#like i did get a good grasp of numbers and probabilities from my simulation games obsession as a child

[circumlocutive]

I'm lucky being east Asian and ADHD and having zero interest whatsoever in gambling lmao

[demansiabites]

So, the 2010′s are over, what the fuck is up with that one? I spent more time in video games during the 2010′s than I probably spent in school, so I’ve naturally been trying to rank 10 games as my favorites of the decade. Of course, I’m a dumb bitch so I couldn’t think of anything past four or so games that I loved during the decade. So under the cut, here are my top 10 games that I played during the decade ranked in idunno an order I guess:

Number 10: Far Cry 3 (November 29th, 2012), aka the worst fucking game I’ve ever enjoyed. Far Cry 3 is a video game, that’s one of the few things I’m certain of, so naturally it has video game elements. Story, gameplay, characters, some vague semblance of doing something. If someone asked me to describe how well it did any of those things, it’d probably go something like this: “The story was fucking garbage, there was one good character that they killed halfway through, there was like one good mission in the entire game, and the gameplay was passable for a first person shooter”.  So then what the fuck, why is it this high up? I don’t know, but for some reason I kept playing this god damn game at least once every year for the past few years. Even though I had to use uPlay, even though the characters are unlikable as fuck, even though the story feels like it was written in one night long bender including some combination of Vodka and Red Bull that probably resulted with at least one person in the hospital, I kept playing this fucking game. And I think I might have figured out why, it’s just fucking stupid. There are very few games I would consider a “survival” game where it doesn’t actually have survival elements, and Far Cry 3 is one of them. The entire map itself wants you dead honestly. Including a cast of tigers, giant birds, pirates, bears, giant cliffs, and sharks, there’s no safe place on the map. Getting from one end of the map to the other will include at least one fight, no matter what you do. The game gives you the stupidest tools I can think of to get you across the map. There’s literally no reason for them to give you a flare gun, but they do because why not. A wingsuit? You get that shit like, 60% of the way through the game, and that last 40% is mostly me fucking around with the added mobility they should’ve given me from the start.  I fucking hate this game so much, purely because I enjoy it more than this game has the right to make someone enjoy. I give it a 4/10. If someone asked me of any good survival games, I would recommend something else then remember Far Cry 3 a couple hours later when taking a shower. Then I would probably play it myself, because it’s the guiltiest of pleasures.

Number 9: BioShock (August 21st, 2007), aka I never said all the games came out this decade, I just said I played them. BioShock is one of those games people consider a “masterpiece”. It’s got an amazing story, revolutionary gameplay, fantastic characters. I may agree with that, but that’s not why it’s here. I bought this game and for the following three days I stayed up playing it from 8 PM to 7 AM because I kept getting so fixed into the game that I lost my passage of time. If that’s not top 10 material I don’t know what the fuck is. BioShock is a 9/10 game, play it if you know you’re not doing anything for the next 3 days because you probably won’t realize how long you’ve been playing it. Also it’s actually pretty scary sometimes, so be warned.

Number 8: Mount and Blade: Warband (March 30, 2010), aka the game where I said I was going to take over the entire map then spent 60 hours getting 33% of the way through that goal. Mount and Blade: Warband is a perfectly accurate simulation of the days under the feudal system, because everything takes 8 years to fucking happen. Travelling across the map takes minutes at a time, battles take minutes, starting a castle’s siege takes 3 in-game days, then the siege itself takes anywhere from 10 real life minutes to an hour based on how mean the game is feeling. Do I dislike this? No, not at all, I love how large scale this game. As a matter of fact, it’s one of the largest scale games I’ve played ever. Battles can have hundreds of troops at a time, the world is dominated by kingdoms with actual politics, there are hundreds of named NPCs in the game almost every single one of which you can fight or ally with. It’s fucking insane. Mount and Blade: Warband gets an 8/10 from me, it’s not at all for everyone but it’s certainly for me.

Number 7: Resident Evil 4 (January 11, 2005), aka “wait the same person that played Leon Scott Kennedy also voiced the Merchant?” I don’t think I have anything new to say about Resident Evil 4, so I’m not really going to bother trying to critique this game. I will say I beat it at least 4 or 5 times throughout the decade, having only owned it for a few years, and that I also played it with my significant other during that time and after that they bought it to play it themselves. The only other thing I feel worth mentioning is god damn did they make Leon Scott Kennedy fucking THICC. You may think the artillery are the guns you’re carrying around anymore, but nah, them cheeks could fucking fracture a skull. Resident Evil 4 gets an 8/10 from me, I would buy it at a high price. Also I love Ada Wong.

Number 6: Danganronpa Another Episode: Ultra Despair Girls (September 25th, 2014), aka the reason I would never recommend somebody to follow me on this fucking website. Danganronpa is by far, the best series I’ve ever seen have so many crippling flaws in it. Thankfully, Ultra Despair Girls manages to avoid those flaws by being just straight up a different game entirely. Most of Danganronpa’s flaws comes from how many characters they have. Ultra Despair Girls manages to fix that by not having as many characters, but expanding heavily on the characters that it does have. The motherfuckers literally made the hyperactive serial killer my favorite character in fiction, I don’t know what y’all expect of me at this point. Also, the game manages to have gameplay that is actually suited for someone such as myself. I absolutely adore the class trials in Danganronpa, but visual novels aren’t my thing most of the time. Danganronpa is certainly an exception, but Ultra Despair Girls’s third person shooter gameplay holds my attention like a vice, that shit was made for me. Danganronpa Another Episode: Ultra Despair Girls gets a 7/10 from me, it’s certainly not the best game but god damn if it didn’t ruin me.

NOW ENTERING, THE LARGE LADS, WHERE RANKING MATTERS

Number 5: Plants vs. Zombies (May 5, 2009), aka the sentiment from the memories I have playing it is enough to put it on here. I played Plants vs. Zombies one time in the past decade, and that was just last year. But, I played it with my significant other while I was in England visiting them. We bought it for 1 pound from a game store, and played it almost every. single. day. after we bought it. We beat the main story at least three times, and one of those times I played. Honestly, it’s still a really fucking fun game, and I wouldn’t go back and change a second of the time I played it. Plants vs. Zombies gets a 9/10 from me, it’s an incredibly polished game and the memories I have of it means it’ll hold a special place in my heart for a long time to come.

Number 4: Fallout: New Vegas (October 19, 2010), aka 234 hours of my life I will never get back. Fallout: New Vegas is a special experience that I’m certain will never have a replacement. It’s reached a place in my mind where if I ever want to experience a game like it again, there is no “other game” to go to, I just go back to New Vegas and play through it all again. I give Fallout: New Vegas an 8/10, it’s incredibly buggy, but I’ll never be able to escape its grasp.

Number 3: The Outer Worlds (October 25th, 2019), aka wait there’s another Fallout: New Vegas, damn that’s rad The Outer Worlds was introduced to me through this trailer, upon which everyone was hyping it up. The game was made by the developers of Fallout: New Vegas, it looked like it had way more polish, and it was a space adventure. So naturally, with all of these positives, I was fucking horrified at what we were going to get. I was so unbelievably afraid that Obsidian was going to release the game and it was going to be bad. Well, I bought it a couple weeks after release, and let me tell you what the days after were like: BioShock, it was fucking BioShock again, god DAMMIT. The Outer Worlds is a fun, amazingly written, anti-corporation, fuck you Bethesda, space adventuring, really fucking fun game. I’m pretty sure I did almost every side quest, only missing on a couple companion quests, and I did everything I could to get the ending I sought after the most. I wanted nothing more than to topple the Capitalist Assholes, so I did. Not only did the game let me do that, but it has LGBTQ+ characters, and holy shit are some of them comparable to the UV Rays the sun is trying to fucking end me with.  The Outer Worlds receives a 9/10 from me, and I should play it again.

Number 2: Fallout 2 (September 30th, 1998), aka wow this game is the most dated piece of media, can I play it forever? I honestly have no fucking clue why I fell so in love with Fallout 2. It’s got some real problematic elements, homophobic NPCs, some of the worst parts of society, literal slavers? Literal slavers? But for some reason, I’m happy playing a game with them, because there is almost no consequence to just wiping them the fuck out. Every time I play through this game, it’s just routine for me to kill the slavers, the drug producers, the Scientologists. It’s like, the most selective experience ever, I could probably do quests for these people, but nah, I wipe them out and the game just stands there with its hands in its pockets not saying a word. It doesn’t try to stop me, it doesn’t give me some stupid negative trait for what I did. So long as I survive the encounter, I’m free to just move on with my day. On top of that, it’s also got amazing characters, and an amazing story. You can tell the story’s amazing, because in Fallout 3 Bethesda tried to do it again, and failed miserably. Fallout 2 gets an 8/10 from me, it’s a buggy piece of shit, but with a mod that fixes it it’s a way for me to spend another 90 hours.

Number 1: OneShot (December 8th, 2016), aka the best video game experience. OneShot is one of those special game experiences where I have nothing that I dislike about it. The main character is one of my favorite characters ever, they are an absolute baby. Every other character in the game is likable, as well. I have honest to god tried to come up with something I dislike about OneShot and I just can’t think of it. I may not replay it multiple times, but I don’t need to. I’m so in love with OneShot, I don’t need to play it multiple times. As a matter of fact, I don’t need to play it. I don’t own OneShot, my significant other does, they bought it at my recommendation. OneShot will never stop being one of the most special experiences to me.  OneShot is a 10/10 game, and I genuinely, with all my heart, recommend anyone who has even slightly similar tastes to me to play it. It’s one of the most lovable games in gaming, has exclusively likable characters, and I will always adore Niko from it.

[allitalksfandom]

Happy belated Nagamas!

Hello @darkflierliesel! Sorry for the extensive delay (offline life very much got in the way), but here’s your @nagamas gift! I decided to write Innes x Vanessa with the sci-fi AU prompt. I’ll have a post about the worldbuilding behind the AU up soon. 

Rated T for implied sexy situations. Word count, including dividers: 2,186

“Vanessa Bergfalk seeking permission to depart the planet. Ship designated number five-seven-four-six-five-seven-five, call name ‘Titania,’ over.”

           “Frelia space command grants Vanessa Bergfalk permission to depart, over.”

           She heard footsteps behind her as she began the rhythmic spaceflight departure maneuvers. She would recognize those steps anywhere. Fortunately, much of the departure work was automatic on the part of the ship, and her share was almost automatic at this point, too.

           King Innes waited until they had cleared Frelia’s atmosphere to speak. “I’m pleased to see that my efforts to streamline space command’s clearance protocol have paid off.”

           She set the ship to autopilot before she responded. “Your Majesty.” She stood up and bowed-her uniform’s short skirt did not allow for a curtsy.

           Was she imagining things, or did he frown? Regardless, his expression returned to its usual neutral state. (Some of her coworkers said that he tended to wear a critical facial expression, but she always thought there was something welcoming about it.)

           “I heard that your parents celebrated their thirty-fifth wedding anniversary. Congratulations.”

           She wasn’t sure what the end result of this conversation would be, but she took the bait. “Thank you. My parents bought each other some relics from Valni.” Her parents were researchers studying the ancient inhabitants of that Frelian moon.

           “That sounds nice.” A pause. “I have to say, I’m pleasantly surprised that you’re willing to talk to me, Vanessa.”

            “I don’t follow, Your Majesty.”

           “You’ve been avoiding me for two weeks. It would hardly have been appropriate for me to chase you down, given that I’m your employer. Or perhaps you feared a further relationship with me could affect your position in the Royal Cadets?”

           Speaking of automatic, her face flushed almost instantly. The muscles in her jaw tightened. “I had thought that you had lost interest.” Her reasoning sounded pathetic to her ears, and King Innes certainly didn’t seem to be buying it. She backpedaled, saying “I wasn’t sure what your intentions were, if you wanted to keep having…” She grasped for a word. “Liaisons. Or if you hoped to date, or if you simply wanted to forget about the whole thing.”

           “Ideally, this is the sort of thing a prospective couple discusses together.”

             Vanessa tapped her index fingers together. “To be honest, I have little experience with this sort of thing.” Embarrassing to say, yes, but probably evident to him, anyway.

           “And I have little experience with small talk, which is why this conversation is torturing us both.”

           She waved a hand dismissively. “I wouldn’t say it’s that bad!”

           “Good.” Her liege definitely wasn’t frowning now.

             Her years of training had made Vanessa used to a steady schedule, and she awoke early to eat breakfast with the ship’s medic.

Moulder Austen was not only a priest of the Order of Peter; he also was an accomplished medic. Vanessa was grateful for his company on their journey. He was infinitely less distracting than the king, at the very least.

           He was finishing a conversation on his Mind View when Vanessa entered the small dining area. The useful tool functioned as a visor that pulled over one eye; the device was used to transmit thought and images for the purpose of a simulated conversation. It could even receive documents. Its basis on neural networks made it difficult to hack, which made it well worth the money spent on repairs during the Solar Stone War.

           Father Austen blinked five times in quick succession, causing the screen to retract. “Good morning, Vanessa. I hope you had a restful night.”

           “I have my best sleep on a ship, Father.” Her parents found it odd how she and her elder sister, Syrene, preferred the dorm-style furnishings of a spaceship to their reasonable accommodations of their childhood bedrooms, but tough training made her grateful for the most sparse of beddings. “And yourself?”

           “Unfortunately, I am fussier than I would like to be, but no matter. I was just Exchange Viewing with Natasha Aquino.”

           Vanessa nodded in recognition of the name. “Are you in touch with the clergy from the Gradoan sector of the solar system, Father?”

           “He has been a great asset in terms of a present concern of mine, so you could say that.” The door to the room slid open, and His Majesty entered.

           Both Father Austen and Vanessa greeted him, though the former was not nearly as surprised by his presence as Vanessa was.

           She turned to the priest. “I forgot how sensitive your hearing is. And His Majesty’s, for that matter.”

           The two men instantly responded, Father Austen offering to examine her hearing and King Innes questioning the noise pollution standards of the country’s spacecraft.

           “My performance on the auditory tests was within acceptable levels as of testing last month, Father, but thank you. And Your Majesty, I suspect any damage to my hearing is from the spacecraft relics I have been restoring on my break day.”

           “Right,” said the king. “If I remember correctly, that scholar from Renais had sent you the docs containing their specs over the Mind View.”

           “Some of them, yes, but others I’ve found on my own in the Royal Cadet Record Library.”

           Father Austen cleared his throat, and this time it was her liege who was startled. He turned back to Vanessa. “I suppose you can know about Father Austen’s project. You see, he has been investigating rumors of collaboration between Renais and what remains of the Magic Wielders of the Gradoan sector. It’s called Project Torch. Have you heard of it on any of your travels?”

           Given that magic was found to be a byproduct of the last few centuries of technological advancement, a fair number of humans had developed the abilities to cast spells. Between that and electricity, an ancient technology, torches were something reserved for storybooks. Given the fact that it seemed to be a secret, Vanessa doubted that the project was a historical reenactment. “‘Project Torch?’”

           “According to some chemical theorists, Fomortiis influenced his army using pheromones that affected aggression in non-human species. If that were the case, then, surely it would be possible to engineer chemicals to produce the opposite effect.”

           “While that would make things easier for us cadets, wouldn’t a chemical like that override free will?”

           “Ah, and that’s the source of the debate. To what extent it would change an individual’s personality is, again, theoretical at best. There’s also the matter of modifications that unscrupulous characters could make to cause other emotional reactions in those exposed to the pherenomes.”

           “Not to mention that its usage could affect relations with groups like the Mogalls from Za’ha’s moon, Bigl,” added Father Austen. Relations between humans and other species had been strained since the war.

           “What do the pheromones have to do with Renais?” Vanessa had a feeling she already knew the answer.

           King Innes did not answer at first. “The rulers of Renais did not take the loss of their friend well. Yet while Queen Eirika strives for peace, and I have always been the first to criticize King Ephraim, I do not believe that they would take such a risk.”

           Vanessa had met the princess during that fateful meeting with King Hayden, but she was surprised that the woman wanted to speak to her personally before they departed Frelia.

           The room where they met was functional, with a small table, three chairs, and a screen that connected to Mind View.

           The princess appeared as composed as one could be in such a situation. Beside her was Seth Lapointe, Head Keeper of the Crown. Vanessa averted her eyes from his wound, instead looking at Princess Eirika.

           “First of all, thank you for fighting beside us.”

           “Think nothing of it, Your Highness.”

           The princess moved to sit down; Vanessa and Sir Lapointe followed suit.

           The princess tapped her cheek with her finger. “According to reports, you’re about my age but well-recognized for your accomplishments in the Annual Royal Cadet Games.”

           “In the course of my studies, I learned a bit about Frelia’s Royal Cadets. Last year, you ranked twenty-fifth out of the all-time record for the Time Trial?” The Head Keeper blinked five times, opening the record in Mind View and using Exchange View to project it on the screen.

           “That is true. I decided to attend the Royal Cadet Academy and follow in my sister’s footsteps.”

           “I see that you studied ancient spacecraft.” The Head Keeper winked five times, which allowed him normal vision while keeping the Exchange View on the screen. The tone in his voice indicated that her profile, which now graced the screen, had given him pause.

           “I had originally planned on following in my parents’ footsteps and working in the research labs on Valni.”

           “There’s nothing wrong with that,” said the princess warmly. “I assume that you followed in your sister’s footsteps instead? My own brother taught me how to fight.” She looked at Vanessa, her gaze suddenly intent. “As a younger sibling, I’m sure you can understand…my situation.”

           Vanessa nodded slowly.

           “More than anything, it’s compassion and a strong heart that will get us through this mission. If we have that, we will reunite with my brother, and you’ll return triumphant to your family.”

*****

           They had a smooth landing, as expected, and they managed to complete their port registration in an efficient and speedy matter; King Innes expressed mild bewilderment that King Ephraim had taken his suggestions on how to streamline the process to heart. “Then again, it may have been Eirika’s doing.”

           Their escort consisted of two members of the Crown’s Keepers. While Vanessa did not recognize one of their companions, the second was a familiar face.

           “It’s good to see you, Franz.”

           Franz Fortier was scarcely old enough to be called an adult when Vanessa had first met him, so it was bizarre to see the slightest bit of stubble on his chin. Presumably he had missed the hairs while shaving due to their light color. “Vanessa! My brother will be disappointed he missed running into you.”

           “The last time we talked on Mind View, he said that he had left the Crown’s Keepers to focus on his artwork.”

           Franz tilted his head slightly. “He wants to, yes, but he’s only semi-retired from the force. Unfortunately for him, he’s been hounded by new recruits hoping to get some wisdom from a war hero.” He blushed. “They’ve even been talking to me. I just tell them that I learned everything from Sir Lapointe. Granted, my father was his role model…”

           They continued to make friendly conversation while his fellow Crown’s Keeper drove the subatmospheric vehicle used and beloved by Crown’s Keepers, the Stallion model.

           Vanessa preferred Titania, and had had many passionate discussions with Crown’s Keepers on the subject of subatmospheric versus spaceflight vehicles. Princess Tana had even joined in on the debates, and Vanessa found that she had much of her brother’s strength of conviction.

           Upon arrival at the residence of King Ephraim and Queen Eirika, Vanessa and Father Austen were left to wait outside the meeting room. Vanessa kept herself busy by reading explanatory Exchange Views from Lute Rayne, her scholarly friend from the war. Vanessa had asked the purple-haired woman what she knew about a reference to a long-ago civilization in one of her ancient schematics meant, which had led to a history lesson.

           Vanessa had finally finished reading Lute’s Exchange View. After shutting off the Mind View, she rubbed at her eyes. She stood up automatically at the sound of King Innes walking towards her and Father Austen.

           He shook his head with the smallest of movements. They know nothing.

           “Perhaps I had wanted to uncover something, play the hero.”

           Vanessa’s quarters were more crowded than usual that night. The king lay under the blanket next to her, arms folded behind his head.

           “That doesn’t sound like you, Your Majesty. You’re a practical man, and you wanted to make sure that they weren’t making the same mistakes as their lost friend.”

           He looked at her out of the corner of his eye. “I thought I asked you not to call me that in here. Unless you want to-”

           She elbowed him lightly in his ribs, blushing.

           “I deserved that. But that reminds me, we should address what, exactly, is happening between us.”

           Vanessa pursed her lips in thought. “Actually, I can tell that you’re still preoccupied about Project Torch. We can talk about that.”

           The king sounded grateful as he spoke. “Rumors do not simply happen for no reason. I believe I can trust the Renais twins, which means four options remain. One, Project Torch is happening in Renais and they are ignorant of it. Two, they have been prevented from telling me about it. Three, someone or a group of someones wants to discredit them and has started this rumor. And fourth, Project Torch does exist, but in some other capacity. You know that I have little faith in Carcino…”

           Vanessa nodded slowly as he spoke. “What does this mean for Frelia?”

           He sighed. “We keep listening.”

           “We stay on guard.”

           “Ever vigilant.”

           “Starting tomorrow.” Vanessa closed her eyes.

[lechevaliermalfet]

Rise, and Escape – A Long Look at Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter

Quick note: This deep dive write-up was originally posted elsewhere in May of 2015.  I’m polishing it for reposting here.  In addition, for those interested, a while back I recorded a podcast-type thing for a project called Pause Menu Monologues, which was being done by an acquaintance of mine.  Said monologue was derived from a cut-down version of this effortpost.  For those interested, you can listen to that here. Now, on to the main event.

As I prepare to leave my current job for another with far better opportunities, it feels tremendously appropriate to talk yet again about a game premised almost entirely on the idea of escape.

I’ve written about Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter before, but it was requested that I write about it again.  It was @squeemcsquee making the request, so I listened more than usual.  I’m sure I’ll probably wind up saying a lot of the same things I said on the first go-‘round, but who knows?

Well, here’s something I didn’t say before this writing: When I first introduced her to Dragon Quarter, she got into it.  Really into it.  Given her relative inexperience with Japanese role-playing games, this was surprising to me; it’s so different from the usual run of JRPGs, especially as the genre stood in about 2003 or so when the game first came out.  Contrarian that I am (at times), that’s part of what endeared it to me.  But as she pointed out, the things that made it seem out of the ordinary to me meant very little to her.  She didn’t have much “ordinary” to compare it against.

Unfortunately, watching her play it made me want to play it also.  Part of this is the natural (and deeply unfortunate) backseat-driving instinct I have whenever I’m watching someone do something that I’m familiar with, but feel they could be doing better, and in fact, if they’d just let me have the controller for a few minutes, I could show them exactly how… But part of it was also just that seeing the game played really made me want to be playing it myself.  This presented a problem, what with us having only the one copy.  It led to arguments.  Not, like, real arguments, but not exactly cutesy fun arguments, either.  We did, at the time, have both a working PlayStation 2 and a backward-compatible PlaySation 3, so it was only owning just the one copy of the game that was really a problem.  So the solution was pretty simple.

That’s how good it is. Dragon Quarter: The game so nice, we bought it twice.

Technically, we only bought the game once.  I bought it when it first came out, back in early 2003.  I played it for a while, and while it was pretty to look at, and it had good music, and the setting was interesting, it just didn’t come together for me.  Despite this, I had no desire to trade it in.  I had the feeling I was onto something good, though I couldn’t quite grasp it at the time.

I hadn’t had much experience with the Breath of Fire series then. I owned a copy of Breath of Fire IV, which was really the first game in the series that I even tried to tackle seriously.  Having unwillingly skipped over the 16-bit generation (owning a TurboGrafx-16 and five games hardly counts), my impression of the series at that time could basically be described as “like Final Fantasy, only not quite as inventive”.  It perhaps wasn’t a fair assessment, but I was basing this on the opinions of friends and acquaintances; I was unable to draw my own conclusions.  Still, I liked Breath of Fire IV well enough, even outside of some positive personal associations, so I hung on to Dragon Quarter, feeling relatively certain that one day, I would get the itch to try it again.

As it happened, I did, a couple years down the line.  The story and the characters were calling to me, and this time, everything finally clicked.

It probably helped that, around that time, I was beginning to become aware that JRPGs as a genre were becoming (or more likely, always had been) deeply conservative in terms of design, as well as character and story archetypes.  Realistically, this has probably been the case since the days of the original Dragon Quest, Final Fantasy, and Phantasy Star.  But I got into these types of games in late 1998 with Final Fantasy VII; I was new to the genre in those days, so even things that were rote and by-the-numbers were fresh and new to me then. And in fairness, I’ve enjoyed a number of these types of games.  But by this time, I found myself wanting games in the genre to branch out and do something new.  So many of the mechanical mainstays of the genre, the “traditions” of JRPG design, began life as frankly clunky workarounds for technology that wasn’t really up to giving us a less abstract simulation of the expected features of a fantasy adventure: travel, exploration, fighting monsters, finding treasure, getting new and more powerful gear, and saving the world and any number of princesses.  If you wanted to simulate all of these things on older hardware, you had to have a certain amount of abstraction.  So you had your turn-based battles, your random encounters, and so on, and so forth.

By the PS2 era, the technology was rapidly growing beyond the need to adhere to these ancient abstractions for any reason other than nostalgia’s sake.  It had been doing this for some time – Chrono Trigger jettisoned random encounters back in the mid-90s, but despite the universal acclaim that game received, no one seemed terribly interested in implementing any of its innovations elsewhere.  Developers were, by and large, unwilling to grow out of those old ways.  In part this might be down to the reluctance of their audience (or at least a very vocal portion of it) to part ways with those same traditions.  But whatever the reason, the result was the same: stagnation. Or so it felt to me.

I wanted something that was different from the JRPGs I’d played before.  Something that still offered the thought and planning that went into playing an RPG of any kind, something with a good story and interesting characters, but which went off the beaten path and did something different.

And so, in late 2004 or maybe early 2005, two years after I originally bought it, tried it, and hung it up for the foreseeable future, I started playing Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter again.

It’s an odd beast, this game, even when you look at it in the context of its own series.  All the more so, really.  The earliest Breath of Fire games got compared to the 8- and 16-bit Final Fantasy games, at least by most of the people I knew back then.  Really, a more apt comparison would be to Dragon Quest, but I hadn’t played any of those games, and I was part of a group of friends who oddly lacked much experience with that series, so maybe nobody was in a position to make that particular comparison.  With most of my friends, Dragon Quest (then known as Dragon Warrior due to trademark issues; I feel so old sometimes) was always “That game where you grind for hours and hours and then you finally say ‘fuck this!’ and go do something else, maybe play Final Fantasy or go outside or something, I dunno”.

Anyway, the whole series up to this point had been pretty standard high-fantasy fare, with the unique selling point being the main character’s ability to transform into a dragon. Most of the game mechanics beyond this were pretty straightforward.  My experience with the series at large was pretty much limited to some time spent on the fourth game, and some time spent goofing off with ROMs of the first two out of idle and quickly satisfied curiosity.

One other consistent feature of the series is that the main character, the aforementioned dragon-transforming person, is always a young blue-haired swordsman named Ryu, and there is always a blonde, winged young lady named Nina who typically focuses on magic. Additional characters tend to be of all shapes, sizes, and species.

Dragon Quarter, by contrast, occurs in a future dystopia where humankind, having pretty much destroyed the environment through the use of biologically engineered weapons called dragons, has retreated to a single subterranean dwelling called Sheldar.  There, they survive as best they can.

In this society, everyone is given a rank, called a D-ratio.  On the surface of things, this ratio is a measure of one’s current ability and future potential, and places limits on their social standing, the kinds of jobs they can hold, places they can live, and overall determining just exactly how high they can rise in the world, figuratively and literally.

“Low-Ds”, that is, people with low D-ratios, live further down in this habitat.  The air is worse, people’s lifespans are shorter, and there are occasionally monsters called genics that roam around down there.  The people with high D-ratios live closer to the surface where the air is better and things are generally less dangerous. A nice touch is that, especially in cut scenes, the game is literally more hazy and grimy, visually, the further down you are.  As you go up, the environments gradually become clearer and brighter.  It happens bit by bit, so you may not notice it the first time through, but if you finish the game and start over again, the difference stands out.

One of the few story beats to be preserved is our hero: Ryu.  Here, he’s a low-D ranger, whose job mainly seems to involve security and hunting down genics.  His D-ratio is abysmally low: 1/8,192.  His current job is the very highest he can hope to achieve.  He’s partnered with another young man named Bosch, D-ratio 1/64. While Ryu is effectively at the very limit of how far he can rise in the world, Bosch is only at the beginning.  A D-ratio as high as his means he can potentially qualify to become a Regent, one of the four rulers of this underground world. Bosch is basically just paying his dues here.  He’s friendly enough to Ryu, in a condescending sort of way, which Ryu mostly just shrugs off.  What else is he going to do?

While reporting for an assignment with Bosch, Ryu succumbs to a brief fugue, in which he has a vision. He sees the decaying remains of a giant dragon spiked to a wall.  Despite clearly being dead, the dragon seems to talk to Ryu, mind-to-mind, though what it says to him makes virtually no sense at the time.  Not long after, Ryu comes across the real thing, though it is very visibly dead and inanimate.

A terrorist attack splits up Ryu and Bosch, and shortly thereafter, Ryu runs into this game’s version of Nina, as well as a member of the resistance movement Trinity, named Lin. She seeks Nina for her own – or rather Trinity’s – purposes.  The three form an unlikely but highly effective team.  But allying himself with these two has its consequences, and by the time Ryu and Bosch reunite, circumstances have made them into enemies. Bosch is a good fighter, and he has plenty of allies with him, but Ryu refuses to betray his new comrades. Thankfully, his encounter with the dragon was no mere dream or hallucination.  Unbeknownst to him, it has bestowed him with awesome power… and a deadline.

With every passing moment, the monstrous dragon power lurking within Ryu grows more prominent, threatening to overcome him.  While Ryu is in control, he can transform into a bestial form capable of slaughtering even bosses within just a couple of rounds of combat.  But drawing on that power accelerates its progress in overtaking him.

And so, with all hands turned against him, Ryu, Lin, and Nina have ultimately just a single option: Escape.

One of the things that I like about Dragon Quarter – one of many, many things – is the way that the game’s more prominent mechanics and its story are so closely intertwined.

The dragon power bestowed upon Ryu early into the game isn’t just a narrative device or story element, coming out only when dramatically convenient.  It’s also a game mechanic, in the form of what the game calls a D-counter. This is a number, a percentage, that appears in the corner of the screen.   As you play, it slowly ticks up toward 100 in intervals of a hundredth of a percent.  Everything you do in the game causes it to increase.  Everything.  Every 24 or 25 steps will cause it to increase by one interval.  Later in the game, this happens every dozen steps or so.  Ryu’s special D-dash ability, which allows him to avoid enemy combat, causes it to tick up faster.  Transforming, all by itself, raises the counter, and any actions taken while transformed increase it by whole-number percentages.  It is literally overpowered.  What I mentioned about crushing bosses in just a couple of turns was not hyperbole.  I’ve done it.  It’s basically my end-game strategy.

There is no way to drop the counter.  Ever. There are no items, no spells, no techniques which will allow you to reset it or undo any of its progress.  It just sits up there in the corner, slowly increasing and glowing ever more furiously as the number grows.  The tension between the temptation to use it whenever you’re in a bind and the punishing consequences of that use can be exquisite.

When I first heard Dragon Quarter described as a survival-horror RPG, it didn’t make sense to me.  But that’s mainly because I associated the mechanical elements of most of the survival-horror games I’d played with the more thematic elements of horror.  And there are horrific moments and images in Dragon Quarter; the world of the game is not a happy place, and its maintenance is not easily or cleanly done.  But that horror is mainly a consequence of the world-building; it’s not the point of the game.

The key here, I think, is the word “survival”.  You might more accurately call Dragon Quarter a survival-RPG, except it’s basically the only one of its kind that I know of.  It’s kind of hard to wrangle a whole genre out of that.

At their heart, survival-horror games generally “work” based on two principles.

The first is the fragility of the player character relative to other types of games, and relative to the enemies within the game.  You are not the hero of a more action-oriented game, who can take maybe a dozen sword strokes straight to the face and just keep going, or who can withstand a hail of gunfire and duck behind cover for a few seconds while your shields recharge.  Here, the player is reduced to a much more even footing with the enemies.  Every bit of damage taken is a significant setback that needs to be planned around, either to prevent it or to deal with it when it happens.  Every attack must be calculated.  This is because of the second principle, which is resource management.

The in-game resources, both those which you use to preserve yourself and those you use to eliminate your enemies, are finite.  So they must be spent wisely, frugally.  Because of this, you are constantly required to take a measured, careful approach to any situation.  You can never just blithely wander around; to do so invites disaster twice over.  In the short term, you risk serious harm, leaving yourself vulnerable to future threats.  In the long term, if you come out of the situation relatively unscathed, it’s generally at some expense of resources, leaving you ill-prepared for future encounters.  Carelessness becomes indistinguishable from suicide.

This puts pressure on the player to play extremely well at all times by punishing mistakes immediately and brutally.  As a result, some of the typical elements of JRPGs are missing.

There are no healing spells or techniques.  All healing – whether restoring health or curing negative status effects – is accomplished by way of expendable (and frequently pricey) items.  And you have to consider how often (if at all) you’ll be using some of these items, because inventory space is limited, and multiple items of a single type don’t “stack” very much before requiring another inventory slot.  And, naturally, the usual economics of JRPGs are in full effect.  Whatever you get for selling an item is a pitiful fraction of what it costs you to buy.

The game offers you the ability to use bait and traps to lure enemies into a position of compromise and get the drop on them, but even these need to be used sparingly.  There’s hardly enough for every encounter.

Interestingly, the game knows exactly how difficult it is, and gives you something of a way around the problem.

As with most RPGs of any kind, Japanese or otherwise, you earn experience points, new equipment, and new abilities as you go through the game.  In addition, Dragon Quarter also gives you what’s called Party XP.  Basically, this is experience you can dole out to party members as you like to boost their levels.

Should you find yourself in a situation where you can’t progress without either having your party wiped or running the D-counter up to 100% (which, if it hasn’t become obvious by now, is an instant Game Over), you have the option to do what’s called a SOL Restart.  This restarts the game from the beginning, but lets you keep all the equipment and skills you’ve learned, as well as any Party XP you still have.  This gives you get a fresh start while retaining your improved gear, and the Party XP lets you give yourself a boost in the early stretches.

There’s also an option to restore a previous hard save along these same lines.  Dragon Quarter allows “soft” saves anywhere, but these are temporary by design.  Once loaded, these saves disappear.  There are only a few “hard” save points, from which you can restore at will, and to which you will be returned with a SOL Restore.

If this sounds ridiculous for what is typically a long-form type of game, it may help to understand that Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter is only about eight to ten hours long from start to finish on a single play through, once you know what you’re doing.  Even with a couple of full-blown restarts, you’ll be spending no more time on Dragon Quarter than any other game from the same time period.  Less, probably.

Writing this now, I just about want to say that Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter was Dark Souls before Dark Souls really existed. There’s a certain similarity in that both games are more difficult than usual while still being relatively fair, and in the expectation that you will die, probably more than once, and that rather than being a tragedy, it’s simply an instructive part of the experience. Or in the case of Dragon Quarter, you’ll experience (probably more than once) a situation in which death is basically a given should you continue, and the smart thing would be to cut your losses and restart.

Dragon Quarter’s infliction of pressure extends even to the representation of the game’s characters and world.

Most characters have a skinny, almost emaciated appearance.  Part of this is simple stylization, of course, but it still contributes to the overall effect.  These people live a thin and narrow existence, it says, devoid of the expansive pleasures humankind was meant to enjoy.  There is a grimness and a quiet desperation underlying it all.

The world itself is a fucking hole.  Corridors in the lower areas are littered with random junk and debris; it’s best not to think what it might all actually be.  The air is hazy and grimy, and things have a sort of cobbled-together look that just makes the whole place look cramped and dingy and uncomfortable. In these lower areas, everything looks like it’s about one stern look away from falling right apart.  The upper areas are cleaner, more solid, but can seem so sterile and strictly designed as to be hostile.  Dragon Quarter does a wonderful job of creating a world you want to get the hell out of as soon as you can.

It’s ironic, really. Most games, I play to escape from the troubles and stresses in my life.  And most games oblige this desire.  Even the ones that take place in barren wastelands tend to take place in gorgeously rendered barren wastelands that encourage you to examine every carefully tailored nook and cranny.  They’re an invitation to exploration and adventure, and are “barren” or “waste” only as a matter of aesthetics.

But limitation and escape are the central themes in this game, and a world in which such themes are explored must be more than a background or a prop.  

The world is limited in its size; an RPG with little to no detectable exploration, comprised mainly of tunnels and rooms, and a single clear direction and objective at all times.  The player's inventory of supplies is likewise limited, in keeping with the surival horror influence.  The player is frequently required to prioritize, and ditch whatever they aren't likely to use based on their play style.  Care must be taken by the player to work within these limits.

Narratively speaking, the story also explores the idea of limitations.  Ryu himself embodies these limits.  His D-ratio is among the lowest of the low.  His place in society, the ways in which he can define and express himself, how he can live – all of these things have strict limits placed on them. And this dragon entity, Odjn…  As much as it much as it appears to be the key to his salvation, as much as it empowers him to break all barriers and overcome or destroy all opposition, it limits him as well.  It puts a countdown on his life, ticking down the hours he has left until... well, until whatever horrific thing might happen when Odjn gains total control and breaks free.  

And in the end, the characters decide to break free of these limits placed on them by the world by breaking free of the world itself, to smash through the ceiling of it and see once and for all what lies beyond its narrow, choking confines.

Dragon Quarter is a game about escape.

Ultimately, this is a large part of what interests me about the story of Dragon Quarter, what keeps me coming back.  Rather than a big, trampling save-the-world epic, it’s about a group of characters who just want out.  This is a smaller story, a “tiny tale of time”, as the game itself tells us in its opening narration. It’s huge in its implications for its world and its characters.  It’s great in the scope of the ideas it asks its characters to contemplate.  (It flirts with Gnosticism, which immediately grabs my interest).  It that sense, at least, it does involve the end of the world, in one way or another.  But the scale is smaller, and the characters strike me as being more real because of it.

Ryu, Lin, and Nina don’t want to fight anybody.  There’s at least one memorable occasion where Ryu, surrounded by enemies, asks why they can’t just let him and his friends go.  The character animations in Dragon Quarter aren’t spectacular, but they get the job done here.  There’s something about the way that Ryu asks his question that seems to have layers.  On one layer, he seems mentally, psychologically exhausted from the strain of all the fighting, and the toll all the deaths he’s dealt out has taken on him.  On yet a deeper layer, he seems equally exhausted from fighting the thing inside him that threatens to take over and destroy him.

They aren’t trying to harm anybody.  And it seems reasonable just to let them go, on the one hand.  But on the other, there is the major problem that letting Ryu and company out of this subterranean pit will completely upend the social order – will end this idea of the world – purely as a side-effect of his escape.  Because the underlying problem with Ryu’s world is a variant on the same problem that keeps people in dead-end jobs and abusive relationships long beyond the point when, logically, they should be getting out.

Fear.

The world of Dragon Quarter is, as previously stated, an absolute, utter shithole in purely objective terms.  Even the people in charge don’t seem to be enjoying themselves much.  And it’s because everyone seems to be in unspoken agreement that even if the current circumstances are awful, at least they’re familiar awful circumstances.  It’s possible that things are better on the surface, but it’s just as possible that they aren’t.  It’s just as possible that they’re far worse.  This, at least, is the devil we know.

Even one of the main villains, the ruler of this subterranean nightmare, is ruled by fear. A thousand years before the story proper, he was given the opportunity to open this world to the surface.  But he backed down.  In his fear that the world above might still be the barren wasteland people left ages ago, he turned back at the final moment, sentencing himself and everyone in the underground to remain in it indefinitely.

There’s an anime I like quite a bit – it’s probably my favorite, really – called Revolutionary Girl Utena, and in it there is a bit of dialogue that is recited so often it’s practically a ritual.  It goes like this:

“If it cannot break out of its shell, the chick will die without ever being born.  We are the chick.  The world is our egg.  If we don’t crack the world’s shell, we will die without ever truly being born.  Smash the shell, for the world revolution.”

This is actually a paraphrase from the Hermann Hesse novel Demian: The Story of Emil Sinclair’s Youth (usually just known as Demian), in which it’s put this way:

“The bird struggles out of the egg.  The egg is a world.  Who would be born must first destroy a world.  The bird then flies to God.  That god’s name is Abraxas.”

To go up, to go out, to rise, to escape: This is an act of tremendous faith.

[sweatypolarbear]

EVERYBODY’S GONE TO THE RAPTURE REVIEW

Decided to sit down and write a lengthy review of one of my favourite games, read on if you’re interested.

-Robin

Hi there, thought it was time that I sat down and finally had a proper review of one of my favourite games.

EVERYBODY’S GONE TO THE RAPTURE.

 Everybody’s gone to the rapture is a fairly recent game which is made with the assistance of Cry-engine 3.

I’m going to break this review down into a few key parts and feel free to adjust your read based on the features that interest you.

Like I said, it’s one of my favourite games so expect a lot of fanboying and a general bias. I am sure to say that it’s “the best” at something. Stave off your own opinion as I use “The best” so often to describe so many things. I like the use of superlatives to emphasis my general appreciation for something, so keep this in mind when reading.

I will do my best to avoid spoilers, except in the last bullet point where I will indulge the more intrigued of you.

 Story telling mechanic:

Everybody’s gone to the rapture has a very unique story experience, I can liken the telling of it to “Gone Home” or “Journey” In the sense that most of the story is down to your movement and interaction with the environment. Most of the story is in the details of the world.

I should clarify for those of you that aren’t aware with this kind of storytelling structure. Whilst the game is inherently linear in the pattern you move throughout the game in the4 sense that it is a single straight path/road that you follow to the end destination which intern acts as the progression of the story. The clear majority of the game is down to the movement you take around an area.

Taking the first area as a prime example, it’s a small English village, as you walk around you’ll get occasional snippets of dialogue and the very brief and vague narrative that is given to you in the form of Jeremy our first character; Jeremy is a Priest who we are gradually told about. If you’re careful and follow our little glowing sprite he will lead you through several spots and you’ll understand pretty quickly that Jeremy is somewhat looked down upon by most members of the community, for something he was involved in.

The premise of this games story telling is generally that the more you explore and the more time you take to intimately explore an area the more events you will trigger and a better grasp of the characters you will have. Which I suppose gives it a big incentive to be as completionism as possible when approaching the game. Take the time to go over an area once or twice and ensure that you took note of all the little areas and sounds.

This method of storytelling is honestly one of my preferences when it comes to games nowadays, I feel like so many games have taken advantage of this method to tell compelling stories with an environment as much as the script. I think games like this are often the forefront of the story department as they are almost totally reliant on the tendency of their stories to entice your intrigue. In this instance the way that the Town is empty, and you never actually see another living creature really adds to this effect. The sheer lifelessness of the environment means that the few sounds and voices you get to hear are so welcome and you get more and more eager to reach the next section of interaction.

In a lot of games of this nature this is where it can drop off. If the interactions are too far in-between or they don’t reward you enough for finding one, then there isn’t that drive to find the next one. However, this is totally against the prerogative in terms of Everybody’s gone to the rapture. Trust me when I say that every little piece of dialogue is valuable, and every piece provides a nice little touch of humanity to these characters. And it’s through this gradually assembled jigsaw of character moments that you can clearly get a scale of their roles in the story. It’s so rewarding to learn that each character knows the other ones and has their own secretive opinion or viewpoint on them. It’s world building in such a nice and fun way.

My last point on the topic of story comes straight from the nature of the way that the game is delivered to you. So much of it is down to the players own interpretation and how much they were paying attention and how much was retained. As someone who did a marathon of this game over the course of 3 days I can tell you that most of my enjoyment came from learning things that backed up my theories about what happened and every single radio message from Kate. There’s a lot to digest and retain and naturally you will forget stuff, people, and locations. Things come back though, and characters return and it’s so fun to create your own web of knowledge you have learnt and fit that into the realm of information you already have. Me and My partner played this game keeping track of who was who and how they fit into the grand scheme of the story.

The story is a very strong cornerstone that holds the game up. I think that the way games like these tell a story through the environment and the gradual exposure to dialogue branches is one of the most engrossing and complex ways to tell a story. This game stands out though above games like “Gone Home” for going above a single narrator and a single story, it has all these branches from characters that feed back into the main trunk of your story.

Sound, Music, and Sound-scaping.

If you have ever met me, you probably are aware of how obsessed I am with the audio input that games offer people. Soundtracks and Sound-scaping is the most imperative feature of a game. For those of you who are unaware of sound-scaping;

Sound-scaping is a technique for mapping out an area and having different sounds come from different areas and having the idea that a sound is emanating from a direction. This is noticeable if you wear headphones when playing most games. You will appreciate that one sound is louder in one ear than another and you will know which direction the sound is in. Specifically, in Everybody’s gone to the rapture this takes the form of having a faint series of numbers being spoken by a woman on the radio or a telephone ringing in the distance. It’s a good way to adjust yourself directionally and using this a much better way to direct yourself than following a ball of light around.

The other aspect of Sound-scaping though which is very present in Everybody’s gone to the rapture though is the aspect of the music kicking in when approaching or going into a new area. The music ramps up as you enter a new area and it paces itself to the speed you move forwards. It’s so rewarding and really sets the scene as a glorious orchestral chorus starts up in full majesty as the sun rises and the world lights up for the first time. As you start one particular scene the Music noticeably turns a little sinister and ups the temp which is so sudden and out of nowhere I found myself clenching up and leaning forward I was so prepared and anxious for what would come next.

In a game that prides itself on the inherent beauty of silence, how empty and vacant the town is without it’s people. How scary it is to nice the lack of birdsong in a forest. Where the only sounds you hear are the trickle of water from the stream or the sounds of the tree’s in the wind it’s hard not to take explicit notice of the soundtrack and the musical score present in the game. It’s a very unique and heavenly sound. Which is very innkeeping to this idea of the Rapture as it was. The beautiful male choir singing is dramatic and is great for these moments where the world is laid out for you and you get to see the great swathes of the valley in one go.

The soundtrack most notably though is relevant. Songs aren’t out of place and they are really used to set a stage for the area you are in. They give a general air of relaxation and calm to the empty countryside, which is both unsettling and expected. I can’t help but think that the music is meant to be ironic in some sense but I am getting into spoilers.

 Visuals and Ambient Lighting;

I think if you’ve seen even the first second of the game it’s easy to tell that there is a major visual aspect to this game. I think this game is the absolute pinnacle realistic visuals I’ve seen in a game.

Hats off to Cry-engine as they are always at the top of their game when it comes to creating scenery for games. Games like Crysis have some amazing backgrounds, but I don’t think they ever really got a “Real” looking game until this. Everybody’s gone to the rapture is so grounded in one place that it feels vivid and real. I would even hesitate and say better than life. I’m going to give them one more tip of the hat in the sense that they took the time to animate things like the water and the tree’s so well. I’ve lived in England for quite some time and I’ve been into the countryside and walked around aimlessly as you do in Everybody’s gone to the rapture and I feel like it’s a perfect simulator (You just save yourself from being cold and bored.)

Going back to the actual visuals themselves, I think they are the main keystone in the game. As much as I love the plot, characters, and the sense of impeding dread. The visuals are just too good.

The game can easily be dismissed in a lot of ways. For a lot of people, they just can’t get over games like this because often they aren’t very fun to look at. Everybody’s gone to the rapture is so above that stereotype, because it’s a pleasure to look at. I am going to compare it to a quote people use to describe a lot of Stanly Kubrick’s work, “Every Frame a Painting.” And it couldn’t be truer in this instance. I really could only pick up the moments when I stared at the floor in the pitch black and saw exclusively black as times when I wasn’t enjoying a picturesque scene. The Colours and Textures are out of this world. The sheer scale and vividness when it comes down to the scenery is hard to explain.

Walking through the countryside and seeing each tree being given it’s one colour palette and having its shadows wave gently across my path as I walk forwards is something I never noticed in other games as much as I did in this game. I think this has to do with the deliberate use of narrations and story moments changing the time of day in the game, causing the sun to revolve around the sky and you basically watch the shadows and lights flicker across the sky as the whole world around changes colours. I pick up on shadows a lot in this instance, because really, they are the best. There’s such a definite shape and weight to them, when I move into one and look up I see the exact outline of them in the shape of the leaves and the sun shining through them. When the sun moves in the sky the shadows will elongate or shorten based on the positioning of the sun. It’s such a silly little thing to obsess over but it really got to me the level of attention that went into the exact nature of these.

The Light is also the bad guy in a way, as you’ll get a grasp of almost immediately in the game. A ball of light will float through the world and each narrative clip is represented by the silhouette of a person in golden flickers of light. It’s a nice visual effect that I can appreciate. It’s a nice twist on the shades of people or tape recorders (not that there aren’t any of those.) Specifically, it’s the way this light stands out so alien in the bright daylight of the game. It doesn’t matter how bright and sunny the game get’s that ball of light is a stain on it. It’s refreshingly sinister in the empty landscape, and I initially found it playful and fun to follow and see floating, but as you play you grow to appreciate (or you don’t) just how unnerving this insistent little orb is. I call him Lionel.

 Lionel and the Magic Right Trigger.

It’s not a terrible sounding porn movie, it’s a small section where I give some advice regarding two things.

Lionel is what I call the floating sphere of light who “guides” you through the world. I say that in quotes, because in my experience he only leads you to the audio dialogue which is specifically plot relevant and not necessarily the valuable character moments I love. He’s a constant little companion, who fucks off into the sunset at 100mph and leaves you behind the wonder how your meant to follow him. He can be annoying at the best of times, but he has a heart of gold. Well basically an everything of gold.

Lionel is alright, I just advise ignoring him completely unless you are absolutely stuck and don’t know where to go. I specially recommend exhausting all other possibilities before following him. Almost always he will lead you to the next section of the game, so the game will go into next chapter mode and you are almost forced to go to the next section or you’ll miss out on the ambient music and music scaping that occurs when entering a new area. Name him too. I named him Lionel cos he looks like a Lionel, but naming him and yelling his name whenever he pops up adds to your experience tremendously.

As for the proverbial “Magic Right Trigger” there is a feature to the game that is totally alien if you didn’t go on the internet before playing the game and it’s a game saving mechanic for most people.

PRESS AND HOLD DOWN THE TRIGGER AS YOU WALK TO MOVE FASTER.

I really stress this to people whose main point of contention is the movement in the game. I don’t use the sprint function in games, so this works out fine for me. However, in this game it is clear from the start that you walk at a normal pace and if you aren’t aware of this feature it gets frustrating for the more eager of you out there. Even I do this at times where I am getting a little excited for the next scene and I will make use of this feature. It’s well hidden though as you must hold it for about 2 seconds before it will even kick in and it says nothing about it anywhere in the game. It’s just a feature for the more explorative of you.

Spoilers -

Science

The presence of deeply thought out science and these two-competent people talking about this extra-terrestrial entity is an enlightening experience. The way that the issue comes about and the gradual escalation into the ranges of danger are so well done and it really gets across the suddenness of this calamity. They are each dealing with it in their own way and they are both scared of what is happening to themselves and this entity. We are given information gradually and it’s fed to us in Kate’s dialogue as to what the Rapture was and how it isn’t intentional. The way they lose control of it and how much it scares both of them is so intoxicating and it really pushed me forward. I was so keen to know more about how it all came to pass, and it was gift wrapped to me in the wonder of Kates chapter.  Not going to speculate or infer my own viewpoint as I feel it detracts from the experience if I tell you my viewpoint on the end of the game.

Kate and Stephan

Kate and Stephen Appleton are the stars of the game and I can’t emphasise enough how much I love these two in this game. Kate and Stephen are these two characters which get referenced more and more frequently as we get closer and closer to the end of the game. We are almost immediately aware that Stephen is involved in the decision to bomb the town and destroy it, but as you can plainly tell the town is unscathed. Kate and Stephen are directly the cause of the Rapture as we see later in the game and the game is so rewarding of second playthroughs as you are made aware of the intimate relationship and feelings these two had and how they’re relationship fell apart and caused the emotional trauma that caused the Rapture. My theory on the ending are my own and I don’t want to influence anyone’s own theory, so I am not going to talk about the ending. This might disappoint some of you who want to discuss the ending and definitively have an ending and reasoning for their actions in your head. What’s the point? Games that leave you thinking are so much better than ones which answer all your questions. So, I’ll happily be confused for years to come.

Kate though~

Kate’s voice actress, Merle Dandridge. Is above and beyond the call of duty. She is wonderful, and her voice is so distinct and memorable, which makes it so perfect for the character. The highlight of the game for me is her chapter at the end. The long drawn out moments where we explore her character and let her speak for minutes at a time, whereas before where a mere piece of dialogue was enough for us is so rewarding and such a satisfying ending. Kate’s character in general is the glue that holds the story together I think that the story couldn’t have achieved a lasting effect if you didn’t have the witty and playful commentary and Horror of the unknown that Kate carries with her. She is the best. Just the best.

Stephen is great as well, less so than Kate though. Who would cheat on Kate!? Seriously?

Like Kate is a nerdy awkward scientist, who rambles about science. Talks to people in your hometown and gets to know people. She’s got a lovely voice and can talk to you about science stuff and you won’t get bored!

That’s my fanboying over with time to score our game~

Final Review

Gameplay: 48/100

Despite my love for the game and the intimate nature of which I spend time on the game. As well as my 3 playthroughs of it. Despite the 3000 so words I put into the game I must admit that this is a walking simulator and I appreciate that. It’s not terribly exciting to play, it’s not tense or dangerous. It’s not even scary. It’s walking and getting story dealt out to you over the course of time. There’s also no map which lets you know where the points of interest are, and no reward for replays which make the experience easier. I yield that my major enjoyment is searching the beautiful open world, but I am losing out on the story I enjoy if I can’t find all the audio logs. This makes it frustrating as I feel constantly no matter how much time I take that I am missing stuff. That feeling is irritating at points. The hiding of the speed up function is irritating as well. I feel like the option needed to be there from the start to allow people to play the game. IT would’ve made it more accessible for people who weren’t used to this style of playing games.

Story/Narrative: 83/100

It’s high there’s no doubt, it’s a wonderfully crafted and excellently paced journey which you get the pleasure of experiencing. It’s going to be a story which you really get into and want to solve. Each piece of the story you collect is going to improve the regards you have for it. It’s not perfect as it is delivered to you in a way that is entirely reliant on the attention given to it by the player. So, this means that the experience is too varied dependant on the amount of playtime in one go. There’s so many character beats and moments that get lost if you play it in short instalments. The story is so vast and complex at times, it’s relatable and humble. You really feel for these characters and their all very sweet. There’s so much to see and feel with this story. Kate and Stephen contribute so much to the story and there is this deepest romance which is heart-breaking to hear about.

Characters: 77/100

There’s an inherent need to relate to characters in any game and this is one where I could see myself in Stephens shoes. I could relate to these characters well and appreciated the level that each one was developed. With 5 sections and the deep exploration into each of these gives you the chance to get to know each of the cast in a great deal and experience a level of their sadness to the events of the story. Moments where each person accept their fate are heart breaking after you connected to them so much.

Visuals and Soundtrack: 78/100

I would give it higher, but when it comes to games My highest tiers are reserved for very artistically styled games. Despite this the game goes to great lengths to be extensively realistic and gorgeous and its portrayal of this valley. The use of light and shadow are second to none and it really gets a scenery that is worth the story. The soundtrack compliments this wonderfully and serves to enhance the environment created. The Soundtrack paired with the visuals really deliver a high-quality experience. These and the Story really make up for the lacklustre gameplay and make the game worth playing.

Robins (That’s me) Enjoyment: 67/100

I love it, but the mechanic of walking everywhere gets tiring and can hurt your hands if you are just holding the stick forwards all the time. The story is unique and thought provoking. It really grips me, and It fits wonderfully into a category of games which I am finding to be increasingly my favourite. Its visuals are amazing to look at and I take screenshots constantly as I am playing, I keep finding imagery that really looks the best. It’s an achievement in gaming that’s for sure. This game is artistic and visually stunning, but it’s life-like qualities lose me a little. I am more appreciative of the pitch-black scenes illuminated by the alien light, specifically when the observatories are bathed in the alien light. The soundtrack is on my playlist for easy listening and it’s great to listen to in the background. It sets a scene and acts as a good framing device for a scenes tension, but it ends too frequently and sometimes I feel like it could do more from being quieter and revelling in the silence of the valley.

Alternate Direction – Robins Ideas~

It’s a funny idea, but I feel like Everybody’s gone to the rapture had the potential to be a truly terrifying horror game. Set in the broad daylight and the light is the bad guy. There didn’t need to be any enemies nor any stealth sequences. There just needs to be a more visceral score and a darker approach to people dying. There’s so much suspense that goes to waste on the fact that the music is bright and uplifting where if the score focused on getting a more hopeless feel across it could express a much more different view on the whole ordeal, whilst still having these character moments in the foreground. This is just my desire for more intelligent horror though.

That’s all for today, thank you and let me know what you thought~

[fromtheground39-blog]

10 Years of Gaming PCs - 2015 - 2019 (Part 2)

ah PC gaming in one way or another. It'S provided countless hours days weeks, even years of entertainment to generations of enthusiasts around the globe or discs, as it were. These last 10 years have been something of a roller coaster, ride for enthusiasts and novices alike, and today we begin our story, one of sloth and greed, of loss, rebirth and a never-ending thirst for more so make yourself comfortable. As we take you back in time and celebrate PC gaming in the only way, we know how I feel like a bunch of gaming PC's, it's gonna be fun. You ready, oh, and it's brought to you by actually powered by C sonic and brought to you by LG's ultra gear. Ultra wide gaming displays yeah any news crew ever to the first chapter of our story begins way back in the long long ago, time known as 2009, the 44th President of the United States of America was inaugurated. The Twilight series made its debut and James Cameron's Avatar became the highest-grossing film of all time, depending on your take on those events. It was either a great year or one that you'd rather forget but fear. Not 2009 was a pretty good year for PC gaming. We got Borderlands, Batman, Arkham Asylum left, 4, dead, 2 and Dragon Age Origins just to name a few to run those games Intel had just launched the core. I series as a replacement for the core twos that had gone toe-to-toe with AMD in the years prior. As a result, while the Linfield core i7 handily outperformed its core 2 quad predecessors, the price for those older chips fell steadily as the new platform found its legs and they remained a highly popular choice for builders, especially with early ddr3, costing a pretty penny and not Significantly outperforming the outgoing ddr2, so our build then is equipped with everything we need to make a great 2009 gaming machine, a Core 2 quad, q96 50 with gorgeous Zellman flower cooler on it, 4 gigs of ddr2, 800, dual Radeon, HD, 59, 70s in crossfire and, of Course, Windows 7, all for just under 18 hundred US dollars at the time, so I was actually pretty into both of these games. I guess I'll go with Dragon Age. It'S probably the more graphically demanding of the two and a have. You actually tried these games. I loaded them up to make sure they launched in that they're in the right resolution. But aside from that, Oh nope, you're, gonna, have to create a character and everything I actually probably don't have to do that I could. I could remote into my computer at home and load up my safe. I think I still have it alright. So, theoretically, I've thrown my old save file for a lira in here, but I don't know vps hosting seattle if it's actually gonna work. There'S a previous folder that has like a portrait stuffin, it man. I remember this. Alright, let's see if it's in their caverns whoa. Actually that ain't bad. I think I was kind of an evil character, which is why my face ends up looking kind of like scary and stuff arcane bolt winters grasp slowdown, you hoser finding the controls a little clutch in it in this after this. After so long, all right, obviously don't know any of my my binds here. Oh it's immune to fire, not that makes sense how about some lightning for you there. You know it's funny new games or they definitely look better, but this looks all right. Doesn'T it yeah? I mean like most of the graphical fidelity is made up in the lighting. I think, because the textures don't really hold up very well today, no they've aged for sure that was definitely a trip down nostalgia Lane. But one thing I won't miss is how loud gaming machines were back then and how bad the cable management options were. This case sucked the following year, saw Bioshock 2 hits Steam libraries along with Battlefield, Bad Company, 2 sip 5 Mass Effect, 2 and Starcraft 2 wings of Liberty. Carrying on this pattern of sequels AMD's new Phenom, 2 X, 6 offered more threads than the core twos did at a price much lower than the core AI series, particularly when it comes to the supporting hardware. This made it a favorite among enthusiasts, looking for something better than a Core 2 quad and a multi-threading workload without breaking the bank, because, while it was slower per thread, it held its own in most titles, wider availability of ddr3 made for a lower early adopter tax. Although ddr2 would remain much less expensive for some time to come, our 2010 gaming PC, therefore, is equipped with a phenom, 2, x6 10:55 T 4 gigabytes of ddr3 1333 and twin Radeon, HD 6970 s still rocking Windows, 7 or again just shy of 1800 dollars in 2010 well remember when you could right-click on Network crap in the bottom right and then you would well ok when it wasn't broken like that yeah and then you could just go to your network configurations. I did do that all right. So what are we trying to run out here again, 34, 40 by 1440, so full ultra wide. As you can see, it doesn't exactly scale the intro graphics, very well. No, but once again the textures are a little rough and a mocap technology definitely had a long way to go back then, compared to now you can definitely tell when things like godrays are hard-coded versus dynamically generated by the engine by the light sources. Yeah in this case, if you removed all the geometry in the scene, those godrays would still be there. He looks like he just smelled something bad, so this game apparently scales to ultra wide by narrowing your vertical field of view. That'S not a great gaming experience. Ultra wide support has definitely gotten a lot better over the years, so our number 10 bulb is actually cut off, and so is our point decrease button here. Well, I'm not sure how to proceed from here. To be honest, wha-wha 2011 brought us a huge number of hot titles like portal to Sky roll. Oh, that's! A pretty dead beam, sorry Skyrim, deus ex human revolution and everyone's favorite masochism, simulator, Dark Souls but 2011 was also a dark year for AMD. With the release of Sandy Bridge and Intel's new consumer LGA 1156 platform, until not only had a very fast line up of CPUs at their disposal, but a cost-effective one at that, AMD's response in the form of bulldozer failed on all counts, giving them a reputation as The cheap option that would take years to overcome now because in the early days hyper threading had a tendency to negatively impact gaming performance. There was very little reason to go with the high end core i7 2670 500k with 4 gigs of ddr3 ram, whose price had come down a fair bit since 2010. Now, this time around, we've gone green team for our graphics card, because in videos, GTX 590 outperformed AMD making it the goat card for over-the-top monster machines. But it was also around this time that enthusiasts began to shy away from dual GPU solutions due to the prevalence of micro, stuttering. The GTX 590 would be among the last such consumer cards from Nvidia this year we picked up check this link right here now an SSD for the first time, bumping our total build price to nearly 1,900 dollars, and that SSD option is something we'll be keeping in. All future builds unlike Windows, 7. For which, sadly, the road ends here, one thing that was a big deal that we didn't cover in the blurb for this year is that the define was pretty much the defining case of this time. Unlike the p180 series from an tech that preceded it, it was actually affordable, so you could get a nice looking quiet, discreet case. Without now I actually never actually played Skyrim when I was big into oblivion, but I never played this one. This is the one that everybody played. I know right, I got ta say the texture quality, even just in the loading screens, is feels more than a year ahead of what we were just looking at. That'S a huge difference, and this is even without the modding community. Coming in and fixing it for us yep, however, the 8k texture packs that were available for this wasn't actually 8k, but you know: should we just jump to one of the towns sure you watch out boom yeah you like that boom right fist, let's just oh he's, Got a sword boom, wow, wow, wow, oh great, a sword. Go nice, just got a knife or maybe he only had a knife in the first place. Wow. Oh, I have an axe. How do I equip it? Let'S go axe, some shiz lightning axe, oh wow! This is how waiting works in this game, yeah that is so ugly and unnecessary wow. This is really a much much better looking game, though it's still, it still doesn't hold up that well compared to modern stuff, like you can really tell a lot of the assets and the trees are obviously reused. Shadows are very lifeless feeling mm-hmm. It'S a shadow map. The trees don't move, you know, yeah no breeze, but one of the things that was really great about this game was draw distance like you could really look out into the distance and feel like you were in an immense world. Well, the world didn't end in 2012. It wasn't an outstanding year for gaming as a whole, either standouts include far cry 3 XCOM enemy, Unknown Borderlands, 2 and csgo. The CPU world, meanwhile, arguably came to a halt. Ivy Bridge was a modest tick to Sandy bridges, talk representing a die shrink and not much else. Pci Express 3.0 became a thing and they updated the integrated graphics and improved quick sync support, but neither of those things were earth-shattering at the time. Still, as gamers moved on to the new architecture, the lessons of the previous generation carried forward to this one to so many went with the core i5 this time around, and so did we, the 35 70k powers, our rig this year, along with 8 gigabytes of very Inexpensive RAM and the Radeon HD 7970, which, despite its slightly lower performance out of the gate, mostly kept pace with Nvidia's Kepler and eventually I performed it in the long haul, thanks to its larger frame buffer. At least this build costs less than last year's at just over 1,800, but we're now also running Windows 8, so have fun. With that, I never actually played Far Cry 3, even though I played the first one and loved. It played the second one and literally had my save game tanked because it had autosave and then it auto saved when I was too far from anywhere to recover from some poison or something oh, tennisforum.com/members/346995-routerhost.html?simple=1#aboutme the malaria yeah. So I couldn't I couldn't do anything so my save game got played. This is a crappy game anyway. So yeah didn't bother with this one, even though it was supposed to be good yeah, they skewed a little bit less towards the realism aspect of this one. You know, as far as I know, I was the first North American retailer to bring in the define r2 really yeah. We brought in almost a container of them at a time when they were basically a completely unknown brand. It was like a huge gamble for me as a product manager. They had their issues. I remember there was a big scandal where there learn the facts here now their front USB was like wired up wrong or something Oh, and they had to send us a bunch of like replacement USB harnesses, and I was like what am I gonna do with these, like. You expect me to have someone go in the back and replace all your stupid front panel, cabling literally open every case. I guess they expected them to like be shipped with the cases or something that was ultimately the solution making the customer deal with it, but it was not a good time. People were not happy. Facial animations have come a long way in even just a few short years now. They'Ve come a long way further. Since then, these releases here with specular, highlights, are much better than previous. Yet like we're getting to the point now where I'm not gonna play this game and go oh there's a little yeah see the highlights on those packages yeah, and you can see them in people's eyes too yeah the eyes, especially it gives them a lot more Life vegetation still looks pretty static. Mutants on this is pretty good as well, but I can tell that, like it kind of cuts off around there part of it too, is that they've also applied a depth of field effect. That was something that didn't come into play until around this time. Yep 2013 brought comparatively few, but major releases like battlefield, 4, dota, 2 and Saints Row. 4 AMD wasn't having much fun, though, and their desperate attempts to compete by both lowering their prices and increasing their clock speeds and therefore power consumption never quite managed to break them. Free of the rut they found themselves in has well, then, was the next talk, and this time around, we actually did get a bit of a performance boost, even if it was a single-digit one. Thanks to a move to Intel's 22 nanometer FinFET manufacturing process, hyper-threading also became more useful this year. As the concept of streaming your gaming began to take off in earnest, and the core i7 4770k was also clocked higher than the core i5 variant. So that's what we went with along with 16 gigs of fast ddr3 ram and a geforce gtx 780 Ti Kepler. Second outing certainly did a lot better than the first and unfortunately, for AMD. Radeon, still to this day, hasn't made a return to the top of the benchmark chart. This year, windows 8.1 made its debut, but I don't know that anyone actually cared outside of the fact that it was a free upgrade for Windows 8 users which I guess might have helped a little with the ballooning prices of enthusiasts PC hardware. This build all told commanded, a total of just over 2,100 u.s. dollars now. This is where we get into the games. That really make me say, is this even that old like I could play this game today, and it would be perfectly fine. This is battlefield. 4 textures look freakin, awesome, high res lighting. Reflections are handled differently depending on the type of surface that the light is hitting can actually see objects that move into the god rays, get illuminated by them. Like my gun. A lot of the improvements here aren't even just in technology they're, also in style like you, can really just tell how much more attention to detail is put into mocap yeah character models. These are so detailed compared to the ones that we were looking at at the beginning hall that bloom, yeah and lens flare love it like a really complex lens flare to the final year, represented in this first part of our series is 2014, which was another relatively Light year for high-profile releases with Dark Souls, 2 alien isolation, shadow of Mordor and The Sims 4 representing as for hardware and it's Ivy Bridge all over again. But worse. Tik-Tok and boars law largely fell apart this year and instead of a new microarchitecture or anything of substance, we got Haswell refresh literally just the core clock, improvement and, admittedly much needed more efficient Tim. We did get a new chipset to go with it, though, which, for the first time implements nvme support, not that anyone had any use for that at the time. But hey a features, a feature. So we went with a core i7 4790k, along with 16 gigabytes of ddr3 just like last time, but now we're dropping our hard drive in favor of a faster large SSD. The other main difference is in Nvidia's Maxwell based GTX 980, a complete rework of Kepler that improved efficiency and overall performance to running on the same process. Node. That was a pretty impressive feat and AMD wouldn't release their response until the following year. Mercifully, total cost is down significantly this year, and this will also be the last year that we build with Windows 8.1 with that said, I'm sure that there are still some fans of it out there somewhere. So this is alien isolation and yeah. One of the things that you'll notice - it's got Medicaid, yes, yeah, that's kind of the aesthetic of this, but it was also something that kind of became popular in around this time. Right. Real-Time Instagram filters yeah. So, as you can see, it's like fine when we're looking right at it, but if we move the camera yeah you get that red fringing on it yeah. I think I'll go green over here. That'S cute, yep lighting effects are so natural and it's amazing how much of a difference that makes I mean the graphics card manufacturers are constantly talking about how lighting is such a key component to making a game look more natural and more immersive, but, as we've gone Through this six years of gaming PC's, it's like yeah, certain things have improved like textures, but lighting is definitely the one that has been the most game-changing pardon, the pun, yeah and, like this watery effect here, the way the light plays off. Of that. That'S something that just didn't happen in previous generations, so much subtlety to it like just areas on the carpet that are more lit, like we've, got actual light, bounces yeah. So as we come out here, we can see that you know the carpet here. Well, it's not really carpet but like it's way less well, you lost shiny than this. This trim is yeah. It used to be that, like going back to really old games like doom three, just like the entire environment felt shiny if they wanted to have light reflecting off anything like they elect subtlety yeah, Full Article and in this case you can kind of see here like the way They did with the bump mapping here yeah. It looks shiny, but also greedy at once, which is a really difficult thing to pull off on previous generations. I remember it being a big deal to even be able to reflect the environment scope before this. Oh yeah yeah used to be like he was read an orchestra. You could have something that was either like a static scope or you could have a low resolution or a high-resolution reflection yeah, and there was a significant performance penalties for enabling it. It was a discrete menu option. Man, this the steam effects here, looked great yeah. The fact that, like when you go by them and the the light is no longer I mean it's that's kind of a screen space thing, but it kind of also works because it no longer is in your your field of vision. So it kind of just fades out so this first half of the last decade represented a steady decline in hardware improvements in innovation year over year. But somehow, on the software side of the gaming industry, they still managed to squeeze far more realism and image quality out of said hardware. Now some believed that this decrease in performance improvement would continue ad infinitum as a result of the death of Moore's law and the future. Indeed looked pretty dim. In 2014, it seemed as though PC gaming would begin to drop off, along with the decline in PC shipments. In general, but stay tuned folks, because for part two, where we go from 2015 all the way up to today. Well, let's just say if you're new - and you don't already know how this ends, I think you're gonna be surprised at where things go from here. What will be a surprise is this segue to our sponsors for today's video, LG and C sonic, who provided these monitors and, of course, literally powered all of our systems here? So if you guys are looking for a great gaming experience, LG's Ultra Gear gaming monitors are a fantastic choice. We'Re gonna have those linked in the video description and also down. There is gonna be some c sonic power supplies, no matter what kind of a rig you're, building small form-factor large power, sipping power, chugging, doesn't matter see Sonic's got you covered. So thanks for watching guys. If this video sucked, you know what to do, but it was awesome, get subscribed, hit that like button or check out the link to where to buy the stuff we featured in the video description also link down, there's our merch store, which has cool shirts like this One and that one and that hoodie and our community forum, which you guys should totally join

[nezzfiction]

ENMY Chapter 84 - Crownless War God

Series Synopsis: 

Team RWBY is disbanded, and Yang must find herself new allies. For her, that might very well be yesterday’s enemies. Joining up with the likes of Emerald, Mercury, and Neo, the four will comprise Team Enemy(ENMY).

Links to read the series: Ao3 or FF.net

Or hit the jump below

.

Narrated by Emerald Sustrai

(Previously on ENMY)

Okay, where to begin?

Well, Salem declared war on Vacuo, sending Cuckoos, a type of parasitic Grimm, to infiltrate the Kingdom’s capital.

At the same time, the Witch took a crack at splitting my team apart—and succeeded.

Yang thinks Neo killed a kid, which was actually impersonated by a Grimm. The two get into some real relationship problems (the kind that takes more than a few couple therapy sessions to fix). Merc’s deep-seated daddy issues catch up to him. Oh, yeah. I also killed a couple of Cuckoos pretending to be my parents. But, hey. I dealt with my family/abandonment issues like—what, two, three arcs ago? So whatevs.

Some more dramatic shit happens when Temujin gives us a job to bring back Professor Oobleck from the Tower. We run into a creepy-ass Grimm who likes riddles (in the form of spouting gibberish and mindfucking, apparently). Neo and Mercury don’t pass Giza’s test, and head back to Vacuo without us.

After me and Yang reach the Tower of Alexandria, we learn about the true history of Remnant. That, and the end of the world via the Tree of Balance’s reset mechanism (good going, Masa), and by extension, the Last Fairy Tale.

While we’re using the Tower’s resources to read intel on Salem’s side, Vacuo’s capital comes under attack. The first battle between the Grimm army and the Kingdom’s warriors is ended prematurely when Glynda Goodwitch forces the enemy commander to retreat tactical, magic-nuclear styles.

But we learn later the battle was only a distraction to let assassins infiltrate the city. Attacks are carried throughout the Kingdom. Taking advantage of us not around, Neo and Mercury also become targets.

After some (short)deliberation, me and Yang decide to use an experimental, top-secret thing we can only call the “Bridge Project”. Cause of that, we were able to warp-drive from the Tower to the city in time to save our partners. I got to shiv some cold-steel irony between ribs nine and ten of Mercury’s douchebag of a cousin, Jupiter. And Yang got to save Neo from Adam and Blake (very dramatic, parallels stuff). Finally, some checks in the win column.

After the couple’s reunion, and having read Summer’s romance biography with Raven, Yang decides to pop the question to Neo.

To which, our resident psychopath says, “yEs”.

They both get married (blegh). Yes, it was very touching. Apparently, they also exchanged Auras, which I have no idea what that means yet.

Blakes goes a little bit more crazy after hearing about their marriage (just a little bit), and it actually gets her to shake off Salem’s influence. Deciding that her future vessel isn’t quite up to the task yet, the Witch decides to see to the war personally. (i.e. the big bad herself arrives in Vacuo…)

Meanwhile, after letting the bosses know what we learned at the Tower, Vacuo and Atlas officially enter an alliance. Cinder and the Snow Queen send a fleet of airships, due to arrive somewhere in a week’s time. Truly, nothing brings people together more than an approaching apocalypse, headed by some crazy bitch everyone hates.

And then, and then, and then—

Seeing as we made such good pals with Vacuo, I decided to take some liberties with that. Needed to have a private chat with the boss, so I had my team create a (little)distraction. It really wasn’t that bad, they just fought a few palace guards and Chain Nai.

We got arrested, cause that’s somehow fair.

Good times.

And now, the Vacuo Arc continues!

So excited…

.

.

Crownless War God

.

I am the bone of my sword.

Steel is my body and fire is my blood.

I have created over a thousand blades.

Unknown to death

Nor known to life.

Having withstood pain to create many weapons.

Yet these hands will never hold anything.

My life is an Unlimited Blade Works.

.

.

“…I wonder how long they plan to keep us here,” Yang muttered, while staring at the ceiling. She must have counted the number of bricks a hundred times by now. “I mean, no one even got hurt…badly.”

“Yeah,” Mercury replied. “I bet you anything Temujin just wants to mess with us.”

“If we broke out, and saw her the next morning, she’d probably act like nothing even happened.”

In her team’s dank prison cell, Yang lied restlessly on her cot with Neo snuggled under her arm. Mercury was sitting with his back against the wall, staring out the window into the night sky. And Emerald sat cross-legged in deep mediation.

“I just wish there was some way to past the time,” Yang complained.

There is, Neo looked at her suggestively.

“Definitely, not into exhibitionism.”

“Please, don’t,” Mercury added. “I’d rather run a death simulation marathon before sitting through that.”

“That sounds like a plan.”

“I was kidding.”

“Hey, Em!” Yang shouted to their leader in the corner. “How about you run us a hallucination, already? I’m thinkin’ my mom, Cinder, Pyrrha, and Victoria. Or maybe, some Nightmare-Class Grimm? We could practice for when Salem’s army shows up.”

Emerald remained silent.

“…Helloooo?”

Emerald’s temple creased with a vein.

“I’m getting bored heeerreeee~”

“Would you shut up?!” Emerald finally snapped. “I’m trying to concentrate!”

“You’ve been doing that since forever. What are you trying to do, anyway?”

“Yes, Yang. By all means, I’ll tell you exactly what I’m doing, out loud—while the prison guards listen on every word of our conversation.”

“Soooo, what are you doing?”

“Kay. Not listening anymore. La la la la la~”

“Em~!”

“LA LA LA LA~!!”

.

X  X X  X  X

.

…

I was dead.

I’m sure I was well and truly dead.

…

My body and soul sunk into the deepest depths. I don’t know what it was, but I swear, to this day—I grasped something at the core of our world. Some form of enlightenment, perhaps?

And then, I felt the very hells of Vacuo spit me back out.

*Cough!*

When I woke, I tasted nothing but ash and sand in my mouth. I could feel the sun roasting my skin. There was no way to know how long I had been out there.

As soon as I could get my bearings straight, I immediately wished I hadn’t.

It was a pit of corpses. The naked dead piled on more naked dead. All dignity stripped away. Their souls gone, leaving only dry husks. They were mutilated, they were burned, they were cruelly disected into even segments.

I remembered what happened.

They experimented on us. They sought the secret to eternal life, forced us to take toxic amounts of Dust and Bane.

We were nothing but lab animals to them, and they killed us by the thousands without batting an eye.

And when we were no longer of use, they discarded us out in the middle of the desert—like common refuse.

I was in a panic. My memories were becoming clearer. Our parents were with me.

My hands searched the bodies around. I can still remember that feeling to this day, the sensation forever carved in my memories. Tender flesh and hollow bones. The final moments of countless lives, recorded in every corpse’s face.

Anguish, fear, despair.

The loss of hope.

…

And then, I found them.

I don’t know how I could possibly have known. My experience with death had undoubtedly changed my senses.

There was nothing left of our mother and father, save for a pair of charred black ribs.

I could feel Vacuo suffocating me, or was that the grief?

I cried at the heavens through a throat that no longer worked.

My mind ceased to function. I became something base, primal. I could only feel.

…

And all I was became Rage.

…

The concentration of negativity drew the Grimm. Monstrosities circled me, the lone survivor. A girl who could not fathom what was happening.

And it was that moment, I digressed further. I was no longer something I would call sentient.

Not a living thing.

Not an organism.

Lesser, simpler.

An element.

My baptism—the Awakening of my Semblance was performed by none other than the Heart of Vacuo itself.

I was its nature.

I was its storm.

My Aura merged with my surroundings, and I felt the Kingdom answer my call.

The bones of my parents would be the very first weapons I would ever forge.

They made the finest of blades.

I struck down my first foes with them.

Once they were spent, I sough my next set of “weapons”,

And I realized everything became a weapon to my touch.

The fallen corpses of Vacuo became my next blades.

And the next.

And the next…

Until all my enemies were nothing but dust in the wind.

…

What returned was no longer a nameless slave.

It had devolved—

I became a Fang.

The Fang of Vacuo.

.

X  X X  X  X

.

As soon as I reached the city, I was able to find my brother.

Shepherd had avoided the mass abductions for the experiments. He was lucky.

As lucky as one can be, having his parents and only sibling go missing for several months.

He could see the change in me… the violence I could control at my fingertips.

Sometimes, I look back and wonder…

Did he embark on his pacifist crusade to save Vacuo’s soul—or mine.

…

Or maybe, he tried to save Vacuo from me.

How ironic, but so very fitting.

If they never took his life through their Third Crusade, they would never have seen one light of my wrath.

He was so foolish.

I warned him. I knew the world would turn on him and others like him.

The corrupt always justify themselves to the righteous through strength.

No. While my brother tried to offer redemption for those crooked souls, I took my time finding those who would rise with me, when his ambitions failed.

Chain Nai was a champion of the Gladiator Arenas. He had “won” his freedom, but the ones controlling the games propagated the backstory, he stayed to fight for the thrill and honor.

Peh! What nonsense. Still, their foolishness would ultimately work to my favor.

Nai was the only one to ever defeat me during my time as a gladiator, and I was the only one to ever face him in a fair match, and live.

He would become my first general, my first Khan. The Fist of Vacuo, many would later proclaim him.

…

My friendship with Minerva was unexpected, to say the least.

By then, I was forming the first vestiges of the Red Fang, when I heard about a single Faunus massacring a small army of Human aristocrats.

I sought her out eagerly, entertaining the idea I had found one similar to myself.

But Minerva could not be more different.

She was originally an attendant to a young noble. A Human who researched Magic and even managed to learn a few tricks himself.

Minerva and the man fell in love. He taught her what he learned, and surprising them both, found she had a gift for Magic.

Rumor spread. A romantic relationship between Human and Faunus was forbidden. They were inevitably caught.

…

They lynched the poor man, and hung his body from the roof of his house.

Minerva joined me the moment I asked her.

She became my second Khan.

The Sorceress of Vacuo.

.

X  X X  X  X

.

I…

I do not look back as fondly on our first meeting as Raven probably does.

When I first found her, she hid behind a miner’s mask. The shovel in her hands was covered in blood. A tiny thing, but she held onto it like a sword made to smite all those who would do her and her brother harm.

I didn’t think much of her at first. I had seen countless children like her in my travels.

But when she removed her mask, I found myself captivated.

The way she stared at me through her tears. A fire of defiance, but at the same time, a purity—an innocence.

I lost myself in that moment.

Raven looked to me like a little goddess of death. So precious and deadly. I don’t believe in a god or a heaven, but if such things ever existed, I could only think they sent her to me.

I embraced her without thought, and she wept openly in my arms. I didn’t know little goddesses could cry.

In time, I believed she would one day become my third Khan. The greatest of my generals and a stronger warrior than myself or Nai.

But she needed time.

…

And in that time, Raven would become someone I would care for deeply as a daughter. Less than the weapon I wanted her to be at our first meeting. The compassion I thought I lost, was returned to me by her, and her alone.

My brother and I sent her and Qrow to Vale, hoping they would find a better life.

I’d never seen Raven as furious as the day we saw her off for Beacon Academy. But I was fine with it. Even if she grew hating me for the rest of her life, I was content.

I would wage my war without Raven. I was satisfied with that thought.

…

For a moment, I may have believed in my brother’s campaign of nonviolence. After all, what did I have to lose should he succeed?

I would satiate my bloodlust some other way, I was sure.

When he inevitably failed, I promised I would be there. I would protect him, nurse his wounds and ego— give him the older sibling’s “I told you so”.

…

They killed Shepherd, and I practically let them.

I let my own brother fall.

And like all things, I turned him and the very memory of him into a weapon.

His death caused an outrage.

And I used it to wage the war I always wanted, the war I waited every day for.

…

Nai was more than ready. Minerva was at my side.

…

Raven had returned to Vacuo a few years before. She left her child behind for me. And I foolishly welcomed back my goddess of death as the Third Khan I always dreamt she would be.

I sent the younger generation like Blake, Ilia, and Adam to fight my battles. Be it to die on the frontlines or execute the defenseless in the rear, it did not matter.

My war was waged.

The three Khans, as well as their Great Khan, laid ruin to countless Crusaders.

In time, I won my Vacuo.

And when I finally sat on that cursed throne in the Hanging Gardens, I felt something I hadn’t felt since before I died—since before my rebirth in that desert all those years ago.

I was afraid.

.

X  X X  X  X

.

The moment we won Vacuo, I saw a room filled with the faces of those I loved.

Every life I touched, turned into a weapon before my very eyes.

And I was overcome.

…

One word, and they would march.

A single command, and a Kingdom of blades would have ravaged the world of Remnant without mercy.

I doubt even Salem would have been able to stop that.

…

I had made weapons of everyone I had ever cared for.

And when I held the crown made of the blood and souls I had sacrificed to, I learned I did not want it.

But I couldn’t let anyone else have it either.

Who knows what insanity someone else could do with what I built.

Vacuo would be ruler-less. And I would play the guard dog until someone suitable could claim the throne. Someone who would not lead our people down a path of destruction.

Minerva would have proven adequate, but she wanted to help create a brighter future through its children. Perhaps, inspired by her lost love, she decided to become an educator for eager minds. And the Headmaster of Shade Academy came to be.

For a time, I also believed Blake could take the throne. But she held no desire to play such a role. Guilt-ridden by the things she did under my order, she wanted the life of a Huntress to atone. She wanted to do good, not rule. The least I could do was support her.

…

And then, I finally found them.

A pair of siblings, Mouse and Knives Rakis. Their mother gave birth to them, while suffering the symptoms of Dust Poisoning. They were born with a few health complications, but more importantly, their capricious circumstances allowed them to develop Silver Eyes. I can only assume the large consumption of Dust and Bane awakened some ancestry connected to the Fairies.

Both were absolutely gifted— young, malleable, bright. They could share the throne of Vacuo and lead our people to prosperity.

What greater rulers could there be than those with a Semblance to predict the future?

They were young and ready to be groomed. But as their abilities developed, they revealed to me the fates to befall not only our Kingdom, but all of Remnant.

A world where every living being was wiped out.

We worked to make sure such a future never came to be, but all efforts so far have failed.

Until a slight deviation occurred in the prediction. The timeline corrected itself almost immediately, but more of these “alterations” appeared as time went on.

It was only recently, we were able to match the deviations with certain events happening outside our Kingdom…

A war over some Grimm-infested isles.

Rumors of a young team of mercenaries waging battle at Tower trapped in a storm.

A newly christened Spring Maiden.

The resurrection of the Fall Maiden.

The usurping of the Atlas Kingdom.

…

“Sound familiar?”

In the open desert, watching a swirling storm of floating debris, two figures stood. The dreamscape showed the fluttering pages in the hurricane to be the host’s memories. Like Yang’s and Neo’s before, Emerald found herself traversing Temujin’s “Soul”.

“Sound familiar?” Temujin repeated her question.

“Yeah, it’s pretty obvious,” she rubbed her arm uncertainly. “Guess, it’s too late to say sorry for making you dream about your past.”

“Eh,” the other simply shrugged.

Though she tried to play it off lightly, Emerald could see the forlorn sentiment lingering in Temujin’s heart. Emotions were amplified in the host’s dreams. The mint-haired girl saw the deepest contents, and was taken back by what she found there.

There was something else after Temujin’s recollections. Something she didn’t say aloud. A secret she kept from everyone, including Minerva and especially Raven.

Before the end of Remnant, there was an event preceding it that the Rakis siblings foretold and feared.

The Death of Vacuo.

…

Unable to stand the silence any longer, Emerald spoke.

“You’re pretty critical of yourself,” she said passively.

“Oh? I’ve said nothing but the truth.”

“In my experience, people always make their pasts worse than they actually were. But thanks for the story.”

“Hm. Is that all you have to say?”

Emerald looked down for a moment.

“…You’re too arrogant,” she finally said. “The people who followed you chose to follow you. You didn’t turn them into weapons. They decided to fight for themselves. Thinking you had any actual control over them is nothing but arrogance.”

“Hmmm… Maybe, so. Is that what your team is to you?”

“Obviously. I can’t make my idiots care about me. And they do it anyway, even if I don’t want them to.”

Temujin gave a dry chuckle.

“If only you were born earlier, and had been raised in Vacuo. You would have made a fine Khan.”

“Not even in your dreams, lady.”

“Current topics aside, you are rather talented.”

“Just a little bit.” Emerald rubbed her nails on her chest, and breathed a huff. “I’ve hallucinated dreams before, but this was some new level shit.”

“Heh heh heh,” Temujin gave another hollow chuckle, and grasped the younger woman’s arm in a firm grip.

“This talent of yours gives me an idea.”

.

.

.

.

NOTES

Q: Schedule?

A: Nope. Can’t make one. Tried. Chapters comes out when they’re finished.

Q: CinderxNeo (sinnamon spice/spicecream) fic?

A: Ugh. Kind of, maybe, interested, but I don’t see the romance aspect? But I do think they could make one of the best partnerships in RWBY in general. Maybe a platonic sidequest in the future during the hiatus? No promises.

But, yes. I’d love to write something about the two of them. That would be fun. (Message suggestions?)_

Q: Ever think of writing a lemon(smut fic?)?

A: No. Not interested in writing pure smut.

Q: Ever think of writing a romance fic?

A: No. I don’t have that ability. It would end up being too short.

Q: Kingdom Hearts fic?

A: Maybe. Not immediately, if ever. Have a rough idea of a party consisting of Aqua, Lightning, (young)Tadashi, (and Balthier or Fran?). One of the worlds they visit is Atlantis or Treasure Planet.

Q: What do you think of toxic wasps and bumbley shippers/drama?

A: …What?

(Googles)

Oh. I had no idea there was stuff like that happening in the RWBY community.

…

I got nothin’. I barely pay attention to stuff outside the show as it is. Feels like a lot of noise I just don’t understand. Welp, time to write the next chapter.

.

As always, thank you for reading.

See you, when I see you.

-Nezz

[shonikado]

Warning: Contains Dice Thoughts #14, A.K.A. "Minimal Homebrew To Make DM’s Life Easier Hopefully"

(most likely, said DM will be me)

Step 1, everything is a d20 vs. d20 contest Step 2, advantage/disadvantages no longer cancel out Step 3, (dis)advantage can stack (highest 1 of 3d20, for example) Step 4, instead of rolling disadvantage, other side gets advantage Step 5, all enemies/traps in a dungeon share a single roll modifier Step 6, simulate good/bad stats with advantage/disadvantage Step 7, a 20 is auto-success, unless both sides roll 20 Step 8, ties are flexible, can reroll, give to players, etc. your pick

More info below the readmore - I tried to organize it decently.

What’s the goal here? To reduce unnecessary planning/running effort for the DM, and to increase flexibility/freedom for DMs and players. This is all built for a DM who hides all information from players, was built with some software assistance in mind, and does its best to only affect how the DM runs things - rather than the systems the players play with.

Everything's a contest, no static DCs? A player knows if they failed/succeeded against a static DC if they rolled high/low. In a contest, the DM has more room to fudge rolls and pick the appropriate outcome. (Also, I personally think letting players roll for everything leads to feeling more in-control.)

Doing away with monster stat blocks? Figuring out if a monster has a +0/+1 for a stat won't significantly impact player experience. Having a single modifier sets the overall difficulty of a dungeon, which can impact player experience. If a monster is strong, give them advantage on rolls involving being strong. If they're evasive, advantage on avoiding things. (Dis)advantage is visible to players and can be more easily grasped when forming tactics.

(Dis)advantage more complicated? If a player shoots at an evasive enemy with a bow, it should be disadvantaged. If a player not trained with a bow shoots at a static target, it should be disadvantaged. If a player not trained with a bow shoots at an evasive enemy, it's reasonable that it should be even harder. So, double disadvantage.

20 as crits for all rolls? This helps keep bounded accuracy. In addition, no matter how high/low your modifiers, it means advantage makes you more likely to succeed (more likely to roll a 20) and enemy advantage makes you less likely (more likely THEY roll a 20, possibly countering yours). "Crit" is just my term for "auto-succeed" and has no bearing on success being better or worse than if you'd rolled anything else. (Though I did toy with such ideas.)

What about 1s being auto-failures? I'm still debating that, depending on if it creates noticeably better probabilities (which requires being able to tell what “better” is). They’re definitely not necessary, though - their usual purpose is to ensure any roll can fail. Since both sides can auto-succeed through a 20, that inversely ensures the other side fails.

Why no decision on how to handle ties? Well, the "fair" thing is reroll, that way you get 50/50 odds in even matches. But maybe the game is about letting players be heroes, so just let them win ties. Or succeeding against the odds, so let them lose. I thought it might be fun to let players decide if they want to win or lose ties before each session, and offer bonus EXP if they pick to lose them.

Is this part of an idea involving more sweeping, player-side changes? Yeah, originally it was tied to a system that officially scraps stats in favor of "traits" for (dis)advantage, even for players (like "strong", "evasive", "forgetful"). I don't think that's the first time I've proposed such a system. There would still be one granular number - level. You'd add your level to your rolls, and enemies add theirs. If party levels are consistent, and enemy levels are consistent, it's a single number the DM could precalculate and just handle on their side of the table. If the DM always balances encounters, it'd be 0, never a concern. "Boss" enemies could be a higher level, but ideally would instead use traits, especially since they're more useful than traditional stats. Instead of a creature having +5 AC, they can be "Huge", but that can be taken advantage of by the ranger who now has a bigger target to hit. An "Evasive" enemy wouldn't be able to evade once trapped or cornered.

Any weirdness involving level caps? I'm building this with d20 in mind but it could be for dice with any number of sides. One thing to note is that, as far as this system is concerned, very high/low modifiers stop being relevant. For 20, this means that +19 and everything beyond is effectively the same. That'd be an issue if you did the "add your level to your roll" thing and broke the 1-20 level range, with, say, a level 30 enemy. An army of generic level 1s is as effective as an army of generic level 11s. I'm a fan of both bounded accuracy, and of having all values differentiated, so I find that bothersome, and is partially why I'm sticking with d20 - lots of wiggle room for character levels without hitting that point.

[locatie]

2019 Gaming Year in Review

This year I beat 21 games! Last year I beat 38, but this year was a little rough on me in many ways, and I had to go a few months without really committing to anything.

I’m going to go through my list of games and jot down a few thoughts I had about them! Spoilers ahead, naturally.

Rating System:

5⭐: An absolute favorite! A game that’s going to stick with me for a long time. Regardless of any flaws I found, I fell deeply in love with these games. 4⭐: A pretty good game! I really enjoyed my time with these ones. They’re not quite perfect, maybe a few story beats or mechanics I couldn’t jive with, but I did still love these as well. 3⭐: A decent game! I didn’t fall in love with these games and the good and bad felt fairly equal. I don’t regret playing these games, but they had a lot of room for improvement. 2⭐: A bleh game. Most of these games were very ‘miss’ rather than ‘hit’ for me. Good concepts are probably buried in these ones, but I struggled to get through them. 1⭐: A terrible game. There is very little about these games that I find redeeming. I probably played them wishing they’d be done already. That I finished them at all is a miracle.

In order of when I beat them, starting with the beginning of the year:

Gris by Nomada Studio

4⭐

A visually gorgeous game. The mechanics were satisfying and made puzzle solving enjoyable, and I adored ‘unlocking’ the colors of the world to restore it to its former beauty. The game only got more beautiful as time went on, and the level design was very memorable to me. Also the soundtrack is one of the best of all the games I played this year, and I keep it on repeat a lot.

Best Part: The art in general. A treat to look at, and it makes for the best desktop wallpapers. Worst Part: The ambiguity in narrative. It’s not too bad, I just wish there was a little more to it.

Pokemon Let’s Go Eevee by Game Freak

4⭐

Despite this feeling like the millionth time they’ve focused on the Kanto region, and the blatant baiting of nostalgia, I appreciated this game. I’m a sucker for having my Pokemon follow me or being able to ride them. Much more accessible than going back and replaying the original R/B/Y games, which I can’t seem to enjoy anymore due to the QOL features that newer games have, so if I ever have a craving for Kanto, this will satisfy me. Not the best Pokemon game though just because Kanto was a pretty boring region visually and they stayed true to that, haha.

Best Part: Pokemon following the player! Riding Arcanine was a blast. Worst Part: Being in Kanto again. Really wish it was Gold/Silver for the double Johto/Kanto region thing, because Kanto alone just isn’t worth it.

Kingdom Hearts Final Mix by Square Enix

3⭐

I liked this game a lot as a kid and was interested to see how I would feel about it as an adult. It’s... something. There’s something always very off when JRPG localized dialogue is voiced -- it’s extremely cheesy to listen to in English, and this game is no exception. Still, I enjoy the sheer absurdity that is mashing up Disney and Final Fantasy characters anyway. The platforming is not remotely fun at all and the story is ridiculous, sometimes not in a good way. Thank god for skippable cutscenes or I wouldn’t have survived the end of this game.

Best Part: The creativity of the worlds. It was such a unique and ambitious concept for its time. Worst Part: The dialogue/story. This might be the only JRPG where the whole ‘friendship makes us stronger’ angle makes me want to strangle a fictional child.

Dear Esther by The Chinese Room

2⭐

I do enjoy walking simulators, but apparently not ones by The Chinese Room. Not as bad as Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture, but still...not very enjoyable. I couldn’t seem to process what was going on as it was narrated to me -- I liked how it was written, and I was interested in hearing it, but I dunno. It meant nothing to me. I might replay it and try to grasp it again, really focus on it, but as it was presented to me on the first playthrough, it didn’t grab me. This is what I get for expecting something really good of a game where I wander around aimlessly for a couple hours

Best Part: The writing style is really neat and I enjoyed reading along and being fascinated by the prose. Worst Part: The ambiguity of the narrative. what the fuck is happening. why am i in a cave. who was that i just saw

Assassin’s Creed Odyssey by Ubisoft

4⭐

Not the first AC game I’ve ever played, but the first I liked enough to beat! It’s essentially an action rpg more than ever -- stealth is completely unnecessary if you so choose. I loved Kassandra so, so much, and exploring Greece was extremely fun for me! It was gorgeous and I often found myself wandering around towns and cities, soaking in the sights and feeling pretty dang immersed. I haven’t played the DLC yet but hope to some day. Not a perfect game -- while a lot of side quests are fun, the charm wears off after a while because the gameplay loop of sneaking in and murdering everyone got stale finally after 50 hours. Still, I’d love to go back and replay it some time.

Best Part: Kassandra. Everything about her. I would die for her. Also Greece in its entirety. Worst Part: Every goddamn time Deimos opened his mouth.

Rose of Winter by Pillow Fight

3⭐

A pretty cute but simple visual novel! I liked the protagonist quite a bit and a couple of the romances, but I wished it was longer/more fleshed out. I liked the universe it took place in and the concepts it presented (time travel! Race relations/the variety in cultures!) and would’ve happily played a longer game about these things. The romances leaving me wanting more was a good and bad thing, in the end.

Best Part: The protag! I love this chubby pink-haired knight! She is SO cute and lovely. Worst Part: Lack of depth in the romances. I like drawn-out romances, and these take place over the course of a couple days, and that’s not my bag.

Celeste by Matt Makes Games Inc.

4⭐

My review on this game is a little skewed. I was very bad at it, in the end, and very tired of dying literally hundreds of times in some areas that I had to give myself extra dashes. I had to keep toggling them on and off after giving myself a certain number of tries, because I really wanted to see how this game would play out. The gameplay and design and soundtrack give it the score it has, but the writing it was knocks it down from being a 5 star game. The concept of the story is good! Madeline wanting to reach the top of the mountain for her personal reasons was really lovely but the delivery of it felt very flat. The writing itself didn’t do it justice for me! I only ever see people talk about the gameplay itself and not the story/writing and maybe that’s why.

Best Part: The fact that the developers added accessibility options to people who aren’t very skilled at games, like me, can enjoy a game like this, even if we’re not playing “as intended.” Worst Part: Madeline’s reflection. As a narrative device she’s good, but the dialogue between the two characters was kinda mehhh to me.

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt by CD Projekt

5⭐

There’s nothing I can say about this game that a million other people haven’t already said. I loved dad!Geralt. I loved Geralt in general. I did enjoy the first two games but who he was as a character in this game was my favorite. Yennefer was also great, as was Ciri, and the family dynamics were The Best. Also probably the best side quests in any rpg I’ve ever played! None of that radiant quest bullshit or fetch quest nonsense that pad a lot of other WRPGs I’ve been into :/ I still need to finish Blood and Wine, but so far it’s incredible, as was Hearts of Stone. Ugh I have so much to say about how much I loved the music, and Skellige, and Novigrad (Novigrad is one of the best video game cities as a worldbuilding device, imo), but I’ll keep this all brief. Don’t like Gwent at all though!!

Best Part: The entire portion of the game where you have to be a Good Dad or else you get a bad ending. Worst Part: The fact that Iorveth and the entire Scoia’tael subplot was cut entirely yet Roche got to stick around. I hate Roche. Iorveth was way better. Bring back my boy.

Persona 5 by Atlus

5⭐

holy shit. I haven’t beaten a JRPG this good in so long. This game changed what I want out of a JRPG. The soundtrack is phenomenal, the design of everything is impossibly stylish and I never got sick of any of it in the 96 hours it took me to beat the game. I adore Joker, Yusuke, Haru, and Ryuji as characters!! I don’t really care for Akechi and Shido as villains, but the proper final battle was very tense for me and the cutscene that followed felt so good. BIG GUN. Sometimes the palaces were a little tedious, and it took me a really long time to actually finish the game from when I started, because I needed big breaks after chunks of the game, but once I got into the swing of it after Makoto’s introduction as a Phantom Thief and that palace, I was pretty sucked in.

I will never forget my desperate struggle to max my stats by aggressively eating giant burgers until the endgame.

Best Part: The entire ‘student daily life sim’ portion. Managing my time and my relationships was very fun and I loved getting closer to my friends and choosing where to go, how to spend my time. Worst Part: The occasional sexism and homophobia that I had to sit through. Giving Ann agency after the first palace, but then trying to convince her to get naked really sucked, and then those two predatory gay men. Ugh. Oh and Ryuji looking at Ann’s boobs all the time. Seriously? are you for real??

Nier: Automata by PlatinumGames

4⭐

I waffled between giving this 4 or 5 stars, but I think 4 is right. I adored this game to bits, but admittedly didn’t do everything in it that I wanted to. I loved the world, the music, most of the characters, the combat, and that fucking ending. I didn’t like Adam and Eve (their dialogue...was so dumb...), and I was a little eh on route B, since it’s a lot of the same as route A, just from 9S’s perspective. At first I thought it was asking a lot to make me essentially do all the same shit over again, but when everything started changing in the third route, that’s when I was getting really invested. I mean I was already loving it during the first route, I was just slightly skeptical about having to replay a lot of the same things.

Ending E fucked me up though. Hearing Weight of the World didn’t hurt me until that ending, after all I’d been through, and then accepting help and hearing the chorus of voices. Ugh. No ending has ever been like that in a game for me.

Best Part: Sacrificing my data to help some stranger out there, because people do want to help. Humanity can be good. The message that there is worth in having feelings and being alive and real and loving. Worst Part: we really out here sexualizing 2B and looking at her panties a lot, huh.

Spyro 2: Ripto’s Rage (Reignited Trilogy) by Toys For Bob

4⭐

This is the Spyro game I played the most of as a kid, and this remaster is incredible. All of the Reignited Trilogy makes the Spyro games look the way that I felt they did when I was a child. Seriously, it’s gorgeous and I can’t believe how true to the originals it is. I had a blast playing this one; it doesn’t get 5 stars, though, because I wouldn’t say this is like a ‘favorite’ game or anything. It’s wonderful, but not mindblowing.

Best Part: Getting to run around the hub worlds and drinking them in -- they’re where I spent hours as a child, and that nostalgic really got to me. Worst Part: the fucking TIMED FLYING PORTIONS

Spyro 3: Year of the Dragon (Reignited Trilogy) by Toys For Bob

4⭐

I was really excited to play this one because I didn’t get to beat it as a kid, and it was impossible to emulate because every rom of it didn’t work. Not as good as Ripto’s Rage to me, personally, because I didn’t love the levels where I was the penguin or the monkey. There were a lot of gimmicks, so to speak, in this game that I could do without. Skateboarding didn’t add anything to the experience either, ehh. Still, 4 stars because what Toys For Bob did with the trilogy is amazing and it made me wish games there had been more Spyro games that were like this.

Best Part: I finally got to beat this game after so long and it felt like a childhood wish of mine came true. Worst Part: I never want to be that stupid monkey ever again. Most of these side characters do not feel like they belong in a Spyro game, even though I know they were just trying to innovate the formula.

Fire Emblem: Three Houses by Intelligent Systems and Koei Tecmo

5⭐

Ohhh my god. I was nervous about another mainline Fire Emblem game, ever since Fates burned me pretty badly with how much I hated that game. Three Houses gave me nearly everything I wanted out of a Fire Emblem game, thankfully. No stupid explanation for offspring, no wasted dialogue between characters that didn’t need to have supports! I fell in love with so many of the NPCs and while the story isn’t perfect, it was a blast to go through and see the multiple sides to the conflict.

I went Golden Deer first and watched most of Amy’s playthrough of Blue Lions. I was in the middle of a Black Eagles run when I got a little burnt out and put it down, but I’m super excited to eventually see what Edelgard’s side of the story is, seeing as I don’t like her in the other routes but I’m shrimpterested in what her possible justification for anything is. Can’t wait for more story DLC whenever it happens!

Best Part: The support dialogues between characters. Also Claude von Riegan, destroyer of racism. Worst Part: the fact that there’s barely any time between Dimitri finally being nice to Byleth and the end of the Blue Lions route. he’s such a growly ass for so long.

Genital Jousting by Free Lives

2⭐

Obviously this game is a self-aware joke and isn’t meant to be much. The reason it got 2 stars instead of 1 is because I played it at a time that I really needed a laugh. I streamed it for my friend and for a while I was happily distracted by the story mode, even if it mostly involves hopelessly sticking my dick head into butts. The narration gave me Stanley Parable vibes, which was amusing, but yeah. Obviously this wasn’t gonna be some game of the year shit

Best Part: Playing with friends and yelling “GET OUT OF MY BUTT” at the top of your lungs. Worst Part: You can only enjoy sticking your dick in butts for so long before you don’t wanna do it anymore

I Love You, Colonel Sanders! by Psyop

1⭐

Yes, I am ranking this game as worse than a game about wiggly dicks. I didn’t have any hopes or expectations for this game, as it was always obviously meant to be a giant advertisement for KFC food, but that’s not even the part that bothered me. I didn’t care or mind the blatant product placement, the millions of mentions of all their herbs and spices and their gross bowls of corn, potato, and whatever.

I was so damn disappointed because it just wasn’t a good visual novel. I spent the whole time comparing it to Hatoful Boyfriend, which is an actually good parody of the entire genre. ILYCS felt more like “ha ha see how fucking weird dating sims are?? See how stupid and absurd the things that happen in them are?” rather than any kind of remotely interesting subversion on the genre. I don’t know why I expected that ILYCS would bother to do that, but I figured if a pigeon dating sim could surprise me, maybe this would too. Bleh.

Best Part: I did succeed in making Colonel Sanders love me, at least. Worst Part: Literally everything else.

The Outer Worlds by Obsidian Entertainment

4⭐

I’m giving this 4 stars, but this game gives me conflicted feelings. I love the companions in this game a lot, but some of them do have slightly disappointing arcs -- Ellie comes to mind for that one. The writing for the dialogue is great, but some of the main quests are just OK. The flaw system is really cool in theory, but I definitely didn’t think of them were worth the perk points, though they’re great if you’re serious about roleplaying.

I did have a lot of fun, but the ending felt very abrupt to me. I got to Phineas and we spoke for a minute, and then the credits rolled. And capitalism sure was bad! That was very heavy-handed. I enjoyed my time with it a lot but I am not itching to replay it. If there’s a sequel, though, I will definitely be on board with it.

Best Part: The dialogue options. They’re so fucking funny. Obsidian is the champion of snarky/witty dialogue. Worst Part: The ending made me the leader when I didn’t really feel prepared for that, I didn’t feel like that was the narrative I built for my character. The ending came at me so fast, it felt wrong.

Tyranny by Obsidian Entertainment

4⭐

If nothing else, Outer Worlds made me crave more of Obsidian’s writing flavor. This is the first CRPG I’ve ever committed to and beaten, and I do not regret that choice. I had tried to play it before but stopped very early on because it’s a lot of reading -- the entire opening has you do so much reading to make choices to kind of build your character’s backstory.

I loved playing a bad guy and accumulating power. My character was so loyal to Tunon and I loved the active development I got to have as someone who was so devoted to being a cog in the machine to someone who realized that they are special, they can be a conqueror, they can shape the world however they want. I know it’s possible to undermine all the bad guys and use your power for good, but eh, this is a game about being bad! It’s wonderful! And it was just long/short enough that it was great for someone just getting into CRPGs.

But. Like Outer Worlds, the ending felt rushed in Tyranny, though in an even more egregious way. Just as the story starts truly kicking off -- you have all this power, I had succeeded in making my superiors bow to me -- the game ends. It seems as though they ran out of time or money to have you actually face off against Kyros, the obvious next step in your plan for domination of whatever flavor. Maybe it was always the plan that taking down the Overlord was sequel material, but the way they built it up, it doesn’t feel right. And the game didn’t do well enough, or so I’ve read, so there will never be a face-off against her. I had such a good time with this game, but the ending left a real sour taste in my mouth.

Best Part: Really feeling like I had earned the power I got by endgame, by ‘playing’ the system. Defeating Tunon by manipulating him into bowing to me had me on edge and I was terrified until I walked out of his room. Worst Part: Knowing I will probably never get a resolution for the fight against Kyros. Really felt like all the cool stuff I did meant nothing.

Pokemon Shield by Game Freak

3⭐

Biiig mixed feelings about this one. I know Pokemon games are not known for their storytelling prowess, but even this one felt insultingly stupid to me. I know they can be good and interesting and posit cool concepts based on the worlds they’ve built. I didn’t like the gameplay of Black/White but I guess since that one tackled the ethics of Pokemon, Game Freak doesn’t want to try making any more challenging storylines.

The world also felt so empty. I never really noticed it in older Pokemon games, but SwSh has all these houses and no one has anything interesting to say. The NPCs aren’t worth talking to except when they give you items. Problems like that are common in Pokemon but I really hoped that bringing it to a home console meant that the game could be bigger and more full of content. The post game is almost nonexistent. For the first time ever, I don’t feel compelled to play long enough to complete my dex.

Best Part: The Wild Area, and doing raid battles with Amy. Playing alongside her and battling together was fun, and it was nice to cut down on the time it would’ve normally taken us to grind. Worst Part: Hop, Leon, and Bede. Worst characters in any Pokemon game, hands down.

Pillars of Eternity by Obsidian Entertainment

5⭐

I had initially tried this game out last year or so, but couldn’t get into it. Beating Tyranny finally made me feel able to tackle this one, and I’m so glad I gave it another chance. For most of the game I was meticulous and did almost all of the side quests, and I felt extremely rewarded by the narrative for doing so. Most of the companions were a joy to be around, and the lore of the world really drew me in.

Thanks to PoE, I think a whole new world and genre of games has opened up to me! But I’ll always feel like this is the first one I really loved.

Best Part: Eder!!! Ok also the themes of the game, especially in White March. Almost a month later I’m still thinking about the meaning to some parts of the game. Worst Part: That part in White March part 2 with the debate I couldn’t win. I understand why it was like that, I didn’t hate it or anything. Just the prerequisites to get the good outcome are bananas and there’s NO way I could possibly get the “good” ending of that dlc without following a guide WAY ahead of time. Oh well!

Katamari Damacy Reroll by BANDAI NAMCO Entertainment

2⭐

I didn’t play the first game when it came out. Instead I played the sequel, and that’s the game I have fond memories of, so unfortunately I spent this remake wishing they’d remade that one instead. The controls are more frustrating than I remember, and the level design is kind of meh. I do like that the town gets bigger with (almost) every level, until you’re rolling up adjacent towns and cities, but it wasn’t as fun as the paper crane level or the flower level or the zoo level of We Love Katamari :/ I absolutely pushed myself through this one as fast as possible, no replaying levels for the fun of it.

Best Part: The creativity and absurdity of Katamari as a whole. Rolling around a little Japanese town and finding very Japanese items is fun. Worst Part: The controls. Trying to climb up things is a nightmare and I ran out of time during some levels purely because it was so difficult to climb sometimes.

A Plague Tale: Innocence by Asobo Studio

3⭐

I didn’t know a whole lot about this game going in. I didn’t think the narrative was as incredible and resonating as reviews led me to believe, but it was alright. The first half of the game was very interesting to me -- the perspective of children running away from the Inquisition during the plague was exciting and I feared for these children as they never seemed to be able to get a moment of rest. I did like that Amicia and Hugo needed to build their bond from scratch, and it was full of missteps that I could understand children would make.

However as soon as things got supernatural wrt Hugo’s blood, then I felt like it lost a little bit of the charm for me. I liked the ‘found family in an unforgiving world’ aspects, but then suddenly blood powers happened and the vibe of the narrative changed. Oh well.

Best Part: The progression of power in the game. At first I felt very nervous when sneaking was the only option I had, as I am bad at stealth, but then gradually being able to kill people with my sling and solve puzzles with fire and light and being nearly unstoppable was really cool. I felt like I had earned Amicia’s strength. Worst Part: Hugo’s RAT POWERS and that final boss. just. what.

Untitled Goose Game by House House

2⭐

I wanted to close out the year with something fun and short, but I didn’t expect just how short this game would be. Although, ngl, if it were any longer I think I might’ve gotten rather tired of it anyway. The memes and whatnot that Goose Game gave the internet were worth more to me than the game itself. $20 for roughly an hour of gameplay just feels... bleh. I don’t even normally believe in that whole “$1 per hour of gameplay” stuff that many gamers like to throw around, but this felt like a rip-off. Still, it’s kinda fun to be a wretched little goose.

Best Part: Being a naughty little goose is cute and amusing, and bullying that Griffin McElroy looking boy into the phone booth is the highlight of my experience. Worst Part: It’s a hilarious concept but I don’t feel like I got to harass people half as much as I expected I would. The objectives to find a series of items and dump them somewhere else is just boring.

[tradeshowguy]

NAB Show 2019: A View from the Tradeshow Floor

Having never attended the National Association of Broadcasters Show in Las Vegas, I did not have a full grasp of the scope and size of the show. And once I was walking the floor earlier this week, it still took a few hours to fully comprehend how freaking big it is. There are nearly 2 million square feet of exhibiting space in 13 halls separable by movable walls.

Over 90,000 attendees showed up along with over 1600 exhibitors to see the latest in video and audio tech in all its glory: broadcast and cable TV, sports, podcasting, radio, lighting, cloud services and much more. It was all there. And it was overwhelming.

The biggest takeaways? As an old radio guy who started his career by playing single 45s on a turntable, I can safely say: we’ve come a long way (mentioning those 45s to the 20 and 30-something folks staffing the booths also was a good way to bring forth those puzzled looks along with a hesitant chuckle – yeah, I know I’m old).

Video is huge, as are the gigantic video walls, which seemed to adorn nearly one out of three booths. Quality is impressive. Cameras are going up in quality as the price creeps down. Seeing and playing with 8K cameras showed attendees what the working video world will be working with soon if they aren’t already.

Audio production, and in particular, the production of audio in conjunction with video, is a really big deal. Avid’s booth featured a large screen displaying how they mixed the music that was a part of the Oscar-winning Bohemian Rhapsody. Also there were the Oscar winners, who sat on a panel discussing the process.

Visitors also could partake in training on a large scale: Adobe, Avid, DaVinci Resolve and many others were doing full-on all-show-hours in-depth training on their latest products.

From an exhibit standpoint, I also saw something I’d never seen before: many video camera and monitor manufacturers built set and had them populated with stand-in actors. The idea was to give visitors a chance to put their hands on the various cameras and zoom and pan and see how everything worked under conditions that replicated what they’d find on an actual set.

I also saw at least three stationary cars equipped with cameras to film actors as they drove. One exhibitor went even further: behind the car there was a large video image of a road as if the car was moving. On the right and left were more screens with similar images. And for the coup de grace, a large video panel suspended over the entire car which simulated the movement of the sky, reflections of streetlights and more. An actor need only sit in the car and everything else is captured in one take, with little post-shoot work needed.

How to film a scene in a car to make it appear it’s really moving.

Lots of international exhibitors, including Europe and China, Korea and Canada among the more prominent. It seems pretty common that exhibits from China and Korea will set up exhibits with walls that enclose much of the space. I don’t see that as much from US exhibitors, so my hunch is it’s a bit of a cultural thing. I also don’t think humor passes easily from culture to culture. One exhibitor from China had a McLaren automobile on display (wasn’t really sure of the purpose, but it certainly looked sharp). As I was talking to one of the reps, I joked that maybe they should raffle off the car at the end of the show. All I got in return was confused look. Hey, I thought it was funny!

Exhibits were impressive from the big companies, and many of the smaller companies also had a good look. Although as in any show, you always see the smaller companies in the 10x10s around the edges of the main floor struggling to be seen or to even have something worth seeing. The most impressive things seen in the smaller booths were the company’s product lit up with LED, or something moving that catches the eye.

Esports had its own section, showing off gamers and gaming. We know that gaming has become a multi-billion dollar industry and if you search for esports competition, you’ll find a lot. There were panels and competitions taking place in the section, but frankly, since I’m not a gamer, it didn’t hold my interest that long. However, my 18-year old son probably could have spent all of the show in this area and it wouldn’t have been enough!

They’ve got their eyes on you!

The tech that supports radio, tv, cable and Internet was also displayed throughout the halls. Not being a tech guy, much of this was over my head, but impressive nonetheless: network, audio, video controllers; studio design and audio and video production boards, facility infrastructure, transmitters, processors, automation software, captioning AI, streaming, scheduling, logging, transcription…you name it, somebody was here promoting it.

I talked to well over a hundred people about the show, how it worked for them, how it helped create leads, sell their products. Most told me it was a great show for them. Several said this show in particular was the one show that gave them most of their good leads for the year for them to follow up on.

But not everyone agreed. One woman I spoke with said she’d been coming to the show for thirty years, and it’s not the show it used to be. One comment she made totally threw me. She said the “little Sony” booth wasn’t impressive at all. My jaw dropped because I’d been at the Sony booth (probably around 10,000 square feet) earlier in the show and determined it to be one of the top exhibits there, going so far as to walk through the booth for a minute or two shooting video to capture it all. But no, she said, “Sony used to take up a third of the hall!” She said that the networks (CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS) don’t send the people they used to, and the few they do send spend all their time behind closed doors in meetings, and don’t get out and mingle on the show floor like they used to. So her market wasn’t there to the extent they used to be. I found her perspective fascinating: no matter how much evidence you see to support one view, there’s always another view that’s just as valid.

I caught a couple of events on the main stage: opening day, NAB President/CEO Gordon Smith (and former Oregon senator) gave a keynote and ended by awarding MASH actor Alan Alda the NAM Distinguished Award. Alan sat for about 15 minutes after the award to chat about his career. I also caught the next morning’s panel, Tales from the White House Beat, featuring Smith chatting with ABC’s Cecilia Vega, NBC’s Hallie Jackson, CBS’s Steven Portnoy and PBS’s Yamiche Alcindor as they shared stories and insight into covering the Trump administration.

Cecilia Vega, Steven Portnoy, Hallie Jackson and Yamiche Alcindor with Gordon Smith

I was invited as a blogger which made me a member of the media, so I felt a bit of kinship with these professional journalists. I’ve been in radio news teams, hosted talk shows and been behind the microphone for decades, and it was great to hear the stories they told.

Lastly, a shout out to these folks: Josh at Time Lapse Cameras, Kent at Sharp Electronics and Suzy at FeiyuTech for their time and information. They reached out and invited me to check out their latest. Time Lapse Cameras has, as you might imagine, some great little affordable time lapse cameras which can be used to record any number of things from construction to exhibit setup and dismantle. Sharp showed off their new 8K cameras which are out later this year, and FeiyuTech demonstrated a new action camera, the Ricco, along with a handful of three-axis gimbals and other assorted goods for the video camera market. All good stuff and thanks for having me!

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Vbucks Fortnite Free of charge Amusing eight Videos About Practical Hints That'll Make You Cry

Players, young kinds in any case, don’t feel to notice this sort of things. They’re immediately after assault rifles (preferably the Legendary SCAR), pump shotguns, bolt-action sniper rifles (the scope is actually a boon), chug jugs, slurp juices, bandages, medkits, and protect potions. They see, and covet, skins that seem awesome but don't have any bearing on recreation Enjoy; for twenty bucks, you can don the Leviathan or maybe the Raven. Or they fixate on dance moves, the so-named victory emotes you may have your avatar complete, in the warmth of battle or after a get rid of. The Floss, the Refreshing, the Squat Kick, the Wiggle—these have spilled out into the world. You could see folks about you, or professional athletes on Television set, breaking into strange dances. The one particular often known as Go ahead and take L is major nowadays within the Bundesliga and at Moment Maid Park.

Fortnite Gold

Loads of completed players search down their noses at Fortnite, the best way, Probably, that some jazz and blues diehards, in 1964, dismissed the Beatles. The dances, the alliterative put-names, the dearth of accurate postapocalyptic menace: these can point out a lack of seriousness that to some appears to be spell-breaking. A classmate of Gizzard Lizard’s, ZenoMachine, a gamer for for a longer period than seems plausible (he commenced taking part in Group Fortress two in kindergarten and now develops his own online games), is definitely the eighth quality’s resident Fortnite Scrooge. “To start with, I’m not a admirer in the polygons,” ZenoMachine explained to me. We ended up over a park bench, right after university—a uncommon strike of daylight. “It has a hi-res texture but minimal-res polygons.” Gizzard Lizard had warned me which i wouldn’t fully grasp ZenoMachine, but I collected that he was critiquing the game’s aesthetics. He appreciated a realer glimpse. He objected to specified inconsistencies. The pickaxe, by way of example, which players use to demolish partitions and properties, results in Practically no damage to other players to be a weapon. “How can that be?” he mentioned. “I see why quite a bit of people like Fortnite. It targets gamers who aren’t skilled. But it violates the legal guidelines of regularity.” He said that The very first time he performed he won—by hiding out until eventually Everybody else experienced practically been killed off. This is recognized as tenting, and it is frowned upon by normal players. “If one thing so simple as participant preference affects the other players’ knowledge, you’ve bought a layout flaw,” ZenoMachine reported.

ZenoMachine develops his individual games utilizing a platform known as the Unreal Motor. Fortnite, mainly because it occurs, is built within the Unreal Engine, also. The game could be the generation of a company termed Epic Video games, based mostly outside the house Raleigh, North Carolina. In 1998, Epic released a primary-individual shooter referred to as Unreal, which appreciated only average good results but which, Pretty much by accident, experienced an enduring affect about the evolution of online video video games. Epic made use of Unreal’s underlying architecture, and some of its sections, for making what came for being often called the Unreal Engine, a essential platform that supports all method of online games, be they shooters, brawlers, platformers, or sandbox R.P.G.s. It’s basically a suite of tools that developers can use to style and Construct game titles together with other simulations. Rather than ranging from scratch in, say, C++, the popular graphic-coding language, impartial builders and also other companies use the Unreal Engine to help make their particular video games. (The licensing of your motor, subsequently, presents Epic the cash circulation to dedicate time and assets to the development of hit video games like Fortnite.) Each year, Epic uses existing video games, many of them all but forgotten, to soup up the Unreal Engine, so that it could handle an at any time additional advanced array of demands. Fortnite was the main Unreal Engine 4 launch. Among the other matters, Epic needed to adapt the motor that can help its servers accommodate the huge volume of information that has to be processed instantaneously when 100 gamers are competing in just one Fight Royale spherical. The concern of which steps have an effect on Other folks, and from what distance, on this large storm-sieged island—the old if-then trouble—is a great deal more complicated than it would seem.

“Consider Fortnite as a visual kind of media,” Jamin Warren, the editor of your society-and-gaming journal Eliminate Screen, told me. No matter what Fortnite’s attract like a sport to Perform, Additionally it is apparently quite possibly the most beguiling a person to watch. As video clip-recreation spectatorship fills arenas, and siphons a technology away from actual athletics, Fortnite has become by far the most viewed recreation on YouTube—by March, there were Just about a few billion views with the an incredible number of periods that players had uploaded—and the top recreation on Twitch, the streaming platform. Looking at isn’t just for spazzes anymore. “It’s produced a kind of worldwide arcade,” Warren said. “Instead of a handful of Youngsters looking about the shoulder of the new-shot more mature brother or whatsoever, down in the shopping mall, you have got many people observing, and the individual taking part in the sport can be a millionaire.”

The medium’s breakout star is called Ninja. He is a previous Expert Halo player named Tyler Blevins, who may have claimed that he will make over 50 percent 1,000,000 pounds per month by streaming his Fortnite periods, and his totally free-associative commentary, on Twitch (that's owned by Amazon). His YouTube channel has more than ten million subscribers. Previous thirty day period, he how fortnite get popular hosted a Fortnite tournament in Las Vegas, within an e-sports arena, and almost seven hundred thousand individuals tuned in to his Twitch stream. I’ve heard numerous teens confer with him as America’s biggest entertainer—which isn't as hyperbolic since it Appears. In April, Ninja ranked increased than any athlete on the globe in “social interactions,” a evaluate of social-media likes, reviews, shares, and views. Cristiano Ronaldo was No. two. In March, Ninja consented to a Fortnite session with Drake.

Blevins, who is 20-six, comes from exterior Detroit and life around Chicago (he gained’t say exactly where) along with his spouse, who handles his company affairs. He streams 10 to fourteen hrs every day, typically from about nine A.M. to 3 P.M. after which from six P.M. right until Each time. All advised, he logs about three hundred hours a month. What one sees is his game screen, together with his avatar in regardless of what skin he has picked, and, within an inset, a perpetual shot of Blevins himself. A ninja headband girds a Bieber-ish shock of hair that he dyes different colors: emerald inexperienced, platinum, yellow. He’s a lean, boyish guy who appears to make an hard work to take care of some semblance of a smile all of the time. His spiel is goofy, caffeinated, and moderately cocky. He does impressions. In March, he was mumbling some rap lyrics as he performed, and by some means the phrase “indica” arrived out given that the N-term. Amid the backlash, he apologized, sort of, and, when it came time for me to talk to him final week, his manager’s a single situation was which i not ask him about this, as he’d presently said what there was to convey, which was, in part, “I guarantee that there was no mal intent (I wasn’t even seeking to say the term—I fumbled lyrics and received tongue-tied inside the worst achievable way).” A scrupulous journalist may have named from the job interview, although the teenagers I’d been speaking with regarding the video game were being so impressed that I might speak with Ninja that I caved. At the final moment, although, Ninja bailed, professing disease. Burn off! (“I’m quite sure which was BS,” one of those teens texted me. “I think he was streaming today.”) At any price, Ninja’s sensitivity is a sign that avid gamers like him are coming into the mainstream. They've got to observe the things they say.

Onscreen, the millionaire maintains the environs on the gamer boy. The digital camera requires in an acoustic-tile ceiling, wall-to-wall carpeting, bare drywall, as well as a fourposter mattress. There’s a framed Detroit Lions poster propped against a wall, together with a mini-fridge stocked with Crimson Bull. Ninja is really a lifelong gamer, but he helps make a point to remind his lovers, lest they receive the fall-every little thing bug, that he did effectively in class, performed soccer together with other sporting activities, completed college or university when holding down a task at Noodles & Firm, and even appeared, with his spouse and children, on “Loved ones Feud.” The sport ability is legit. He wins a little something like 50 percent of your many hundreds of game titles he plays just about every week, from all comers. He’s a crack shot and it has a nose to the substantial ground. As usually as not, It appears he’s barely being attentive. He’s studying followers’ messages out loud, just like a converse-radio host, or jabbering with One more Fortnite star, such as Dr. Lupo or KingRichard, whenever they’ve teamed up for the game or two: “The recoil on this detail is stupid”; “You said you experienced a complete protect, ass”; “So keep my dick”; “That dude was seeking to consume a chug jug. What a noob.” All accompanied by occasional bursts of gunfire. “To any individual observing the stream, I hope you men are taking pleasure in the content, guy.”

Gizzard Lizard’s shoot-out in Tomato Town came about on the last night of April, which was the last night of Season 3. Anticipation was managing significant. Among the ingenious innovations of Fortnite should be to introduce seasons of about two months, as on the cable-tv series, and also to combine new plot and sport factors. (Previous week, within a crossover masterstroke, Thanos, the indestructible villain of The brand new Avengers Motion picture, dropped in on the game—that is certainly, gamers could adopt a Thanos skin—and so, for some time, the Fortnite established gleefully schooled a variety of Thanoses in a means the Avengers could not.) On April 30th, a comet that had been hovering about the island was alleged to strike following midnight. For times, meteors had been showering the sport. Teasers—the newest currently being “brace for impression”—experienced impressed a raft of speculation and conspiracy theories. In the beginning, individuals envisioned the comet to hit the crowded city location known as Tilted Towers, but some clues led Other people to forecast, properly, which the comet would wipe out Dusty Depot, which was thereafter to get called Dusty Divot.

It had been tough to do homework on a night such as this; Gizzard Lizard returned to the game. He performed on the Computer system he’d crafted at college. It didn’t Have a very graphics card. He’d by no means been a giant gamer—his parents were being pretty stringent about screens and experienced never consented to an Xbox or even a Wii—however he’d performed Minecraft for quite a while. This standard of obsession was a little something new. He noticed on his locate-your-buddies bar that a lot of schoolmates were playing, so he FaceTimed one who goes by ism64. They teamed up and strike Lucky Landing. Gizzard Lizard wore an earbud underneath a list of earphones, so that he could talk with ism64 whilst listening for that seem of approaching enemies. From the distance, it appeared that he was speaking to himself: “Permit’s just Construct. Watch out, you’re gonna be trapped less than my ramp. I’m hitting this John Wick. Oh my God, he just pumped me. Arrive revive me. Construct all-around me and come revive me. Wait around, can I've that chug jug? Thanks.”

I’d been struck, observing Gizzard Lizard’s video games for a couple of days, by how the spirit of collaboration, amid the urgency of mission and menace, seemed to deliver out something approaching gentleness. He and his pals did favors for each other, viewed one another’s backs, presented encouragement. This was a thing that I hadn’t witnessed A lot of, say, down at the rink. 1 could argue that the previous arcade, With all the ever-current danger of bullying and harassment and the problem of proclaiming dibs, uncovered A child to the world—it’s character-building!—but there was a little something to get claimed for such a refuge, even if it did include assault rifles and grenades.

Then the John Wick was upon him. “Oh God! Oh God!” Foiled once more.

A John Wick was an achieved participant who had attained a pores and skin that bears a resemblance towards the character performed by Keanu Reeves inside the “John Wick” films. (Officially, the skin is known as the Reaper, presumably to stay away from licensing charges, but gamers simply call it John Wick.) It absolutely was available to anybody who had attained all hundred tiers of the sport in Time 3—a combination of accomplishment and experience which might have expected taking part in for among seventy-5 and 100 and fifty several hours.

As the final several hours of Year three expired, players scrambled to succeed in Tier a hundred, and have their John Wick skins. Gizzard Lizard was nowhere shut. He’d started the year for a noob. Arrive another morning, Day One among Period four, he had a intend to place while in the several hours for getting to Tier one hundred. It could get major commitment. For The 1st time, he bought a thousand Fortnite V-bucks, for $nine.ninety nine, with which to obtain skins. He went With all the Carbide, a modern one which introduced to head a wetsuit. This was The 1st time he—or, much more to The purpose, his moms and dads—had at any time invested anything but quarters over a match.

[fishermariawo]

What Causes Slow Post-Workout Recovery—and What Can You Do About It?

One of the biggest mistakes I see among people who exercise is they forget this core truth: we get fitter not from training, but from recovering from training. This doesn’t just occur in beginners either. Some of the most experienced, hardest-charging athletes I know fail to heed the importance of recovery. Hell, the reason my endurance training destroyed my life and inadvertently set the stage for creation of the Primal Blueprint was that I didn’t grasp the concept of recovery. I just piled on the miles, thinking the more the merrier.

It didn’t work.

What is recovery, anyway?

There’s short-term recovery. Your heart rate slows back down, your body temperature drops, your sweat dries, your muscles and lungs stop burning.

Long-term recovery is less conspicuous, more internal. You replace lost energy stores, repair damaged muscle, clear out waste products, and begin the process of adaptation to the training.

When both short- and long-term recovery happen together, you “feel ready” to go again.

Some portion of how quickly we recover from training is out of our direct control.

Genetics is one factor we can’t control. Researchers have found genetic variants of collagen-encoding genes that increase or decrease the rate at which we recover from exercise-induced muscle damage, muscle tissue genes that increase resistance to exercise-induced muscle soreness, immune genes that affect the speed of adaptation to training. But even many genetic variants purported to affect recovery act through decisions carriers make. A carrier of a genetic variant linked to muscle power experienced more muscle damage and required more recovery after a soccer match, but only because that carrier “performed more speed and power actions during the game.”

Age is another factor out of our direct control. Sure, living, eating, and training right can stave off many of the worst effects of aging. Sure, a sedentary 70-year-old will recover from a workout far more slowly (if he or she can be cajoled into training) than a 70-year-old master athlete. But time does tick on. Following training that fatigues but doesn’t damage the muscles, like easy cycling, light weight training, or a sub-aerobic threshold jog, older athletes recover muscle function and performance at similar rates to younger athletes. After intense exercises that damage the muscles, like sprints, heavy lifting, intervals, or longer race-pace runs, however, older athletes recover more slowly than younger athletes.

Other factors, while preventable and modifiable over the long haul, inexorably inhibit workout recovery once they’re in place:

If you’re sick, you won’t recover as quickly. Illness diverts some of the resources that would otherwise be used to recover from training.

If you have heart disease, you’ll recover more slowly. In one study, having heart disease was the greatest predictor of a slower rate of heart rate recovery after exercise.

If your hormones are out of whack, you’ll likely recover more slowly. Hormones are the messengers and managers that tell our cells what to do. That includes muscle repair, hypertrophy, fuel replenishment, inflammatory signaling, and every other cellular function related to recovery.

Now I’ve got bad news and good news. Everything else that slows down workout recovery is under your direct control.

Factors We Can Control Stress

Stress is stress. Traffic is a stressor. A job you hate is a stressor. Procrastinating until you absolutely must get working is a stressor. And yes, exercise is a stressor. Too much of the psychological, lifestyle, or mental stress we all face impairs our ability to recover from exercise-induced stress.

Recent research confirms that “mental stress” impairs workout recovery, and it doesn’t speak in generalities. Thirty-one undergrads were assessed for stress levels using a battery of psychological tests, then engaged in a heavy lower body strength workout. At an hour post-workout, students in the high stress group had regained 38 percent of their leg strength, while students in the low stress group had regained 60 percent of their strength.

I developed my anti-stress supplement Primal Calm (now, Adaptogenic Calm) back in the chronic cardio days as a way to improve my training recovery. That’s what gave the product so much momentum in the endurance community—it turns out that beating back stress of all kinds quickened recovery from a very specific type of training stress.

Some stress is unavoidable. But most of us create additional stress in our lives and fail to do enough to counter or manage it. Stop making unforced errors.

Poor Sleep

Sleep debt impairs exercise recovery primarily via two routes: by increasing cortisol, reducing testosterone production, and lowering muscle protein synthesis; and by disrupting slow wave sleep, the constructive stage of slumber in which growth hormone secretion peaks, tissues heal, and muscles rebuild. That’s probably why sleep deprivation has been linked to muscular atrophy and increased urinary excretion of nitrogen, and why the kind of cortisol excess caused by sleep deprivation reduces muscle strength.

Additionally, sleep loss can increase the risk of injuries by decreasing balance and postural control. If you trip and fall, or throw out your back due to poor technique, you won’t even have a workout to recover from.

Most people think bad sleep is unavoidable. It happens to the best of us from time to time, but a night of bad sleep here and there isn’t going to slow down recovery. The real recovery killer is chronically bad sleep, and that’s the kind most of us can avoid by sticking to a good sleep hygiene regimen.

Nutrient Deficiencies

Since every physiological function requires a micronutrient substrate—vitamin, mineral, hormone, neurotransmitter, etc.—and physiological functions increase with exercise and recovery, active people require more micronutrients in their diet. “More of everything” is a safe bet, but there are a few key nutrients that working out especially depletes:

Zinc: Exercise, especially weight training, works better with plenty of testosterone on hand to build muscle and develop strength. Zinc is a key substrate for the production of testosterone, and studies show that exercise probably increases the need for zinc. In fact, one study found that exhaustive exercise depleted testosterone (and thyroid) hormones in athletes, while supplementing with zinc restored it.

Magnesium and Other Electrolytes: Magnesium is required for a number of physiological processes related to workout recovery, including oxygen uptake by cells, energy production, and electrolyte balance. Unfortunately, as one of the main electrolytes, lots of magnesium is lost to sweat during exercise. The same could be said for other electrolytes like calcium, sodium, and potassium, but most people get plenty of those minerals from a basic Primal eating plan. Getting enough magnesium, however, is a bit tougher, making magnesium deficiency a real issue for people trying to recover from workouts.

Iron: Intense exercise depletes iron, which is instrumental in the formation of red blood cells and oxygen delivery to your tissues during training and the immune response after it. They even have a name for it—exercise-induced anemia.

Soreness

Post-workout delayed onset muscle soreness, or DOMS, is no joke. While many of you folks reading this probably enjoy DOMS and take it as feedback for a job well done, it’s a hurdle that many beginners never move past. They join a gym, d0 a workout, feel great, go to bed feeling awesome, sleep like a baby, then wake up and find they have the bipedal capacity of a three-month-old. They can barely walk. Lifting their arms to brush their teeth is agony. Walking downstairs is out of the question. Some will move past the DOMS and get back into the gym. Many will not.

Low Fuel Availability

Working out expends energy. That energy must be replenished before you’re fully recovered and prepared to do another workout. Unless you’re trying to increase efficiency by training in a state of low fuel availability, like the “train low-carb, race high-carb” method, you should recover what’s been lost. What you replenish is conditional on the type of exercise you did. If you went for a long hike or easy bike ride that burned primarily body fat, you don’t need to—and probably shouldn’t—”replenish what you lost.” If you’re coming off a 30-minute full body CrossFit session that left you gasping on the ground in a puddle of sweat, you probably have some glycogen stores to refill.

This is a common issue for folks trying to lose weight through diet and exercise. Inadequate calorie intake coupled with intense exercise sends a “starvation” signal to the body, causing a down-regulation of anabolic hormones. Instead of growing lean mass and burning body fat, starvation (whether real or simulated) promotes muscle atrophy and body fat retention. Either alone can be somewhat effective, but combining the two for too long will only impair recovery.

Alcohol

Drinking directly impairs muscle protein synthesis, the essential step in muscle recovery and adaptation to training. Moderate or “social” drinking is probably safe (just don’t use alcohol as a post-workout recovery drink), but even just a single day per week of binge drinking is linked to 4x the risk of sarcopenia, or muscle-wasting. It’s hard to recover from your workouts if your muscles are atrophying.

Oddly, drinking directly after a training session also increases testosterone levels. One theory is that testosterone levels rise after drinking because it becomes less bioavailable; your muscle cells’ resistance to testosterone goes up, so it just circulates and gives “false” readings.

Things You Can Try

The obvious thing to try is the opposite of all the modifiable and preventable recovery-inhibitors mentioned above. Get good sleep, don’t drink too much (especially post-workout), get a handle on your stress, eat enough food, eat enough protein, get your micronutrients. What else?

Watermelon

L-citrulline is an amino acid found in watermelon that shows a significantly ameliorative effect on post-workout muscle pain, or delayed onset muscle soreness (DOMS). You can also supplement directly with L-citrulline, which may work, but watermelon is so good right now with a little salt, lime juice, and cayenne pepper, and it’s actually lower in carbs than you probably think (about 10 grams per cup of watermelon). I recommend fresh watermelon over pasteurized juice, as heat treatment reduces the effect.

Beets

Beets (and beet juice) aren’t only good for exercise performance. They also reduce DOMS. Nitrates have been posited as the primary constituent responsible for the effect, but beet juice works better than pure sodium nitrate.

Tart Cherry Juice

Tart cherry juice is best used to recover during competition, when your primary concern is to get back out there and perform. Its extreme effectiveness at killing muscle pain, reducing local and systemic inflammation and exercise-induced muscle damage suggests it may hamper training adaptations, however. It does also improve sleep, which should translate into better adaptations.

Massage

Massage feels great, and the evidence shows that it’s great for recovery from exercise. It alleviates DOMS. It speeds up the recovery of muscle strength and enhances proprioception. It improves central nervous system parasympathetic/sympathetic balance, even if the masseuse is one of those weird back massage machines.

Compression Garments

These aren’t just for show. A recent meta-analysis of the available research concluded that compression garments enhance muscle recovery after strength training and improve next-day cycling performance.

Whey

Compared to other proteins, whey protein accelerates muscle adaptation to eccentric exercise.

Creatine

Although we get creatine from red meat and fish, supplementary creatine can boost our recovery from exercise via a couple mechanisms. First, it increases muscle content of phosphocreatine. That’s the stuff we use for quick bursts of maximal effort, so carrying a little extra can do wonders for our ability to perform. Second, it enhances muscle glycogen replenishment without increasing insulin.

Fish Oil (or Fatty Fish)

Adding fish oil to a recovery drink reduced post-workout muscle soreness without affecting performance. Fish oil may also enhance muscle recovery from and adaptation to strength training.

Cold Water

A cold water plunge after training enhances the recovery of muscle function. However—and this is a big “however”—post training cold water plunges also seem to impair long term muscular adaptations to resistance training. In other words, a cold plunge might help you get back in the game for the short term at the cost of long-term adaptations.

More Carbs

I always say “Eat the carbs you earn.” While that often means eating fewer carbs than before, it can also mean eating more if you’ve trained hard enough to warrant them. This even applies to keto folks; depleting glycogen through exercise creates a “glycogen debt” that you can repay without inhibiting ketosis or fat-adaptation too much. The carbs—which you don’t need much of—go into muscle glycogen stores for recovery and later use without disrupting ketosis.

Don’t take this final section as a blanket recommendation, however. Before taking ice baths, dropping $500 on massages every week, taking a long list of expensive supplements, and walking around in a full body compression suit, make sure you’re sleeping, eating enough food, and giving yourself enough time between workouts. Quite often, handling the basics will be enough.

What have you found to be the best way to recover from your training? What are the biggest roadblocks? Let me know down below, and thanks for reading!

[cynthiamwashington]

What Causes Slow Post-Workout Recovery—and What Can You Do About It?

One of the biggest mistakes I see among people who exercise is they forget this core truth: we get fitter not from training, but from recovering from training. This doesn’t just occur in beginners either. Some of the most experienced, hardest-charging athletes I know fail to heed the importance of recovery. Hell, the reason my endurance training destroyed my life and inadvertently set the stage for creation of the Primal Blueprint was that I didn’t grasp the concept of recovery. I just piled on the miles, thinking the more the merrier.

It didn’t work.

What is recovery, anyway?

There’s short-term recovery. Your heart rate slows back down, your body temperature drops, your sweat dries, your muscles and lungs stop burning.

Long-term recovery is less conspicuous, more internal. You replace lost energy stores, repair damaged muscle, clear out waste products, and begin the process of adaptation to the training.

When both short- and long-term recovery happen together, you “feel ready” to go again.

Some portion of how quickly we recover from training is out of our direct control.

Genetics is one factor we can’t control. Researchers have found genetic variants of collagen-encoding genes that increase or decrease the rate at which we recover from exercise-induced muscle damage, muscle tissue genes that increase resistance to exercise-induced muscle soreness, immune genes that affect the speed of adaptation to training. But even many genetic variants purported to affect recovery act through decisions carriers make. A carrier of a genetic variant linked to muscle power experienced more muscle damage and required more recovery after a soccer match, but only because that carrier “performed more speed and power actions during the game.”

Age is another factor out of our direct control. Sure, living, eating, and training right can stave off many of the worst effects of aging. Sure, a sedentary 70-year-old will recover from a workout far more slowly (if he or she can be cajoled into training) than a 70-year-old master athlete. But time does tick on. Following training that fatigues but doesn’t damage the muscles, like easy cycling, light weight training, or a sub-aerobic threshold jog, older athletes recover muscle function and performance at similar rates to younger athletes. After intense exercises that damage the muscles, like sprints, heavy lifting, intervals, or longer race-pace runs, however, older athletes recover more slowly than younger athletes.

Other factors, while preventable and modifiable over the long haul, inexorably inhibit workout recovery once they’re in place:

If you’re sick, you won’t recover as quickly. Illness diverts some of the resources that would otherwise be used to recover from training.

If you have heart disease, you’ll recover more slowly. In one study, having heart disease was the greatest predictor of a slower rate of heart rate recovery after exercise.

If your hormones are out of whack, you’ll likely recover more slowly. Hormones are the messengers and managers that tell our cells what to do. That includes muscle repair, hypertrophy, fuel replenishment, inflammatory signaling, and every other cellular function related to recovery.

Now I’ve got bad news and good news. Everything else that slows down workout recovery is under your direct control.

Factors We Can Control

Stress

Stress is stress. Traffic is a stressor. A job you hate is a stressor. Procrastinating until you absolutely must get working is a stressor. And yes, exercise is a stressor. Too much of the psychological, lifestyle, or mental stress we all face impairs our ability to recover from exercise-induced stress.

Recent research confirms that “mental stress” impairs workout recovery, and it doesn’t speak in generalities. Thirty-one undergrads were assessed for stress levels using a battery of psychological tests, then engaged in a heavy lower body strength workout. At an hour post-workout, students in the high stress group had regained 38 percent of their leg strength, while students in the low stress group had regained 60 percent of their strength.

I developed my anti-stress supplement Primal Calm (now, Adaptogenic Calm) back in the chronic cardio days as a way to improve my training recovery. That’s what gave the product so much momentum in the endurance community—it turns out that beating back stress of all kinds quickened recovery from a very specific type of training stress.

Some stress is unavoidable. But most of us create additional stress in our lives and fail to do enough to counter or manage it. Stop making unforced errors.

Poor Sleep

Sleep debt impairs exercise recovery primarily via two routes: by increasing cortisol, reducing testosterone production, and lowering muscle protein synthesis; and by disrupting slow wave sleep, the constructive stage of slumber in which growth hormone secretion peaks, tissues heal, and muscles rebuild. That’s probably why sleep deprivation has been linked to muscular atrophy and increased urinary excretion of nitrogen, and why the kind of cortisol excess caused by sleep deprivation reduces muscle strength.

Additionally, sleep loss can increase the risk of injuries by decreasing balance and postural control. If you trip and fall, or throw out your back due to poor technique, you won’t even have a workout to recover from.

Most people think bad sleep is unavoidable. It happens to the best of us from time to time, but a night of bad sleep here and there isn’t going to slow down recovery. The real recovery killer is chronically bad sleep, and that’s the kind most of us can avoid by sticking to a good sleep hygiene regimen.

Nutrient Deficiencies

Since every physiological function requires a micronutrient substrate—vitamin, mineral, hormone, neurotransmitter, etc.—and physiological functions increase with exercise and recovery, active people require more micronutrients in their diet. “More of everything” is a safe bet, but there are a few key nutrients that working out especially depletes:

Zinc: Exercise, especially weight training, works better with plenty of testosterone on hand to build muscle and develop strength. Zinc is a key substrate for the production of testosterone, and studies show that exercise probably increases the need for zinc. In fact, one study found that exhaustive exercise depleted testosterone (and thyroid) hormones in athletes, while supplementing with zinc restored it.

Magnesium and Other Electrolytes: Magnesium is required for a number of physiological processes related to workout recovery, including oxygen uptake by cells, energy production, and electrolyte balance. Unfortunately, as one of the main electrolytes, lots of magnesium is lost to sweat during exercise. The same could be said for other electrolytes like calcium, sodium, and potassium, but most people get plenty of those minerals from a basic Primal eating plan. Getting enough magnesium, however, is a bit tougher, making magnesium deficiency a real issue for people trying to recover from workouts.

Iron: Intense exercise depletes iron, which is instrumental in the formation of red blood cells and oxygen delivery to your tissues during training and the immune response after it. They even have a name for it—exercise-induced anemia.

Soreness

Post-workout delayed onset muscle soreness, or DOMS, is no joke. While many of you folks reading this probably enjoy DOMS and take it as feedback for a job well done, it’s a hurdle that many beginners never move past. They join a gym, d0 a workout, feel great, go to bed feeling awesome, sleep like a baby, then wake up and find they have the bipedal capacity of a three-month-old. They can barely walk. Lifting their arms to brush their teeth is agony. Walking downstairs is out of the question. Some will move past the DOMS and get back into the gym. Many will not.

Low Fuel Availability

Working out expends energy. That energy must be replenished before you’re fully recovered and prepared to do another workout. Unless you’re trying to increase efficiency by training in a state of low fuel availability, like the “train low-carb, race high-carb” method, you should recover what’s been lost. What you replenish is conditional on the type of exercise you did. If you went for a long hike or easy bike ride that burned primarily body fat, you don’t need to—and probably shouldn’t—”replenish what you lost.” If you’re coming off a 30-minute full body CrossFit session that left you gasping on the ground in a puddle of sweat, you probably have some glycogen stores to refill.

This is a common issue for folks trying to lose weight through diet and exercise. Inadequate calorie intake coupled with intense exercise sends a “starvation” signal to the body, causing a down-regulation of anabolic hormones. Instead of growing lean mass and burning body fat, starvation (whether real or simulated) promotes muscle atrophy and body fat retention. Either alone can be somewhat effective, but combining the two for too long will only impair recovery.

Alcohol

Drinking directly impairs muscle protein synthesis, the essential step in muscle recovery and adaptation to training. Moderate or “social” drinking is probably safe (just don’t use alcohol as a post-workout recovery drink), but even just a single day per week of binge drinking is linked to 4x the risk of sarcopenia, or muscle-wasting. It’s hard to recover from your workouts if your muscles are atrophying.

Oddly, drinking directly after a training session also increases testosterone levels. One theory is that testosterone levels rise after drinking because it becomes less bioavailable; your muscle cells’ resistance to testosterone goes up, so it just circulates and gives “false” readings.

Things You Can Try

The obvious thing to try is the opposite of all the modifiable and preventable recovery-inhibitors mentioned above. Get good sleep, don’t drink too much (especially post-workout), get a handle on your stress, eat enough food, eat enough protein, get your micronutrients. What else?

Watermelon

L-citrulline is an amino acid found in watermelon that shows a significantly ameliorative effect on post-workout muscle pain, or delayed onset muscle soreness (DOMS). You can also supplement directly with L-citrulline, which may work, but watermelon is so good right now with a little salt, lime juice, and cayenne pepper, and it’s actually lower in carbs than you probably think (about 10 grams per cup of watermelon). I recommend fresh watermelon over pasteurized juice, as heat treatment reduces the effect.

Beets

Beets (and beet juice) aren’t only good for exercise performance. They also reduce DOMS. Nitrates have been posited as the primary constituent responsible for the effect, but beet juice works better than pure sodium nitrate.

Tart Cherry Juice

Tart cherry juice is best used to recover during competition, when your primary concern is to get back out there and perform. Its extreme effectiveness at killing muscle pain, reducing local and systemic inflammation and exercise-induced muscle damage suggests it may hamper training adaptations, however. It does also improve sleep, which should translate into better adaptations.

Massage

Massage feels great, and the evidence shows that it’s great for recovery from exercise. It alleviates DOMS. It speeds up the recovery of muscle strength and enhances proprioception. It improves central nervous system parasympathetic/sympathetic balance, even if the masseuse is one of those weird back massage machines.

Compression Garments

These aren’t just for show. A recent meta-analysis of the available research concluded that compression garments enhance muscle recovery after strength training and improve next-day cycling performance.

Whey

Compared to other proteins, whey protein accelerates muscle adaptation to eccentric exercise.

Creatine

Although we get creatine from red meat and fish, supplementary creatine can boost our recovery from exercise via a couple mechanisms. First, it increases muscle content of phosphocreatine. That’s the stuff we use for quick bursts of maximal effort, so carrying a little extra can do wonders for our ability to perform. Second, it enhances muscle glycogen replenishment without increasing insulin.

Fish Oil (or Fatty Fish)

Adding fish oil to a recovery drink reduced post-workout muscle soreness without affecting performance. Fish oil may also enhance muscle recovery from and adaptation to strength training.

Cold Water

A cold water plunge after training enhances the recovery of muscle function. However—and this is a big “however”—post training cold water plunges also seem to impair long term muscular adaptations to resistance training. In other words, a cold plunge might help you get back in the game for the short term at the cost of long-term adaptations.

More Carbs

I always say “Eat the carbs you earn.” While that often means eating fewer carbs than before, it can also mean eating more if you’ve trained hard enough to warrant them. This even applies to keto folks; depleting glycogen through exercise creates a “glycogen debt” that you can repay without inhibiting ketosis or fat-adaptation too much. The carbs—which you don’t need much of—go into muscle glycogen stores for recovery and later use without disrupting ketosis.

Don’t take this final section as a blanket recommendation, however. Before taking ice baths, dropping $500 on massages every week, taking a long list of expensive supplements, and walking around in a full body compression suit, make sure you’re sleeping, eating enough food, and giving yourself enough time between workouts. Quite often, handling the basics will be enough.

What have you found to be the best way to recover from your training? What are the biggest roadblocks? Let me know down below, and thanks for reading!

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Article source here:Marks’s Daily Apple

[its-a-lark-blog]

Neurotypicals & Innate Variables

And How it Affects Game Dev

I won't refer to these as 'qualities' as there are no qualitative factors to them, quite to the contrary. I mean, if I were to tell you that the games industry was quite the Penis Empire, you'd be more than likely to have some kind of kneejerk reaction, eh? You'd spit out some blimmin' utter nonsense acronym or phrase that was programmed into you, like 'SJW' or 'virtue signalling,' as you're unwittingly an easily hacked robot.

Still, a lot of the video games industry is a sausage fest that doesn't really involve women -- this is true on all echelons of it from indie right up to the very top tiers of triple-A, it's why the industry still has a sexism problem no matter how hard it tries. And the reason for this is the assumption -- which neurotypicals can't get away from -- that you're automatically going to understand everything.

Neurotypicals have a perverse belief in their own omniscience, so they don't need to ask anything, they just know. How do they know? A lack of introspection seems to be the only answer I can come up with.

I don't know if this is just down to a very extraverted world, but in my life I've only met a handful of people who're capable of actual, honest-to-goodness introspection. Instead of running with an assumption based solely upon flawed data, they'll ask 'is this actually the case?' in order to arrive at a more probablistic truth backed by proof and evidence. Neurotypicals can't do that.

I'd even say that there are some autistic people who can't, too, but I do wonder about misdiagnosis, there. I weigh the strength of someone's autism on their capacity for introspection, to question rather than assume. My partner and I are both exceedingly autistic and we value when questions are asked, even if they shake the very foundations of something that we've always believed. In truth, especially then. It's thrilling! Neurotypicals hate that.

I sometimes wonder why bad science has become so commonplace, I think it's the shift from it being mostly autistic individuals doing the science though often being taken advantage of by neurotypicals (Edison abusing Tesla's trust, et al) who're all too capable of being sociopathic sharks without a shred of empathy, to neurotypicals playing scientist themselves. Badly.

This is why we have dark gravity, now. I'll always shake my head at that. I mean, we have things we should be investigating, right? There's pilot wave gravity, emergent gravity, and the very real possibility that a number of our assumptions about gravity and the mass of other galaxies is simply wrong. I'll tell you, it makes my head spin that the recent discovery of just how wrong we were about the mass of Andromeda didn't even shake the belief in dark gravity.

Dark gravity is like a neurotypical religion that's parading as science.

This is pervasive, too. This lack of introspection that neurotypicals always have; It can be found in every field. For example -- it's as easily measured in PhD's as well as students that people in the psych field never ask autistic people for opinions. They believe they have an absolute knowledge of autism despite their neurotypical brains being completely incapable of grasping it -- which leads to them having incredibly, horrifyingly wrong ideas about autism.

I'll sometimes watch people on sites like Quora and StackExchange try to figure out something about autism -- and I'm just sitting here, being me, and wondering why they don't just ask an autistic person? That, however, takes a level of awareness that neurotypicals have never possessed. A shame, but a truth.

An example of this?

Theory of Mind. Neurotypicals, for the longest time, believed that autistic people couldn't read emotions and had impaired empathy. All this came from the astounding realisation that they'd never even bothered to interview autistic people to find out if that was true, at all. It took decades, and the Internet, for them to finally realise in their slow, reptilian, cold blooded brains that perhaps they could ask?

I think we all have morbid fascinations. I remember neurotypicals watching 9/11, unable to look away as people were begging for anyone to save them, waving to be noticed as the building was burning and crashing. I couldn't watch it, I was told about all of this by those who'd watched, who couldn't stop watching. I would watch them watching, seemingly devoid of empathy for the people on screen.

As an autistic person, I can't stand to see people suffer. Neurotypicals seem thrilled by it, though? Being autistic, I naturally decided the best course of action was to interview them to find out why they're so attracted to watching people suffer. The answer I got was that it was exciting for them, they couldn't stop watching because witnessing mortality so brazenly put on display was thrilling.

They felt powerful and privileged that they were chosen to live.

Ultimately, though, the most I could get out of it was that even though they knew it was wrong, and sick, it was thrilling to watch people suffer.

Now, my autistic brain will never understand that. Too much empathy.

I accept that I'll never fully grasp that, though. All I can do is try to get neurotypicals to try to explain it to me as best they can. This is quite the commonplace thing, though. I'll try to understand neurotypicals, whereas neurotypicals will assume they already know everything and therefore there's nothing for them to understand. What I could grasp about the why of this is that neurotypical culture has a sociopathic quotient to it, it's killer shark-y, so they need to be manipulative, pretending to know more than they do???

How awful! And how terrible for science.

Similarly, I see birds, dogs, and other animals trying their best to communicate with neurotypicals. Often, neurotypicals won't give them the time of day, there's this bizarre narcissistic weight in their mind that harks back to the fetish for their own species they have -- where it is the burden of the lesser species to put in all the work. If birds can't learn English, then they're too stupid to bother with. Why aren't we trying to understand their methods of communication??? They're clearly trying to understand ours.

If this doesn't seem relatable to you? You're probably autistic. I mean, I see people who're obsessed with bugs or birds as their special interest (which is very autistic in the first place), and they absolutely are trying to learn how to communicate. So for them this might seem alienating. Sorry to be the one to tell you, but you're very likely autistic. You might want to investigate that for yourself.

This all brings me back to the point of autistic empathy.

Turns out that we don't lack empathy. Turns out that we don't lack Theory of Mind, either. Turns out, in fact, that according to brain scans and other evidence we actually have more innate empathy than any neurotypical alive. Turns out that what's actually happening is that we have difficulty expressing empathetic responses. Turns out, of course, that we could've told neurotypicals this at any time had they asked.

They don't ask, though, they never do. They don't ask, they don't enquire, they don't investigate, they don't like it whena another asks a question of them. They don't like that at all. And worst of all? They don't ever ask questions of themselves, they don't internally interrogate themselves to learn.

It was startling to learn that.

So I did a study of my own. Unofficial, of course. I asked as many neurotypical people as I could whether, when presented with a topic tehy know nothing about, do they rely on possibly fallible memories and opt for assumptions or do they spend time questioning themself in order to ascertain how much they actually know? In each case, when I could get them to be honest about it, they admitted that they didn't ask themself -- they just opted for assumptions.

Assumptions are an innately neurotypical problem. Which leads to kneejerk reactions when presented with contrary information, it also leads to very incorrect ideas about how to approach problems.

This brings me to game development. If your game dev team is made up of mostly men, and you don't have any women in an advisory role? What's going to happen is that the men will assume that they know all about feminism and women, so they'll do what's right for women and include that in their game. They know best, right?

This is why you'll see white, healthy, able-bodied men speaking for women, other ethnicites, and the disabled because naturally they know best. I don't know whether it's just this subconscious, animal fear they have in their cold-blooded reptile brains, but they're terrified of the very idea that they might not know something.

To have advisors on board would admit that. Can't do that.

This leads me to wonder just how autistic Ubisoft is. I mean, I can't say I like many of their games, you know? I don't. Sorry, Ubisoft! You don't make bad games, at all. No, no no no. You just don't make games I necessarily want to play; They're too grounded in reality for me, not nearly fantastic enough, and in the case of Assassin's Creed they revolve around lots of murder.

I want to see Ubisoft develop an open world thiefy simulator. Similar to what was attempted with the recent Thief reboot (THAIF), but... um... actually interesting and competent. The THAIF thing is interesting, though. Can I talk about that?

Initially the Thief reboot was called THI4F. A lot of people assumed that EIDOS didn't understand how the numbering thing worked, how it was L33T-SP34K where numbers replaced letters. I entertained that idea, but i also asked other questions. Such as -- Is thiaf actually a word?

Being as autistic as I am (which is as autistic AF, naturally, loves), I found out that thiaf is indeed a thing! It was proto-Germanic, Saxon in nature. I began to wonder to myself whether this meant that Thief was going to have a proto-Germanic setting, with all the trappings thereof, as opposed to the usual thief fare. I began to imagine how this would work, how they'd set up the location and the lore. It was fascinating, putting together this anachronistic representation of a forgotten Germany, pulling on history, folklore, and fantasy to do so.

After Deus Ex: Human Revolution, I gave them the benefit of the doubt. I wondered if Eidos could actually pull this off. They created such an autistic intellectual property (which was actually intellectual) with their first Deus Ex game that I believed, for a moment, that this was their intent. They weren't failing to understand L33T-SP34K, they were being incredibly clever and hinting at what their upcoming game was about! Suffice it to say, I was excited.

I was then disappointed.

Turned out that they just didn't know how L33T-SP34K works. Sad.

No, really, a big bloody shame there as another culture other than Britain could've been explored as a setting. I'm British! I find it quite belaboured how everything that isn't modern day is generally British. Even the Elder Scrolls can do better than that, and that's not exactly a high bar (unless we're talking about Online, as that one tends to occasionally surprise me with how intelligent it can be).

Which brings me back to Ubisoft. Ubisoft enjoys having advisors and exploring other cultures; I'd love it if they were more fantastic and less murdery, but that's just what they want to do and I won't begrudge them that. They're not games made for me, but they are truly exemplary games. I'm not saying that to be political either and to try and look like a better person than the next because I'm invested in some sort of sociopathic, manipulative social game. No, no, no. Absolutely none of that. I hate that. No, I respect them.

I don't enjoy their games, for the most part. I buy some of them. I enjoy bits of them (being a pirate, Google conspiracy, the discovery tour mode, hacking), but in general the whole package doesn't click with me. My head is too in the clouds, and Ubisoft's offerings are too grounded. This is why I'm very excited about Beyond Good & Evil 2 as they might, finally, be making a Ubisoft game I want to play. The first was about lefty underground progressive journalism AND alien invasions. God yes. My god yes. Of course, my god has scales but the sentiment of my words likely isn't lost on you. I'm excited! Oh, yes.

Perhaps not Night in the Woods excited, but excited.

Note to self: You need to write about Night in the Woods and how the assumption that anthropomorphic characters are always meant either for children or bloody, violent, aggressive, mutilative games because you can't appeal to Teh Furreez. And how Night in the Woods just overturns that assumption with flawless gusto. Talk about that.

Sigh. Neurotypical assumptions.

This all brings me back to the Penis Empire thing. Yeah, a bit tongue-in-cheek. I've tongue-in-cheek trolled people before, in different places, with different names, just to try and snap them out of their assumption-laden stupour. And always it's the kneejerk reaction instead of wondering what's meant by it and questioning whether there's perhaps a shred of truth behind its statement that games development is a sausage fest where assumptions are made for women who're never allowed to speak for themselves.

That's why Ubisoft stands out to me, really. It's a company where women are allowed to speak. Usually, games development has very toxic ideas about women, even if women are allowed to work on developing games. It's almost every other day, now, you hear about harassment in some video game dev house or other.

I wouldn't call it surprising, but I would call it new.

In the '90s, it was entirely acceptable for a woman to lead a development team and create games which were sensitive to women. This was because, at the time, it seemed like a lot of the people using computers were autistic/introverted nerds. The neurotypicals just couldn't figure out those computer things, at all, so there was no market ther efor them until later on, when things had been dumbed down enough to be accessible to the neurotypical mainstream.

In the '90s, people were sensitive to sexism and racism more than today. It was the audience. If you had a scantily clad woman, or racist epithet, it'd leave your audience feeling distinctly uncomfortable. It was a different time, one where even furries could openly work on developing games. Then we were flooded with neurotypicals and the industry changed, it went from being one of questions to one of assumptions.

So instead of Laverne, Laura Bow, and Elaine Marley, we had faceless femme fatales or submissive sex objects meant for neurotypical males to lust after. It was a sad, sad, sad time. And whereas women-lead development was fairly common in the '90s, today it's almost unheard of. Thanks to neurotypicals, we went from a more equitable games industry to one that's truly a Penis Empire.

And it's not okay to call it that because it challenges the assumptions of neurotypicals. Assumptions that they know everything, that they never do wrong, and that everything is okay. I want to see women leading development again, and other ethnicities, and disabled people; I want to see developers taking this seriously and including advisors on their team whom they ask questions of and actually listen to.

What I don't want is to play a game and be hit with an autistic slur, only to see the garbage person responsible defend it by saying that 'people in reality can be nasty, too.' That's not the point, mendicant. You should be setting an example with your work. Yes, people can be bad, but in reality you'd have someone speak up against the slur in defence of the person being attacked. Which never happened in Dreamfall Chapters (the fell game responsible), did it?

Neurotypicals have been ruining game dev for the longest time, now. It's why I've fallen out of love with it. I mean, I look at the figures I used to love and I see people who're as autistic as hell. Tim Schafer, Ron Gilbert, the Coles, among others. I mean, I'm sorry if that's offensive to them but an autistic person can always spot another, it's not hard. I'm open to being proved wrong, of course, but I'm not basing my belief upon base assumptions. A life of researching neurotypicals? I've learned both how they are, and how they are not.

I'm open to being wrong, always, but since I bother to actually research things I'm more often correct than not. And I'm also sad. I'm sad that game dev used to be more progressive. It wasn't scared of anthros, animal people, and friendly dragons; It wasn't scared of ethnicities; It wasn't scared of strong, independent women; It wasn't scared about actually learning about the topics involved in its own games. I miss that. I miss that dearly.

I miss a games industry that wasn't afraid to ask questions, and wasn't afraid that the answer might not align with what they believe. This is why when I speak of game dev, if I want to see women in games I'm not saying "Hey, hire me!" but "Hey, hire women similar to the character you're trying to depict and ask them how accurate it is!" instead. This isn't some popularity contest, this is just one bloody ancient Welshman on the Internet longing for more diverse, interesting, and better games.

Hire more women, more ethnicities, more disabled folks, more autistic people, and give them a chance to have their voice heard as it once was in game dev. We've heard all that we can hear from white, healthy, cis-gendered dudes. Let's hear some new voices.

Like we used to.

Of course, I am intrigued by Shadow of War. I hear it's about a sociopath (the pompous arsehole of an elf), his enablers (such as the idiot ranger who's more compelled by his position on the social ladder than with petty little concerns like ethics and empathy), and how herd mentality can allow atrocities to come to pass with very little challenge since neurotypicals prefer to idolise the charming sociopath rather than recognise the genuinely terrible things they might be doing right in front of them (such as torture and slavery).

I heard of a scene where apparently Mr. Sociopath Elf is yelling about the orcs just being savage monsters, not noble men. Better nod along with that because he's just so handsome, charming, and in control!

That's kind of how Nazi Germany happened, right? The neurotypical herd idolising the sociopathic Hitler, treating him like some kind of adonis-esque godhead and ignoring the whole Holocaust thing. I mean, I've been watching that bit of ach-y-fi life theatre my entire life. Interesting to hear of a game tackling it.

I need to play that game, though it might be preaching to the choir.

More like that. More intelligence. More diversity. Come on, games industry. Do better.

[scarletkate1881]

Coming Down - Chapter Three

A/N: If you’re reading, THANK YOU! And don’t be a stranger, send some requests if you want. I just want friends.

Promise

To say I’d become rusty may be a huge understatement, after only twenty minutes of basic training in the Danger Room I’m out of breath and have a stitch in my right side. Sweaty and panting, I watch as my fellow teammates whiz by me; Colossus charging full speed toward the “Sentinel” while Kurt pops up here, there and everywhere. Thankfully, Gambit was nowhere to be seen, I wonder if he’d just skipped or if he just didn’t have to practice alongside the rest of the team.

It’s not like I just sat on my ass while I was away, I did go running most days when I could be bothered, maybe I should have joined a boxing class or something.

“Rogue, I know you’ve just came back, but we can’t have anyone here lacking; get it together!” Cyclops shouted from the other side of the room before turning on his optic blasts and propelling a flying Sentinel into the ceiling before it came crashing back down.

“I know,” I muttered, knowing that he wouldn’t be able to hear me, but I did try to get back into the action.

Gaining control of my powers had come with other perks; the powers I’d absorbed I could call upon, at least the ones that I’d had the most exposure to, like Wolverine’s and Magneto’s. So, channeling the old bucket head himself, I pulled his abilities to the front of my mind.

It. Felt. Amazing. Just to feel the metal around me, it made the hairs on my arms and on the back of my neck stand up, while also giving me chills. The fact that I could tear this room in two filtered through my mind, and I’m not sure that those thoughts could be solely blamed on Magneto.

I scoured the room, looking for who needed the help most. My eyes landed on Jubilee, who still wasn’t allowed to go out on proper missions as Summers didn’t think she was ready.

Easily, I lifted myself into the air, going higher and higher until I was eye-level with the thirty-foot Sentinel; it’s focus was on the small girl who was throwing harmless firecrackers at it. So, I raised my hands and extended the power to grasp the metal giant.

“Might want to move, Jubes!” I called down, I didn’t look to see if she heeded my advice, I kept my eyes on the robot as I concentrated on stripping away it’s iron shell from its face; it was easy, like pulling down wallpaper. I got the sudden instinct to clench my fists, so I did.

The thirty-foot metal monster crumpled like it was nothing but paper; the yells and bangs behind me stopped as the ball of jagged iron fell to the ground with a loud crash. As I lowered myself to the ground I could feel their eyes on me and hear the whispering.

I took a deep breath as I worked on pushing Magneto back into his cell before I turned around and faced them with a smile on my face. “If Sinister’s anything like this, I think we’re in with a chance,” Keep smiling, stay confident, you totally meant to do that. I moved some of my white fringe back behind my ear. “I might just be this team’s lucky charm.”

“That was awesome!” Bobby exclaimed with a wide smile on his face; Scott and Jean didn’t seem to share this opinion if their worried looks were anything to go by.

“And that brings a close to this session, go clean up everybody, same time tomorrow.” Scott instructed, his eyes still on me, so I knew he probably want me to stay behind.

It took a few minutes for everyone to filter out and for the simulation to shut down, so we were just standing in a bare metal dome room. So, I was left facing Summers and Grey, the main team leaders.

“Rogue, I get that you want to help, but using those types of powers could go wrong; we don’t know how much hold you have over them, they could easily spiral out of control which may cause more harm that good.” Scott spoke slowly, as if he was talking to a child, while I may have been doing work on my social skills, one thing I didn’t even bother trying to change was my quick temper, that would take too much work.

“Don’t you think that’s the reason why Mystique and Xavier wanted me back here? Because I have all of these powers? To maybe give you guys a slight advantage? I’m practically a one-woman army here!”

“That’s really not a good thing, Rogue, remember what happened before when you absorbed too much? Maybe it’s the same if you keep calling up those psyches, if you keep using them they may take over.” Jean, as always, trying to be the calm voice of reason with a soothing smile.

“Fine, I’ll just rely on being a leech and knocking people out, without giving them a taste of their own medicine, sure, that’s just great.” I muttered as I turned and stalked out of the Danger Room, not waiting to hear either of their responses.

After a blissful shower, I ventured down to the common room, not really wanting to just sit in my temporary room in silence. I was surprised to see only Kurt, Jubilee and Rahne sitting around; then again, I guess now that most of the occupants are in their twenties and have a lot more freedom than they did when they were teenagers, they’d be out doing other stuff, rather than just sitting around watching TV or playing video games.

Maybe it was because this place didn’t house as many people as it used to; from dinner last night, I’d heard talk that Sam, Amara and Ray had left, they stayed in contact with some people here, but they were either back with their families or doing their own thing. I wasn’t too sure about Jamie or Sunspot. And those were just the people I knew during my time here, I knew from Logan that for the first two years after I left, there had been an influx of mutant children passing through the doors of Xavier’s, yet none had remained after the school was shut down, not that I could really blame them.

Jubes and Rahne were busy reading celeb trash magazines and gossiping, while Kurt was raptly watching some cartoon, from what I could gather in the couple of seconds I was taking in the scene, it was about a grandfather and grandson going through portals.

“Hey Rogue, what you did in training was awesome!” Jubilee exclaimed when she noticed me in the doorway.

“It’s too bad Cyke and Grey didn’t think so,” I muttered as I sat next to Kurt on the couch, he barely even acknowledged me, too captivated with the TV.

“They’re both stressed out, you know, with the whole Sinister thing and the wedding,” Rahne said almost absentmindedly while flipped through her magazine with a bored expression.

“Scott and Jean are getting married?” I wasn’t sure if the cold feeling that washed over me was from the jealousy that Scott and Jean were really in love, even though I thought my infatuation with Scott was over, or maybe it was due to the fact that yet again, Jean was getting everything that I always wanted but never could get, and I don’t mean Scott; just anybody who would love you enough to want to marry you.

“Oh yeah, they’ve been engaged for about three years, though, Jean kept putting it off but this time they’ve really started to get everything together; she’s even got her dress sorted, I’m not much of a fan of it, I preferred another one she tried, but apparently, she values Kitty’s opinion more than mine, but you know, whatever.” Jubilee ended bitterly.

“So, they’ve set a date?”

“Oh yeah, October 12th, so save the date!”

I restrained myself from making the point that I probably wouldn’t get an invite, and even if I did, I wouldn’t really want to go; hopefully, I’ll be out from here by then. Instead, I turned my attention to my fuzzy blueberry of a brother.

“Kurt, don’t suppose you want to do something? I feel like I’m gonna go crazy if I just sit and stare at a wall.”

“We can play pool?” Kurt offered, finally ungluing his eyes from the television set with a hopeful expression; I guess it wasn’t really that common for me to actively want to do something social and it must have taken him by surprise.

“Sure, just don’t raise the stakes too high; wouldn’t want to swindle you out of your comic book collection.”

I jinxed myself, that’s the only explanation that I could think of after the third game Kurt beat me at. Pool had always been my game! Mainly down to the number of hours I used to play it alone; when I was a child, Mystique used to visit this friend of hers and because they were talking business, I’d have to find something to do; it was a big house however most of the rooms were sparsely furnished, but there was a room with just a pool table, I’d play for hours, normally having to stand on a beer crate to be able to reach the table. I’d even been able to score me some food money in California by betting against drunks in grimy dive bars.

“Since I am clearly the king of the table, I deserve a reward,” Kurt proclaimed with a victorious, goofy smile.

“Unfortunately, I don’t have much to offer, would you take seven dollars?” While it may have sounded like I was joking, it was the truth, I’d spent most of my money just getting here.

Kurt pretended to consider my offer for a moment. “As tempting as that is, I’d prefer something else. I want you to do something for me.”

I visibly braced myself, expecting him to ask me to get revenge for him against Bobby for something stupid or maybe something more demeaning. “And that would be?”

“I want you to make me a promise; that you’re not just going to disappear when this is over, if you need to get away, please tell me and stay in contact,” he took a pause, but before I could respond he started again. “I’d also like you to give Mystique a chance – “

“Now hold on a moment,” I interjected, but he carried on.

“I know you don’t trust her and knowing what I know, I don’t blame you, but I’d like to think you trust me, so when I say that I believe that she has changed, that she does want to be part of our lives in a positive way, that you’ll accept it.”

There was only a couple of seconds of silence, but it felt like hours. Kurt was staring at me with pleading eyes; I sighed loudly, I really must have changed in the years I’d been away from here, because in the past his puppy eyes never worked.

“You asked for a reward, not two,”

“I won three games, so really, I still have another one to claim, but don’t worry, I think I’ve asked enough for one day, I’ll just wait for the right time for my last one. But please, Rogue, she wants us to be a proper family.”

A proper family? And what in the world is one of those? Are we gonna have dinner together and talk about our day? Go on vacation and play board games? My face must have given away my thoughts, as I saw Kurt’s shoulders slump and he lowered his gaze to the ground.

“I understand, I know – “

“I’ll try, but I can’t promise you more than that. I’ll spend time with Mystique with you, but if she thinks we’re gonna go on shopping trips and have girlie days out, then she’s got another thing coming.”

“No, no, that’s enough for me,” Kurt’s smile was like nothing I’d ever seen before, he was practically glowing. “Can I – uh – can I hug you?”

I didn’t even have to think about it, I set down the pool cue I’d been leaning on and walk around the table to him; he didn’t waste any time in enveloping me in an almost bone crushing hug.

When we parted he looked serious again. “I want you to say that you promise.”

“I already did,” I argued lightly, he just raised his eyebrow and waited. “Fine, I promise won’t disappear and I promise I’ll try to get along with Mystique as long as you’re in the same room.”

“Danke, Schwester. And now, my stomach is telling me it’s time to eat.”

“Are you sure you don’t want to pinky promise, just to solidify this agreement?”

Again, Kurt pretended to think about my offer. “No, I think I’ll trust you this time.”

I let myself smile as he bamfed off in search for food. Kurt trusting me is all well and good, but I couldn’t whole heartedly say that I could stick to my promise, mostly because I don’t believe that Mystique has changed, I wondered if she gave him the same speech she did with me and he was foolish enough to believe it.

Shaking my head, I set about setting the table back up, even though I was usually the only one considerate enough to think about the next person wanting to play. As I did, a thought popped up in my head; if I was about to accept Mystique back in my life, I should probably reconnect with Irene; I still thought of her as my mother, even though she knew what Mystique wanted from me and didn’t try to help me, she was still the one who gave me the most love and affection.

Back for only two days and already I’ve thrown myself into a tangle; it was sure to drain me, I was already fully aware of that being the case when I decided to come back here, this place had a really good way of making people face up to their problems. Makes me remember why I left in the first place.