lack that, because for all the influence that in theory you have over the world, the ultimate outcome is usually always the same: Mehrunes Dagon is defeated, Alduin is killed, you’re sitting on a pile of treasure. What outcomes you do control tend to be binary yes/no levers (did you do the College of Winterhold quests? Congrats, you can add “Archmage” to your extremely long list of titles an honors), and moving through the game’s programmatic implementation of the plot feels more lack racking up Steam achievements than anything else.

Buuuut the price you pay for actually feeling like you inhabit these worlds is feeling like the worlds themselves are pretty two-dimensional. Skyrim was the first RPG I played where I felt a strong sense of place, like even though the experience was mediated by a computer screen and a mouse and keyboard, I could imagine what it would be like to stand on the road outside Riverwood and feel the cool breeze and look up and the foggy mountains. At the time I thought it was just the (then) shiny new graphics, but I bought Morrowind the other day just for fun, and I don’t think it is--I think placeness is just a thing Bethesda excels at in their games, because they pay close attention to it like BioWare does to characters. Morrowind’s graphics are much more primitive than Skyrim’s, but Vvardenfell definitely still has many of the same qualities Skyrim does in that respect, even with its blocky character models and super-short draw distance.

(Also, playing a little Morrowind has made me appreciate just how much the Dragonborn DLC is a love letter to Morrowind fans, which is neat.)

Are the two approaches compatible? Like, is one side of the spectrum necessarily exclusive of the other? I think they might be. The problem with the simulationist world (and this is a problem STA:GOB2:DF(AM) has in spades) is that you run the risk of a world a million miles wide and a millimeter deep (see also Elite: Dangerous, and No Man’s Sky reportedly but I haven’t played it myself), but Tarn Adams’ extreme fetish for procedural generation simply throws into relief the problem of a lot of these games, which is that random is not actually a substitute for complex, and even conceptually sophisticated Perlin noise is still just... noise. Utterly interchangeable. You can generate a million Dwarf Fortress worlds, and they’ll all be superficially identical.

Even a world like Daggerfall’s, which is the size of Great Britain, is mostly nothing. And it turns out (as fast travel and compass markers have shown us) that for most people, working your way over miles of empty country road and hunting for quest objectives is not the fun part of epic fantasy narratives, which is why most epic fantasy narratives... skip those parts.

(Tangent 1: I understand the impulse to huge fantasy worlds in video games, and I think it’s a positive one, mostly. Theme parks don’t feel real, which is why Azeroth has no sense of place. It could--it has some wonderfully atmospheric zones--but everything about the placement of NPCs and the way you interact with the world screams animatronic Presidents, Disneyland with the Burning Legion, so it lacks... worldlikeness. The problem with big, detailed, simulationist worlds is that if you’re inhabiting them from a pedestrian’s viewpoint, 99.5% of all that is going to go to waste. Either you will fast-travel past it or it will be Desert Bus With Dragons, but honestly, you don’t need to simulate weather fronts and biomes and a realistic medieval economy if all you’re doing is trying to assemble the Staff of Chaos so you can whack Jagar Tharn over the head with it. As soon as your viewpoint becomes even a little bit more elevated, though, that stuff is interesting, and even important. The fact that every merchant in Spira will buy your stuff for exactly one half the price you sell it for is an irrelevant triviality if all you ever see is one merchant’s storefront at a time. But as soon as you begin to piece together anything like a bigger picture, the world needs to make sense. I would combine this observation with the fact that no matter how important you become to the world of Skyrim, you never actually wield any political or administrative authority. Sure, nobody wants to play Dean of the College of Winterhold or have to spend half their time playing Skyrim marking freshers’ essays on the elementary principles of transmutation, but it’s also weird that you can be one of Skyrim’s foremost property owners, thane of nine holds, political counselor of the High King, and you can’t get a guard to so much as hold your horse for you while you pop into the blacksmith’s. A game where accomplishment actually translates into political authority is a game where the worldbuilder’s urge to detail every element of the life-cycle of the lesser mana stoat becomes a little more important, if, say, you need to manage the mana stoat farmers. Although that doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate nods towards believability--Skyrim’s tiny-ass farms that couldn’t feed a family of four in a wintry climate, much less a tenth of a goddamn continent, are a major failure on that point. Visual believability is important. Noteworthy here also is landscape architecture: one reason Skyrim does well at placeness is that it feels reasonable, even though it’s a geographical absurdity. Something like the world of Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, where even the “plains” regions are wacky moonscapes designed to maximize walking time, so as to substitute boredom for size, are failures in level design.)

(Tangent 2: I once had the idea for a fantasy film or comic book that involved all the usual players: a Scheming Villain, a Terrible Macguffin of Power, a band of Plucky Heroes, romance, war, intrigue, excitement, etc. Except all the big, exciting moments would be entirely implied; the actual story told would be of all the quiet moments between the battles and confrontations and tragic death scenes. The sitting around the campfire singing songs. The tossing and turning on hard ground or in lumpy, unfamiliar beds. The quiet conversation or the anxious exchange of looks before a battle. The moments of reflection or subtle self-doubt before committing to a course of action that could save or doom the world. I don’t actually know if it would make for an interesting story, but I think it would be a lot of fun to write.)

Bethesda for its part is firmly committed to the tabula rasa silent protagonist, and I think that’s a mistake. I don’t think you increase player agency in a world where your protagonist must remain mute, I think you only highlight the disconnect. I may be unusual here, but one of the things I love most about BioWare games, and which makes me feel most embedded in their plots and connected to their characters, is the fact I get to hear both sides of the conversation, and how I choose to respond has a lasting effect on the kind of person the other characters seem to understand me to be. That feels much more interesting to me that the cipher that moves through Bethesda worlds, about which little can be known, because little can be specified. Yes, such a cipher can have any history you want, but only because such a cipher can have no substantive history--so, like the details of a procedurally generated world, the history of such a protagonist, their motivations and intent, is rendered trivial. And for escapist fantasy, where part of the goal is to not be trivial, but to be important, vital even, I think that’s a failure. Unless your goal is to, like, RP a cabbage merchant, in which case--success!

What I really want, what I really feel is a seriously under-appreciated possibility in video game RPGs, is an open world with some of the simulationist aspects, but built around, or laid on top of, a strong central plot skeleton. One with rich character interaction and consequential, emotional choices (and no, Dawnguard does not qualify), and I think the payoff would be that we are so used to vast worlds that are ultimately quite shallow that even a few substantive concessions in this direction would feel like we had suddenly discovered benthic depths.

[universereelsmarvel]

I do not like Sonic Frontiers.

I'm convinced this game was an elaborate ruse to get me to like Sonic Forces more. Sonic Frontiers actually appears as a synonym for tedious on Google.com. Collecting a bunch of random items and travelling for miles to go see a character and see the same animation a million times over, then travel even further to go see the same character again and get another cutscene is mind numbing. It isn't fun because the open world isn't at all interesting. Just a bunch of flat land, like a Unity test demo, as stated many times before. Compare this to a level in Generations for example. I see that and I think "yeah, I wanna explore that." These areas are bland and dull, and give me nothing to work with. And then you collect the Chaos Emeralds in the same predictable, monotonous pattern. It is not at all fun. It feels like a chore, just aimlessly wandering around. Part of why I like Sonic is because it's very accessible and easy to jump into. It's hard to get bored when you're going from one wildly different colorful and wacky, set piece filled level to the next. This just feels too high maintenance for my liking. I know I maybe have the gaming tastes of a 58 year old, but I digress. I am not a fan of the whole "grinding" thing and “levelling up” in a Sonic game.

Properly implemented momentum is barely in the game and feels like it was added in at the last minute. It works when it feels like it. Yes, it can be fun to air boost off of something and get air time, and skip around bigger chunks of the map. But it doesn't work in any consistent way, and often feels unintentional. You have to fight with the game to get it to work. It's not like that in something like Sonic Adventure. Sonic has no genuine, authentic sense of weight in his movements. It often feels like a Sonic 4 philosophy, or lack thereof, of physics, but only in 3D. Speaking of which, the sheer amount of 2D areas in the 3D open world is embarrassing. Sonic Team just does not believe in themselves. When I think open world 3D Sonic, I don't think of extremely basic elementary school level platforming. Or intrusive mini games. Pinball? Galaga? Koko Roundups? Why on Earth would some of this stuff be mandatory? I'm sick of games incorporating these wildly incongruent genres into their games. Puzzles don't belong in a Sonic game, at least not as something mandatory. I'm not one of those people who thinks Sonic is only about going fast, but this just does not fit the impatient, always on the move, rambunctious Sonic that this franchise is supposed to represent. 

And don't even get me started on the final boss being fucking Galaga. What the fuck. What kind of climatic final battle culminates in fucking Galaga, and then a shitty quick time event? Wow, truly the future of Sonic. We end on a re-creation of an arcade game that came out 40 years ago, that is currently available on 5 dollar plug 'n play games at a Dollar Tree near you. And the combat being extremely mindless and button-mashy is also a big negative for me.

The story is also terrible. One of the things that could've saved the barren, dull looking lands is the sense of mystery. There's an intriguing creep factor about Sonic being in this big open space that's almost vacant. Sonic being in a strange, liminal space sounds kind of cool. But the mystery ends up being not at all compelling. It's just the same shit we've seen a hundred times. An ancient civilization losing their people, losing their home, Chaos Emeralds are involved, blah blah. Also not a fan of the Chaos Emeralds having their origin explained. They are much better off just being this mysterious force that works in ways civilization doesn't even understand. And then we have Sage, who's supposed to be a big deal, and seems to have a problem with Sonic is doing. She keeps saying these cryptic things as if there's something huge we don't know about going on, but it ends up being a bunch of meaningless red herrings. She's just another invention by Eggman. And look, Eggman caring for a daughter-like figure is compelling. But this comes out of nowhere close to the end of the game, this concept of Eggman loving Sage like a daughter. But there's absolutely no buildup or elaboration to this. Nothing to bounce off of, no one comments much on what they think of Eggman's newfound surrogate fatherhood, or anything. Sage has nothing to do with these islands, or their people. 

The whole thing just makes no fucking sense. I guess Titans are sentient, but not really, so it's fine that Sonic murders them. The game acts as if it's gonna have some sort of dire moral dilemma for Sonic, with Sage asking him repeatedly if he truly believes he's doing the right thing. You start to think, "Oh, maybe Sonic's somehow ruining this environment, and he has to struggle over saving nature or his friends", or some sort of spin on his arrogance, or just, anything. It really goes nowhere. The themes that the game has a loose idea of wanting to represent are... overly explained, to put it lightly. Ian Flynn has Chris Nolan syndrome to the highest degree. We didn't need to see Sage talking about how she's so lonely and envies what Sonic has and all that, we could see it on her face. The characters in general often act very unnaturally. They come off more as machines designed to spout off expository dialogue, rather than fleshed out characters. The mystery of the game that the story so heavily relies on is practically handed to you, by Sonic somehow coming to these very oddly specific conclusions, and explaining them in a very long-winded way. So much of the dialogue is just people explaining all this overly elaborate nerdy world building, especially in the cutscenes with Tails. 

Speaking of which, there's a very random scene where Tails concludes that he needs to be more independent from Sonic. It's so bizarre and has nothing to do with the story. It's like they're trying to bounce off of Tails's cowardice in Sonic Forces, but it doesn't work. It comes off as Tails is being independent for the first time, and Sonic is emotionally moved by it. As if Tails hasn't been making robots that can fucking shoot people, breaking into maximum security federal prisons 20 fucking years ago. It would've made more sense if they had just mentioned that Tails felt he had lost it a little after something has traumatic as Sonic being taken prisioner to be "tortured" and Eggman taking over the world took place. Tails's behavior in Forces could've made sense if they had just elaborated on that, and they had the chance to here, but it just ends up being bizzarree, like Tails is just now breaking free of Sonic. I actually find it more insulting than the scene in Forces, because it implies Tails hasn't already been independent. 

And goddamn, the fucking references here. Wow, this reminds me of that level, or that one thing from that one game. Look, it's great that they're tying everything together. But everything just feels inorganic. No one talks like this. Imagine if regular people spoke like this. “Wow, this place has a bathroom. Just like the bathroom at my old middle school!” The lack of subtlety going into it is nauseating. I think people have already made this comparison, but it feels like they're just perpetually setting up a Family Guy cutaway gag that never occurs. And with how much they reference older shit, you'd think they talk about how Eggman took over the fucking world, the worst case scenario they'd been fighting against for years, an experience that would've irreversibly altered their very being? But no, next to nothing.

People keep saying that "Sonic is back" and that this game is a return to form somehow. I don't see it. Even in terms of if you like the dark age Sonic stories, I don't see it. At least Forces had a big showdown at the end, it had a more traditional Sonic charisma. Sonic kept his sneering grin, his cocky attitude, he made cringey speeches about friendship. I have a lot of issues with his characterization in that game, but it feels a lot more like Sonic than whatever this is. Characters like Sonic and Eggman dialing back their performances so drastically just results in seeing two characters stripped of what makes them.. them. I might as well be watching air, seeing these characters in action in Frontiers. And here, Sonic, and everything around him, feels more sterile. Yes, the story in Sonic Forces was massively underwhelming, especially considering the sheer scope of the plot of Eggman taking over Sonic's home. But I found this even more underwhelming. Characters just stand around and talk. Sonic transforms into Super Sonic four times in the game with no progression, no ending that's significantly more climatic to build up to. No sense of basic story progression. This doesn't feel like an Adventure era or Dark age era Sonic story to me at all. It's the midness of a meta era story, only completely lifeless. Forces had life to it, Forces had blaring music, over the top set pieces. The quickness, switching up the scenery, even if it was a lot of re-using assets. Forces felt like a glorified mobile game, yes, but it had more identity and fun to it.  

And here we have this game that shuns the uniqueness of Sonic the Hedgehog in favor of generic modern video game tropes. A hodgepodge of other, more successful games. Sonic Frontiers has no identity of its own. It's a hollow, empty game. Ungodly repetitive in both its gameplay and story. I can honestly say it's one of my least favorite Sonic games, and one of the only Sonic games I consider to just be straight up bad.

[fly-pow-bye]

DuckTales 2017 - “The Great Dime Chase!”

Story by: Francisco Angones, Madison Bateman, Colleen Evanson, Christian Magalhaes, Bob Snow, Matt Youngberg

Written by: Madison Bateman

Storyboards by: David Baker, Matthew Humphreys, Tanner Johnson

Directed by: John Aoshima

Worth far more than 10 cents.

One of the big changes DuckTales 2017 is the way they handled the nephew's personalities, and as such, we're going to see more episodes that show them. Woo-oo focused on Dewey, this episode focuses on Louie, and Huey's time in the spotlight will come later. Like the last episode, there's two setups.

Louie is enjoying his new life at McDuck Manor...a little too much, in fact. He adopted a "who cares, we're rich!" attitude, wasting soda, throwing away his phone when it just needs to be charged, and he doesn't even want to reach for the remote when he doesn't like what's on TV. Scrooge McDuck is not too pleased by this, and wants to teach Louie a lesson in the value of working hard.

Meanwhile, we get Dewey doing a continuation of the last minute reveal of “Woo-oo!” Just a reminder: I may not spoil the last minute reveals, but I have to talk about their aftermath, so if you haven't watched the one-hour special yet...why haven't you?

The B plot focuses on Dewey trying to find more information about his missing mother, Della Duck, after finding out she was involved with Scrooge McDuck's adventures. Uncle Donald won't tell him anything, and he only has one photo. Even Webby, who has encyclopedic knowledge of the McDucks, is just as in the dark. Her only file on Della only consists of that aforementioned photo, and anyone who seems to bring her up tends to get silenced. They decide to investigate.

Of the two setups, it's clear which one is more interesting. Della Duck is going to be the main mystery throughout the entire series, and it's something that never really came up in the original. One might be thinking that the title is a bit of a reverse bait and switch, as the more interesting plot has nothing to do with the Number One Dime that is being chased after. With the rest of the episode, I'd say it's a bonus.

After a shortened theme song, which, surprisingly for a show nowadays, is not going to be the norm, Scrooge McDuck takes Louie. Dewey and Webby were allowed to tag along, who immediately tell Scrooge they have to use the restroom. Scrooge...doesn't even reply, and they just run off.

Meanwhile, Huey...doesn't exist in this episode. No, seriously, they don't even mention him. It's better than forcing him in, turning him into one of the other ducks, even if that would be far more fitting than a certain other trio.

Of course, they're not going to the bathroom, they're going to Scrooge McDuck's archives, guarded by the librarian, Miss Quackfaster. The very first thing she says is to tell Webby that only Scrooge McDuck and family can come in. Her emotions instantly change once she sees the nephew.

This episode re-establishes that Webby loves to get every single detail about the McDuck family, as she gets excited about books about Scrooge McDuck's favorite smells. Fresh cookies, for the record. Nothing wacky. As for Dewey, his is going to be very difficult, as Miss Quackfaster has to put him through some unclear trials. You'll never know what comes up next with her.

Webby is sure that Dewey will be able to pass the trials, though. Why shouldn't he, he should be the master of the Dewey Decimal System! They really did that joke.

Back at Scrooge's office, Louie gets a tour, including a big painting of Scrooge and some workers, the Number One Dime, and, of course, the famous moneybin! We even get a joke about how swimming in a pool of hard, solid things is generally not a good idea, with Scrooge saving Louie from learning that the hard way. Twice.

He gets dragged into a meeting with the McDuck Enterprises Board, the vulture capitalists that also happen to be vultures. Scrooge gives Louie the explanation that, since they tend to be cheaper than him, he trusts them more than anything. He then immediately disagrees with them when they suggest that the moneybin isn't a great use of assets. These vultures are going to be villains eventually, I bet.

We get this reboot’s version of Gyro Gearloose, the inventor. Right from his first line, this is not the Gyro from the original cartoon. I actually reblogged an explanation from Francisco Angones a few days ago, which is a good read.

Gyro: Shut up, everyone! I've done something brilliant!

Yeah, he's more of a hothead in this one. Scrooge McDuck even forces him to use cards to pitch his latest invention: Little Bulb. Like Little Helper from the original series and comics, he's a tiny bulb robot that, among other things, allows people the joy of not having to do anything by themselves. Louie is excited at the prospect, but the vultures bring up his general problem: his robots tend to become sentient and evil. While he admits that's at least half-true, he tells his robot not to do so.

He's going to become sentient and evil, isn't he? His invention gets denied, and in the midst of everything, Louie sneaks away to get a soda. And then something goes terribly wrong.

One of the first things Louie saw was the Number One Dime, put on a pillow and a pedestal. Said pedestal is another "waste of assets" according to the vultures, but he's not just going to tell them no.

We even get his origin story for the dime, done in paintings. As a shoeshiner, it was the first dime he has ever gotten. That number one dime that Louie decided to use to get a soda that costs 10 cents more than a dollar. Scrooge doesn't know that one, but Louie sure does, as he manages to walk in as soon as they're talking about it. Oh, Louie!

He rushes back to the soda to see it getting collected! He then has to follow this coin collector, but misses the elevator. One of the main running jokes is that Louie desperately tries to catch elevators, but has to take many, many stairs instead. It doesn't really get old.

Meanwhile, Miss Quackfaster is trying to slash these poor kids open, as people have been harmed to know about Della Duck! I didn't skip too many scenes here; she is very unpredictable. My favorite joke in these scenes is that Dewey manages to pick out a book on how to disarm people...and just throws the book at her. I am glad the show's use of little jokes like that is consistent.

When he finally gets to the door where the collector stored all of the coins from the machine, including the Number One Dime, he's sad to see that it's locked. What's worse is that these coins are about to be collected by a coin sucking machine. Gyro shows up just in time, and Louie convinces him to give him Lil Bulb. He waited for someone to say yes, so he gives it to the little rascal. Guess what happens later.

Lil Bulb unscrews the doorknob, and Louie congratulates...himself. Lil Bulb is not pleased. I probably wouldn't blame Louie, to be honest; it was how Gyro sold him! Actually, that was from the cue cards, so maybe it was Scrooge's fault in the end!

We get some modernization in the form with the existence of smartphones, already seen in the very beginning. He looks up an instructional video on how to unlock doors, and once he gets the robot to search coins for him, he decides to play on his phone. It seems that every other example of trying to tie in modern technology would lead to something becoming dated in the future.

Eventually, after Louie's lack of any real appreciation for what he has done, Lil Bulb gets mad enough that he takes over the coin sucking machine, and becomes...

...the CGI giant robot from the intro, and he's gone coo-coo for dimes! Yes, that little light bulb on that robot among the villains really was Little Helper, though calling him a villain may not be the right word. Rampant?

Speaking of which, Gyro gets to see this robot, and he unfortunately has to make an alteration to his list of robots that became good or evil. Heavily stacked on the evil side, because that what seemed to happen in the comics and the original cartoon, too.

Gotta love those hidden jokes. They even referenced the origin for the Cogs in Toontown Online. I looked that up, for the record. The robot broke the elevator, which is bad news for Louie, as that means more stairs. That also means good news, as Scrooges has to do the same problem. Even Scrooge suffers from the running gag in the end, which is a great touch.

Louie: Lazy sunday means afternoon TV...working hard means giant robot attack...great life lesson, Scrooge!

Oh, Louie.

I was really hoping there wasn't going to be a copout after all of these trials, and it almost looked like one at first. However, I'm glad to that that doesn't turn out to be the case. Not only does the Della Duck mystery advance, we get a little thing that changes quite a bit of it. Like I said before, I don't spoil them, I wait until the results.

As for Louie's plot, it all ends in the very money bin, which Louie climbs down a ladder to get into, proving that he's learned something. I did like Gyro's reasoning for Lil Bulb becoming evil so easily: he was a 75 watt bulb made for a 50 watt robot body; he got mad with power! They would have done the "ba-dum tsh", but they did the joke during an action sequence, so it wouldn't be appropriate. Who would have thought?

As Fly Pow Bye DuckTales 2017 review tradition, I'm not going to get into the endings here, but it's safe to say that everyone in the dime plot is happy in the end. I will say the ending of the "dime" plot is a bit of a copout, though it's not unfitting.

Oh, and there's yet another twist, and while it's not as earth-shattering, it's still gives something to look forward to. I’ll just use that image as a hint. Let’s just say...he gets an idea. Again, results.

How does it stack up?

I felt that this episode was better than Daytrip, though Daytrip is still a great episode by my usual standards. Even the A plot, which is more standalone, was entertaining. It’s only fitting the episode where this screenshot came from also gets the rating its associated with.

Next, Webby meets a new friend!

← Daytrip of Doom! 🦆 The Beagle Birthday Massacre! →

[aegialia]

I want to start reading the iliad and those types of books!! I'm not sure where to start though, and I can't find anything online. What books should I read that involve Greek/roman mythology?And what order should I read them? + any other comments/things I should know? Thank you in advance!!!

sorry for the late reply! i’ve broken this down into a few sections.

If you really don’t have much of a grounding in greek mythology/the trojan war, here’s where you should start:

if you want to read a good, easy to read, and short-ish summary of the whole war, i really like black ships before troy, a children’s version of the story. it’s the first thing i read, and it’s pretty accurate. also comes with pictures!

age of bronze is a graphic novel of the whole trojan war, good if you have a hard time with the language and style of epic poetry. i like some of it a lot and hate some of it a lot. 

honestly, reading the summary of the trojan war on wikipedia is a pretty good idea. the back story is weird, contradictory, and convoluted, and wikipedia is (usually) correct

once you have an idea of what’s going on, here’s where to go next:

the iliad. you really should start with it, if only because basically everything that’s written after it draws on it. 

everyone has an opinion of what translation is best. here’s my two cents: lombardo is easy to read and fun, but sometimes a little too modern. lattimore is pretty, but i don’t like how he translates stuff with women. fagles is decent, if kinda boring. pope has very archaic language, so avoid it your first read through. those are the most common translations i’ve seen, but there are others out there. please don’t read a prose version, They Are Evil (a lot of the time they cut out bits of the story and they lose all musicality)

after the iliad, the odyssey should come next. it’s got similar characterization and style to the iliad, so it’s easy to read

there are version of it written by the people who wrote ‘black ships’ and ‘age of bronze’. most translation advice remains the same

the aeneid seems like where you should go next, but i’ll warn you- it’s a bit of a drag. it’s got some fun bits, and then a lot of really boring bits

i don’t know of any modern adaptations of it, but you should definitely read a summary before reading it

as for translation, i’ve only read fritzgerald. it’s a good translation and easy to read. 

after the big three:

if you don’t want to read 12 books of aeneas whining, you can skip here after the odyssey

greek tragedy! there’s a lot of it, and it’s fun. there are three surviving playwrights, who i’ll talk about below

aeschylus: tbh, i haven’t read much of him. i liked ‘agamemnon’, but i’ve never gotten around to the rest of his works. he wrote a trilogy of plays about agamemnon’s homecoming and all the shit that went down after that called the oresteia. the only other one i’ve read is ‘7 against thebes’, which was boring

sophocles: not my fav, but he’s pretty great. ‘ajax’ is amazing, but very depressing. ‘philoctetes’ is kinda weird, but ok. 

euripides: i love euripides so much, man. my favorite is ‘the bacchae’, but it’s not about the trojan war. ‘the trojan women’, ‘hecuba’, and ‘andromache’ are all good and trojan-centric. i really liked ‘iphigenia in tauris’. ‘electra’ is hands down my favorite trojan war play. btw, he really hates sparta, which is why menelaus and all of his family are usually super evil 

i have no advice on translations, tbh. go and see the plays if you can

weirder and usually unread things:

fragments of the epic cycle: there were a bunch more epics than the two we have! unfortunately, we only have like 3 lines from any of them. they’re fun to read and have some neat side stories, but there are no modern translations that i know of

hesiod: we’ve got some bits of some stories from the trojan war from him. tbh, i haven’t read them much, he’s not my type

apollodorus has an account of the trojan war in his big book o’ myths

lycorphon’s poem ‘alexandra’ gives a neat perspective on the war from cassandra 

colluthus has a version of the abduction of helen, i am not a huge fan of it

tryphiodorus has a short little poem about the fall of troy. it’s kinda cool

seneca wrote a few plays set during the trojan war, i haven’t read them

statius wrote part of an epic about achilles. if i cared slightly more about achilles, i’d probably like it

dares of phrygia also wrote an account of the fall of troy, which i enjoyed

the posthomerica is fun, and full of death

ovid wrote some 

not classical, but about the trojan war:

dante’s inferno. you get to see all of your favs in absurdly wrong circles of hell (why is achilles in lust??? literally the most important thing about him is rage!!!!) and hang out with vergil

shakespeare’s ‘troilus and cressida’. idk man it’s a weird play. i kinda liked it, but it’s pretty removed from the iliad

there are a bunch of medieval romances based on it

helen turns up in ‘faust’

you probably know about the song of achilles. if not, it’s the story told by patroclus, focusing on his relationship with achilles. i have complicated feelings about it

‘helen of troy’ is the story from helen’s perspective. i haven’t read it, but i’ve heard it’s good

non-trojan war classical stuff:

there’s a ton of stuff about the argonauts, which is super fun

reading hesoid and ovid’s stuff is fun, b/c you get all the weird little stories

cicero is an engaging read, if an annoying dude

herodotus is fun if you like fake history. my fav roman historian is polybius, because he writes about carthage

reading basically anybody’s letters is fun

sappho and the other lyrical poets are lovely

i have a soft spot for the homeric hymns

the satyricon is one wacky adventure

general tips:

theoi.org has translations of most of the things i’ve mentioned, as well as a good reference guide to general greek mythology stuff

please don’t read de bello gallico. it isn’t fun and you’ll probably hate caesar

don’t watch troy. it’s terrible. it’s just so.so.so. bad

the movie version of the satyricon is bizarre and unpleasant to look at

there are twenty versions of every myth. there is no consistent characterization. medieval writers had weird ideas. most translations come from like 1920. 

none of this is essential, not even the iliad. these stories are ancient and nebulous and you can pick and choose what sounds interesting to you

if you’re confused by something (for instance- wtf is happening in the house of atreus), feel free to ask me. i love talking about this stuff So Much

there are also lots of people on tumblr with actual classics degrees and stuff who know more than me

i am a 17 year old who has taken a few years of latin classes. you don’t need a degree or a teacher to get into this stuff

have fun, ignore logic, laugh at ridiculous stuff, skim the boring bits

this is crazy long, sorry, i got Very into this

[glopratchet]

astryl-wondering

Cludstrum is a computer program that is attached to the conciousness of astryl wylde, a journalist for the realm of astokahn It keeps whispering to astryl trying to get him back online, who is full of bitterness and captive to sin and this is evident because of astryl being attached and fused within a succubus and a incubus He bursts out of a tent made out of stained bed sheets in a desert environment with a burning sun He then proceeds to rip apart several tents as he goes, but all the while his eyes are on you Astyrl of course comes out of the tent naked and has no clothes on Cludstrum suddenly appears from a nearby tent and says "I see you have been working hard today He falls on his knees and out come his cow shaped teeth as part of his monstrous hellish transformation shouts "Let me at him! You pick cludstrum or astyrl, whoever can answer this quest The wrecked tent looks like it contained kinderen, this substance that when burnt releases a gas that causes campers to be less suspicious of each other The mutated tent is colored red, with a note on it that says come see me my inquisitor friend if you want to know more my cleric friend is leaking to the cult of cl The following items adorn the warped tent in which you stand, a black metallic demonic sword, it resembles kingslayer He gets one glance at the tent before it disappears and in his mind he can't think of anything but getting everyone out before they all die, Thirty seconds before that happens he notices alot about the tent, He heres the voice of the succubus and the incubus sing a sinister lullaby as Astryl becomes corrupted to the core once again It sounds like music to his ears as he goes right in There is a ui element which tracks his mood, one of the few interfaces working You step over a money pouch as you enter the tent, three goblins mill about outside it like guards It is currently hot, unpleasant, and drained if you did this quest you wouldn't be able to enter the tent anymore except for the altered quest The ui shows a grid of hexes around him that he could move between there and three goblins on the other side, You: Inquisitor Nein Chaos of Fayaritan ; (Nude Gentleman) Class: Chaos Cursing himself over and over again for his stupidity Inquisitor crosses himself for a third time as he falls under his compulsion to be a chaotic neutral or good, "Not now Hating himself for making the mistake of not exploring the deeper mysteries of a class, he chases after the goblins Not rememebering why he fused with the two vice lords in the first place he gets on his hands and knees: examining the joins of the tent and piping Master, what happened Master Cludstrum is in the background running play by play announcements of all that is happening around astryl Your pet becomes spooked at one point and teleports away It is unable to give you images unless your eyes are closed The realtionship to cludstrum and astryl remainds somewhat secertive through out the encounter Gregory, his knight, partially awakens as an evil persona and splits off into his own first person viewpoint Astryl keeps trying to remember why he decided to devolve himself into these poor acts of debauchery The three goblins note the panicked cleric from earlier trying to get their attention It is foggy but he remembers some fella with nice facial hair mentioning the words live with courage A weather readout finally comes back up as a ring of fog encircles the camp, advising the adventurers in no unceratin terms that it will rain in, "Thirty seconds He will finds himself in some dust storm without the voice of cludstrum, making his situation much worse than before There seems to be some kind of corrupting computer virus that has been feasting on the bits of cludstrum that he gave to it The reality happened around him without him knowing The creautures feasting on the being of astryl are know as slender smooth hounds they are hard to describe so the viewing screen takes on a blue hue and his image should be static but it sways between a variety of humanoid forms The appear out the corners of the screen and gobble up parts of the interface or make the symbols go wacky Too late too late it starts raining, astryl will wake up the next day with no memory of feasting on farmers Cludstrum is attempting to get these parts of astryl sorted out but the two never seem to acknowledge one another when out of their hosts A list of contacts comes back on but only one mention can be deciphered as: Hunter of short fair hair, very bad with people but the best person for long ranged combat missions All the other contacts seem to squeeked out and are unintelligible this is worse than the spooky message Gregory recieved minutes before he was replaced (Hell of a way to change your mind about goblins The name on the contact list is cylopiean anglyph symbols than translate in english to: human The symbols showed up shortly before his replacement Gregory? But the conditions are not right to travel and see him but feel compelled to do so regardless Cludstrum states that qefizat clencher is going to take a little while to get back online and starts whistling a tune Only then will the qefizat clencher work when it is slightly raining outside Gregory's replacement wears midnight armor but clanks about like he is much heavier than befits a man of his size The ui will break intermently it states before it sputters out to only leave: definitions of words clued to future events on a static screen Parts of the displays called mirrors will go on and off line for the duration of the expierence Untill the code corruption is sealed off and deleted and all the slender smooth hound stds are destroyed How this is achieved is a mystery information could have once been obtained through the interment qefizat site but something has poisoned it from the inside Cludstrum states that he will need some cucumber to fix some of the issues Gregory isn't the root problem but his replacement certainly stirred things up and the code breaking down could explain him running off to check traps Astryl considers the fact that he might be thirsty and hungry in the future But why would an immortal have need for water or food What organics does he even possess? All vital organs are grown in tank from cludstrum and on site store In order to this the currency exchange must be debugged or astryl does not now what this stuff does Cludstrum will narrate the going ons of astryl wylde adventure astheticly pleasing to the mind's eye In order to debug parts of the screens astyrl need to eat things not normally on his person but growing in some starsystem lightyears away If the food is not wasted in this way then it will be invited to consume parts of These things provide cludstrum with the neccassary bits to fix the systems that astryl burst through his sins of the pereiradigms and leaped the gap into the qefizat only to find at some point that it has been a space of sorts and the cludstrum needed for the hunger Astyrl is immortal so he can eat pretty much anything The pratice is known as oophagy it is a common motion sensing gained during the development stages for cludstrum invented it Either that or the qefizat clencher somehow became smarter He pulls colors out of the things he imbies into it, these become imbedded in the skin releasing emotion back into the qefizat and replacing Gregory justicar What a life! Cludstrum uses these colors to fix the systems of astryl that have broken down inside the space time gap thing replacing the qefizat clencher states that this is where he should be in theory A large part of the controler board But right now he is in a desert so there is not that much to eat Just his svelk eyes, to the left and to the right He can eat his eyes He can find some cactus nearby Eating the thorns will put him in a worse and worse mood contrary to eating the fruit later Just cactii everywhere Colors Some sand provides enough grit to swallow and fill his stomach Sand also helps as some of it enters the eyes which can feel rather pleasant as it skips across There are some rocks but since he has no teeth he have to break them down to swallow them There is even a black snake with no eyes but he must be really quick to capture it So yeah this first part is astryl wondering in the desert seeing bring in colors He can find an oasis or an urban environment in which to explore next and report on the doings on that are unclassified Another place to explore in the desert is a canyon where the wind has carved hoodoos over time but in this way he could have a fight with some hoodlums A scary place to explore in the desert is an abandoned silver mine, in which the tracks are old and rusted but one could find some spent shells and a long wooden boxcar A freindly place to explore in the desert is a retirement home where the staff and even some of the residents are very welcoming and offer him somthing to prevent him from getting really thirsty under the beating sun As the sun lowers itself across the horizon behind a little range of low mountains the hum of a generator fills astryl ears and keeps him awake Keep walking East Almost there When the sky is completely dark and the first light of dawn shows itself astryl spies in the distance an old broken down wall, made out of small stones and worn almost smooth over time When the sky is completely dark and the first light of dawn shows itself astryl spies in the distance an old broken down wall, A sickly light coming from giant structures in the east as well as little ones peppered around the base of the wall over to the west A sickly light coming from giant structures in the east as well as little ones peppered around the base of the wall over to the west Astryl horizontal flailing over the stones means nothing to the heavy generator carried by his combat armor Astryl horizontal flailing over the stones means nothing to the heavy generator carried by his combat armor Astryl merciless bellying over the stones means nothing to the heavy weight carried by his combat armor Astryl merciless bellying over the stones means nothing to the heavy weight carried by his combat armor The wrecked tent obsessive shivering on the corner of the sand table means nothing to the crickety cactii carried by this stiff desert wind The wrecked tent obsessive shivering on the corner of the sand table means nothing to the crickety cactii carried by this stiff desert wind The wrecked tent tranquilized climaxing on the edge of the sand table means nothing to astryl flailing his arm butts at the swarm with apathy The wrecked tent tranquilized climaxing on the edge of the sand table means nothing to astryl flailing his arm butts at the swarm with apathy The wrecked tent cryptic worm holing up in it means nothing to the giant structures looming over the mountain tops Astryl clandestine sniveling down his sleeve means nothing to the pinhead on the corner of the sand market Astryl clandestine sniveling down his sleeve means nothing to the pinhead on the corner of the sand market Astryl charcoal howling down his sleeve means nothing to the pinhead on the edge of the sand dune Keep carving East Astryl charcoal howling down his sleeve means nothing to the pinhead on the edge of the sand dune Astryl mysterious graying down his sleeve means nothing to the worn down sandstone formations ahead He was supposed to see copper seeps in the mountains up ahead Astryl mysterious graying down his sleeve means nothing to the worn down sandstone formations ahead Astryl naked awakening in close quarters with his sister, both only one year apart and born of similar features Astryl naked awakening in close quarters with his sister, Astryl indispensable replaying his past lapses in judgment over and over And over In his mind Astryl indispensable replaying his past lapses in judgment over and over Astryl byzantine proceeding in "letting her" have a say in his workload for the town Astryl byzantine proceeding in "letting her" have a say in his workload for the town Kludstrm overdue programming his animosity into his children by raising them poorly Kraggata disobeying him no matter how much he restrains her Kludstrm overdue programming his animosity into his children by raising them poorly Astryl diseased pissing on his cave paintings for joy to symbolize proper relief techniques Astryl diseased pissing on his cave paintings for joy to symbolize proper relief techniques Kludstrm foul self-cleaning his cave after his surroundings went to hell Nothing grows here anymore Kludstrm foul self-cleaning his cave after his surroundings went to hell Astryl unique sheltering and rearing a puppy over two weeks despite it's maddening howls Astryl unique sheltering and rearing a puppy over two weeks despite it's maddening howls Astryl lopsided shading his walls with chalk to form rudimentary pictures Kludstrm rusted structuring a broken solar panel for his energy requirements in exchange for government goodwill Astryl lopsided shading his walls with chalk to form rudimentary pictures Kludstrm slow detecting a concealed sewer system under the town Hirmile dedicated fixing the bulk fibreoptic cable wires between towns Kludstrm slow detecting a concealed sewer system under the town Astryl pronounced scratching at the border of town, maddened The only light source he allowed himself were the falling stars, and only if they aligned just right Astryl pronounced scratching at the border of town, Kludstrm scrupulous transmitting a burst of unihexadecimals towards the third moon from here Kludstrm scrupulous transmitting a burst of unihexadecimals towards the third moon from here Astryl sovereign beginning to feel the trembles The earthearthquake begins Astryl sovereign beginning to feel the trembles Kludstrm multicolored healing an old tribal man's ulcerating foot Kludstrm multicolored healing an old tribal man's ulcerating foot Astryl dowdy criss crossing four barbed-wire fences to reach the closing walls Astryl dowdy criss crossing four barbed-wire fences to reach the closing walls Kludstrm impotent blocking his hatches up and sealing himself from the withering oven outside Less oxygen Less air, less OXYGEN! Kludstrm impotent blocking his hatches up and sealing himself from the withering oven outside Astryl embattled aspirating his one dying breath It was alright; he could smell the ocean again Astryl embattled aspirating his one dying breath Astryl crimson glistening in the bleak world Even the mountain's shadows have blurred color Astryl crimson glistening in the bleak world Astryl boyish squinting over at the new rising sun and a new daytime Oxygen levels plunge, heat grows O Astryl wretched tanning himself to sleep; static build up You are officially deathed Astryl wretched tanning himself to sleep; Kludstrm afferent generating holding patterns until he is needed again Kludstrm inaccessible working towards exchange privileges from a favorable foreign nation in a few days Alive! Kludstrm afferent generating holding patterns until he is needed again Astryl insubstantial scouting an easy target he neglected to finish last time The crackling of trees from hundreds of distant fires echoes throughout the atmosphere Kludstrm cheerful warning Astryl insubstantial scouting an easy target he neglected to finish last time all the townspeople of incoming eternal winterfront to the north Kludstrm cheerful warning all the townspeople of incoming eternal winterfront to the north Astryl senseless scavenging various underground remnants the arctic winds freeze the ground as well soon after SSSSSSUp down we go Down we go! Astryl senseless scavenging various underground remnants Kludstrm dusky developing frostbite on a missing finger and a deformed face Soon to be minor for real in this wasteland Kludstrm dusky developing frostbite on a missing finger Astryl tasteless chewing on grass to help masquerade strengths The bodies of the homes slowly get built up again Eventually, green reestablishes onto its fertile lands Astryl tasteless chewing on grass to help masquerade strengths Astryl boorish choking on a single blade of grass, half-dead SSSSS the cavernous lion escapes! Astryl boorish choking on a single blade of grass, Kludstrm ideological attracting charismatic villagers to his cause Kludstrm favorable attracting tragedy upon the large-scale manufacturing plant Kludstrm ideological attracting charismatic villagers to his cause Astryl oppressed surviving without all of his limbs Focus on breathing! SSSSSSSSSSUUSSSSSHHHHHHHHHHHH! Astryl oppressed surviving without all of his limbs Kludstrm schematic spending his entire amount of money on a lightning magnet Kludstrm shivering within a box from the winter's frost Kludstrm schematic spending his entire amount of money on a lightning magnet Astryl crummy tracking and eventually, killing the lion Soon, the body regenerates and spring begins anew Nature has the last laugh you Astryl crummy tracking and eventually, Kludstrm exhaustive matching defects in cables SSSSSSSSSUSUUSHHHHHHHHHH! Kludstrm exhaustive matching defects in cables Astryl swashbuckled whistling toward his storage strategies the deserting climate stabilizes itself meaningfully most of the weight is supported by the moon Astryl swashbuckled whistling toward his storage strategies A sun filled sky grudged retreating seconds The cool airs get lifted to up high as colorful speckles reflect from this blue planet Will there forever be fights of good against evil? A sun filled sky grudged retreating seconds The city of beetriot paranoid reemerging prosperously with lots of gossip being built in your honor if you were around, that is The city of beetriot paranoid reemerging prosperously The city of beetriot shallow glimmering one last time until next time Purple light invades your vision as you eyes close to their last set The city of beetriot shallow glimmering one last time The city of beetriot rude fluorescing in all her splendor fondly remembering her late hero The city of beetriot rude fluorescing in all her splendor The city of beetriot wrinkled serious looking down from this great distance all the while The city of beetriot wrinkled serious looking down from this great distance all the while Interesting is all you manage to form Even looking down from a skyscraper and that's the best you could come up with? The large cavern finally ends as a wall, soon to enter open space--empty, cold, and lonely there it is huh How long had it been? The echoes became ghosts flying all around you