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lonesomealley · 5 years ago

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Risk of Rain 2 Early Access Review and Discussion

Writer’s Note: This review was written after the December update was released. Any opinions and problems with the game are subject to change over time as the game reaches its full release. This review also contains some spoilers? Risk of Rain isn’t really a game that you can spoil, you’re not ultimately losing anything from reading ahead for this type of game.

-=REVIEW=-

Risk of Rain 2 is a game that I’ve played over 200 hours of since I initially bought it on June 5th of 2019. This is important to say outright because it needs to be expressed that Risk of Rain 2 is super into the arcade-y, repetitive, RNG roguelike style that many games before it have fallen into. These games are not for everyone, and if you’re someone who’s expecting runs to be bursting at the seams with new content, you’re going to be left in pure disappointment. At best this game will throw new content at you for the first couple of hours you play, but after that there is a sharp decrease in this content.

However, I have to preface that this review is a positive review, and that Risk of Rain 2 has created a gameplay loop that is very addictive to get into for many (including me). This game can be easily summarized down to the following: You pick a character, kill enemies, get items, kill the boss, go to the next level, kill enemies, get items, kill the boss, etc. There is technically an “end game” to Risk of Rain however it basically involves becoming so powerful that you’re capable of constantly obliterating all enemies instantaneously. And while this system is fun, this review is going to explain why the end game is currently broken and that the game suffers from a bunch of small yet consistent issues that actively bring down the experience of the game.

First let’s talk about all the things that the game does right. All of the characters, while some flawed, are exceptionally different from each other and are fun to play in their own ways. All of the characters are also well balanced in that there is no character that is obviously the best character in the game, and no character is so bad that it is beyond difficult if not impossible to reach the end game with. The vast majority of items are well balanced in the scheme of the game, with only a couple items being overwhelmingly awful to acquire (primarily the lunar items) and one item being a direct detriment to pickup. We’ll come back to these later in the discussion part. The game’s art style is great, and the stages are beautiful albeit some poorly designed. The enemy types are somewhat varied yet become boring to look at with time, and the AI of the game is pretty mediocre but otherwise serviceable for a hoard shooter. And finally the multiplayer is an alright system of peer to peer, however many players have complained about the lack of host migration, meaning that if the host leaves the lobby, the entire lobby will close.

You wouldn’t know that I basically covered all of what you can really talk about from a basic review standpoint of Risk of Rain 2, if I wasn’t so generous as to tell you. So instead of providing a long form critique/review like the one I just did for Borderlands 3, I’m instead going to give you a brief review with the review score ahead of time, before I go into just deconstructing the game. So, here it goes:

Risk of Rain 2 feels exactly what a sequel should strive to do in the face of a game franchise. It takes the original concept of the first game and puts all of it into three dimensions. The way that this is pulled off is almost so flawlessly done that it is legitimately difficult to attempt to go back to the original game’s mechanics. This new focus on 3D gameplay has come with the freedom of movement that was noticeably absent in the first game (shooting while moving, sprinting, faster movement, and versatile movement skills). In some ways certain elements of the game have become dramatically less important or dumbed down, such as drones being next to useless, homing rockets being seen as passive damage rather than a massive game changer, and the introduction of death pits that correspond well enough with certain items or abilities to completely change the tide of a fight.

In many more ways, however, the game has become a much more flexible and skill based game that allows the player to play in a much more expressive manner. Gameplay is a smooth, fast paced, hoard based experience that will push you to cleverly use the resources that you’ve been given to turn the tides of a fight. Initially this game is going to seem very difficult for people who begin playing on the, “Rainstorm,” A.K.A normal difficulty, because what this game doesn’t tell you is that there are a ton of nuances that will completely change how you play the game as you learn them. During your first playthroughs you’re going to find that Stone Titans are a very annoying enemy, and that the laser is a powerful attack that will melt your health very quickly. Then later on you’ll find that Stone Titans are pretty much push overs in small numbers or individually, because you can stand at the feet of the Titan which stops it from ever trying to laser you. There are many little quirks like this in the game that will ultimately change how you handle the hoard based combat, and eventually you’ll come to the resolution that Lesser Wisps, supposedly the weakest enemy in the game, are actually the strongest.

By the time you reach that point though, you may become frustrated with the RNG systems of the game. RNG dictates a couple things in Risk of Rain 2, but most importantly it dictates what items you get and in what order you get them (randomly). On some of your runs you may find a legendary, or two, or three on the first level that essentially renders the difficulty of that run nullified. On other runs you’re going to get a bunch of trash items 3-4 levels in and eventually find yourself fighting a game of attrition until your inevitable demise. Of course, you can theoretically skill your way through the game, and the further into the game you get, the more possibilities you have to find items that will turn the tides of your run around.

The character you choose is also a massive influence on how you learn to play the game. If you’re anything like me or my friends, you’re going to immediately gravitate towards the Huntress, as she’s easy to unlock and has considerably more survivability than the other survivors that you unlock early on. The biggest problem that the Huntress posses to the player’s attitude towards the game is that she provides players with the tools to never properly learn how to position or prioritize enemies. What happens when you begin playing the Huntress is that you find it very difficult to play other characters such as the Commando, Mult, or Artificer. This may result from what pieces of information that Risk of Rain provides about the other characters simply not being clear enough as to how versatile they really are. This was somewhat addressed with the introduction of, “Mastery,” challenges that unlock cool skins for each of the characters (minus engineer :c). However, I don’t believe that players will be driven to try out these new characters or even play the, “Monsoon,” difficulty of the game before they’ve put anywhere from 20-40 hours into Rainstorm/Drizzle.

Given this, Risk of Rain isn’t ultimately a game about becoming the best at its systems. It feels much like a “for fun” kind of game where you just sit down for a couple of hours and have a blast killing enemies. This isn’t how I approached the game, however if you ultimately decide that the game is too difficult, the Drizzle difficulty is going to be just the thing for you. You will be, more or less, consistently overpowered on this difficulty if you have even the most basic understanding of how to play the game. You can totally just play a Drizzle run for 2 hours straight and ultimately understand the purpose of Risk of Rain: Get overpowered and screen wipe enemies consistently. And even though I personally don’t play the game like this, I wouldn’t blame you if this is how you prefer to play it.

This game isn’t going to be for everyone, but if you like arcady, roguelike, third person action this game will probably be right up your alley. I give this game a review score of 7/10. It is well worth the $20 asking price, and is definitely made much more fun with friends (who can manage to get good at the game). When this game receives more content and is completed I imagine that this review score will go up, but for now this game may be lacking in content for many people.

-=DISCUSSION=-

That’s where the review portion of this post ends. If you really only wanted an overview of what the game is and what it does well, then that’s what I have to offer you. The rest of this post is going to be going into a long discussion about why certain systems of Risk of Rain 2 are bland and overall degrade elements of the game. So let’s dive into those core issues, why don’t we?

Items

Firstly let’s hit on the core mechanic of this game: randomized item drops. The method in which Risk of Rain 2 hands out items isn’t heavily biased into giving a player a certain set of items or outright trying to discriminate against items (except of course that item tiers become more rare as they go up). However the problem with this system is the aforementioned frustration that comes along with a game that's far too dependent on RNG. In some runs you will be given just the right combo that will turn your run into a god run, whereas others are doomed from the start. I don’t consider the option of “skilling” your way through the first 7 stages to really be an option, since without damage and effect procing (chance on hit) items, the later levels become an absolute chore to play through. Of course, this is detrimental to the game in the way that it may just be outright impossible to obliterate or reach god run every run.

Now this is going to be a hard change to swallow, but I think this game could benefit from having biases in its RNG distribution of items which, according to Ghor (developer of Risk of Rain 2), has been confirmed to be entirely random.

This system doesn’t have to be a drastic overhaul that makes every item has its own custom probability for drop, but it should focus on making each playthrough feel a little more balanced. My proposal for this is to make a system that attempts to balance out how many damage, healing, and utility items the player gathers throughout their playthrough. Basically, if you have too many damage and utility items, the game should start pushing towards giving you some healing items and etc. But there’s some new problems introduced with the change.

Firstly, how do 3D printers affect this? Well, I think there’s two options for this. One, have 3D printed items have a special tag on them that stops them from affecting the RNG calculations of items drops. Or two, just doing nothing about it. That latter fix doesn’t seem all too appetising, but I think it could lead to some interesting developments and meta games around 3D printing items.

The other major gripe I have with the item system is that items are hitting this level of power creep that has made certain elements of the game almost meaningless. And when I say meaningless, I do literally mean meaningless. For the most part, Risk of Rain’s item balancing is fantastic with most items feeling like they belong in that tier, while others are either way too overpowered or provide next to no benefit. And this is the type of subject that I think is difficult for ROR2 to get right because the ultimate goal of this game is to become overpowered, so it would make sense for overpowered stuff to just exist, right? Well no. While it is important for the game to have kinda meh items and kinda alright items, the extent to which the game has pushed its power creep is really stupid.

Most predictably I will bring up Shaped Glass. This item has been in hot heat from most of the game’s community for making the gameplay really dull and having little to no actual risk in using it, despite being a lunar item which is supposed to be a risk and reward item. For those uninformed, Shaped Glass cuts your health capacity in half while doubling your damage multiplicatively. All is well so far, until you factor in how healing and one shot protection works in the game. When your health is over 90%, you cannot die to a single hit of damage excluding over time effects like burning or sticky bombs. The basic gist is that by cutting the maximum health you have with Shaped Glass, healing items will retain their default stats and hence actually be improved each time a Shaped Glass is acquired. Given that this item works multiplicatively, (2x, 4x, 8x, and 16x damage and health debuff) a run will quickly spiral into a god run with no penalty to the player long term.

But at least that takes some effort to achieve, where as Old Guillotine has outright destroyed the balance of elite monsters. Stack a couple of these bad boys, and elite enemies are now a complete joke. Originally introduced in the Scorched Acres update as a direct counter to malachite enemies (as far as I can tell that’s the only reason this item was added), this item allows the player to kill elites at a percentage of their health instead of just getting their health to zero. So if you collect 1 guillotine, the elite monster will die at 20% of its health instead of 0%. This item is generally an okay item, balance wise, if it wasn’t already piss easy to instantly screenwipe enemies during a god run. But oh god, the flat percentage rates compared with how high these percentage rates are per stack are ungodly. According to the Risk of Rain Wiki, collecting just 10 of these bad boys will allow you to kill elites at a whopping 90% health. Meaning, if you manage to find an Old Guillotine printer in your mid game, elite enemies are no longer a problem. But let’s be real, no one needs that many guillotines when only 3 of these nets you roughly 50% (This piece of information has become outdated, now it's about 40% for 3 stacks and 70% for 10 stacks). This is the stack count that I usually strive for because it's the best blend of economy and effectiveness. As you can imagine, even with 3 of these, elite enemies essentially become pushovers. Seriously, having 50% of elite enemies’ health gone is just that good, I don’t know how else to explain this pretty simple concept, but yes it’s true.

And I haven’t seen many people in the ROR community saying this item is a bad game item (please email me) so I will now explain why this hurts the game. Nothing in this game, especially in the later stages or god run, will be difficult if you are on the right track. Elite enemies could’ve and should’ve been the one turning point that kept any resemblance of the game's difficulty outside of the bosses (unless you’re already insta killing them). I can really only qualify this claim by making the point that “elite enemies” are called elite for a reason, right? The following screenshot is Google’s definition for the word “elite.”

However, when I think of the elite enemies in ROR2, I think, “Oh hey more money.” Not, “Uh oh this is bad,” or, “I really need to focus this thing.” To be fair, malachites do manage to pull this off even in the late game due to their (rather bullshit) debuff applied on getting hit by their normal attacks or dispersed spikes (we’ll touch on this later). But this mentality is, most likely, not what the developers intended players to think about their marketed “difficult” enemies. This isn’t to say that elite enemies aren’t dangerous, but even that only comes from the fact that flaming and overloading elites can outright kill you from landing one attack on you in late game. But this isn’t a danger that I’m actively worried about when the elites die in mere seconds at this point anyways.

There are also several items that just outright break bosses. Willow the Wisp turns the Grovetender boss into a free teleporter item. The Halcyon Seed is an item so strong, accompanied by a boss so easy to defeat, that it’s worth getting every time. Previously this item was a pretty meh item because the Aurelionite simply didn’t do much damage or assist you in any meaningful fashion. At some point, though, his laser beam attack was added to his friendly AI via an update, and it just melts bosses. Unstable Tesla Coil makes horde boss fights beyond easy (this item generally makes the game a cake walk). And of course, Chronobauble will transform you into an invincible chad ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°).

I’m sure there are some items that I’ve missed in this list, I could go into some depth about how 57 Leaf Clover is the best item available, or that some items are useless in comparison and were outright terrible for some time because of the developers’ oversights (H3AD-ST-v2 breaking Artificer’s float and Aegis being worse than the Topaz Brooch.) But you should get the point. Overall the item balancing isn’t awful, the game is still overall playable without an overwhelming amount of this power creep, and to be fair instantly melting the bosses in this game is enjoyable even if I don’t, at all, deserve it.

Stage Imbalance

What is awful then, is the stage imbalance present in the game. Stage imbalance is probably one of the biggest things turning me off from the game right now. Nothing frustrates me more than getting Scorched Acres or Siren’s Call on a shitty run, and basically having to accept my death because I’m unable to grab the Preon Accumulator or kill the AWU with my pitiful damage and healing.

For some unknown, dumb shit reason, Hopoo has stated that this is the way they want to continue developing the game. So this is an issue that isn’t getting fixed, and might get worse over the next three updates. I really hope it doesn’t, because the idea of having the game be more luck based than it currently is might just make me pull my hair out. These tiny, rather inconsequential things in the moment, will eventually build up into a sort of “power creep” among the levels. I’m unsure if this is the right term for this imbalance between the levels, but right now it certainly feels like exactly that. Now, to be fair, there are only 2 levels per stage, however I will now argue that this only furthers the point that this design style is harmful to the gameplay.

Right now, it feels like the most optimal stage path is Distant Roost, Abandoned Aqueduct, Rallypoint Delta, and then Abysmal Depths. While some of these maps have their own issues, the others have issues that pull the maps to be less favorable than the ones described.

Titanic Plains, firstly, is way too big and spacious in comparison to Distant Roost. When you spawn into Distant Roost, you can very quickly identify where the teleporter has spawned due to the compact nature of the map and where the teleporter can spawn. This compactivity also gives you the benefits of an RNG chance at a large supply of items spawning in the center of the map. Titanic Plains is giant, and lacks anything interesting to look at or venture into. It’s an okay map, but has a huge issue with pacing and seems to come from a completely different design philosophy than Distant Roost. Far too many times on Titanic Plains I will get confused on where the teleporter is because it’s out in the open plains area on a bright blue backdrop. And of course, the particles that the teleporter gives off are not prominent enough to stand out from this backdrop.

Other times it’s tucked way too far into a back corner, or obscured by a structure.

The items on this map are also very hit or miss, sometimes I favor Titanic Plains over Distant Roost for how many items this map can really provide, other times I leave the map with the bare minimum for my tastes. This is, however, a problem with the general generation of chests and not strictly an issue with Titanic Plains, but I feel the issue is exacerbated on Titanic due to its size.

I also largely favor Abandoned Aqueduct over Wetland Aspect because of its readability and predictable chest placements. Wetland Aspect has way too many branching pathways with tons of stuff in the way. This is the one map I’ll often ask myself, “Did I miss checking somewhere?” or, “Did I miss it when I was looking through an area?” The teleporter, more often than not, seems to always be tucked away into some obscure corner that I have to go way out of my way to go for. Although I will say this map’s chest distribution is far better than TItanic Plains.

A map that is terrible in almost every aspect however is Scorched Acres. I truly despise this map, and seeing it come up on 50% of my playthroughs makes me want to turn the game off and leave it for good. This map is god awful, where Rallypoint Delta has a circular pathing structure so you can walk all the way around the map and get almost all of the chests (for players who are into that), Scorched Acres is a slow slog up some water geysers and into a park and down some giant structures, ugh. The best place to spawn on this map is at the highest point it generates, because having to look up to find the teleporter’s red specs on an orange background is comparable to making color blind people take color blind tests just so you can laugh at them. And having to get to a specific point on the map in order to jump up a water geyser, for a game about time management, is outright awful design. This map also lacks basic functionality that others ones have like the special TC-280 Prototype (who cares honestly) and the timed chest which contains a free Preon Accumulator (I care). And when I say lacks, I mean it doesn’t have anything else to compensate. Generally how you’d play this map, is you’d locate the teleporter or establish a general area for where the teleporter is, and linearly work your way towards it. If you see an area with a bunch of chests, you sit there and grind up enough money to collect those chests before heading on your way.

Now that final bit might have you scratching your head, “Don’t all of the maps play that way?” Well yes and no, you can play it that way if you want, but most maps are going to have the connectivity to allow you to skip on those chests until after you’ve found some other chests or defeated the teleporter event. You basically cannot do that on this map unless you want to waste minutes of your time or you have so many jumps and so much speed that you can jump from the center of the map to the upper areas with ease. Some characters also have an easier time on this map than others like the Huntress, but that’s generally just amplified because of the shitty map design and not a specific issue for Scorched Acres.

Finally, we come to Abysmal Depths versus Siren’s Call, and. . . Abysmal Depths wins, no big surprise. Siren’s call isn’t really a bad map per se, it’s compact, somewhat easy to navigate, and isn’t a hassle to get the things you need. However there’s one massive imbalance with this map, and that’s the Alloy Worship Unit. The AWU is Siren’s Call’s way of getting a guaranteed red item, and this boss fight is pretty damn tough even after its nerf. This boss scales faster than other enemies, so if you don’t get to him quickly in your early game you’ll be suffering in this boss fight, hell you’ll be suffering anyways. But beyond the boss being a pain to defeat, there’s nothing necessarily wrong with placing a red item behind a boss. Except when you take into account the fact that it is menially easy to get the golden chest on Abysmal Depths. The golden chest on Abysmal Depths always spawns in the same location, and costs a whopping 16 times the cost of a normal chest for the stage. There’s no hooks, no catches, it just requires a decent time investment to get the item because you’ll be grinding out normal enemies. That time investment is the only real contending downside for going for the golden chest on Abysmal Depths, but that also applies to fighting the AWU. If you have a terrible build and you’re gambling for a good red item from the AWU, you could find yourself spending just as long (longer even) fighting this boss. Plus you have the possibility of dying, meaning your run is over. At least now you'd have another chance to get Abysmal Depths.

And sure, as of the December update the AWU has been nerfed pretty drastically. A huge 75% decrease in damage scaling and 20% less scaling in the health department means that this boss is now overall easier to kill. But these changes haven’t ultimately made the boss any more enjoyable to kill when the run just isn’t getting started. Sure, now you can kill it faster, and you now have a more adaptable playstyle where either stage can be more viable than the other depending on your loadout but I still feel myself gravitating towards Abysmal Depths more often than not. This update also added “map variants,” but for the sake of just calling them what they are, they’re basically just additional maps. I’m honestly okay with having more than 2 maps per stage, I think that can lead to a pretty satisfying experience. My only real gripe with these maps is that you can tell these were made by another company and not Hopoo. These maps, especially the Distant Roost variant, incorporate a lot of vertical space into their game play and map flow that at times can be confusing to work around for new players. However I would not be opposed to having essentially 4 different maps for the game to choose from, granted that they’re all balanced well enough.

If Hopoo doesn’t wish to balance the stages with each other, the much simpler system I’d recommend is to have the game force the player to eventually play that stage they missed out on later. So instead of being able to get Scorched Acres 2 times in one run, if the game makes me play on that map for my 3rd stage, then I should know for a fact that I’ll get Rallypoint Delta for my 7th. And of course for Rallypoint Delta I would also recommend putting a second timer on the Preon Accumulator chest just so that it’s an option for players who don’t get it on their first loop. This would scath a good amount of my frustration towards the system because at least then I’d know my run would balance out towards the end.

The stage progression system in this game is currently very awkward. As of writing, you have to run through 7 stages before you can enter a “celestial” portal and obliterate yourself at an obelisk. It seems the way that Hopoo wants to take the game is to have 4 entirely unique stages, and then from there you’d either go to the boss or you may be forced through another loop of the game until stage 7 where the celestial portal will be replaced with the portal to the final boss area. I wish this system was more transparent with where it’s going, and if it is going to do a double looping system I’d honestly appreciate just having 7 unique stages rather than this current system. Again, this problem would be fixed if the game forced you to play the alternative stages on concurrent loops.

Feedback

Feedback was something that was somewhat addressed in this recent December update. The screen now gets dark around the edges when you’re hit and at low health your screen will start graying out. These are absolutely great steps towards integrating more feedback into the game, but it’s still missing the mark with a lot of elements.

Namely, elites have been one of the leading factors in me dedicating a part of this discussion to the feedback of the game, and this is due to the shift towards developing more powerful, end game elites. A lot of the time in Risk of Rain 2, especially end game, you’ll find yourself in situations where you just die seemingly instantly. This isn’t a problem specific to the end game but more a general problem with the lack of feedback that the game gives you when you’re being hurt or have, say, a sticky grenade stuck to you. This recent update has since added some incredible feedback additions to the game, but this system is still lacking. In an ideal universe, I should be able to tell how I’ve been hit and what’s happening to me without having to specifically focus on that. To an extent this game does that well, red lasers appear from Lesser Wisps and shoot very quickly, Golem laser blasts are pretty distinguishable, and so on. But other elements, namely elemental elements, are an area of the game that lack any specific feedback currently.

It would be cool if there were different effects that showed on screen when I was hit by different elements. Such as flames around the edges of the screen when I’m on fire, vines or whatever for the malachite, and some ice for freezing. In the case of the sticky grenades (whatever you wanna call them) it would be cool if they had a Halo-esque sound effect where it would beep for a bit before exploding to give you a very clear indication that, “You’re about to die.” Currently the game lacks this. At best the fire ticking away at your health always means that the screen is darkened, but this is an annoying effect to have on your screen for more than a mere moment. I’d say feedback is the primary reason why malachites are such a massive problem in this game, because more often than not I’ll get the malachite debuff without realizing it and then die shortly after because I wasn’t regenerating health.

More auditory feedback would also be greatly appreciated. Something as simple as a crashing sound (like the Loader’s gauntlet punch) to indicate something like, “You’ve just been melee attacked!” would go a long way to improving the crowd fighting aspect of the game. I would also like to see some more ambient sounds for enemies to emit simply from existing on the map like the high pitched hum of the Lesser Wisps or the burrowing of the Magma Worm. Again, for the most part, the audio is done well, but some enemies are just lacking in any auditory presence. Bosses like the Grovetender and Titan don’t have just a passive sound effect, you’re really only alerted to their presence when you’re close enough to see them or to initiate their attacks. Being able to hear the distant chattering of rocks or the clanking of chains in the distance to signify bosses being around the corner would add a lot to the ambience of this game. It already seems that Hopoo wants to do something great with the game’s audio because of the already existing ambience, enemy sounds, and even the music that all feed into Risk of Rain’s atmosphere. Right now it’s just lacking.

Lunar Bazaar / Lunar Coins

This system, you can tell, is disliked by most people who play this game. Streamers are always talking about how they’re out of lunar coins and a fair amount of the playerbase have just cheated themselves to a couple million so they’ll never run out. In a lot of different ways, I don’t like this system. It encourages players to grind the game instead of playing it for fun. It requires stocking up on coins in down time runs so that players can experience god runs. The system is easily made meaningless by just a simple value change and people who do this are having more fun with the game than those who don’t. And there’s a couple more issues but let’s just begin listing out these problems and going in depth from there.

First, let’s talk about how many lunar coins you can expect to earn from a single round of playing just going from stage 1 to stage 7 and obliterating. On average, I was earning about 6-7 lunar coins on each run, 1 or 2 from random drops and 5 from obliterating which always rewards the same amount. This isn’t factoring in the new secret boss that has the capacity to drop 10 lunar coins, plus the 5 you’d earn from obliterating. So in the best ideal scenario you could earn a profit of 16 lunar coins (Beads of Fealty cost 1, 10 from the secret boss, 5 from obliterating, and assuming you get 2 from world drops). But you probably won’t be able to fight the secret boss consistently from run to run without losing lunar coins in the process, so for the sake of argument I’ll be leaving this new boss out of the equation. All of this math speak demonstrates the upcoming point: You aren’t paid enough lunar coins on a per run basis. Let’s assume that you start off a run with 5 lunar coins from a previous obliteration, and that you’re going to earn 2 more as random drops throughout your progression. The cheapest that you can acquire a lunar item, far less likely one that you actually want, is 1 lunar coin spent towards a lunar pod. The next possibility is that a free blue portal appears and then you find an item you want and can spend 2 lunar coins on it. The scenario after that is that you purchase a blue portal for 1 lunar coin, go in and find the item you want and buy it for 2 to make a total of 3 spent. From here the total amount of lunar coins spent can increase exponentially because, given the rng nature of the game, it’s totally possible to never find the lunar that you want. And that’s a big problem, because ROR2’s rng systems are essentially locking away the player’s potential for success at almost every turn.

And the reason for that is the absolutely abysmal balancing of the lunar items. See, the regular items can get away with a decent amount of imbalance because one, these items don’t negatively affect the player in most instances (Personal Shield Generator cough cough) and two, you’re given the opportunity to 3D print these items away for potentially better items. At best, you can spend more lunar coins at a cleansing pool to have the potential to remove a lunar item that you dislike, but again that’s just more rng on top of the rng and costs lunar coins to use. It’s incredibly easy to lose all 7 of your lunar coins because the game just refuses to give you the item you want, which is most likely going to be Shaped Glass or Gesture of the Drowned. So I suppose I’ll begin with why you’ll most likely want these items over other ones.

Shaped Glass, as mentioned before, doesn’t really have a downside to using it as it’s pretty easy to abuse the game’s mechanics with it. Firstly, if you’re killing more things faster, those things most likely won't even have an opportunity to damage you. This is an okay example of a risk versus reward mechanic, but I’m going to have to lean on this item being more rewarding than risky. That’s because, as also stated before, healing doesn’t scale with this item, hence the lower amount of health you have the faster you can recover back to full. And recovering back to full is important because you restore one shot protection which allows risky players to continually survive even in the most drastic situations by abuse of the mechanic. This item is the foundation for building a god run.

Gesture of the Drowned, on the other hand, has a downside that’s very easy to bypass by simply picking up the right items and equipment. If you pick up something like Preon Accumulator, sure it shoots off 50% more often but now you have to be constantly thinking of what you’re going to be shooting it at and at what time it’s going to happen. Where as if you pick up a Deployable Missile launcher, you don’t have to worry about aiming at all because those rockets are homing and rarely go after the target you’re trying to aim at anyways. Gesture + Deployable Missiles also synergizes incredibly well with Soulbound Catalyst which decreases your equipment cooldown by 4 seconds every time you kill and enemy. So in this scenario, as long as you’re able to continually chain kills with your abilities and the missiles, you will be spewing out missiles constantly with no stopping. So there’s not really a downside to picking this item unless you really want to use something like the Preon Accumulator which, most of the time, isn’t a necessary item for the late game. There are a plentiful amount of other equipment that synergize decently well with Gesture as well such as the Gnarled Woodsprite, Royal Capacitor (due to its short cooldown time), the Back Up, Blast Shower, etc. So odds are that you’ll already be carrying an equipment that synergizes well with Gesture.

Examples of lunar items that are bad would be Brittle Crown, Corpse Bloom, and Effigy of Grief. These items are ones that no rational player would ever consider picking up in their runs (maybe Effigy if you got it from a lunar pod). Corpse Bloom is an item that you’d really only take if you were desperate enough to just get through the rest of the run, but even then it may be detrimental to your healing capabilities. The only situation I can see Corpse Bloom being useful would be in situations where the player has no active healing items and has had to rely on passive healing for the entire duration of the run. Otherwise, in the long run, the item will only restrict the player’s ability to be successful because they’re going to be hard limited to that 10% healing per second. This means that for the player to reach the one shot protection threshold from less than 10% health, they’ll be waiting a whopping 9 seconds and cannot take damage during that time otherwise the player is dead in late game. These kinds of items are embarrassing to see in the lunar item pool and are essentially scams.

Another item that’s entirely a scam is the Brittle Crown. On paper this item seems like a blast. You’ll have about a third of a chance to acquire additional gold simply from dealing damage to an enemy that scales over time, and the only downside is that the player will lose gold equal to the amount of percentile damage taken. What percentile damage means is that if you lose 90% of your health, you lose 90% of your gold. It’s another example of a risk versus reward item, but during the entirety of the run you’re bound to take a lot of damage simply because of the hoard combat. There are a lot of factors to take in when fighting a hoard and not taking damage on just one stage is incredibly difficult. So that means that you’ll be losing gold quite often, and losing this gold (especially while farming) can be devastating to the flow of your run. Especially in the late game where you can lose millions of gold all because you simply got hit once. There is no chance of losing gold either, it’s 100%. So if that isn’t enough to dissuade you from this item, then the fact that this item costs lunar coins to acquire absolutely should.

I’ll skip talking about the Effigy of Grief so I can get back to the point that lunar coins are a limited resource. So how do you stock up on these? Well, since lunar coins are kept between runs, that means the best way to experience the game is to grind out a couple obliterate runs until the player has stocked up over 10 to 20 lunar coins. This will give the player a decent amount of wiggle room for spending and dealing with the RNG of the lunar bazaar. Here’s the issue with this: The player will most likely grind them out over a long period on Monsoon or speedrun Drizzle to maximize how many coins can be acquired in a short amount of time. Grinding, as a game mechanic, is very polarizing for many different players. It has its place in games because why else do we have the massive game titan World of Warcraft, or Borderlands, or Destiny, or just about any mmorpg to hit the market? But introducing grinding to your small, indie roguelike is questionable.

The grinding system of lunar coins in Risk of Rain just feels like Hopoo wanted to have a more premium currency for adding depth to the game, but had no clever ideas as to what they wanted to achieve with it. Right now, the system is bland, uninspired, and cumbersome to play with for many legit players. The first thing to get out of the way is that I have the actual data collected in Hopoo’s discord server to back up what I’m saying here. This poll was posted by a moderator from the aforementioned discord server to collect feedback for the developers to work with.

Most players here are saying that they’d like to be paid out more lunar coins because they’re shredding through them too quickly. Personally, I tried to avoid spending lunar coins except in situations where I really wanted to win a run or was trying to shoot for a god run. Before my save file corrupted I had about 180 lunar coins which is absolutely more than enough to keep up consistent runs for a while, but that’s assuming I’d want to be working at a deficit. This is because, for the lunar bazaar, the chance of the item you’re specifically looking for spawning is around 30% according to this video and it's even less for the lunar pods (This piece of information has become outdated with time as more lunar items have been added to the game, dropping the percentage even lower). Using this logic and the knowledge that I’ll be spending at least 2 lunar coins on a bazaar item it’s pretty easy to deduce that i can easily play my runs at a lunar coin loss if I am actively trying to get that one item. All of this, again, creates a down time period where players either won’t be spending any lunar coins or are actively trying to build them up. I do not believe, however, that simply increasing the amount of lunar coins paid out will entirely fix this problem.

I would recommend entirely revamping the lunar system to be way different or just outright deleting the lunar system altogether and allowing lunar items to spawn as world drops. There are a couple ideas that come to mind: Randomized challenges on each run that reward lunar items, making lunar items world drops, or creating more world events like the Void Fields, mountain shrines, or maybe even being able to fight the lunar bazaar shop keeper so that he’ll drop a lunar item. These randomized challenges don’t need to be anything specific, but I do believe they should incorporate a good amount of the environment and gameplay to make each run unique in its own ventures. Something like tasking players to kill Runald and Kjaro (ideally only as the engineer or in multiplayer games), activating a newt alter on a specific stage, reaching a stage within a specific time, etc. These challenges would reward specific lunar items and be cycled out for new challenges upon completion so that the player isn’t limited to their capabilities in late game. A system like this probably doesn’t solve the rng factor of obtaining the lunar items and is contrary to the goal of lunar items (to be risk and reward items) while probably creating a list of its own issues, but at least now players won’t feel limited by simply how many lunar coins are on them.

Hoppo could completely remove the RNG aspect of obtaining lunar items while still keeping lunar coins a viable option in the game by allowing the player to purchase a specific amount of certain lunar items at the very beginning of the game or even in the character select menu. A system like this would completely kill off the rng aspect of the game, while encouraging players to levy their odds of just how far they want to go with their run. A player can purchase 4 Shaped Glasses right at the beginning of the game, but the player is going to have to be able to carry those throughout the entirety of the game if they want to achieve a god run and should they die, they lose whatever they invested into the run. Although I’d have to wager that there would be a limit to how many lunar items a player can buy each run so that the player doesn’t just stock up on lunar coins and Shaped Glasses for easy runs. Of course the issue of down time still isn’t resolved, but given an increase in the amount of lunar coins paid out would ensure the player could somewhat consistently engage with this system on a run by run basis.

Having lunar items drop as extremely rare world drops would also be an interesting spin on the mechanic but is probably far less desirable than the other options. While it would make gathering lunar items more consistent, I imagine the rng chance of obtaining lunar coins would be comparable if not less than red items. Although I imagine having the occasional lunar drop would allow players to quickly restructure their runs assuming they got a worthwhile item. Aside from this minor bonus, this suggestion wouldn’t be capable of replacing the current lunar system that’s in place.

While the lunar system is simple and intuitive, it’s overall harmful to the game and draws many players towards just cheating in millions of lunar coins so that they never have to micromanage this currency. Please understand that the above suggestions are merely suggestions and not tried and true methods for replacing this system. However given that Hopoo doesn’t even seem interested in nerfing Shaped Glass, I suspect that the lunar system won’t be changing any time before release.

World Events

The new optional events included in this December update are absolutely fantastic. The Void Fields are a fun way to break up the monotony of the game, and having a new optional boss to kill is always a joy. Even though I may trash on bosses like the Aurelionite, having these bonus areas to play through does make the game feel more substantial, and I think Hopoo should incorporate more of these deliberate world events and even some procedurally generated ones.

I personally enjoy the small secrets and additions like Kjaro and Runald’s cave, shrine of N'kuhana, etc. But I find these additions too small in scope to really be worth the effort to achieve every run. The Void Fields on the other hand is a substantial enough challenge and provides a large enough scope that I want to see more of in upcoming content updates. It would be cool to have the world be an almost mmorpg-esque world, with multiple side objectives to do along the way to a main objective. The unfortunate thing here is that not all of these side things are worth doing. N’kuhana’s shrine in fact offers nothing to the player outside of the initial unlock of the item, N’kuhana’s opinion. And the cave of Runald and Kjaro isn’t worth visiting for the measly two green items, on top of the caves only being accessible in multiplayer, or as the Engineer, or managing to glitch your way through the door with character abilities like the Huntress’ blink. I believe the Void Fields did it right in this regard by having a decent reward for players to contend for in the form of 8 white/green items and a red item. Perhaps having items that were more easily accessible or simply rewarding more items and incentives to partake in these optional areas (3D printers, boss items, particular shops, etc.) would drive more players to use them in their common routing. Blend these generated areas with the suggested stage progression of playing each stage once throughout a run, and a player would be able to make a reasonable path of execution that they could somewhat reliably depend on as long as rng was on their side.

To keep the more randomized spin on a player’s run, the use of randomly generated events could be used to allow the player to participate in potentially unique events to acquire a little bit more power for a little bit of their time. A system that immediately comes to mind is a hit list: You load into a new map and the game will tell you to kill a specific enemy on the map for a reward. In of itself, having something like this wouldn’t do much to bolster the game for people who can already kill bosses consistently, so instead there would need to be some type of modifier system. Simple modifiers could be used like 2x damage, health, enemy leeches health on hit, etc. But simple modifiers cause a game to lack depth, so I propose different challenges and modifiers: Time limits, hydra bosses (duplicate on death), health gated bosses (to somewhat halt OP players), and maybe even specialized boss elements that are separate from the usual elite elements. That isn’t to say that these randomly generated events even have to be bosses, it could be something to defend, a flag to capture, a delivery drop to conquer, etc. I believe this would be the best way to keep a game like this fresh while maintaining a lot of what the game wants to do.

Randomized events could also be a risk versus reward endeavor through the use of limiting what abilities and items the player has access to. Let’s say in the latter parts of the game, the player can stumble upon an event that will restrict them down to 20 randomized items (while they possibly have over 100 to be chosen from). Although I’d wager that players in this position would just opt to not even do the event as it could possibly end their run, what better way to reward these players for being risky than giving them more of the lunar items they want or even lunar coins? If players are able to be more productive in their runs by taking these additional challenges, I believe it’ll drive those players to accept these events in their late games. Plus these events give the game that feeling of a larger scope without altering all that much about the levels or the gameplay. And really, you only need to put like 2-3 on each stage to make the events system feel substantial enough.

Overall, I think if Hopoo were capable of designing a system like this, and designing it well, it could draw players back into playing the game for hours upon hours on top of what they’ve already invested. For me personally, the game has gotten pretty bland to play with time because each run just feels like it runs through the same loop: Hope for good beginning items, hope for good stages, farm for a red item on stage 4, and then if I’m doing alright I’ll try to get my way to the celestial portal, if I’m doing really good I’ll try to go for a god run. As much as the game tries to hide this gameplay format by having a wide range of RNG systems at play, the overall experience after a couple hundred hours can become apparent and stale as time progresses forwards. That isn’t to say that I think the current game is bad, but I think it could be so much more than what it is currently.

Challenges?

Another thing that would go a long way to making the game feel more expansive and player-progression focused would be the implementation of some good ol’ challenges. Hopoo seemingly doesn’t know how to develop a challenge that doesn’t have something locked behind it, or outright refuses to make challenges without a reward. Like seriously, some of the hardest challenges in the game reward alternative abilities for characters. Some of those being direct upgrades from the character’s normal ability. You really mean to tell me that I have to beat stage 20 without picking up any lunar items just to get a frag grenade for Commando? Alright, I guess. Hopoo has even realized that not all players want stuff to be locked behind challenges, and has added a decent amount of immediately accessible content to the game to appeal to those who aren’t into the challenges system. However they have also stated that they’re proud that players aren't immediately able to unlock the new abilities from the Skills 2.0 update and I just have to wonder, why?

Limiting the players to the degree that Risk of Rain 2 does seems overall harmful to a player’s experience with the game. You don’t unlock the best red item in the game, 57 leaf clover, until you’ve managed to clear 20 stages in a single run, which will probably be a player’s first time getting a god run. When you start up a new save file, you’re severely limited on the items that you can get your hands on because stuff like tougher times, armor piercing rounds, berserker's pauldron, preon accumulator, etc. are just locked away from access completely. That is disappointing because many of these items are staples in developing a good build, and it’s now more difficult for players to understand what items do what and which items are worth the time and effort when they have to unlock the item first and then have a random chance of acquiring it in a future run with a random amount of stacks to be accumulated. It’s even more disappointing that players have to fight a hill of challenges that get progressively more and more steep with its requirements and begin requiring players to either master elements of the game or the characters present.

I understand having hard challenges in your roguelike, but having items and content locked behind those challenges can turn a lot of players away from your game. The only saving grace here is that these challenges don’t have difficulty requirements outside of a couple select challenges, but most of these only offer cosmetic rewards that come from the monsoon obliteration challenges. It seems inexcusable to me that there wouldn’t just be challenges that players could attempt for fun. Instead we have challenges that players are being forcefully drawn to if they want new toys and gadgets to play around with in their future runs. Some of the challenges are understandable to skip, like if you don’t like the Engineer, you probably don’t have to worry about doing his challenges. However I wouldn’t skip any of the item and equipment challenges because items and equipment are the core of the game experience. Being limited in the items available means you’re only experiencing a limited amount of the game, and that’s a big no no.

The change that I’d propose here is just to nerf a lot of the more difficult challenges that have gameplay impacting items locked behind them, and then put those challenges in their own categories that players can try out on their own time for their own enjoyment. With these changes the unlock system would appear less like a grind and more like something for completionists and avid players to use in order to test their skills at the game. Something else that I’d recommend is a little stamp or indicator that tells people what difficulty the challenges were completed on, just as a little extra something for players to work towards. This part of the discussion is relatively simple because, come on, it’s challenges. But hopefully Hopoo changes the way that they handle the inclusion of challenges in the future.

Collectibles

Oh boy the collectibles. The collectibles aren’t terrible and before my save corrupted I was very close to have 100%’d the unlocks and collectibles, but 200 hours in and I still hadn’t unlocked everything. And the reason for that is because the unlocks take way too long to unlock and are way too frustrating to actively chase after. The environment logs became a chore to try and collect, when after spending about 100 hours after the Scorched Acres update I was still completely unable to obtain its environment log. It took me 90+ Grovetender kills to finally get his monster log, and to this date I’ve only had the little disciple item drop for me twice (one was in a multiplayer match). I ultimately gave up on trying to even go for the Aurelionite’s monster log when it once took me 4 hours to get a single gold portal to show up in a god run.

This section of the discussion is going to be short because I have a very simple message here: Increase the god damn drop rates of some of this stuff, seriously. It’s not satisfying to spend 200 hours and still see that there’s some little lore tidbits that I’m missing from my log book. It’s not satisfying to have to stop my flow of gameplay every time I get Scorched Acres just to have a tiny tiny tiny chance that the environment log radio might have somewhere on the map and then having to go hunt for it. And then when I don’t find it after being way more thorough than one should be on any given stage, I then have to question if I simply missed it or it actually didn’t spawn. It’s not satisfying to finally get that environment log or that one item from that one boss that has a random chance to spawn in the 50% chance stage that also has his own fucking chances on whether or not he’s going to drop the monster log and/or the boss item. Stuff like this is absolutely ridiculous and tedious and is making me work way too hard and having me dedicate too many resources just to get some god damn lore text. Little disciple isn’t even that good of an item, so why is it so rare? Just increase the spawns of stuff like the gold portals, monster logs (for bosses), and environment logs. Come on Hopoo, I just want to read your game’s lore.

-=CLOSING=-

So that’s my super long and in depth explanation and critique of many of the systems that Risk of Rain 2 has. I still love this game, and can’t wait for more content updates on it (primarily a fix to the corrupting save files). Please understand that these are just my opinions and whether or not you disagree with me doesn’t mean either of us are wrong or right, it just means I want a different game than you do.

To summarize my review from the beginning of this post: Risk of Rain 2 does it’s predecessor justice and so much more. The jump from 2D to 3D just feels so right that one has to question if this was Hopoo’s original intent before realizing they didn’t have the resources for it. The gameplay loop and gameflow are excellent and you really do feel like you’re overcoming insurmountable odds at certain points to become invincible by the end. It has issues and probably always will be given Hopoo’s unmoved demeanor in even the most balance breaking items in their game. I just hope that they will reconsider some of their design philosophy for the sake of making a much more entertaining video game. As stated before, I overall give this game a 7/10 and depending on the person you may play a few or a few hundred hours in Risk of Rain 2. It’s a fun game to just sit down and play, and you’re given a decent amount of freedom in how you go about playing. And at the end of the day, just having a fun game to play is all that should matter, right?

-Count_

#review #discussion #risk of rain 2 #risk of rain #lonesome alley

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rumpikerzzzworld · 6 years ago

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April, You Will Be Remembered

It’s the 1st of May!! I want to post about some unforgettable April 2019 moments because I want to keep the memories that someday I want to remember again. So many things happened in the month. There were some heart-breaking incidents and of course there were some enjoyable moments as well. I’m just gonna highlight the things I want to remember the most. Here they are!!

BLACK HOLE

It is announced that on 10th April 2019 a group of scientist from the international Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) releasing the image of a black hole to public. This project was began in 2006. It took supercomputers, eight telescopes stationed on five continents, hundreds of researchers, and vast amounts of data to accomplish (source: the verge).

(cr: Event Horizon Telescope)

I was not someone who understands much about space life, even though I studied the basic knowledge when I was in secondary and high school. However, I appreciated a lot this not easy job. I used to have a dream to be an astronomer when I was a kid, but i have to come to realization that I’m not smart enough to pursue the dream, lol. I’m currently into astronauts’ life though. I watch documentaries, read articles and other sources about astronaut’s and space’s life. So that, it made me happy to read this news. Moreover, one of the computer scientists in the team who led the development program to get the first-image of black hole is a woman named Katie Bouman. She is just 29-year-old when she did that. She is amazing!! I always wonder what kind of method those people use when they are studying. I mean, how could they be so smart? I feel like I’m such a useless and stupid human being. I’m nothing huhu. Anyway, I’m happy to witness the history of the first image of black hole.

GAME OF THRONES

FINALLY, WINTER IS COMING. I might not be the fan of the show since day 1. I just started watching game of thrones in 2017. Ever since I watched the first season, I started becoming a fan and addicted to the show then finished all of the 7 seasons in a few weeks. The show is that addictive, it made me threw any dramas/movies for about 6 months because I felt that the show was too well executed and any other movies/dramas in that time period I was watching the show felt bland. I’m sorry, I didn’t intend to belittle other shows. It’s just the thing I felt that moment. I was so mesmerized by the storyline which literally beyond my expectation. It was so good. I know there are a lot of people who don’t like the show, and it’s okay as everyone has their own preference. But to me, this show is so far my very favourite one.

It took me 2 years to wait for the last season which is season 8 to be aired. I cant contain my feelings as I was so excited about this. AAAANNDDDDD IT’S FINALLY HERE. GAME OF THRONES SEASON 8 IS HAPPENING. 14th April 2019 should be put as a history date as the show was aired on that day. Actually, I’m pretty sad that there will be just 6 episodes. I wish they make it to 10, but who am I to complain?

Okay, back to the show. The most talked episode is episode 3, the Battle of Winterfell, which was shown in that very episode. The episode lasts for about 80 minutes long. The thing that has been waited since season 1 was the war between the alive and the dead. There are so much reactions and opinions regarding the episode, fans are splitted into two groups, the one who enjoyed the episode and the one who disliked the episode as it didn’t reach their expectation. I’m the one who included to the first one, I pretty enjoyed the show although I think it wasn’t the greatest battle in Game of Thrones. My favourite battle was Battle of Bastards as it was really tensed. But, I still like the Battle of Winterfell though. As of now, I want to put aside the negativity and just enjoy the rest of episodes. I’m planning on reading the books after the show is over.

One thing that I really like about episode 3 is the hyped from the people who watched together in cafes, restaurants, and other place. Their reactions were priceless. See these videos that went viral on twitter!!

1 2

ELECTION

One of the most tiring to bear ever since social media era existed is election. The countries that pursue democracy usually conduct election to choose their own leader, including my country. In the past, there weren’t much sources to search about election information other than from tv and newspaper, so that the backlash could be reduced. But it’s different now. In this digital age, people can share everything including the positive and negative contents. Social media as one of the tools for people to do campaign and spread either good thing or black-campaign for the election candidates. ISTG, this is so tiring to witness people bashing each other and most of them have crossed the line. I’m so done!

In Indonesia, for 2019’s election, there were some changes compare to the previous election. They were included the period of time of campaign which was so long (about 7 months) and also adding the other 3 elections of legislative to be held in the same very day. It used to be held in different months, but due to the lack of participation in legislative election so that they were all conducted together.

Indonesian Presidential Election Candidates (Left: Jokowi-Amin, Right: Prabowo-Sandi)

(cr: Media Indonesia)

I was eager for this to end soon. It finally happened on 17th April 2019. But, something bad happened again. The incident which happened in 2014 was re-enacted as both candidates claimed they win. Even though the quick count results from about 12 institutions showed that Jokowi-Amin led the vote by gaining about 54% votes while Prabowo-Sandi gained around 44% votes. I’m so done with this. I will just wait for the official results to be announced and I wish on that day there will be no chaos happen.

Aside of that, something that breaks my heart is there were a lot of election officers died and fell sick due to exhaustion from working way too hard as most of them working until very late night and some even worked until the next morning because there were so many jobs to do, including counting the vote for legislative elections (DPR, DPRD, DPD). Although there were no major incident happened during the election process itself, but still this thing supposed to not happen. There is definitely something wrong with the system and it should be fixed so that there will be no victims anymore.

MOURNING IN SRI LANKA

21st April 2019 is Easter Day. Things supposed to be calm and sacred on that day. But disgusting act ruined it all. Multiple bombing attacks happened in several places in Sri Lanka, including at churches and hotels. Hundred of people died and many people got injured. Some extremists claimed they are responsible for the attacks, SMH. I wish the ones who dead are resting in peace, while the ones who got injured will get well soon and receive some strength to continue life. and for the terrorists, I wish you die in suffer and go to hell!!

I don’t get why in 2019, hatred ideology is still growing fast in this world. Sadly, in some developed-countries which the citizen are more educated, this ideology also exist. People should learn that the differences that make this world beautiful. Why some people feel like they want to hurt each other just because they have differences in term of race, skin colour, religion, countries, ideology, etc. We need to respect each other differences as long as it doesn’t violate the rule of law.

I think there should be a formal lesson in school to teach students to respect the differences. Parents should teach their children right too. Sadly, I found a lot of parents who taught their children to hate people who are different from them. This needs to be stopped. Everyone deserves to get equal treatment. We all want a better future. We cant reach this as long as we still fight each other because of the differences. Just put aside it and look the bigger picture, the same goal we want to pursue. As of now, i’m kinda sceptical if we can reach peace in the near future. However, someday in the future, I wish the world will be a better place to live in. Amen

(cr: wisdom quotes)

AVENGERS ENDGAME

Marvel fans have anticipated the final movie from Avengers United. They are excited as well as sad as the avengers series come to end. Avengers Endgame was screened since 26th April 2019 in my country. There were so much fans who purchased pre-order ticket in a few days prior to the movie screening. It’s kinda cray because the cinemas are full packed with the audiences. Most cinemas even dedicated all of their studios for this movie as the demands are very high then putting aside the other movies. I feel bad for the other movies as they didn’t get time slot for their movies in cinema because of Avengers movie. I wish this wont last long as other movies deserve to get screened as well.

Okay, back to Avengers Endgame movie. Just in March 2019, I watched Captain Marvel movie and in April, I got to watch the last movie of Avengers. I’m actually not a big fan of Superheroes movies, I’m just a casual viewer who enjoyed the movies and i enjoyed watching this one as well. Avengers Endgame runs for 181 minutes, it’s pretty long. I came to bathroom in the middle of movie though, lol.

Overall, I like this movie as I think everything was executed very well. The cinematography, the sound, the edit, the effect are totally top-class work as well as the casts and their act. It really gives everyone goosebumps during the war between Avengers United and Thanos and his soldiers. I couldn’t blink my eye any second because I didn’t want to miss anything. Even though, I felt like I wanted to go to number 1 again in the middle of war scene, but I held it until the movie was over, lol. The movie is worth the hyped though. It’s indeed a masterpiece. I think I’m gonna rewatch it later. But, first I need to watch several marvel movies that I haven’t watched yet so everything will connect and make sense as I still didn’t understand some part. Anyway, thanks marvel for presenting a very well done job!! Goodbye or See you (?) Avengers!!

(cr: marvel)

Bye April 2019. Welcome my month, May!!

xoxo

mels

#black hole #katie bouman #game of thrones #election #sri lanka #avengers #avengers endgame

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jungkkyuk-main · 8 years ago

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Former One Direction member Harry Styles sent fans into a frenzy on May 12 with the release of his self-titled solo debut record, which debuted in the Top 10 everywhere from Azerbaijan to the US. The album finds Styles, who co-wrote every song on the album, laying the foundation for the artist he’s come of age to be, without the overbearing presence of One Direction mastermind Simon Cowell — a drastic shake-up from the time he spent as a pop music mouthpiece in One Direction, where he performed songs he barely had a hand in writing.

Naturally, the fiery hot takes came rolling in almost immediately, as music writers attempted to reframe the former boy-bander in this new solo context: The Guardian threw some neutral shade at Styles’s plethora of influences, while Rolling Stone crowned him a “true rock and roll prince” and the New Statesman argued that he’s been a rock star all along.

These attempts to label Styles as something go hand in hand with a need to reject the “former boy-bander” label. Referring to him as a “rock star” is somewhat condescending, implying what he’s pursuing is performative rather than artistic. It also extends the false notion that to be considered as an artist, rather than a performer, one must be divorced from “pop” and married to what’s (incorrectly) perceived as a more legitimate genre: rock.

But perhaps Styles wasn’t trying to be anything with this album. Perceiving the record as his frantic attempt to shed his “pop” image disregards what Harry Styles is: a musical homage to what made him Harry Styles, a flamboyant, honest tribute to influences — from Elton John to the Rolling Stones — famous for their own flamboyancy and honesty.

Ironically, that sense of liberation from labels evokes another sort of label, one that may seem comical at first, but makes a strange sort of sense in the context of Styles’s album: Harry Styles is kind of punk.

Harry Styles is punk in spirit, not sound

When using “punk” to describe what Styles is doing, it’s not intended in the perverted, violent Murder Junkies sense of the word. Hell, there was furor when Styles accidentally kicked a fan in the head when stage-diving; I don't think there's room for any GG Allin bullshit in his persona.

But there’s a total lack of fucks to give on Harry Styles, which finds the singer embodying the punk spirit by doing whatever he wants, in defiance of expectations. The record boasts ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s influences that combine to create something that can’t really be called “rock,” and which symbiotically contribute to the camp, androgynous, glamorous mysticism of soloStyles.

Expectations be damned, Styles is taking a huge risk by not adhering to the confines of a modish genre — something all of his former bandmates have done, be it Louis Tomlinson’s Steve Aoki-assisted EDM or Niall Horan's bland “coffee shop open mic” debut single. Zayn Malik has thrived in R&B, but his Mind of Mine still belongs to a genre that’s both in vogue and fairly expected for a pop-bred singer.

That’s not really the case with Styles. Take the lead single “Sign of the Times,” whose title evokes Prince but which explodes into a Goliath post-apocalyptic allegorical anthem that sounds more like Never Hear the End of It–era Chris Murphy than, say, going crazy, crazy, crazy. In discrediting the accusations of his music being manufactured for him, Styles has opened up himself — and his loyal fans — to an entirely new sound.

Going beyond that single, Harry Styles invites listeners to mellow down with the folk-rock Dawes and Jackson Browne–inspired harmonies of “Ever Since New York” and “Sweet Creature,” (a.k.a. “Thirteen” by Big Star lite), only to then smack them in the face with the raucous lasciviousness of “Kiwi.” But it’s on “Only Angel” where Styles feels most at home: The song is an illegitimate, sparkly glam-rock baby sired by Electric Light Orchestra and T. Rex, dumped on the doorstep of the Rolling Stones’ Sticky Fingers and Sloan’s Navy Blues. He’s having fun with his references in a manner reminiscent of the Replacements’ notoriously erratic live sets, where they’d drunkenly perform everything from the Jackson 5 to Lloyd Price.

Styles’s referential prowess also extends to his lyrics, particularly in the breezy and sexy “Carolina,” which directly cites “Two Girls” by Townes Van Zandt: In name-checking his rumored lover (who happens to share a name with Van Zandt), he sings “Townes, better swim before you drown,” restructuring the original song’s more somber and heartbreaking, “You got to swim before you fly.”

But while such lyrical allusions may be clever, Styles is a more impressive storyteller when he’s at his most raw and real, as is evident during the lugubrious closer “From the Dining Table,” where he apathetically sings, “Woke up alone in this hotel room / Played with myself, where were you? / Fell back to sleep, I got drunk by noon / I've never felt less cool.” Harry Styles is telling us he masturbated just to feel something. Perhaps he’s ridiculing himself for being pathetic in his acedia, but the lack of shame is unlike anything else in modern pop.

The record’s focus on speaking to Styles’s truth is palpable here. His depiction of something so mundane efficaciously taps into both the ennui and the ridiculousness that characterized punk, and provides real insight into what makes him Harry.

To Styles’s discredit, the album’s lyrical matter can be somewhat hard to empathize with on a fundamental level, given that Styles is an attractive, wealthy white man with life experiences that the vast majority of the population will never have. But the record’s depth of emotion — or lack thereof — is definitely born of a human experience, so as to show that maybe being stinking rich doesn’t mean you’re happy. Styles may still be just as lost as the rest of us are in our early 20s. (It would be nice to be miserable and loaded, though. Just saying.)

Yet despite the album’s evolution away from the sounds and style of his boy band days, Styles’s multifaceted taste is still open to pop; he holds no contempt for anything One Direction released. He could have gone the Liam Payne route of singing, “I used to be in 1D (now I'm free),” but showcasing his impressive musical knowledge proves far more effective and much less petulant. On Harry Styles, he still appreciates the fruitful pop music spirit, seemingly knowing that not too long ago, rock was classified as pop.

Styles isn’t trying to be taken seriously. He’s trying to push himself.

Admittedly, there is already a genre label for what Styles has achieved by melding the aforementioned influences: power pop, a rock subgenre that’s been mostly subsumed into other genres since its late-20th-century heyday. But because there are no set criteria for what constitutes power pop in the modern day, Styles is free to mine his being for how he wants to sound, without having to conform to or advance genre expectations.

Styles has stated numerous times that he had no idea what Harry Styles was going to sound like, so there was never going to be just one style peg on which to hang the album. By releasing the album on his own label, he’s both avoiding having to meet A&R demands to adhere to a set style and claiming this album as a product of his own creation.

Critics have been quick to deride Styles as someone who wishes to be taken seriously, as they did with Zayn Malik, but I don’t think that’s what this album is about: Harry Styles is a result of him experimenting and pushing himself to do something outside the system that initially brought him fame. Even his lead guitarist and main co-writer, Mitch Rowland, worked in a pizza shop prior to joining Styles’s band. Taking a risk on an unknown and aligning himself so closely with someone who doesn’t have an established reputation or strong industry ties serves as better rejection of Styles’s regimented boy-band past than any stated rejection of pop or Payne-like lyrical sneering would have.

With his established success, his built-in fan base, and the idea that he didn’t need to reject the “Harry Styles of One Direction” label to be successful, Styles had nothing to run away from with Harry Styles. In launching his solo career from this privileged position, he was able to use his debut to explore and find himself as an artist. He seemingly doesn’t give a shit about anyone else’s categorization of him, and he’s written his own rules to make a record for himself — without the need for total reinvention.

In giving the intransigent boundaries previously dictated to him the middle finger, Styles is typifying the essence of punk. Acting in this capacity — particularly as a musician of his magnitude and fame — reiterates the carefree nature of the record. Which, combined with a total lack of sonic direction, fervent lyrical candor, and general openness to new ideas, created a record that not only told us who Harry Styles is but showed Styles himself who he could be.

#harry is all over my facebook feed now lol #i'm not complaining #hs1 review #vox #media

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gallyg · 8 years ago

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Extended Thoughts on Breath of the Wild (spoilers below the cut)

Breath of the Wild simultaneously feels like an idealized distillation of what Zelda is all about, and a very un-Zelda-like experience. The resulting experience feels both nostalgically celebratory, but also unfettered by traditions that don’t benefit the experience. I went into the game with some degree of cynicism, as I don’t care for survival mechanics and the game seemed to be drifting further and further from a formula that I basically liked as a Zelda fan, but I was pleasantly surprised on both ends.

Perhaps I would have known more about what the survival mechanics in Breath of the Wild were going to entail if I had paid more attention to the pre-release information, but I was trying to stay away from it since I am a doormat for Aonuma and will buy the game anyway, even if I thought it'd be bad, just to keep up on what's going on with the franchise. Or maybe it was never clear. Either way, I don't really care for the idea of having to hunt for food to feed myself because I get hungry. I was relieved to discover that there isn't actually a hunger mechanic. You hunt for healing items or elixir ingredients, but you only need to cook them if you want to heal yourself or create a potion to give you specific buffs. Cooking is a rather tedious, boring process, but at least you only need to do it on occasion to stock up on healing items and elixirs. You can even just eat the fruits and meats raw for a small heal if you don't want to cook anything.

The interesting consequence of this is that you don't have straight-up hearts to collect anymore. Grass drops almost nothing in this game and monsters only drop cooking and crafting material. This is part of a trend Zelda has been on lately with cutting out random consumable drops like arrows and bombs. It all started when Twilight Princess decided not to have random bomb drops, and it comes to a head now when enemies only kind of have random arrow drops if they had a bow and arrow. This makes me curious what exactly the "hard mode" DLC they have planned for Breath of the Wild will entail. Hero Mode is the recent Zelda standard hard mode, and its main feature is the lack of heart drops. The only difference here would be increased enemy health and damage, which really just makes the game more annoying than hard. Here's hoping for more of a Master Quest approach to the game's difficulty, as the puzzles in Breath of the Wild are significantly less demanding than the combat.

This leads me to the other big part of Breath of the Wild's survival mechanics: weapon degradation. The Master Sword is the only weapon you have that won't break, and even it will need to recharge every once in a while. Everything else? Shit breaks after a few skirmishes, at best. If you're fighting a stronger enemy like a Guardian or a Lynel, you will often have to burn through two or three swords just to take a single enemy down. This is substantially more annoying than the cooking, as it is an omnipresent fact that every single weapon you find that you like is either going to be relegated to "too good to use" territory or be quickly disposed of, as there isn't even a way to repair damaged weapons in this game, as far as I could find, anyway.

This is a small annoyance that never really stopped nagging at me, but it is basically the only negative to this game's combat. Wind Waker gave the combat a more fluid feeling, and Twilight Princess and Skyward Sword gave you more ways to act in combat, but the core issue of enemies being weak and passive has only ever been slightly addressed. In Breath of the Wild, running from a fight is not an easy get-out-of-jail-free option, because enemies tend to be quite aggressive in chasing you down. Rushing headfirst into battle is also not a mindless exercise in button mashing on most enemies, because the monsters of this game actually attack when you'd expect something trying to kill you would. Nothing like Twilight Princess's bokoblins dancing and screeching an inch from your face for thirty seconds before finally doing a half-heart attack. The enemies in this game will mess you up if you let your guard down. If you decide to invest in stamina over hearts in the early game, you can find yourself regularly getting one-shot by normal monsters. I think this change is especially welcome in The Breath of the Wild, as it does make the more substantial resource management of its survival mechanics feel more relevant.

I mentioned earlier that the puzzles were a bit easier than the combat, and while I stand by that, I don't want that to come across as a slight against the puzzles, because the puzzle design of this game is absolutely brilliant. This game takes full advantage of its systems when it comes to the puzzles. While you might find a Sheikah shrine that clearly wants you to use all your abilities to move some blocks in such a way that they stay in place and finish an electrical current, you can also just throw all your metal weapons at the circuit to make the connection. You might be expected to use stasis to launch an object at a button across a long body of water, but you can also just build yourself a little bridge with ice blocks, three at a time, until you can push the button yourself. You might be expected to manipulate the room geometry to carefully maneuver yourself higher up, but you can also just use your high jump if you've already completed the dungeon that gives you that. This all technically makes the puzzles "easier", and even the intended solutions tend to be pretty straight-forward, but the way you are allowed to experiment and abuse all the games mechanics to achieve success makes for a great system of player expression. Or to put it less pretentiously, it's fun.

All in all, I like the exploration in Breath of the Wild. It's freedom from the moment you finish the tutorial, and there's always more to find. My only complaint really is that the visuals can get a bit boring. The vast majority of the overworld feels the same with the repeating theme of fields and trees and mountain ranges. There's a few areas that are a bit different, of course, but it's mostly just the dungeon quests around those aesthetics, so most of the exploring still happens in that eternal green field. Fun to traverse, rewarded with finding tons of shrines with interesting puzzles, not a whole lot to look at while you're doing it.

I've heard people complain about the enemy variety, and I do think it makes the world feel a bit bland when combined with the above point, but I think it's made up for to some extent by how many references to the rest of the series there are. Nothing to Spirit Tracks, sadly, but Phantom Hourglass's cast has some islands named after them, Tingle's brothers get some islands, Koholint gets a mountain, Fi gets alluded to, the Wind Waker races are back, even Minish Cap gets a shoutout. And of course, Ocarina of Time gets referenced plenty because of Ocarina of Time privilege.

I am a timeline theorist, so the fact that all these references seem contradictory is exciting to me. It's been a long time since Hyrule Historia and we haven't really had a game that muddied the timeline since then. The Sheikah, Rito, and Zora all co-existing in healthy numbers like they do here makes no sense, even if we grant that every name on the map is just a coincidence. It's fun to think about, and the general conclusion I've come to is that if it is meant to make any literal sense, the Hyrule Historia timeline is useless in discerning that sense. Aonuma even confessed that the timeline he works off of changes to suit the purposes of whatever game they're currently developing. Three games and six years have passed since Hyrule Historia. The timeline they work off of has definitely changed as well. And that's even ignoring my general opinion that the authorial intent does not matter when it comes to theorizing.

That's just speaking literally, though. What the game feels like, to me, is the metaphorical resolution of the Zelda series. The last major game introduced the concept of Demise's spirit and felt like the true origin of the legend. This game features Calamity Ganon, an ethereal spirit/eldritch horror that feels like a spirit that has put up with dozens of lifetimes and thousands of years of anger and frustration. It has degraded into a horrific form, a return to that force of nature Demise was before being reincarnated as Ganondorf so many times. You are not fighting a man or a beast, you are fighting hatred and malice incarnate. This combined with the inclusion of may beloved elements from all the games, timeline coherence be damned, makes me believe that this game is meant to be the definitive end of the story, not just of the adult, child, or downfall timeline, but to Zelda as a whole.

Or maybe it's just after Adventure of Link, I donno.

Random Thoughts:

The Koroks in this game are tear-wrenchingly adorable in this game. Only the ones in the forest, though. The Koroks in the overworld don’t have any unique character or dialogue.

I played this game with my girlfriend and she put forth the amazing idea of having to find replacement Champions for the Divine Beasts as an alternate version of the story. Riju pilots Vah Naboris, Teba pilots Vah Medoh, Yunobo pilots Vah Radunia, and Sidon pilots Vah Ruta. I love this idea and consequently hate that they just had ghosts pilot the Divine Beasts instead.

Remember not that long ago when Twilight Princess, Phantom Hourglass, and Spirit Tracks made it seem like we were headed toward a Steampunk aesthetic? Funny how the somewhat cybertech aesthetic of the Twili are what seems to have stuck around more, with Fi being basically a robot, Skyward Sword having literal robots, and now this game straight up just giving Link an iPad.

So the magic meter is never coming back, right? Right. Damn shame. I don’t like the stamina meter as much.

Much as I enjoy the more open games, I do hope that we eventually see more linear Zelda games. I love the more structured take on things as well. Both of the last two mainline games opted to give you every relevant item from the start over the traditional approach of gaining items throughout the game to unlock the ability to get to new places, which as a Metroid fan I love. Even if it is technically less freedom, it feels more rewarding because when you get somewhere and beat the challenges there, your prize is basically more ability to explore the world.

People complain that this game had no good music but Stone Talus is right here:

youtube

#the legend of zelda #breath of the wild

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doctorwhonews · 8 years ago

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The Pirate Planet - Novelisation/ AudioBook

Latest Review: Written By: James Goss Based On The TV Serial By: Douglas Adams Released By BBC Books: 5th January 2017 Audiobook Read By: Jon Culshaw 10 CDS/ Audio Download Running Time: 11 Hours, 22 Minutes Once in a blue moon, the hardworking, devout people of Zanak experience a 'new golden age of prosperity'. The stars in the night sky suddenly change position, and the economy skyrockets. The natives are assured by their mysterious leader - The Captain - that all this is part of a grand design. But there is an outlier group of which the are wary, contemptuous, even scared. The Mourners. Looking decidedly pale and skinny, they always wander together, and can bring only trouble. Luckily, the Captain's many armed guards are there to ensure that there is no breach of the peace. Now enter three odd individuals, in Zanak's main city, with no warning or announcement. The seeming leader is a toothy, excitable extrovert, with a long scarf and curly hair. With him is a somewhat younger-looking woman, much more smartly dressed, with beautiful looks, and a keen intelligence. And lastly, is a diminutive metallic creature, that has a red visor instead of eyes, a little tail that sways side-to-side, and a rather more impressive nose-laser. The Doctor, Romana, and K9 - as they call themselves - soon make an alliance with a young couple. The male is Kimus: earnest, dedicated and open-minded. The female is Mula: thoughtful, pragmatic and diligent. This in turn leads to the Mourners becoming more engaged in the future of their world, knowing that suddenly a missing piece of information may be missing no more. Soon enough, the mystique over the Captain evaporates. He is far more machine than man, and with a decidedly twisted sense of humour. But he has a plan or three in motion, and many cards in his deck to play. Zanak, and the wider universe, may both end up facing a change of cataclysmic proportions.. --- This joint release of both book and audio release sees the completion of the Fourth Doctor era into novel form. For many years, three stories were outstanding, and the common denominator was that Douglas Adams wrote the scripts. In the case of The Pirate Planet, Adams was still an unknown quantity in the wider world when first pitching his first contribution to Doctor Who. By the time this second story of Season 16 - or 'The Key To Time' arc - was transmitted, Adams' other work for the BBC - The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy - steadily became a sensation, and eventually a global phenomenon. Anthony Read was responsible for editing Adams' scripts into a makeable BBC production. He also made it build on The Ribos Operation, in developing new companion Romana. She was only the second Gallifreyan to assist the Doctor, after his own granddaughter Susan. The story also had to present a different kind of mystery over which item was the segment of The Key to Time. Later on, Adams would take over from Read, and oversee Season 17 (which suffered especially from industrial strikes). Eventually, he realised he could not focus on both primetime TV, and further contributions to his 'baby boomer' Hitchhikers. Such was Adams' disconnect from Doctor Who, that none of his three major stories were adapted until very recently. (However he did introduce close friend, and second Romana, Lalla Ward to her eventual husband Richard Dawkins). Shada was the last of those three, but hit bookshelves first, with the aid of Gareth Roberts. More recently in 2015, the much-loved City Of Death was also converted into a richly detailed novel. This new effort has the same author as City, in the form of experienced writer James Goss. Although The Pirate Planet was four episodes long, this book comes in at 400 pages plus - which is considerably more. Goss has clearly taken inspiration from Adams over the years, in becoming himself a successful author, and he decides to put as much of the original script (and related notes) as can fit. This means that this is one of the longest works of Who fiction, and it lacks the pace of action-adventure that is found in both the majority of the classic, as well as the modern, TV format. Yet, most who are familiar with the TV original must concede that whilst great fun, it is not the strongest production, and really could have done with an American TV budget. Pennant Roberts has done great work for other TV shows, but few would call any of his Who work first-rate. The cast were not all stellar in their readings, with Kimus, Mula and the Mentiads being decidedly bland. This production and acting hurdle is removed entirely here. The book does some excellent work in making the villains even more interesting. It gives them backstory, and motivation, that is rare to find in most Doctor Who books; and I include some of the best original novels in making that statement. The Captain is portrayed as a lot more intimidating, and macabre in design, as well as having a longevity which is mind-boggling. This also makes the subplot involving his subservience to Xanxia that much more emotive and engaging. The Polyphase Avitron becomes a much more intriguing monster, in contrast to the cod pirate parrot of TV. Goss evokes real sense of dread over the Captain's pet, and makes its lethal potential more credible and unpleasant in nature. Xanxia - otherwise simply known as 'The Nurse' - is expertly introduced into the narrative. She appears to be someone that could help the Doctor and Romana. How wrong their impressions of her turn out to be! When the facade has fully receded, there is one of Kimus' better moments, in terms of showing some steely resolve. Also good, is the use of novel 'budget' (and reader imagination), as the Nurse suddenly is adorned in royal robes, thanks to the unique nature of her existence. Mr Fibuli is a touch more likable than in the TV original, and there is little evidence of moustache-twirling cruelty, compared to his sneer and chuckle at the end of Episode Three. He has some inner thoughts that are very 'Everyman', and his brilliant engineering skills feel more layman too. Fibuli's constant awareness that he is replaceable - like any of the Captain's underlings - mean readers care for what fate befalls him. As it turns out, there is a heavy does of irony concerning this end-point, in conjunction with the final chapters' foreboding and tense action. Although my synopsis suggested the guards were respected, even admired, by the (mostly faceless) Zanak citizens, both this novelisation and the TV story frequently take pokes at them for being witless and predictable. All the same, they are not to be taken as completely benign, and do sometimes make a successful capture, or take out a do-gooder with a well-aimed shot. Of course, Goss seizes the opportunity to do some nice work with getting inside the heads of heroes as well, and that very much includes K9. The Fourth Doctor is relatively easy to write for, but few can really make him truly surprising and electric on page in a manner that the legendary Tom Baker could on-screen. Luckily, Goss is very much in that select group. The much-celebrated clash of "It is not a toy!" / "Then what is it for?!" is lovingly expanded on, and probably is the highlight of the entire book. There is plenty of good material for Romana too, as she shows promise that would make her a long-staying companion, and eventually do great things for both E-Space, and Gallifrey itself. She is quick to learn, proactive, and consistently helpful to the Doctor. This sometimes makes the much older time traveller rather defensive. At one point he convinces her to complete a massive timetable, but barely achieves the delay effect he wanted it to. Nonetheless, she still is made to appreciate the Doctor's genius and quick wits, when he is forced to think of a solution to both the threat facing the universe, as well as the key objective of locating the Segment. K9 is of course secondary to the interpersonal drama, but still a personality; one that has emotions concerning tasks, and opinions regarding those he encounters. His one word summations on his 'owners' would be "odd" and "logical" respectively. The metal mutt's inner thoughts are generally the more light-hearted moments of the book/audio-reading. And now, time to recognise just how good an audio release this is, for both casual fans, and die-hards alike. Jon Culshaw has never done anything routine, forced, or ordinary to the best of my knowledge, (perhaps with the exception of singing on Comic Relief Does Fame Academy). Even with the weight of ten CDs, or eleven-and-a-half hours of running time, he puts in a wonderful solo performance. There is especially good use of third-person/first-person blending, which means that listeners can be caught out, thinking Culshaw will be talk in his own steady and affable manner, when reading Goss' prose. Much of the music gives this long story clout too. There are subtle strands, and a much more bombastic sense of 'What's Next?' upon the close of another chapter. I however need to come back to my point on the page count/ running time. This is possibly a case of Goss just slightly getting the balance between quality and detail wrong. The first half of the book, whilst not totally ponderous, does feel slow on several occasions. There are some digressions that display Adams' wit, and thoughtful wonderment at a vast interconnected cosmos, but they do not all feel as organic as in the Hitchhiker's novels (which admittedly used a guide book as the framing device). Thus some passages/moments outstay their welcome. Most odd is the sense of a Season 22 story opening, in that the TARDIS crew take an age to land on Zanak, and get involved. Nonetheless, the final half of this novelisation - especially the final third - is so much more urgent and gripping. It particularly delights in improving on the somewhat absurd Episode Three cliffhanger, by having a homage to the modern-day use of TARDIS in-flight to save a falling victim. Also, there is a very funny moment where the Doctor, in deep, deep trouble, thinks how clever it would be to rig a hologram. Thus when he actually does it, it banishes all feelings of indifference over the implausible onscreen execution. One change I have more mixed feelings over, is the use of the 'Mourners' title, rather than 'Mentiads', which both sounded mysterious and ominous, yet also very funny depending on the particular dialogue context. At least there is much more back-story, and insight into their transformation, and also their "vengeance for the crimes of Zanak". Especially worthwhile is the detail on how Pralix's father was shot down, not long after he transitioned into being one of the select group. This means that the rather dour supporting character is now an angel of retribution, for both the planets and his own lost parent. There also is a change-up in making the Mourners mixed-gender, with at least one of them being female. This elder Mourner is given a few evocative moments in the narrative, helping reinforce how much more progressive Doctor Who was for women in the Graham Williams era, than it had ever been hitherto. --- In sum, this is a very important book for anyone trying to get more insight into the Tom Baker period of the show - one which has been analysed and critiqued for many years now. It has a sense of something old, but also something new, and deserves at least being explored in either print or audio reading, if not both. A compression of gems, that is indeed most rich. http://reviews.doctorwhonews.net/2017/01/the_pirate_planet_novelisation_audiobook.html?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=tumblr

#SERIES 16 #BBC #AUDIO #FOURTH DOCTOR #BOOK

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engrfahadblr · 5 years ago

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6 Top Secrets To Writing A Great Cover Letter 2020

https://www.chinesescholarshipcouncil.com/?p=669&wpwautoposter=1587805089 6 Top Secrets To Writing A Great Cover Letter 2020 At best, a cover letter can help a job-seeker stand out from the pack. At worst, it can make a promising candidate seem like an uncreative cut-and-paster. Sadly, the vast majority of cover letters read essentially the same: Retreads of resumes that ramble on while repeating the obvious. Would you read one of these to the end if it were put in front of you? Probably not, and nor would most hiring managers. Of course, the Internet is full of tips and tutorials on writing a cover letter, but few of them give much useful information other than the obvious (“Use good grammar!”). So I got to thinking about what cover letter tips and techniques have served me over the years. I came up with these six golden rules for writing a cover letter somebody will actually want to read. 1) Don’t repeat your resume A lot of people write cover letters as if they were paragraph-form resumes. Fact is, your letter will be stapled (or attached to the same email) as your actual resume, so you can assume that they’ll at least glance at it (and probably with a keener eye than your cover letter). Instead, use your cover letter to show personality, curiosity, and an interest in the field you are applying to work in. My favorite pro tip: Google GOOG -0.01% around for the history of your field or company, and sprinkle some cool historical facts into your cover letter (or even use one as a lead). If I was applying for a job in tech, I might talk about how thrilling it was to see Moore’s law transform technology before my eyes, and how thrilled I am to be a part of this transformation. If I were applying for a job in fashion, I might talk about how much fashion has changed since the 80s (a lot!). Everything has a hidden history. Use it to show expertise and interest. 2) Keep it short Less. Is. More. Three paragraphs, tops. Half a page, tops. Skip lengthy exposition and jump right into something juicy. 3) Address Nobody Sometimes, you don’t know exactly who you should be addressing your letter to. Nix the generic and bland “Dear Hiring Manager” or “To Whom It May Concern”. If you absolutely don’t know who you should be addressing, then don’t address anybody. Instead, just jump right into the body of the letter. 4) Send it as a PDF Not every office computer can read .docx or .pages files, but virtually everybody can open a PDF file without any conversion. File conversions are bad for two huge reasons. First, they are just as likely to not bother and move onto the next applicant. And, second, conversions can introduce formatting errors. Both are bad. (Note: This story originally suggested .doc files. Definitely better than .docx, but, as the comments pointed out, PDF is surely better. It can’t be easily tampered with, and you have more control over how it appears on somebody’s screen.) 5) Never ever, ever use the following phrase “My name is ___, and I am applying for the position as ____”.They already know this, and you’ll sound inexperienced 6) Close strong Finish off by quickly (and I mean quickly) explaining how your experience or worldview will help you at the job. That’s key. That’s the closer. And it can be done in one to two seconds. If it goes any longer, you’re just rambling. How to Write a Cover Letter for an Internship Sample of Cover Letter for an Internship Caroline Forsey 1 Hireme Road Boston, MA, 20813 Cell: 555-555-5555 Email: [email protected] April 15, 2020 Event Planning Department — Internship Program Company A 35 Recruiting St. Boston, MA, 29174 Dear Internship Coordinator, At the suggestion of John Smith, a senior marketer at Company A, I am submitting my resume for the Event Coordinator internship position. I am a junior at Elon University, pursuing a bachelor’s degree in Sport and Event Management, and am passionate about event planning. I am thrilled to hear about Company A’s Event Coordinator internship program, and feel my experiences and skills would be an excellent match for your organization. As an executive member of the Student Union Board at Elon, I am in charge of organizing, promoting, and implementing multiple school-related social activities per week, while being challenged to design new events. I work cohesively with a diverse team made up of students and faculty, and I also foster relationships with novelty companies. My experience as an Orientation Leader has further prepared me for this internship. It was essential that I remain positive, outgoing, and energized during move-in day and act as a liaison between new students, families, and faculty in a fast-paced and demanding environment. I was expected to maintain a highly professional customer service ethic while interacting with families and new students. My Elon University experiences, executive board membership, and orientation leadership role have prepared me to be successful in the Event Coordinator internship program. Thank you for your time and consideration. I look forward to the opportunity to discuss how I can add value to Company A. Sincerely, (handwritten signature) Caroline Forsey Sample of Cover Letter for an Internship Caroline Forsey 1 Hireme Road Boston, MA, 20813 Cell: 555-555-5555 Email: [email protected] April 15, 2020 Marketing Department — Internship Program Company A 35 Recruiting St. Boston, MA, 29174 Dear Internship Coordinator, I am a passionate, creative, and driven Elon University student with leadership and event planning experience, as well as strong communication skills. I am seeking opportunities to showcase my writing abilities in a challenging and stimulating environment. My skills and experiences will enable me to deliver successful results as a digital marketing intern for Company B. Please allow me to highlight my key skills: Prior experience writing blog posts and press releases for marketing objectives Strong communication skills and ability to adopt voice for diverse audiences and varying purposes Efficient in managing multiple projects with fast moving deadlines through organization and time-management skills A firm understanding of grammar rules and how to write effectively Experience in leadership positions, both as Student Union Board executive leader and as an Elon Orientation Leader Proven ability to form positive relationships with people from around the globe, exhibited by my internship experience in China last summer Experience organizing, promoting, and implementing social events Proficient in Microsoft Office, Adobe Creative Suite (InDesign, Photoshop, and Premiere), and social media platforms In closing, I look forward to the opportunity to discuss how I can be an asset to Company B. I will call next week to see if you agree that my qualifications are a match for the position. Thank you for your time and consideration. Sincerely, (handwritten signature) Caroline Forsey Sample of Cover Letter for an Internship Dear John Smith, I am writing in regards of the vacancy for the consultancy internship with PwC, as advertised on RateMyPlacement. Please find my CV attached. I am particularly drawn to this internship at PwC because of its concentration on sustainability and climate change consultancy. PwC is the market-leader in this field, and I am fascinated by the strategies PwC puts in place to help an organisation meet its social and environmental goals. I have been reading about PwC’s recent project, involving the implementation of new sustainability procedures in government buildings across the UK. My involvement in the ‘Clear Up Our Campus’ campaign at university was similar, and makes me a perfect candidate for this internship. As my CV describes, I am two years into a Sustainable Engineering degree, achieving high grades in modules that focussed on sustainable planning in urban environment. My studies have imparted a groundwork of knowledge, and analytical skills that are crucial for a career in this field of consultancy. I also have three years of work experience at The Bear Factory, which has imparted great collaborative skills. Thank you for considering my application, I look forward to the opportunity to discuss the programme further in an interview. Yours Sincerely, Your Name. A sample of Cover Letter for an Internship [Today’s Date] [341 Company Address Company City, State, xxxxx (xxx)xxx-xxxx [email protected]] Dear Mr. /Mrs. /Ms. (Manager’s Name), I’m writing to you regarding the marketing role that opened up recently. I came across the job description on [Website Name], and was delighted to find that my academic accomplishments meet all of the necessary requirements. I am seeking a challenging but rewarding internship, which is why I was drawn to this exciting opportunity. As a junior marketing student at the University of Georgia, I have acquired skills in advertising, PR, product development, and market research. Currently I hold a 3.8 GPA and have been on the Dean’s List every semester. While in the college of business I have strategically focused my coursework in the following areas: Marketing Analytics Marketing Management Survey Research Strategic Internet Marketing Integrated Marketing Communications Using my knowledge of the above, I designed a marketing campaign for a local pet grooming business that yielded the highest return on investment based on a budget. The campaign was so well received that I was awarded third place in UGA’s business plan competition. I would be delighted to have an opportunity to personally interview with you. Please accept the enclosed resume and feel free to contact me at your earliest convenience. I appreciate your time and consideration. Yours sincerely, [Your Name]

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operationrainfall · 6 years ago

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Title Towards the Pantheon Developer Connor O.R.T. Linning Publisher Connor O.R.T. Linning Release Date May 16th, 2018 Genre RPG Platform PC

When I first heard about Towards the Pantheon, it wasn’t so much the coverage about the game that caught my attention, but rather its developer. Despite my being an avid fan of classic RPGs, especially those that draw inspiration from the SNES and that golden age of RPGs, what ended up sticking with me enough to try this game was the man behind it; Connor Linning. A writer, musician, and game developer, spending just a few minutes on Connor’s blog made me realize the passion and drive this man possesses. I think it’s his ambition in the face of complacency attitude that sparked my interest in his project, Towards the Pantheon. 16-bit graphics, original sound score, narrative and gameplay that draws influence from classic RPG tropes, Towards the Pantheon is a game that honors some of the best this genre has to offer.

Towards the Pantheon drops you into a world in which four quarreling groups are pitted against one another by the Sworn Light, a militaristic entity using divide and conquer tactics to take control of the world. Immediately, we meet Freyja, a young warrior tasked to journey to the Pantheon, the headquarters of the Sworn Light, to deliver a fatal blow to their organization. Advised by Wuotan, an elder of her village, she first sets off to find a willing companion, Bam the cat. From there, she will venture into the four civilizations and interact with their people, learning of their struggles and the oppression by the Sworn Light. Freyja will meet new companions, explore the vast lands, and discover the depth of tyranny and evil the Sworn Light have instilled in the world.

The story of Towards the Pantheon is fairly straightforward, in that you have four isolated populations further turned against one another by an all-influential puppet master. Themes of prejudice, intolerance, and misinformation make up the core of the story, but there is plenty more to spark initial interest. The lore and the individual details of the four types of beings in this world are intriguing and are a pleasure to discover. I also like how equal attention is provided to both a grand scale and an individual level in terms of how the Sworn Light is oppressing the world. Hearing about how individuals, ranging from children, business owners, students, etc., are impacted is a nice touch, as it demonstrates how a world event influences the individual on a personal scale. I found these personal perspectives well written and was motivated to learn as much as I could about this world and its people.

The plot has its shortcomings, however, as one of my biggest gripes is with the strength and pacing of the plot. Simply put, the plot starts slow and remains more a framework than a fleshed out story. After Freyja is tasked with her quest, it takes quite some time before the plot picks up again. In between, we see Freyja and her growing party reduced to errand runners. Yes, plot details do get filled in, but it’s not enough, both in quantity and quality. Bland may be too strong of a word, but at times I definitely felt like saving the world was more an excuse than a purpose, as I was forced around the world on fetch quests and meet ups. Another element that concerns me is with the Pantheon itself. The game is Towards the Pantheon, yet the Pantheon ends up as just a place that houses the final boss. There is a dire need of lore or some unseen importance to this keyword. Give me something. Imagine if Ocarina of Time were instead called The Legend of Zelda – That Room atop that Flight of Stairs. Nobody cares about that room, it’s the Ocarina that’s central to the plot, receiving appropriate lore and significance. Yet here, the Pantheon really is just a place; a feeble finish line.

And finally, there is the horror element of the plot, which doesn’t actually show itself until the last stretch of the game. I am referring to the segment right before the Pantheon in which you have to unlock and cut through an old mansion/ hotel. It feels completely like a tangent, just thrown in at the end. As for the events within, I believe they do occur to the characters in their reality and it’s not some screwed up dream sequence, yet it came out of nowhere and didn’t fit the tone of the previous 3/4 of the game. Although it does make you think about who or what those soldiers really are, with the hints and notes on disappearances, kidnappings, and the electropunk culture of replacing body parts, I wouldn’t consider the game a “horror game” just because of a portion of play. It also fails to add significant depth to its characters, as I believe this segment is supposed to explore the individual characters’ inner struggles, whether it’s regret, loss, powerlessness, or what have you. But again, just throwing it in at the end doesn’t do any justice and it falls flat. Lack of pacing and plot strength make the plot an overall underwhelming experience.

In terms of its implementation, the story unfolds mainly through conversations between party members, NPC interactions, and scattered fragments of books or journal entries found throughout the world. Not a whole lot of the plot is unveiled through the main characters themselves and their interactions with each other, as is common for the genre. Rather, much of the plot is left for the player to discover. Speaking with NPCs multiple times throughout the game, completing side quests and requests, and reading through all the fragments will color in the plot. From history and the origins of the Sworn Light’s threat, to the current desolation and impact, most of these details and the depth they bring require the player’s willingness to discover them.

While I can appreciate this unorthodox method of delivering a story, I felt the narrative overall suffered from it. Typically, this method is used as a support, providing backstory and anything else that fills in the history and lore of a central narrative. Here though, I don’t appreciate this method at the cost of a robust story building effort. I would have preferred a stronger, more directly conveyed story that details unfolding events, rather than the fragments we collect along the way. I understand the intent of this choice; to let us discover the plot ourselves, however, this method lacks the immersion I was seeking during play. The conversations and fragments we come across are not substantial enough to draw you in and keep you immersed. Instead, they only provide just enough to eventually string a story together. Again, I acknowledge the attempt at something different, and while the plot has plenty of intrigue in and of itself, the potency and impact just wasn’t there, failing to consistently trigger immersion or draw my emotional investment.

I’ll admit, there are plenty of helpful hints too

As for its characters, Towards the Pantheon does an adequate job of presenting a set of characters that are easy to care for, instilling a want for seeing their journey through. There are plenty of personal details and friendship building elements to be had throughout and they stand out nicely. The campfire scenes that occur in save locations provide the most character development, allowing the group to recap, unwind, and interact with each other. Their sharing of their personal struggles, past pains, future goals, but also their good natures, humor, and uplifting encouragements to one another, all help to provide much needed depth. I especially like the expressiveness of the characters’ portraits during dialogues, as they help add a nice emotional element to their conversations. Since Freyja is mute, these expressions she shows really help convey her youthful and kindhearted personality without words. My only complaint would be that I wish there were more growth or transformation. The characters we see at the start are pretty much what we end up with. Besides that one point, I enjoyed journeying with this group.

*Heart melts

Towards the Pantheon also follows a traditional RPG style for its gameplay, as exploration and combat make up the majority of play. The world is made up of expansive maps with plenty to discover. Whether it’s finding hidden caves and secret caches for extra items or locations hiding fragments of plot lore, exploration is key to unveiling everything this game has to offer. Exploration is further enhanced by the unique traits each character possesses while on the world map. Although Freyja’s unique skill is climbing ladders, Bam the cat can fit within small openings, Mishima can hack through locked doors, and Phenez can turn invisible, bypassing guards to enter restricted areas. As the team grows, revisiting previous towns and areas is always a good move. Lastly, since exploration and, to a degree, backtracking are encouraged, the game also features a fast-travel system from the start. In typical fashion, once you’ve reached the town a first time, you can fast-travel to and fro.

For the most, combat is your traditional turn-based style, but there are specifics to using each character. With Freyja, each of her attacks requires Stamina Points (SP), which regenerate during every turn. Bam’s skills use EP, the SP equivalent, but they do not regenerate, requiring Bam to rely on EP regenerating skills during the fight. Mishima uses CPU and GPU points, her HP and SP equivalents, meaning that every attack she unleashes also does harm to her. Finally, Phenez uses NP, his HP, so again his attacks also do self-harm. It makes combat far more engaging, as you need to plan your actions accordingly. I found that having a particular strategy for each character’s usage helps greatly. Not having a sound strategy or being able to adapt it during a tough battle will have consequences. Something I do appreciate, even if a party member is incapacitated during battle, they will still receive the same amount of experience points, which is especially helpful for newly joined members, as they all start at Lv 1. With every level gained, a point is rewarded to be used for that character’s specific skill tree. Increases in health, power, recovery and more can be unlocked, so leveling is key. Finally, there are extra combo skills that are unlocked as you collect cards throughout your journey. These help immensely during tougher fights and can be found or purchased in packs throughout the game.

Combat isn’t perfect however, as I found the difficulty level is a touch higher than convention, especially early on. Fortunately, with some grinding, the campaign is very much doable and the grinding required is within a reasonable level. Yet, my issue is with the time it takes. The number of battles needed to maintain an acceptable challenge level is a bit high, taking a bit more time than I would have preferred. Also, combat can drag on, especially with multiple enemies on-screen using their own sets of skills during battle. While enemy encounters are visible and avoidable, they are very much a necessity, so quicker battles would have been ideal.

A final note on gameplay, throughout the game you will encounter event specific items used to solve puzzles, complete subquests, or access new areas. Instead of an auto-use style, you are required to open the item menu and search for the specific item you wish to use for interaction. At first, this is a non-issue, but as your inventory grows, this can become an inconvenience. I prefer auto-use, as most of the time choosing the right item to use, give, or place is fairly predictable. Again, a minor inconvenience, yet it springs up often enough for me to comment on.

Now we move to what I believe are the strongest points of Towards the Pantheon; its aesthetic appeal. This game looks and feels perfectly like a golden era RPG. Visually, the 16-bit graphics are fantastic, capturing the magic of the SNES styling. Everything is custom designed, from sprites to tilesets and the results are amazing. The portrait art showing the expressions of our heroes during their conversations is also incredible, providing an ample boost to the moods and tones of these scenes. Especially for Freyja, I love these changes of facial expressions, as they bring a feeling of genuine life. Humor, thought, and reactions to each other are made so much more lifelike with these simple changes to their faces. I can’t praise that level of detail enough. My only complaints are that, first, there were concept drawing and other artwork that never made it into the game. I would have liked to have seen them incorporated during cutscenes or in-between snippets because they further depicted our heroes in an appealing light. Secondly, the layouts of some maps are a bit jarring. For example, when you leave a forest and enter an electropunk town, the contrast is far too sharp. Better transitions from forest to urban are needed badly, as it looks like a rushed effort on map design.

I would have loved this in-game

The audio efforts are equally impressive and are some of the most impressive I’ve experienced in the genre. As a musician, Connor Linning does an incredible job of adding energy and life through his compositions. Every track fit its area or event perfectly. Plus, there’s plenty of music to enjoy. I love that he incorporated various dungeon themes, multiple battle themes, and an assortment of tracks for almost every location, all in that classic chiptune style. This is easily the game’s highest point and worth a playthrough to experience. Overall, the aesthetics of Towards the Pantheon are brilliant, perfectly capturing the look and feel of that classic RPG style.

Again, inclusion of art would have taken the aesthetics to another level

As a first offering, Towards the Pantheon is impressive, hitting many of the major RPG notes that makes a game of this genre outstanding. For RPG fans, many of the gameplay tropes are there; party based combat, unique skillsets, and traits and peculiarities both in and outside of battle, yet it all comes together and it works. While the ball was dropped in terms of story development and gameplay has its flaws, it was still very much a pleasure to play. I would recommend Towards the Pantheon to anyone looking for a solid 10+ hours of classic RPG to lose themselves in. Like me, it will take closer to 12-13 hours to complete your first run, and with a price tag as low as $1.99 during a Steam sale, there’s no reason to miss out. And finally, although the game is a far cry from perfection, I hope we see more from Connor Linning in the near future, for as he says, “If you fear failure, then consider that it is better to fail creating something that fulfills you than to fail creating something that is heartless.”

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[easyreview cat1title=”Overall” cat1detail=”” cat1rating=”3.5″]

TBT REVIEW: Towards the Pantheon Title Towards the Pantheon

#classic rpg #Connor Linning #Connor O.R.T. Linning #ConnorORT Studios #JRPG #Pantheon #RPG #Towards The Pantheon

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brothermouzongaming · 7 years ago

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Loot Boxes!!

I wanted to talk about them.

Battlefield 1, FIFA, Killing Floor 2, Destiny 2, Shadow of War, and CoD: Infinite Warfare were just the ones that I played. I must say, that personally, I believe these methods of monetization are a terrible business practice. I think it encourages lazy game design, it’s the exact opposite of consumer-friendly (in most if not all cases), and generally steers the way games are made to a heartless money driven scheme. Unfortunately, it’s clear that what originally started as a free-to-play staple is now leaking into our AAA titles. On top of it all, it’s being backed by the industry’s biggest publishers. The scariest thing about it all is, to me at least, it happened almost overnight. I’m gonna talk about the games listed above and the way they implemented loot boxes into their game. Some are alright, some are offensive, but I wanted to give a sense of range because the bottom line is: it can be done right but publishers and developers have to want to do it right.

Battlefield 1: I wanted to start with what I found to be the least egregious and antagonistic approach to the loot box system. Funny enough, a game by EA, and in retrospect, it was very much the clouds on the horizon so-to-speak. As far as I’m aware, this is the earliest game with the monetization mechanic in place as far as this publisher is concerned (outside of FIFA who have been getting shafted for years). Battlefield 1 was overall much much better than 4, I didn’t even bother on Hardline I just couldn’t. From single player to online, it was a more cohesive experience that really doesn’t drop off or feel hollow. It was so good they reined in CoD from the super sci-fi shooter look they were pounding into the ground for the last couple games. I got online for the first couple matches and noticed something different. I wasn’t grinding for the guns I wanted, I was kind of hoping for them after I opened these boxes. I didn’t always get one or have enough of the currency to get one. I did, however, typically earn one in two or so matches. I didn’t even know that what I was dealing with were loot boxes. I didn’t play Overwatch and I didn’t touch FIFA Ultimate Team in the 4 years I’ve been playing. This concept was foreign to me. All that said, I wasn’t mad at this strange new system I was encountering, it was definitely more of a drip feed but nothing anger-inducing. I had no idea about the tsunami of oncoming games in 2017 that would lean hard on the virtual slot machine. If anything my only question is why didn’t they go with this model for Battlefront 2? Why push the envelope when there was little to no outrage or backlash from the major release Battlefield 1 featuring such a new and potentially devious means of endgame material. This is without a doubt the best way of enforcing a loot box system by the people who royally fucked up enforcing a loot box system. I guess they saw what Battlefield 1 did and just couldn’t resist.

FIFA: I love soccer, there is something intangible that electrifies my senses and invigorates the competitor in me. Basketball is my first love but its something special when you think you have it all figured out and a sport comes and knocks you on your ass. FIFA was like playing 2k for the first time all over again, and I’m pretty sure I’ve been chasing that dragon ever since. The level of control you are given once the finer mechanics are mastered is damn near seamless. At times, FIFA truly is the pinnacle of sports simulation so pure and elating that it transcends it’s staggering sales numbers. I say this because the soft and playful tickle that is the gameplay is quickly followed by a cold hard smack when you pop open Ultimate Team. Gain coins through playing games, coins are earned to purchase packs; packs get you different tiers of players. See where I’m going with this? Coins are your only means of buying everything actually, players, contract cards to keep your players/managers, training cards, and essentially anything your team is going to need to keep kicking. People can only play so many games of FIFA, I’m pretty sure I’m addicted and I can only play so many games. So coins go fast, needless to say, fortunately, you can purchase FIFA points in varying quantities. These packs are completely randomized. On top of that, the tier system is wildly skewed toward players you don’t need/could possibly want, even top-tier gold packs. Don’t even get me started on the player controlled auction hell that is the transfer market. On your best match, you get 1,000 coins; a player like Pogba (my favorite) can go for 600,000 coins and up. It’s an absolute mess and countless players like me are left powerless to the FIFA gods who have accrued literal fortunes worth of coins via their immense prowess and domination on the field. I understand and appreciate skill being rewarded but there is no point where I can hope to get that many coins and average but avid gamers like myself (c wut i did therr) that dedicate their time deserve to be rewarded in some way. The pack system for random players from a database containing thousands is beyond underhanded. It’s downright malevolent, and leaving players to the whim of a cruel and greedy market isn’t encouraging in the slightest. I doubt EA will take any charge in this department but who knows.

Killing Floor 2: Ya know what grinds the everloving fuck out of my gears? Genuinely fun games that get in their own way by putting systems in place that discourage and push the player away from the game itself. Killing Floor 2 is this, and it’s pretty heartbreaking. At its core, it’s a better zombies horde mode than CoD the franchise that popularized it. To me, the key is in the classes every player is forced to pick between, a role to play in this session. Snipers sit back and pick off the stragglers, Beserkers run through crowds of Zeds like madmen clubbing everything in sight, SWAT (rEpRESenT!!!) covers the crowd in a mist of bullets. Those are just 3 of the 10, each class having a target priority tree that gives the player a good sense of identity. All while allowing the player to be the Zed slaying machine they please. Where this game slips and is thusly consumed by the creatures dawning the cover, is its loot box system. On the surface, it’s the ideal version of this unfortunate reality in only offering cosmetic prizes (helmets, weapon skins, emotes, etc). What blows harder than John Coltrane in an iron lung is the fact that keys need to be purchased in order to open said crates. 3.00 bucks a key to be specific. This quickly stacks once you play any substantial amount of games required to advance your various classes through their perk trees. Instead of working it into the game itself, through kill-specific challenges or even prizes to draw players to the underwhelming competitive multiplayer. As a party game, it’s great to grab friends and whip out wave after wave of Zeds. However, once you start to invest real time, that is when you get shafted by the game creators for bothering to do so. Another example of how these loot boxes are keeping games from being as good as they could and arguably should be.

CoD Infinite Warfare: What a fucking mess this game was, lord. The story was bland and felt like I was playing Titanfalls annoying younger brother. It is no longer the well-crafted war story that consistently beat out whatever Hollywood blockbuster was out that year. Not even Infinity Ward could save this thing, and on top of it all, the multiplayer was a pay-to-win shit show with no semblance of pride or shame whatsoever. As if that wasn’t enough, the mod and weapon system itself was a convoluted tree of guns I didn’t want or care to see if I wanted. CoD definitely seemed to pivot even more toward the casual audience with their focus on bs cosmetics that varied from the obnoxious to the pointless. At least those were free I guess...? This to me is another large rock on the long fall down the mountain, oh how the mighty have fallen.

Shadow of War: I’m convinced publishers and developers don’t care about themselves, they would rather make money now and lose money in the longrun than make something worthwhile and make money because the game is good. I really don’t get it. Look at Shadow of Mordor, it was the surprise hit of the year if you ask me. I wasn’t expecting much if anything out of that game let alone it be one of the better games of that year. Ride the momentum and use it to propel yourself into an amazing sequel? Watch what the competition and other developers are doing to avoid their mistakes? Not force loot boxes into a game that has less than no business using them? No, no to all of them and fuck you for thinking such logical thoughts. SoW barely adds on to a game that was riding off the backs of others to begin with. What great changes they made like the additions to the upgradable skills and deeper nemesis system were greatly overshadowed by repetitive gameplay and the unnaturally imposed loot boxes. Turning the Orcs we were having fun interacting with and meeting in the game world into these little sprites after our pennies. The world is vast, combat is varying depending on the skills you choose, and it even manages to recapture that magic the first game did as far as specific Orcs becoming special to us as players. It’s the strong-arming of these loot boxes that really holds this game back because again: these orcs could be in the world giving us hours more of game to play and maybe even more varied ways to interact with them.

Destiny 2: Laziness at its finest could be the tagline for this game. I won’t say that it is the use of loot boxes that ruin this game but lord is it one more thing on a mountain of complaints that I and those that remain in the Destiny community have. Eververse is upsetting, especially when it comes from a developer so well known for developing good content. This was their first step into the next gen with Destiny and it had a lot of potential. This time around it is all too dependent on its monetization scheme. Loot that could be used to entice players to spend time in the game world is instead hidden behind “engrams” players earn over time. Or they can spend their money on silver to earn even more of those loot boxes than the one that’s allocated for every level gained. With a game so dependant on online play, this mmo lite is falling short the one way an mmo-esque game can’t and that’s endgame. Literally, all Bungie has to do is remove Eververse and put these items in the world for us to earn and grind for. Which would bide them time to work on the upcoming expansions (if Curse of Osiris is any indication). I want Bungie to step up, I want Destiny 2 to succeed and help start something special in gaming. Right now it is just following in the footsteps of every money hungry triple A title that came out last year. Lately it seems Bungie can’t help themselves especially in the face of constant fan backlash involving the virtual market. Now with the new faction rally they throttled the tokens, only to offer a ghost shell in Eververse that grants you more tokens. Realy shady shit Bungie, cut it out, before you find yourself on the wrong end of a revolt.

#gaming #loot boxes #Battlefield 1 #Killing Floor 2 #FIFA #Call of Duty #Shadow of War #Destiny 2

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happymetalgirl · 6 years ago

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Within Temptation - Resist

Okay, wow. I didnt think was going to be getting another pop-infused metal album so soon after Bring Me the Horizon's amo, a premise I must again clarify that I have nothing against. I enjoyed a lot of the passionate performances on amo even amid the sugary sweet trendy pop elements and basic formats, because they were well-tempered and written and performed with tangible passion at heart. But Resist on the other hand... Wow, this album is such a confused and largely ineffective mess!

The band had stated before the delayed release of the album that it was something they wanted to try blending some pop elements of their sound with without losing the visceral bombast of their symphonic glory, and it seems like they kind of tried to do that, but moreso kept their original sound from overpowering the pop elements being introduced. Consequently, the band's symphonic edge both takes a bit of a back seat and actually ends up highlighting the worst aspects of the album's pop-ification by simply adding another layer of cheesy, gaudy obnoxiousness to the already over-produced (and very poorly produced at that) slathering of knock-off-ish electropop elements.

The viable energy Bring Me the Horizon brought to the bold move that amo was was at least enough to conjure a few highlights and make even the many lesser moments at least bearable for the band's clear zeal and focused intent. But Within Temptation sound utterly desperate for some kind of reason for what they're doing, like they're still plagued by the writer's block that prolonged the creation of this thing. They sound so unsure of what they're doing and unsure of what feelings to even chase that they sound like they're just apathetically probing for answers, almost the entire time. The trendy pasting of modern electro pop rock wallpapering over the simplistic songs on here honestly had me feeling like I was sitting through an Imagine Dragons album at times.

The one diamond in the ruft in all this cacophonous, annoying drivel is the song, "Mad World", which I was worried was going to be a disastrous rendition of the Tears for Fears song. Thankfully that's not what it was, and thankfully it brings five minutes of confidence and booming invigoration to an album drowning in uncertainty, lethargy, and tastlessly applied pop production. It has all the things that show up in spades that ruin the rest of the songs on the album, but with "Mad World" the band actually arranges everything nicely into a triumphant, mid-paced, electro-hard-rocker, that they unfortunately couldn't replicate the lightning in a bottle of.

I'd really rather not go into every song on here lest I end up redundantly criticising the mediocrity and lack of vision or energy of each piece that so solidly characterizes the album. But I feel like I should at least point out the most exemplary moments on here that showcase my points. "Endless War" is one particular song where the band's ordinarily emphatic symphonic grandness is turned into a mere background element that only gives the song a cheesily try-hard cinematic feel, nearly sounding like those corny arena pop rock "woahs" I hate so goddamn much. The more heavily electro-tinged "Supernova" is another one of the songs whose basic-ass pop structuring and generic pop production makes its excessive length a real chore to sit through. Oh but the song "Holy Ground" especially had me feeling like I was listening to an Imagine Dragons song, but with Halsey at the mic, with Sharon den Adel's slightly hip hop-esque vocal delivery in the verses. The annoying, repetitive melodies though are what sink the song like a lead cannonball. The verses and choruses of "In Vain" are top 40 as shit too, and only in the sense that they share the same predictability and bland mix of sonic elements that reveal what little the song has to offer within a minute, making the remaining three-and-a-half nothing more than redundant wait time for the next track. But then that next song is "Firelight", which features this absolutely aggravating repeated vocal sample doing this "woah-oo woah-oo" all throughout the song, which already has no energy at all to overcome it.

There were a few very brief flourishes of the glory that got Within Temptation as far as they are now. The symphonic pop rock power ballad "Mercy Mirror" at least feels a little bit emotive and the song "Trophy Hunter" ends the album on a pretty solid note reminiscent of the orchestrally epic and towering Within Temptation of old. But the fleeting moments of emotive glory the band are able to gasp out are so greatly obscured by the clutzy overproduction with the most default glitzy pop elements that clog up the bulk of the album, with five of the ten songs being utterly, unbearably inept, and only a couple of songs near the end tipping the scales in the other direction, though amounting to too little too late by the album's finish. The style really isn't the problem, as the few moments of clarity showed, but the band's poor handling of the new pop flavors they tried out didn't do nearly enough of what it should have, and overall, the vast majority of these songs do nothing for me.

Clear the roadblock, don't try to go around it/10

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Black Lives Matter: birth of a movement | Wesley Lowery

The long read: The killing of Michael Brown created a new generation of black activists, with thousands taking to the streets, and a hashtag used more than 27m times. But will the movement survive the Trump era?

OK, lets take him. Within seconds two officers grabbed me, each seizing an arm, and shoved me against the drinks machine that rested along the front wall of the McDonalds where I had been eating and working on my report. As I released my clenched hands, my mobile phone and notebook fell to the tiled floor. Then came the sharp sting of the plastic cable tie as it was sealed, pinching tight at the corners of my wrists. Id never been arrested before, and this wasnt quite how Id imagined it would go down.

Two days earlier, Id been sent to Ferguson, Missouri, by the Washington Post, to cover the aftermath of the police shooting of Michael Brown, an unarmed black 18-year-old. The fatal gunshots, fired by a white police officer, Darren Wilson, on 9 August 2014, were followed by bursts of anger, in the form of protests and riots. Hundreds, and then thousands, of local residents had flooded the streets. For the Ferguson press corps which would eventually swell from dozens of reporters for local St Louis outlets into hundreds of journalists from farther afield, including dozens of foreign countries the McDonalds on West Florissant Avenue became the newsroom.

Because the protests were largely, in those first days, organic and not called by any specific group or set of activists, they were also unpredictable. Some of the demonstrators came to demand an immediate indictment of the officer. Others wanted officials to explain what had happened that day, to tell them who this officer was and why this young man was dead. Scores more stood on pavements and street corners unable to articulate their exact demands they just knew they wanted justice. Covering Ferguson directly after the killing of Mike Brown involved hours on the streets, with clusters of reporters staked out from the early afternoon into the early hours of the morning. At any point a resident or a group of them could begin a heated argument with the police or a reporter. A demonstration that had for hours consisted of a group of local women standing and chanting on a street corner would suddenly evolve into a chain of bodies blocking traffic, or an impromptu march to the other side of town.

It wasnt much later that the riot-gear-clad officers entered the McDonalds, suggesting we all leave because, with protests still simmering outside, things could get dangerous once the sun went down. Then, when it became clear that we were happy to wait and see how things developed outside, they changed their tune. Now the officers were demanding we leave. When I didnt move fast enough, they grabbed me.

I was led out of the restaurant to wait for transport to police headquarters, with Ryan Reilly of the Huffington Post, who had also been arrested. We were driven across town in a police vehicle also containing a local minister, still in her clerical collar, who sang hymns for the entire journey.

The officer who arrested us had told us, smirking, that wed be spending the night in the cells, but he was wrong. They locked us in a cell, but about half an hour later, we were turned loose. Inundated with phone calls from other reporters and media outlets, police chief Thomas Jackson had given orders for us to be released. By the time we were given back our belongings unlaced shoes, notebooks, phones wed become momentary media celebrities.

Id arrived in Ferguson thinking Id be there for just a couple of days. Id write a feature or two, and then Id go back to DC and get on with writing about politics. But it became clear that I wasnt escaping Ferguson any time soon.

More than 150 people were taken into custody by the Ferguson and St Louis County police departments in the week-and-a-half that followed Mike Browns death, the vast majority for failure to disperse charges that came as a result of acts of peaceful protest. I was the first journalist to end up in cuffs while covering the unrest.

Resident after resident had told stories of being profiled, of feeling harassed. These protests, they insisted, were not just about Mike Brown. What was clear, from the first day, was that residents of Ferguson, and all who had travelled there to join them, had no trust in, and virtually no relationship with, the police. The police, in turn, seemed to exhibit next to no humanity towards the residents they were charged with protecting.

What happened in Ferguson would give birth to a movement and set the nation on course for an ongoing public hearing on race that stretched far past the killing of unarmed residents from daily policing to Confederate imagery to respectability politics to cultural appropriation. The social justice movement spawned from Mike Browns blood would force city after city to grapple with its own fraught histories of race and policing. As protests propelled by tweets and hashtags spread under the banner of Black Lives Matter and with mobile phone and body camera video shining new light on the way police interact with minority communities, America was forced to consider that not everyone marching in the streets could be wrong. Even if you believe Mike Browns own questionable choices sealed his fate, did Eric Garner, John Crawford, Tamir Rice, Walter Scott, Freddie Gray, and Sandra Bland all deserve to die?

Ferguson would mark the arrival on the national stage of a new generation of black political activists young leaders whose parents and grandparents had been born as recently as the 1970s and 1980s, an era many considered to be post-civil rights. Their parents parents had been largely focused on winning the opportunity to participate in the political process and gaining access to the protections promised them as citizens. Their parents focused on using the newfound opportunities and safeties provided by the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts to claim seats at the table, with political and activist strategies often focused on registering as many black voters and electing as many black leaders to public office as possible. For at least two decades, the days of taking the struggle to the streets had seemed, to many politically active black Americans, a thing of the past.

The shooting of Mike Brown had happened on a quiet side street, in a spot surrounded by four-storey apartment buildings. As the crowds gathered, others took to windows and porches, looking down at the chaos developing below. Within minutes of the shooting, word spread through the surrounding apartments, and beyond, that Browns hands were up in the air when he was shot. Darren Wilson had encountered Brown and his friend Dorian Johnson while responding to a call about two young men, matching their description, who had just been involved in the robbery of a nearby off-licence.

People in Ferguson did not know whether Brown was attempting to surrender or attempting to attack Wilson when the officer shot him. They did know that the police in Ferguson looked nothing like them: an almost all-white force charged with serving and protecting a majority black city. They knew all too well about the near-constant traffic tickets they were being given, and how often those tickets turned into warrants. And they knew that Mike Mike (as the family called him), the quiet kid who got his hair cut up the street on West Florissant and who was often seen walking around in this neighbourhood, was dead.

Mike Browns body remained on the hot August ground a gruesome, dehumanising spectacle that further traumatised the residents of Canfield Drive and would later be cited by local police officials as among their major mistakes.

Protesters in Ferguson, Missouri, mark the second anniversary of the shooting of Mike Brown. Photograph: JB Forbes/AP

The Ferguson and St Louis County police had sent scores of officers, some in full riot gear and tactical vehicles, to deal with the growing crowds and to hold them back as they attempted to investigate the scene of the shooting for themselves. All of this is pretty standard for the scene of a police shooting police, protesters, angered residents and families but the scale of the immediate response from both the community and law enforcement signalled that Ferguson would be different.

And then, four-and-a-half hours after the shooting, officers finally removed Browns body from the asphalt. They did not address the crowds who needed answers after spending most of their Saturday hearing inflammatory rumours.

As the police began to leave, church groups started walking down Canfield Drive, following Browns mother, Lezley McSpadden, who was crying hysterically, to the spot where his blood stained the ground. When they arrived, the groups circled around McSpadden and her husband and began to pray, sing and hug. Some were older folks from the church up the road, others were younger residents who poured out of the Canfield apartments. What had been a rambunctious crowd had composed itself to create a vigil for a violent death.

But the tranquillity didnt last. As the prayer group began to break up, the residents of Canfield began to yell. Prayer wasnt going to fix this. Neither was singing. The police had to answer for this. Why was Mike Brown dead? Why had his body been left out for so long? And when would we get answers? Amid the shouting, someone lit a skip on fire. While moments earlier prayers were being sent up, now it was the flash of flames floating into the night air.

The following day, the Ferguson police department still hadnt explained what had happened or apologised for keeping Browns body out on the ground for so long. And church groups were calling for a march in the dead teens honour. After Sunday services concluded, local pastors and their congregations met at the spot where Brown was killed. Hundreds showed up, and started marching and chanting what they believed to be Michael Browns own words in his final moments.

Hands up, dont shoot!

The cries rang into the air as the crowd, including many students set to begin school the following week, as well as middle-aged residents of the apartment complex, moved forward. As they hit West Florissant and turned left, they were met by a wall of police officers. What had begun as a peaceful march became a heated standoff, blocking traffic in both directions. The crowd continued shouting at the officers, who were shouting back. And as the church groups began to leave, young men emerged who seemed angrier and more determined to extract revenge for Mike Browns death.

That night, armed vandals took advantage of raging protests to break into the QuikTrip petrol station just a block away from where Brown was killed, grabbing bags of crisps and sodas, cigarettes and lighters, as others ripped the ATM machine from the wall. Before long, the store was ablaze.

Photos and videos from the day of Browns death had gone viral, but it was the destruction of the QuikTrip, not the police shooting of Mike Brown, that brought the national medias focus to Ferguson. Unrest had now become a riot. Yet another police shooting in a working-class black neighbourhood, even the breaking of a young black body left on public display, didnt catch the attention of the national media. It was the communitys enraged response broken windows and shattered storefronts that drew the eyes of the nation.

By the time a grand jury concluded on 24 November 2014 that there was not enough evidence to charge Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson with a crime in the killing of Mike Brown, I had been in that city for the better part of three months. I would spend the next eight months crisscrossing the country, visiting city after city to report on and understand the social movement that vowed to awaken a sleeping nation and insisted it begin to truly value black life. Each day, it seemed, there was another shooting. In city after city, I found officers whose actions were at worst criminal and at best lacked racial sensitivity, and black and brown bodies disproportionately gunned down by those sworn to serve and protect.

Meanwhile, the protests had created a countermovement of scepticism, anger and hate, driven by some who genuinely believed that the coverage of Ferguson was overblown and amplified by others with more sinister motivations. These legions of sceptics insisted that the entire story was a fraud, that Mike Brown had deserved his fate, and that tensions in Ferguson were completely stoked by the media based not on historical injustice, but on real-time race-baiting. The photos and videos that we had posted from the protests had unnecessarily fanned the flames, these critics insisted. And by demanding answers of the Ferguson police department, by wanting to know why this young man had died, the critics declared, we were now responsible for the social unrest in the streets.

On the afternoon of 22 November 2014, two days before the grand jurys decision not to prosecute the officer who shot Michael Brown, Cleveland police officer Timothy Loehmann and his partner, officer Frank Garmback, responded to a call about a man with a gun outside a recreation centre. The man who called the police told the dispatcher that the person was possibly a child playing with a toy, information that was never given to Loehmann and Garmback. The officers believed they were responding to an active shooter.

Loehmann and Garmback pulled up in their cruiser next to a park gazebo where for the last hour 12-year-old Tamir Rice had been throwing snowballs and pretending to fire the toy weapon. Their cruiser slid on the snow-covered grass as Loehmann leaped out from the passenger-side door.

Loehmann claimed he yelled for the boy to show his hands, but that instead of complying, the boy lifted his shirt and reached into his waistband. Loehmann said that when he saw Tamirs elbow moving upwards and the weapon coming up out of his pants, he fired two shots. Video of the shooting showed that less than two seconds passed after the officers arrived before one of them shot Tamir dead.

At its core, Tamirs death is a tale of stunning systemic police incompetence and indifference, wrote Phillip Morris, the sole black metro columnist at the Cleveland Plain Dealer. It had been revealed that Cleveland police had hired Loehmann, the officer who shot Rice, without checking his references or running a serious background check. Had the city done that, they would have uncovered job reviews from his former supervisor which made it clear he would not recommend that Loehmann, the son of a police officer, be given a badge and a gun.

A few weeks later, I flew to Cleveland, and made it just in time to see the last of about 200 protesters storm into Cleveland city hall, their signs and T-shirts declaring JUSTICE FOR TAMIR as they marched up to the council chambers for the bodys final meeting of the year.

That night there was a stinging winter breeze blowing off Lake Erie and drifting through a largely empty downtown Cleveland. Typically, this section of the city would be quiet at this time of night, just after dinner on a weekday, with city employees gone from the public buildings courthouse, administrative offices, city hall that line these blocks. But on this night, there was a strong, steady sound of dissent.

This is a movement, not a moment, declared Lorenzo Norris, a local pastor, as he led the racially diverse if largely young group of protesters into the council chambers. The Cleveland protesters were incensed by a recent federal review that had concluded that their police officers regularly exerted excessive force during routine interactions and pulled their guns (and their triggers) inappropriately.

That investigation had been sparked by another shooting in November 2012, during which Cleveland police officers opened fire on a car that had led them on a chase, discharging 137 bullets into the vehicle, only to later discover that both of those killed had been unarmed. Like their protest brethren in Ferguson, the Clevelanders contended that local elected officials hadnt done enough. We want change, Norris told me as I caught up with the group. We must have change.

After the protest, I drove over to see my old friend Colin. We werent exactly surprised by Tamir Rices death. We knew the Cleveland police werent known for their rigour or calculated decision-making in fact, in the last decade, the Department of Justice had issued not just one but two sets of findings that concluded the department routinely violated the civil rights of the citys residents. As young black men from the suburbs riding through the city in cars a little too nice to have either of us behind the wheel, wed had our fair share of colourful interactions with Clevelands finest.

At some point in high school, my best friends and I all had a running joke about the talk, which most of them had been given by a father or mother or some other relative. The underlying theme of this set of warnings passed down from black parents to their children is one of self-awareness: the people you encounter, especially the police, are probably willing to break your body, if only because they subconsciously view you not only as less than, but also as a threat.

Protesters against police shootings march in New York, July 2016. Photograph: Press/Sipa/Rex/Shutterstock

Find almost any high school-age black male and ask him about the talk. Neither of my parents ever really gave it to me, but I heard the talk secondhand from the mothers of a few friends. Besides, when you grow up in a mixed-race home my mother is white, my father black no one has to tell you that one half of your family looks different than the other and that you need to pay attention. Close attention.

Say yes sir or yes maam to any officer you encounter. If you get pulled over, keep your hands on the wheel. As we drove around in Colins car listening to Cleveland rap, wed keep our wallets in the centre console. That way, we wouldnt have to reach into our pockets. Above all, we knew to never, ever run in the presence of a police officer. Thats just asking for trouble.

While the movement was born in Ferguson in the summer of 2014, it had been conceived in the hearts and minds of young black Americans at different points in the preceding years. One of these moments came in July 2013 with the Florida jurys decision to find George Zimmerman, the neighbourhood watchman who shot and killed Trayvon Martin, not guilty.

That year was a major awakening point not just for me but also for other young black men and women across the country. Each story of a police shooting solidified the undeniable feeling in our hearts that their deaths and those of other young black men were not isolated. Peaceful black America was awakened by the Zimmerman verdict, which reminded them anew that their lives and their bodies could be abused and destroyed without consequence. Trayvons death epitomised the truth that the system black Americans had been told to trust was never structured to deliver justice to them. The not guilty verdict prompted the creation of a round of boisterous and determined protest groups, initially Florida-based, although they would eventually expand nationally.

Across the country, at a time when Twitter had yet to become the primary platform for news consumption, a 31-year-old activist in Oakland named Alicia Garza penned a Facebook status that soon went viral. She called the status a love letter to black people.

The sad part is, theres a section of America who is cheering and celebrating right now. and that makes me sick to my stomach. We GOTTA get it together yall, she wrote, stop saying we are not surprised. thats a damn shame in itself. I continue to be surprised at how little Black lives matter. And I will continue that. stop giving up on black life. Black people. I love you. I love us. Our lives matter, she concluded.

Her friend and fellow activist Patrisse Cullors found poetry in the post, extracting the phrase black lives matter and reposting the status. Soon the two women reached out to a third activist, Opal Tometi, who set up Tumblr and Twitter accounts under the slogan.

Black Lives Matter is an ideological and political intervention in a world where Black lives are systematically and intentionally targeted for demise, Garza wrote in the groups official history of its founding. It is an affirmation of Black folks contributions to this society, our humanity, and our resilience in the face of deadly oppression.

Activist Alicia Garza, one of the founders of Black Lives Matter. Photograph: Kristin Little Photography

While the phrase is now the name of an organisation and is often used to describe the broader protest and social justice movement, Black Lives Matter is best thought of as an ideology. Its tenets have matured and expanded over time, and not all of its adherents subscribe to them in exactly the same manner much the way an Episcopalian and a Baptist, or a religious conservative and a deficit hawk, could both be described as a Christian or a conservative, yet still hold disagreements over policy, tactics and lifestyle. For the young black men and women entering the adult world during the Obama presidency, the ideology of Black Lives Matter, not yet an organisation nor a movement, carried substance, even heft. It was a message that resonated with the young black men and women who had been so outraged and pained by the Zimmerman verdict. And the decision by Tometi to focus on Twitter and Tumblr, then second-tier social media outlets, instead of Facebook, proved a stroke of strategic genius.

Both networks allow for more organic, democratic growth. Unlike Facebook, in which virality is determined by algorithms, visibility on Twitter and Tumblr is determined directly by how compelling a given message, post, or dispatch is. A phrase like #blacklivesmatter, or #ferguson, or, later on, #BaltimoreUprising, can in a matter of moments transform from a singular sentence typed on an individual users iPhone into an internationally trending topic. #blacklivesmatter didnt catch on immediately, but its time would soon come.

As writer and historian Jelani Cobb wrote in the New Yorker, in what remains one of the definitive profiles of the creation of the organisation: Black Lives Matter didnt reach a wider public until the following summer, when a police officer named Darren Wilson shot and killed 18-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson. Darnell Moore, a writer and an activist based in Brooklyn, who knew Patrice Cullors, coordinated freedom rides to Missouri from New York, Chicago, Portland, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and Boston. Within a few weeks of Browns death, hundreds of people who had never participated in organised protests took to the streets, and that campaign eventually exposed Ferguson as a case study of structural racism in America and a metaphor for all that had gone wrong since the end of the civil-rights movement.

As of March 2016, the 10th anniversary of Twitter, the hashtag #blacklivesmatter had been used more than 12m times the third most of any hashtag related to a social cause. At the top of the list, however, sits #ferguson, the most-used hashtag promoting a social cause in the history of Twitter, tweeted more than 27m times.

The Movement for Black Lives as activists had begun calling the protest movement and the national push for police reform, had faded from the national consciousness during the first months of 2016. There were bursts of attention, but in each instance Americans focus on race and justice landed like another strong wave, only to recede right back into the ocean. Six months into 2016, my colleagues and I were working on an analysis of the number of Americans killed to date, and had discovered that even after more than a year of protests and outrage, police nationwide were on track to take more lives in 2016 than they had in 2015. Yet none of the men and women killed by police in 2016 had received the same level of attention from the media or had galvanised activists as much as those killed just months earlier.

For racial justice activists, the presidential election was an opportunity to pressure candidates to adopt positions on policing and criminal justice reform, as well as to speak out on other issues of racial disparity.

People know that the police are still killing people. What weve got to figure out now is what a victory looks like, Kayla Reed, the Ferguson protester still working for the Organization for Black Struggle in St Louis, told me in early 2016. There isnt going to be a single bill passed that will suddenly encompass all of the ways the system marginalises black and brown people. We have to redo the whole damn thing.

Many of the young activists who had been driven into the street by the police killings of 2014 and 2015 had begun to move away from daily protesting and organising work. Robust conversations circulated about viral videos of the deaths of individuals and the fetishising of black death. Perhaps, some argued, not every video needed to be shared and played on a constant loop.

In early July 2016, two killings reawakened the movement. Videos circulated on social media of the police shootings of two young men, Alton Sterling and Philando Castile. Among the cities that hosted major protests was Dallas, where the police had gone to great pains to support the protesters, cordoning off areas for demonstrators and posing for photos next to signs calling for reforms and justice. It was here that a single gunman attacked white officers in what he later told police negotiators was a targeted retribution for the police killings of black men.

A week later, another lone wolf attacked officers in Baton Rouge, killing three. The deaths and injury of the officers in these two cities again shook the nation, underscoring with renewed urgency the depth of the anger and distrust towards police still coursing through America.

The attacks on police officers enraged the law enforcement community. In a country with millions of easily accessible guns and an increasing national distrust of institutions specifically the police it wasnt hard to imagine the ease with which someone determined to harm officers could carry out such an attack. With the number of police shootings that have occurred that seem to be totally unjustified, somewhere in this country, someone was going to do such a thing, John Creuzot, a former prosecutor and judge in Dallas, told me after the shooting.

After the Dallas attack, Barack Obama convened a 33-person conference at the White House, a conversation that ran for four-and-a-half hours among the longest single-subject conferences of his presidency. The attendees were a mix young activists such as DeRay Mckesson, civil rights stalwarts such as Al Sharpton, police chiefs and heads of several major police unions, and government officials including the attorney general, Loretta Lynch.

As he facilitated the conversation, Obama often glanced to his left, at Brittany Packnett, a 31-year-old Ferguson protester and co-founder of Campaign Zero a policy-oriented activist arm that pledged to put forth recommendations for how we can live in a world where the police dont kill people. This was at least the third time Packnett had met Obama, who after one meeting had been so struck by her command of the room that he pulled her aside to encourage her to one day run for office. She had applied for and was accepted to a spot on the Ferguson Commission, the taskforce convened by Missouri governor Jay Nixon after the unrest in 2014. Next, Obama invited Packnett to join his presidents taskforce on 21st-century policing.

I asked what had brought her from the barricades into the policy making rooms by now, Packnett had joined street protests in more than half a dozen cities.

Everyone has a role, Packnett said. There are some people who need to be the revolutionary, and there are some people who need to be at the table in the White House. And I knew it was my job to translate the pain I had seen and experienced in the streets and bring it into these halls of power.

A protest on West Florissant Avenue in Ferguson, Missouri. Photograph: Michael B Thomas/AFP/Getty Images

Packnett explains the protest movement as a series of escalating waves. Its conception came from the deaths of Oscar Grant, Trayvon Martin and Jordan Davis, which mobilised black Americans in a demand for justice. Its grand birth, first in Ferguson and then throughout the nation in the autumn of 2014, was prompted by the deaths of Eric Garner, John Crawford and Michael Brown, the cases that showed justice for those killed by the police was not forthcoming. As the list of names grew, so did the urgency of the uprising that would become a movement. 2015 brought a third wave of anger and pain: Walter Scott, Freddie Gray, Sandra Bland, Samuel DuBose another round of death in which the pleas for police accountability became demands. As Obama prepares to leave the White House, it remains to be seen whether the movement birthed by the broken promise of his presidency will live on through the season of his successor.

The protests will continue, Packnett said confidently when I called her from Cleveland on the first night of the Republican national convention in July. Were going to work to continue this level of engagement with the next administration; theres just too much at stake. While the targeted killings of the officers in Dallas and Baton Rouge prompted some commentators to declare the movement dead, the activists have not gone quietly.

A few days later came the non-fatal shooting in North Miami of behavioural therapist Charles Kinsey. Kinsey was lying on the ground with his hands in the air, begging not to be shot as he tried to soothe his autistic patient, when an officer fired his gun three times. I was thinking as long as I have my hands up … theyre not going to shoot me, Kinsey told a local television station from his hospital bed. Wow, was I wrong.

In the days after the deaths of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, thousands of people used an online tool provided by Campaign Zero to petition their local elected officials to demand police reform. In mid-July, as the political media gathered in Cleveland for the GOP convention, thousands of demonstrators took to the streets in more than 30 cities.

We have no choice but to keep going, Packnett told me. If one of the central demands of the movement is to stop killing us, and theyre still killing us, then we dont get to stop, either.

They Cant Kill Us All by Wesley Lowery (Penguin, 9.99). To order a copy for 8.49, go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846.

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