#like the unique death animations and the layer jumps

[boilercity]

Collection of various Annie sprites

[leafydusk]

Something fills his hands, plastic covered in buttons. And there’s a computer screen. Pixelated robot girls jumping around. Yeah. That’s a nice place to be. In your room, in your girlfriend’s apartment, wearing noise-canceling headphones, playing emulated games from vintage Semi-Novan consoles.

"...You send these robot girls on missions and there's thirty-two of them with unique abilities."

"You pick six to go on a mission and you keep going until you win or they all die. When one dies another falls from the sky. They have a projectile attack and a melee attack. You can also call in missile strikes. It has a neat strategic layer actually, the stuff you do in the platforming part affects the world map, like if you destroy a mecha depot-"

".... an intricate sequence of tactics that only make sense within the idiosyncratic rules and troubled production of this game. Enemy telegraphing, animation canceling, glitch exploits, using the invincibility frame of each death to get through the hardest parts."

...his other hand mashes the controller, a robot girl crashing through a pixel door and lasering an insurgent in half.

All the robot girls are dead and the screen is red.

[thecreaturecodex]

Nascent Demon Lord, Dalmosh

“Dalmosh” © Wizards of the Coast, by Izzy. Accessed at the Monster Manual V Art Gallery here

[Commissioned by @annotaremonstrorum​, who wanted a version of Dalmosh from MMV as a nascent demon lord. Their ideas for developing Dalmosh’s cult were very good, and incorporated fully into this entry. The original was a CR 17 with more than 400 hit points and an AC of 13. It felt like a very purposeful experiment with tweaking the hp/CR ratio, and I wonder how it actually worked in play. My guess is not great. I also gave him the dispelling slam ability so he could have at least a chance to pull his signature swallow whole on a high level character.]

Nascent Demon Lord, Dalmosh CR 21 CE Outsider (extraplanar) This massive fleshy creature appears as a boneless parody of the human form. Its legs are columns of swaying meat, its arms overlong with swollen fists, its head conical and asymmetric. It has a gaping maw with blunt teeth, and covering its bodies are sealed fissures disturbingly similar to both sutures and jaws.

Dalmosh The Eternal Hunger, The Walking Mountain Concerns hunger, destructive gluttony, living demiplanes Domains Chaos, Destruction, Evil, Strength Subdomains Catastrophe, Demon, Entropy, Ferocity Worshipers ogres, trolls, creatures trapped in the Gullet Minions dwiergeths, gibbering mouthers, piasa Unholy Symbol a closed fist with a mouth on its back Obedience eat another creature alive. Gain a +4 profane bonus on CMD to avoid being grappled Boons 1: bear’s endurance 2/day; 2: divine power 2/day; 3: extended hungry pit 2/day

Dalmosh the Eternal Hunger is a walking mountain of meat and teeth. His home is the Flesh Mountains, a range of Abyssal terrain spanning several layers that is itself faintly alive. Dalmosh wanders through these mountains, consuming all in his path and chewing himself a cave to hide in whenever he tires enough to rest. Almost everything is food to Dalmosh—animal, vegetable, mineral—although he seems to find unworked earth distasteful. Dalmosh is dull, brutal, and indiscriminately destructive, and he leaves sweeping arcs of ruin in his wake.

In combat, Dalmosh is simple and uncreative. He attacks whatever he can reach, attempting to swallow it whole. Creatures that elude his reach may be pelted with thrown debris, but after a few rounds he will ignore them in search of easier prey.  When struck, Dalmosh’s skin opens up into a set of temporary, but still deadly, jaws. His surface is covered in the scar tissue of previous such openings. Dalmosh has a keen sense of smell, and can be distracted by particularly aromatic morsels.

Any inanimate objects Dalmosh consumes, as well as creatures lucky or clever to fight their way there, are transported to the Gullet, a sprawling demiplane in the shape of a fleshy labyrinth. Gusts of foul wind, pools of acid and occasional meatquakes are terrain hazards here, but there are creatures that make a living in the Gullet. These are swallowed victims who either couldn’t escape through planar travel or simply chose not to, and there are even permanent settlements built in this moist, organic refuge. The largest of these is called Garnamastra, and it is ruled by a rakshasa calling himself the Eyeless Tyrant. It is said that the treasures of ancient realms and slain heroes are scattered throughout the Gullet, and some foolhardy adventurers have allowed Dalmosh to swallow them in order to go treasure hunting.

Despite his dim intellect and utter indifference to worship, Dalmosh has managed to gather enough of a cult following to empower him as a nascent demon lord. The dwiergeths consider him their progenitor, and some pipe a quick prayer to Dalmosh whenever they consume a particularly scrumptious morsel. Ogres, trolls and other evil giants view him as something of a figure to idolize and emulate, although they also view him as a bogeyman to scare their children with. Some particularly evil and crazy spellcasters see Dalmosh as an embodiement of planar paradoxes such as living planes and pocket dimensions, and use gate spells and offerings of rich food and unusual sacrifices to gain Dalmosh’s service as a living siege weapon.

Dalmosh           CR 21 XP 409,600 CE Colossal outsider (chaos, demon, evil, extraplanar) Init +3; Senses darkvision 120 ft., low-light vision, Perception +24, scent Aura cloak of chaos (DC 24), frightful presence (300 ft., DC 29) Defense AC 36, touch 5, flat-footed 36 (-8 size, -1 Dex, +31 natural, +4 deflection) hp 455 (26d10+312) Fort +26, Ref +18, Will +25 DR 20/good and slashing; Immune charm and compulsion effects, death effects, disease, electricity, poison; Resist acid 30, cold 30, fire 30; SR 32 Defensive Abilities rejuvenation Offense Speed 50 ft. Melee 2 slams +34 (3d8+16 plus dispel), bite +34 (4d8+16 plus grab), secondary maws +32 (4d8+8 plus grab) Ranged debris +18 (2d8+16/19-20) Space 30 ft.; Reach 30 ft. (15 ft. with secondary maws) Special Attacks fast swallow, gluttonous frenzy, spawn maw, swallow whole (8d8+16 bludgeoning, AC 25, 45 hp) Spell-like Abilities CL 21st, concentration +27 Constant—cloak of chaos (DC 24) 3/day—greater teleport Statistics Str 42, Dex 9, Con 34, Int 4, Wis 23, Cha 22 Base Atk +26; CMB +50 (+52 bull rush, sunder; +54 grapple); CMD 63 (65 vs. bull rush, sunder) Feats Blind-fight, Cleave, Great Cleave, Great Fortitude, Improved Bull Rush, Improved Initiative, Improved Sunder, Improvised Weapon Mastery, Intimidating Prowess, Lightning Reflexes, Multiattack, Power Attack, Throw Anything Skills Acrobatics +15 (+23 when jumping), Climb +32, Intimidate +38, Perception +24, Survival +24, Swim +32 Languages Abyssal, telepathy 300 ft. SQ nascent demon lord traits, no breath Ecology Environment any land (Abyss) Organization unique Treasure none Special Abilities Dispelling Slam (Su) A creature or object struck by Dalmosh’s slam attack is subject to a targeted greater dispel magic effect (CL 21st). Gluttonous Frenzy (Ex) As a full round action once per minute, Dalmosh can move up to his speed and make a bite attack against every creature he can reach along his movement. Nascent Demon Lord Traits (Ex/Su) Dalmosh is a powerful unique fiend with the following traits:

Immune to charm and compulsion effects, death effects, electricity, poison

Resist acid, cold and fire 30

Telepathy 300 ft.

Dalmosh’s natural weapons, as well as any weapons he wields, are treated as chaotic, epic and evil for the purposes of overcoming damage reduction.

Dalmosh can grant spells and boons to worshipers as described in his cult entry above

Rejuvenation (Su) If Dalmosh is killed, he crumbles into rot and is reborn in the Flesh Mountains 2 days later. Dalmosh can only use this ability once per year; if slain again in that time, he is permanently killed. Spawn Maw (Su) Whenever Dalmosh takes 20 or more points of damage in a single attack, he can create a set of jaws as an immediate action from the wound. These jaws attack as secondary natural weapons and have a reach of 15 feet. If the creature that dealt that damage is within 15 feet, Dalmosh may make a secondary bite attack agains that opponent as part of the same action. Secondary maws created in this way remain for 1 hour. Swallow Whole (Ex/Su) A creature swallowed whole by Dalmosh can make its way to the Gullet with a successful DC 26 Escape Artist check or by dealing 20 points of damage while swallowed. A creature that travels to the Gullet in this way is deposited in that demiplane without further injury. If Dalmosh is subject to a dimensional anchor spell or a similar effect, this option is not available. If a swallowed creature cuts its way out of Dalmosh, Dalmosh can still use swallow whole immediately thereafter without penalty.

[lightning-things]

Quite the predicament

Just a little piece to use as a "sample writing" for now. I was literally trying to get some ideas and then one of my cats decided he wanted some cuddles, so I decided to write this.

Hope you'll enjoy it ^^

Fandom: Genshin Impact.

Summary: All you wanted was to fill the blank pages with words, but someone had another plan.

Characters: Zhongli, Reader (no gender mentioned), Northland Cat.

Theme: SFW, fluff, slice of life, some intimacy. Implied romantic relationship.

Inspiration: Indi -one of my cats- and Liyue Harbor.

Words: 1384.

Warnings: None, unless you hate and/or fear cats.

Read also in: Ao3.

Spanish version: Pequeño contratiempo -> https://lightning-cosillas.tumblr.com/post/646727027636027392/pequeño-contratiempo

Quite the predicament

Liyue is calm tonight.

A gentle breeze caresses the streets, making bamboo leaves float around unbothered by people. Only animals can be found roaming the city in the clear night. Lonely clouds are the only ones seen in the sky, letting the stars shine brightly in the dark blue celestial sea displayed above.

If there are other people enjoying the scenery, you don't know, and you don't care either since your attention is focused not on the beauty displayed outside your window, but on the blank pages in front of you.

A book with no words written on it, a virgin piece of paper that will sit in one of the bookshelves that surround you, if only you could get started and break the solid colour that's been staring back at you for what feels like hours.

You sigh, slouching in the chair after placing the brush in the ornate inkstone to not make a mess when your hands go to your head in a vain attempt to let go of your frustration. You just want to write something: your thoughts, your day-to-day errands, or maybe some tale you heard from Liu Su one of those times you went to drink tea and enjoy a good story.

But the paper is still unmarked.

Just moments ago your mind was full of ideas, thoughts flying non-stop and itching you to take the brush and write them down. But at the same moment you sit on the chair after some minutes of careful preparation, your brain decided to stop working and left you with a -oh the irony- blank mind.

A grunt replaces your sighs and instead of letting go of your head to hit the table with your forehead, you decide to arch your back and rest it on the chair, eyes unfocused but nailed to the ceiling as your index finger begins to tap the armrest in an annoying rhythm.

You don’t know how much time passes, since no sound is heard neither inside and outside the house save for the wind passing through the streets. But be it seconds or minutes or hours, there’s a moment when you decide that enough is enough, that sitting while doing nothing is a waste of time.

So you choose to get up and occupy yourself with something -anything will be good at this point- because you know sleep won’t come no matter how comfortable and inviting your bed is. Your mind will just play with you and bring back all the activity you’re missing right now.

And that was the plan, until something jumps at you, almost knocking you out of the chair.

It catches you off-guard, even if the surprise lasts only for the fleeting moment your ears need to recognize the sound and for your hands to grab the little intruder and sink gently into its soft fur.

Your frown banishes instantly, replaced by a tired but sincere smile. The tension of your muscles disappears within seconds, and your posture -rigid, tense, bothered- shifts into a relaxed one.

The little intruder meows contentedly, green eyes closed in delight and throat vibrating with its purrs. Its short fur caresses your skin whenever the cat moves and for a moment you just stay like you are, eyes looking at the feline and following the streaks of black along the silvery strands of its back and sides.

“The northland one, uh?” You talk to yourself, one hand leaving the cat’s side to stroke his head, trying to please him enough to stop hitting your chin with it. “You’re heavier than you look.” A cat well-fed, with shiny fur and strong muscles underneath.

A stray, but a Liyue one without doubt.

The harbor is full of prey like the birds of the bridges, the rats from the boats or the fishes from the stalls that they can hunt -or steal- freely, as well as a good amount of rocks, trees, stairs, pillars and tall houses for the cats to exercise and play.

And it makes you happy, knowing that even if not all cats would be able to hunt or steal things to eat, the harbor is also full of people who feed the animals so none of them would be found the next morning, starved to death.

The northland cat in your arms moves and meows again, redirecting your attention out of your thoughts and back to him, hitting you with his back and head until your hands are petting him, scratching him with care in the places he seems to like judging by the way he places himself.

The book is long forgotten on the table, ink drying while the pages rest untouched and you can’t bring yourself to care anymore.

"Quite the predicament you're in." A voice you know so well slowly makes its way into the pleasant atmosphere. His words don't break the spell even if there's a hint of a laugh in them. No, the charming voice makes its way smoothly into the symphony of purrs to pull you in deeper.

Slowly, with no rush at all, you move your face just enough to look at him, to lock your eyes on his. Pools of amber and gold look back at you and your unexpected guest, shining with mirth at the situation.

You don't laugh, but your smile widens at the same time the purrs of the cat increase their volume and demanding meows echo through the room. The northland feline has noticed your companion and even if he doesn’t leave your lap, his eyes are now fixed on the male.

"Stop whining, you baby." Your tone is light, amused by the neediness the cat shows just so he can make the brunette pet him too. “I hope we didn’t wake you up.”

"Not at all.” His clothes tell a different story, but if you know him -and you do- you’ll be sure he was reading instead of sleeping, or looking at the streets he loved so much, while waiting for sleep to catch you and force your way to bed.

His eyes take notice of the pages, now scattered across the desk but still with no drop of ink in them. However, he doesn’t say a thing about them, busying himself for a few seconds with putting away the writing utensils, avoiding any possible accident with the ink and brushes.

Meanwhile, you look at him, marveling at the way the silk robe -colour similar to the one of the lanterns light up at night on the harbor- complements his features and allows you a peek at his neck and chest. usually covered by layers of expensive clothing and ties.

“Zhongli.” His name in your lips sounds sweet, calm music like a lullaby in the middle of the night. He merely hums to let you know he heard you, to let you continue talking even if he’s not looking at you right now. “Zhongli.” You call again, stroking the cat with one of your hands and putting the other on his arm.

He stops mildly, letting go of the papers and turning his body to you, one eyebrow raised in curiosity. For a moment, there’s purrs instead of silence filling the space. Then the tap of his bare feet against the floor so he can close enough to put a hand on the cat and the other on your shoulder.

His eyes are on you, attention solely focused on your face, your eyes, your smile, the little details of your skin that makes you so unique to him. Admiration flows from his gaze and you cannot help it when you tilt your head and rest your cheek on the hand he has on your shoulder.

“Yes, dear?” He asks, finally, when all is settled and even the cat has fallen silent, lulled to sleep in your arms aided by your breathing and his warm hand caressing his fur.

“Nothing.” Is what you answer. Your eyes open to look at him again, mouth almost letting go of a giggle at his confused expression. “I just wanted to say your name.” You finish, taking his hand to give a fleeting kiss in his knuckles.

That makes Zhongli smile, a lovely curve of lips full of warmth and so much more…

So you call him again.

You liked it? Want to support me? In that case you can buy me a coffee ^^

[mypoisonedvine]

Hunt (dark!Slayer!Bucky x vampire!Reader)

a.k.a. Bucky the Vampire Slayer

a.a.k.a. Bucky the Vampire Layer

full credit for this idea goes to @deceitfuldevout​ who shared her genius with us for the concept of witch/witch-hunter, which morphed over time into vampire/vampire-hunter, which I eventually adapted into a weird amalgam of a Buffy AU and a Supernatural AU

@giorno-plays-piano​ asked to be tagged if I ever did it!

Warnings: smut, blood play (just a lil tho, but lots of talking about blood bc she’s...literally a vampire), degradation kink, sex that turns dub con/non con, kidnapping

(we are sadly deprived of any gifs of Bucky in the new jacket but please know the pic below is the Bucky we’re working with here)

Bucky clenched his jaw in frustration as his head fell back against the headrest.  His grip on the steering wheel tightened with a squeaking noise as his skin skidded along the leather.

He was irritated because he knew what was waiting for him at the end of this road.  The headlights only illuminated a little of what was ahead, but the predictive power of past experience told him everything he needed to know.

You were going to be waiting for him, and he never looked forward to that.

Memories resurfaced of the last time he had seen you.  He’d found you in the forest and though he couldn’t prove it, he was pretty sure he’d interrupted you feeding on a deer.  It was disgusting.  Yet, you moved with this grace he couldn’t ignore and spoke with a smile that he couldn’t forget.  You greeted him with a familiarity that he wished wasn’t merited.  He was a Slayer, you were a vampire; there shouldn’t ever be a second meeting.  He should’ve killed you the first time, however many months ago it was.  He couldn’t even remember why he didn’t, but you slipped away that night and he swore to track you down.

He did, but he didn’t kill you that time either, because you’d proven useful.  You’d sold out a vampire who pissed you off and Bucky got to put another kill under his belt.  That was definitely the only reason he’d left you alive.  

Then the forest.  You were more feral that time, and he saw more of your monstrous side than he had before.  So why was that the time he thought about when he tossed and turned at night, when he was too pent up from years of solitude, when he forced his eyes shut and slipped his hand into his boxers under the sheets--

Destination is on the right, the GPS alerted with a robotic voice.  Thank god.

Bucky pulled the car into the driveway of the dilapidated mansion, shifting into park and turning off the engine; the metal blasting from the radio halted unceremoniously.  

He didn’t hear the commotion inside the house until he was quite a ways from the car and halfway to the door.  Of course he considered that it was a bad idea to just walk in the front door of a suspected vampire coven as a Slayer, but he wasn’t here on a hunt.  At least, not the normal kind.

Before he was even on the porch, the door opened with an outpouring of pink light.  He shielded his face with his arm as his eyes adjusted, but put it down when he saw it was your silhouette in the doorway.

“Slayer,” you hissed with a smile that blended pleasure and disgust.  He knew the feeling.

“You could call me Bucky,” he offered.

“It doesn’t suit you,” you explained, leaning against the splintered wood of the frame.  “I wasn’t sure you were going to come.”

“Neither was I,” he admitted with a shrug, “but how could I resist a chance to jump into the lion’s den?”

“You’re here to take on a coven?  By yourself?” you laughed.

“I’m not looking for a fight,” he denied.  “I’m looking for information.”

You raised a brow as if to say go ahead.

“A girl in the city,” he continued.  “Mysterious death.  Coroner is stumped, thinks it could be anything from an animal attack to a blood disorder to a ritualistic murder.  Has your name all over it.”

“‘Girl’?” you repeated, as if you’d never heard the word before.  “Girl, no, I don’t remember any girl.”

“White, blonde, 5’2”, 26 years old,” he listed.

“Oh!” you stopped him.  “26!  You mean a woman.  Yes, I remember feeding on a woman.”

“So you’re confessing?” 

“To what crime?  She was going to die in less than a year, easily,” you shrugged.  “She did have a blood disorder.  Leukemia.  She didn’t know it yet.”

“And do I want to know how you knew it?” he shuddered.

“It’s a unique taste,” you grinned.  He felt a little unwell hearing you say that.

“I’m not sure if you’re familiar with human law,” he frowned, “but it’s still murder even if they were going to die soon.  It’s murder if they were actively dying.”

“I was human once,” you deflected.

“In 1447,” he growled.  You would’ve blushed if you could; you were flattered that he remembered.

“Yeah, murder investigation at that time was… very surface-level,” you admitted.  “Is your plan to arrest me, then?”

“I’m a Slayer.  Not a cop.”

“What you are is a wet blanket,” you grimaced.  “We’re busy in here, you know.  Big party.”

“I was hoping so,” he smirked.  “That’s what you promised.”

“Then why don’t you come in?” you asked coyly.  You hadn’t really expected him to do it.

Everyone inside jumped and scurried away the second he set foot in the door.  “It’s cool,” you told them, “he’s with me.”

That didn’t seem to comfort them that much, because what business would you have with a Slayer?

They must have figured it out when you slipped away to a secluded room and dragged him along with you.  He didn’t seem to figure it out until you were pushing him back against the wall, running your hands over his body through his clothes. 

“What I would give to feed on you,” you whispered, running your lips over his neck.  You took in a deep breath and felt a little light-headed at the overwhelming smell of his blood.  He, unfortunately, reeked of Slayer, and you pushed back your instinct of fear to appreciate the man underneath.  AB positive-- your favorite.  “Wanted you ever since I first saw you,” you admitted.  “You looked so fucking delicious.”

You pulled back to look up at him and you didn’t need vampiric hearing to know that his heart was racing: just the way his eyes darted across your face and down to your lips was proof enough.

“Why did you come here today, Bucky?” you asked quietly. 

“I’m on a hunt,” he answered in a low growl.

“For me?”

“For you.”

“You have me alone,” you noticed.  “You could get out your wooden stake and end this for good.”

He nodded, but didn’t move.  Instead you felt his hands trail along your sides; he jumped when he brushed the skin of your arm.  “You’re so cold,” he realized.

Meanwhile you thought you could burn up from the heat of him, radiating out of his body and through the thick layers of clothing.  He was so alive, so awake, so present.  

You pushed off his leather jacket and he didn’t even think to stop you, letting it fall to the floor.  You never cared for it.  He looked as good as sin in it, yes, but it smelled of death and dead things, the skin of something you wouldn’t have eaten when it was alive 40 years ago, and you wanted only to experience the life of this particular being.

And what is life but wanting?  Fuck, you wanted him so goddamn bad.

He wrapped a hand around your neck and pulled you into him, kissing you with instant need and dizzying aggression.

Even now you weren’t sure if he would let you live to see the end of the night.  But you couldn’t see the sunrise anyway, so what difference would it make?

He made embarrassingly quick work of your dress, tearing it straight down the front.  Downside of wearing something you’d had for nearly 100 years is that it’s flimsy.

His hands were back on you the second your skin was exposed.  His touch was so hot that it almost hurt; his hands were so rough and strong that your heart almost clenched.

You clawed at his shirt and gasped with delight when you accidentally nicked him with a sharp fingernail and broke the skin.  The flavor hit the air hard and fast; you grabbed his shoulders and pulled him forward so you could lean down and lick the thin red stripe you’d left on his chest.  Just a taste, but the best taste you’d had in… you couldn’t remember anything tasting this good.

“I won’t kill you if you don’t kill me,” he offered breathlessly.

“Yeah, yeah, whatever,” you agreed quickly as you began to work open his belt because the last thing on your mind right now was survival.

You groaned when you felt his cock in your hand.  There was a lot of blood in that thing and you could feel it pulsing in your palm.  You knew better than to put it in your mouth; you didn’t have the restraint for that.  

You were thankful you hadn’t drank any more of his blood because clearly he had a better use for it.  It was so big you wondered how he hadn’t passed out from it getting so hard because seriously, this man’s cock was a monster; takes one to know one, eh?

“Fuck me,” you demanded, “I want you to fuck me, oh my god.”

He nodded as a low groan echoed out of his chest.  His grip moved to your hips as he pulled you up and put you on the table, pushing you down and bending over you with another bruising kiss that trailed down your body.

“Don’t fucking tease me,” you whined, “I need your cock.”

“Wait,” he instructed, kneeling before you and licking through your exposed folds.  You gasped, unprepared for how strange it would feel; your hand grabbed his hair and pulled harder than you meant to, but thankfully, he didn’t slow down.

Little moans and grunts were lost against your skin as he tasted you eagerly.  You were so overwhelmed with the sensation that he had to hold your hips down to keep you from squirming away.  You’d been feasting on humans for 600 years, and now it seemed like he was attempting to even the score.  Even you never ate with this enthusiasm.  But you’d never thought about a meal so much before consuming it as he had thought about you before this moment.  

You were already embarrassingly close to orgasm, and it was apparent from the way you moaned and writhed and begged.

“I’m so fucking close, just like that, please don’t stop, yes, yes, oh fuck, yes,” you yelped.

It all came to a screeching halt as he stood up and grabbed your face with his hand.  You looked at him with wide eyes, confused but still appreciating how good he looked with wet lips and dark eyes and his hair all fucked up.

“You aren’t gonna come,” he explained between raspy breaths, “until I’m inside you.”

You nodded in agreement, again arching your back as if you could will him to fuck you.

He slid his cock through your folds, coating himself in your arousal which was embarrassingly plentiful.

Finally, he pressed his cock into you all at once and you gasped, head falling back against the wooden table.  He groaned as he gripped your hips, steadying you so he could piston into you with brutal force.  

And to think you thought he was going to stab you through the chest with a wooden stake.  To be fair, he still could.  

He scooped you into his arms, pulling you up until your face was right against his.  “You’re warm here,” he informed you with bared teeth, “did you know that?  So hot and tight around my fuckin’ cock.”

You could only moan, your eyes darting to his parted lips, and then his neck.  You were thoroughly tempted, but didn’t want to do anything that might stop him from fucking you so perfectly like this.  His hand came up to wrap around your throat-- the metal one, specifically.  You were pretty sure he’d lost the arm to a monster fight of some kind but that didn’t matter now.  All you knew was that this one was strong enough to crush you and it was making your head dizzy and your pussy wet.

Your moans were lost to his grip as he choked you, and you could hear the ragged sounds of his breathing as he fucked you deeper and harder.  “You like getting fucked by a Slayer, huh?  You’re such a whore.  My whore.”

You gasped when he released your throat and you could breathe again.  “Yes,” you agreed with a sob, “yours, baby.” 

He chuckled a little at that, slipping a hand between your bodies to rub your clit with his thumb; you yelped and grabbed his shoulders tightly.

“You’re gonna come already aren’t you?” he mocked.  “Dumb fucking slut.”

You hissed at his harsh words but you were too lost in pleasure to complain.  Your eyes shot open when you felt two of his fingers slam into your open mouth and hit the back of your throat.  “Choke on my fingers while you come, bitch,” he growled.  “And I swear if you fucking bite me, you’ll regret it.”

It was like asking you to take a sip of sweet wine but not swallow it.  His skin tasted fucking delicious on your tongue, which you swirled around the digits eagerly.  He laughed: “such a fucking slut, sucking on my fingers like that.  You want it so bad.”

You nodded breathlessly, whimpering as you took his fingertips down your throat.  He groaned and slammed into you harder, which only served to bring you that much closer to the edge.  

“Come on my cock, right now,” he demanded, and you liked to believe it was just lucky timing and not his command that struck you at that moment.  Your nails dug into his shoulders as you felt yourself flexing and clenching around his length, another gush of arousal easing his way as he relentlessly pounded you.

“Good girl,” he praised, pulling his fingers from your throat to hear you pant with exhaustion.  He stopped to lift your legs onto his shoulders, pushing you back but leaning over you.  When he slammed into you again that time, you nearly screamed-- he was hitting something so deep in you that it was actually painful.

“Stop, it’s-- it’s too deep,” you moaned.

You tried to move back but he held you down firmly, a dark glimmer in his eye.  He thrust in again, even harder, and you cried out as you tried to grab onto the table for dear life.  He grabbed your wrists with each hand and pinned them beside you, laughing as you tried to fight him off.  

Any normal human you could overpower in an instant.  But you were no match for a Slayer.  Both of you knew that.  

“Let me go,” you begged, “you’re hurting me.”

“I could do a lot worse to you if I wanted.  You should be thankful I’ve let you live.”

“I could say the same,” you snarled.  He pulled back and rammed his cock into you so hard that you instantly screamed, tears sliding down your temple.

“Don’t talk to me like that,” he ordered.  “Just be a good little whore and take my cock.”

He started to move inside you, hard and fast, and you couldn’t help but struggle against him as he hovered above you.  

“Apologize,” he demanded, and just as he sensed you were about to tell him to fuck off, he accentuated it by holding his hips to yours a little longer than normal, reminding you that he could hurt you so easily if you didn’t obey.

“I’m sorry,” you sobbed, “I’m sorry, Bucky, please don’t… please don’t hurt me.”

He grinned as he watched you cry.  “This is what you fuckin’ get for teasing me.  You killed that girl to get my attention.  You wanted me to find you and fuck you the way you’ve been missin’ out on for the past few centuries.”

You shook your head to deny it but he suddenly let your arms go to slap you across the face.  You tried to use your free arm but in an instant he had your wrists pinned to your chest, putting all his weight on you until you could barely breathe.

“Just admit it, baby,” he said in an oddly sensitive way, like he was taking pity on you.  “Just admit you need me.”

“Please,” you sobbed, near-silent from the lack of air, “please…”

“Aw, look at you,” he cooed, “begging for more.”

He trapped your wrists under his left hand and used his right to roughly grab your jaw until your mouth was forced open.

“Show me your teeth, gorgeous,” he purred.  You hissed as your fangs glistened in the candlelight.  “Mmm, you wanna bite me, don’t you?”

You tried to nod but couldn’t move your face much.

“The feeling’s mutual,” he grinned.  “Fuck, I’m gonna come.  Gonna fill that tight little cunt.”

Your fight was renewed as you tried to kick and squirm away but it was useless.  You grunted as his thrusts became erratic but even more painful, somehow.

“Beg for it,” he growled through his teeth.  “Beg for my fuckin’ come.”

You tried to fight but only got another slap to the face, the sting making your eyes water instantly.  

“Beg, whore,” he repeated, yelling.  “I won’t come until I fucking hear it.”

“Please!” you yelped, and in a sense it was genuine, because once he came this would all be over, and maybe-- just maybe-- he would let his guard down long enough for you to feed on this evil son of a bitch.  “Please come, Bucky, come in me, I need it!” 

“Yeah, I know you do,” he laughed confidently, holding you down by your throat as he pumped into you one last time with a shattered moan.  “Fuck!” he sighed, savoring the feeling of your unwilling body forced to accept his seed.  The truth was, you were tighter when you struggled.

He only let you breathe once he was done, and you choked and spluttered for air as he pulled out.  The second you thought you had your bearings together, you were sitting up to lunge at him.  You felt something press against your chest and even before you looked down you knew it was over.

A wooden stake.  He’d had it the whole time.  You looked back at him and he was smiling, the bastard, even as he was still catching his breath from fucking you.  The sight made you shudder.

“I was gonna fuck you, and then kill you,” he admitted, “but now I think I’ll keep you.”

You hissed with a grimace, flashing your fangs, but knew you had no recourse, no options, no way out.

“You look so cute when you’re scared,” he smiled.  “Can’t wait to take you back to mine, trap you in a little salt pentagram, and fuck you senseless whenever I want.”

You whined, closing your eyes as you realized how well and truly fucked you were.  

“It won’t always hurt so bad.  You’ll get used to me.  And I’ll feed you enough to keep you alive.”

Sounded like a cruel existence, but you weren’t ready to get the business end of your stake, so you swallowed dryly and nodded in acceptance of your fate.  

He laughed and placed a chaste kiss on your cheek before guiding you to stand on weak knees.  “C’mon baby, let’s get you home.”

[leam1983]

Have a Nice Death - Quickie

Imagine a Metroidvania with Roguelite elements and an almost Devil May Cry-worthy combat system, and you'll get a sense of what HaND is shooting for.

Long story short, you're Death. You've been Death since time immemorial, and you've hit a point where reaping all these souls on your lonesome is starting to feel tedious. So, after wracking your brain-case for a while, you unleash the Sorrows upon the world and start cherry-picking specific members of the departed to serve as the executive pool of the newly-formed Death Inc. The system works as planned for a long while - the Sorrows kill and Death Inc. processes, but then the processing half of the equation starts to get bogged down. Your character's stature starts to shrink, as I'm choosing to equate this to Death lending more and more of its power to Sorrows and underlings to compensate - which predictably doesn't solve anything.

We open the game with Fate, Death, the Grim Reaper, Previously Tall, Dark and Handsome or however else you want to call it, having a mental breakdown in a sea of fluttering paperwork. Pushed to the brink, you decide to bring the Sorrows and all of Death Inc's employees to heel forcefully. Time to grab that scythe and to get to carrying out what's possibly the only excusable workplace murder spree in History.

As you could expect, the game generates levels procedurally. The Metroidvania aspects come from the presence of specific doors that require particular attacks to unlock, even if what's on the other side isn't a completely distinct instance, in most cases, but instead just another part of the same level. Every four or five floors - separated by the requisite elevator ride and spurts of Muzak, you'll come across a boss of sorts, or a room where one of your executives - who also serve as vendors in the Roguelite tradition - is usually found waiting. So far, I've only come across Mister O'Sha, the Workplace Safety consultant. Seeing as you're in a notably dismal version of the Afterlife, O'Sha leers at you from the depths of his old-fashioned coffin, sadistically noting that increasing workplace accidents by offering you buffs actually improves productivity...

So, as expected, you can have incredibly productive runs and others where four Spooksmen (think beefed-up supernatural white-collar middle-managers) gang up on you, stun-lock you and defeat any attempt you might make to, well, make like Dante. Some resources are unique to each run, others are permanent, and you'll have to make the most of it.

What's really striking is the presentation. Its monochrome grey world is staggeringly detailed, and Death's small size doesn't detract from the clear and legible movements of his attacks. Everything flows into everything else at the press of a button, animation cancels happen on-the-button in the context of a game where everything feels like it's been animated by hand, and the parallax layers offer plenty of eye-candy without detracting from whatever scrape it is you've got going on. Everything has that typical Tim Burton flair of being resolutely graven, but in a grinning, tongue-in-cheek sort of way. Even Death's voice is a nice counterpoint: everyone speaks in adaptation-convenient gibberish following text prompts, while Death's own babbles feel nasal and sardonic, like you're a pint-sized Skeletor beset with career fatigue and with too much of a thing going on for bleak sarcasm to pull an Allan Oppenheimer-worthy cackle, much less the skeleton-required nasal chuckles.

This comes highly, highly recommended. My one, single caveat to the experience has to be the fact that not everything in Death's repertoire is fully animated yet (HaND is still in Early Access) and that some stun-states aren't associated with visual cues yet. Some attacks can negate your ability to pull double jumps for a few seconds, and if you have nothing that indicates your having entered that state, you can enter a drawn-out fight in the assumption that you've got a complete moveset to work with. I'm sure it'll all get fixed before the game enters its Alpha release, however.

[snini-9]

Abnormal Behaviour

All information and images can be found on this site. *as by request, some of the videos here were originally from PETA* As seen with other highly intelligent animals such as apes and elephants, cetaceans often exhibit stereotypical or abnormal behaviour. Repetitive in nature, this behaviour has no obvious goal or function and is thought to be a result of boredom, distress, and frustration related to an unnatural environment. As a cetacean’s natural repertoire of behaviours cannot be satisfied in a barren concrete tank, they may try to reduce the resulting tension by developing destructive behaviours such as self-stranding for prolonged periods of time, biting on metal gates/chewing at the environment, vomiting and self-mutilation, or non-beneficial behaviours such as comatose-like states/lethargy, head bobbing and pacing/circling.

​

Self-stranding is a particularly notable stereotypical behaviour due to its potential to become life-threatening. In captivity, cetaceans are taught to beach themselves on concrete slide outs to present themselves to an audience, or to participate in husbandry behaviours such as having their weight taken. This taught behaviour quickly becomes an abnormal habit as cetaceans have been seen to repetitively slide out and lie motionlessly on concrete surfaces for up to 30 minutes. Killer whales, the largest species of cetacean in captivity, can weigh up to 22,000 pounds. Once beached, the orca’s weight begins to slowly crush its internal organs and damage its muscles, causing stores of myoglobin to be released. Travelling in the bloodstream, the protein reaches the kidneys where it is highly toxic. After a prolonged period of time, the damage to their kidneys is irreversible. Re-entry into the water allows their blood to circulate more freely, and this carries even more myoglobin to the kidneys leading to severe kidney damage.

​

Photographer Reginald Andreas captured the moment a transient orca stranded whilst hunting elephant seal pups on Sea Lion Island, the Falkland Islands. After vomiting repeatedly, the male died.

Additionally, on top of this risk, beached cetaceans can also perish from dehydration and heat exhaustion. Their thick layer of blubber and the lack of water causes cetaceans to overheat, become dehydrated and dry out. In February 2016, Morgan, a female orca at Loro Parque, intentionally beached herself on a slide out for around 10 minutes.

​

Morgan beaching herself on a concrete slide-out at Loro Parque. The skin on her melon began to dry out leading to her trainer, Rafa Sanchez, signalling her to return to the water.

Within this time, the skin around Morgan’s melon dried out in 19°C heat. Following this incident, Kelly Flaherty Clark, SeaWorld Orlando’s director of animal training, admitted she’s seen orcas “slide out for 5 minutes, 10 minutes, 15 minutes, even 30 minutes, on their own.” If Morgan’s skin can dry out in 10 minutes in 19°C heat, it’s unimaginable how damaging this abnormal behaviour can be if performed for 30 minutes at SeaWorld Orlando, Florida, which regularly sees temperatures of up to 28°C.

​

In the wild, only one small population of Patagonian transients in Argentina intentionally strand themselves for hunting purposes. Consisting of around 22 individuals, the whole population was taught how to perform the unique hunting technique by two male orcas named Mel and Bernardo. This cultural behaviour is passed down from generation to generation of Patagonian mammal-eating orcas and, as no captive orcas originate from this population, it’s completely unnatural for the behaviour to be replicated in captivity. Kshamenk, a bull orca at Mundo Marino, is indeed an Argentinian transient but it is unclear whether he is directly related to the stranding orca pod.

​

Despite not originating from Patagonian transients, orcas at Kamogawa SeaWorld seem to be avid participants in this behaviour, as do various other species of cetacean trapped in Japan’s often horribly inadequate tanks.

​https://youtu.be/hJVybEhJGV4

https://youtu.be/CW6-8t_RSyM

Other damaging abnormal behaviours include wearing the teeth by chewing at the environment and regurgitating food. It’s common for under-stimulated and bored orcas to “chew” metal bars and mouth concrete pool corners, like the main stages and concrete slide outs, consequently causing their teeth to become worn, chipped and broken.

​

Morgan chewing on concrete.

Following feeding sessions, captive orcas have been seen to regurgitate their food and play with it. Although this may provide the orca with some stimulation, obsessive regurgitation can lead to health problems as the corrosiveness of stomach acid can damage the lining of the oesophagus as well as already worn teeth. According to John Hargrove, a former senior trainer, all of the whales at SeaWorld Orlando, SeaWorld San Antonio and Marineland Antibes frequently regurgitated their food, to the point that it became a notable problem. Trainers at Marineland Antibes attempted to discourage the behaviour by mixing spiny mackerel (a fish with painful spikes) into their food to make regurgitation painful, and therefore less appealing. However, unwilling to give up their harmful habit, the orcas figured out how much spiny mackerel was in their food, when they ingested it, and when it was less painful to regurgitate it.

​https://youtu.be/Pnj4rvV4htQ

Perhaps the most worrying of all abnormal behaviours witnessed in captivity is self-mutilation. There are various ways a cetacean can harm itself in a captive environment but the most commonly observed behaviour is for a cetacean to ram its head or body into the walls or gates of its tank. A particularly disturbing example of self-mutilative behaviour in captive orcas would be the behaviour of Hugo, a male Southern Resident killer whale who was captured from the wild in February 1968 and housed at Miami Seaquarium. Prior to being moved to “The Whale Bowl” (the tank that currently houses Lolita), Hugo was housed in “The Celebrity Pool” which is so small that it now houses manatees.

​

​Hugo housed in the “The Celebrity Bowl” in the late 1960 – early 1970s.

“The Celebrity Bowl” now housing manatees.

During his stay in this pathetic pool, Hugo developed self-harming behaviour that consisted of him slamming his body into the tank walls. This resulted in a nasty injury on October 1st, 1970 when he slammed his head into the circular ‘acrylic bubble’ feature of his tank and punctured a five-inch hole into it.

​

The acrylic window Hugo smashed his head into

The acrylic sliced off approximately two-inches of his rostrum. Hugo had to undergo a 45-minute operation without a local anaesthetic for his severed flesh to be stitched back onto his rostrum. Despite his veterinarian’s best efforts, the sewn-on tissue turned completely white, died and fell off completely after seven days, although Hugo did make a full recovery within just four months.

​

Newspaper clipping of Hugo’s injury.

Hugo’s self-harming behaviour continued when he was placed in The Whale Bowl with Lolita. On March 4th, 1980, his behaviour proved to be fatal as he slammed his head into a tank wall and suffered a brain aneurysm resulting in his death. He was just 15 years old.  

​

15-year-old Hugo being removed from his tank shortly after his death in 1980.

However, self-harming behaviour at Miami Seaquarium did not end with the death of Hugo. As recently as September 2015, multiple bottlenose dolphins who take part in the oceanarium’s “Top Deck Dolphin Show” were seen to repeatedly hit their heads on the bottom of their tank floor. Watch the video below.

https://youtu.be/QpANcUismqU​

Just like Hugo, Kanduke, a Bigg’s transient housed at SeaWorld Orlando, was also known to participate in self-mutilative behaviour. According to Carol Ray, a former SeaWorld trainer, Kanduke would ram himself as hard as he possibly could into the cement walls, metal gates, and glass panels in the show pool on a daily basis. He bloodied his chin, teeth, and rostrum so badly on some occasions that he was not allowed to participate in shows because management said he looked too bad for the public to see. More recently, Skyla, a female orca at Loro Parque, displayed similar behaviour when she breached onto concrete, effectively slamming her body onto the stage, prior to a show.

Skyla, a female orca at Loro Parque, slamming her body onto a concrete surface.

Morgan, another female orca at the same facility, repeatedly rammed the gate of the medical pool she was held in after she was separated from her tank mate, Tekoa.

https://youtu.be/JIqmG_PE7kQ

Some captive cetaceans take it a step further and leap out of their tanks, hitting the hard concrete floor below. Kotar, a deceased male orca who resided at SeaWorld San Antonio, reportedly jumped out of his tank twice whilst at the facility, requiring staff to clear and flood the entire stadium so that they could float Kotar back into the pool. In 2002, Hudson, another deceased orca, jumped out of his tank at Marineland Canada during a feeding session. Reportedly unharmed, Hudson was placed on a stretcher and lifted by crane back into the pool. Eight years later in 2010, Kuru, a female false killer whale, jumped out of her tank during a show at Okinawa Churaumi Aquarium. She sustained minor scratches and bruises from the incident.

​https://youtu.be/wxzTyQillMQ

As recently as 2015, a dolphin jumped out of its tank at Gulf World, landing directly on its dorsal fin. According to former Gulf World trainer, Ashley Guidry, the marine park’s dolphins would jump out of their tanks so frequently that a metal rail was added to the top of the show tanks to try to discourage the dolphin’s dangerous behaviour. It wasn’t uncommon for trainers to come into the park in the morning to find a beached dolphin lying on the concrete walkway beside their tank.

​

Other abnormal behaviours, such as comatose-like states and logging, are not necessarily harmful when performed, but do carry risks of their own – risks which have been held responsible for contributing to the deaths of two of SeaWorld’s orcas. In captivity, it’s extremely common to see lethargic cetaceans floating motionlessly at the surface, known as logging, or lying perfectly still at the bottom of the pool.

​https://youtu.be/4dHLzWuVvl0

https://youtu.be/A2qhfcTYP8E

https://youtu.be/vkpOzTETYY0

https://youtu.be/RWq7ZxsadAM

These lethargic behaviours are explained to guests who query it as how dolphins rest. However, although this may be the captivity-adapted version, wild dolphins do not stop moving to sleep. As dolphins must be conscious to breathe, they use unihemispheric sleep, in which they shut down one hemisphere of their brain at a time, to rest whilst remaining alert and able to breathe. Whilst in this state, dolphins remain in close proximity to their pod members, slowly moving forward.

​

https://youtu.be/W8UyuSijYsE

​

According to Dr. Naomi Rose, a leading marine mammal scientist, it’s “extremely rare” for wild orcas to remain still for a minute or two, unlike captive orcas who log for hours upon hours at a time. Dr. Rose believes this highly abnormal behaviour is the result of “chronic stress, boredom and inhibition of natural behaviours that occurs as a result of inadequate living conditions” at marine parks and aquariums alike. As for captive orca deaths related to this behaviour, Kanduke, a 19-year-old male, died in 1990 with the St. Louis Encephalitis Virus (SLEV) implicated in his death, followed by Taku, a 14-year-old orca, who succumbed to the West Nile Virus (WNV) in 2007. Mosquitoes, who swarm the orca’s exposed dorsal fins and backs when they’re logging, were held responsible for transmitting the viruses.

[demonfox38]

Okay. Made it through the last season of Netflix's "Castlevania" interpretation. Thoughts are below the cut.

I've often thought of this series as the exploitation version of "Castlevania," and hiring Malcom McDowell confirms that.

Although, I find it hilarious that both Malcolm McDowell and Patrick Stewart have ended up voicing the same character. I'm sure there's a "Star Trek Generations" joke to be made in there, but I'm not Mike Stoklasa.

Also, I was cracking up a bit when Varney's plot twist happened. Mostly, because it came off a bit Skeletor-esque in vocal performance.

Also, also—laughing that the final boss went the "Castlevania: Lament of Innocence" route despite barely touching on that game's plot.

Animation had its ups and downs with this season. It seemed like there were some frame issues (not enough inbetweening.) I do appreciate how they incorporated more of Alucard's SOTN animations into his fights, however.

Additionally, some of the fight scenes' pacing seemed to have issues, particularly regarding weapon recovery.

The whole bit with St. Germain was off. Like, he's a weird asshole in "Castlevania: Curse of Darkness", but he's more of a weird asshole there in the same way that casually encountering "Doctor Who"'s Doctor would also be strange. Not a straight up villainous boob. Kinda makes sense thematically to have another character who is willing to do horrible shit for their lost loved one, but the series honestly did not do a good job establishing her. Like, did she even have a voice actor? Or a name? All I'm saying is it was much easier for outsiders to get the Lisa revenge thing Dracula had going.

Also, how dare you joke about not being deaf and then have a villainous monologue, TV show.

Greta's a good girl. Well, outside of being an occasional homewrecker. Point is, she's competent and trying her best to save people in a bad situation, and anyone having issues with her is not to be trusted in the same way that you don't trust people who don't like Rochelle from "Left 4 Dead 2."

Look at me. Do not trust people who do not like Rochelle from "Left 4 Dead 2." Yes, her writing could have been better, but she's still a viable character. Let people Thunder Child their ships on the rocks of your better self. Got me?

Also, y'all really need to embrace more polyamory. Or understand the fact that Alucard's not going to love just one person in his life. Dude lives to be at least 600 in the game's timeline. For a dude who loves humans, constricting him to just one who may live to be 100 at best is cruel.

There are some interesting philosophical dialogues going on here, but I can see where some people may lose their patience for them. Considering one of Castlevania's most popular memes is a philosophy debate, you're just gonna have to suck that up. My personal favorites included the topic of acting versus reacting, as well as having agency in one's story.

Striga's battle theme was cool, but otherwise, the music was forgettable. Yes, that is a sin. Punishable by Death? In this series, maybe!

The gore's still over the top. Which, okay, fine. There's a bit of that in game. It's just generally a bit more reserved with it or uses it in crucial boss fights.

RIP doggie.

The Targoviste plot's a bit of a wash, but it doesn't feel as useless as Trevor and Sypha's previous plot predicament. It's just nothing of a surprise, considering how many times the writing has played the "authority figures are useless" and "dark secret surprise" tropes in this series. Like, Greta being reliable is actually more surprising than anything with this plot.

I cannot emphasize enough how boring I found Carmilla's interpretation and plot arc. You guys could have had a giant, naked lesbian riding a skull and spewing magic at people while her cat-eared girlfriend jumped them for extra damage. But no. Vanilla lady with a scarlet sword for you. So long. Farewell. Auf Wiedersehen. Good night.  

Gotta say, as much of a deviation from his source character as he is, Isaac really turned out well in this series. He's definitely evidence that you don't always need to stick to source material.

His Abel is fucking sick, dude. Way to go, king.

Also, I was expecting more violence from Hector this season. Oh, well. At least he got a teeny bit of a spine.

Look. I'm not an alchemist by any means. I'm just a bit baffled by this season's emphasis of obtaining a Rebis. Like, any time the game series has talked about the Magnum Opus of Alchemy, it's more been in pursuit of making a Philosopher's Stone (or at the very least, a Crimson Stone, as seen in "Castlevania: Lament of Innocence.") Pulling a Rebis out of the aether is…well. Could have been more interesting than it was. I mean, it was a bit nightmarish, but it really didn't do much.

Sypha's really never getting back to her family, is she?

Love the idea that the cross subweapon is basically a fancy chakram.

GERGOTH. BUDDY. FRIENDO.

Really appreciating the monster variety in these last two seasons. I mean, that's a big selling point of the "Castlevania" games. Not so much vampires standing around and bickering in dick-waving contests.

Breaking out of the bullet points to hit on the big subject of this season—that is, the ending being surprisingly happy.

There's been a lot of shit that's happened over the last few years. Obviously, a pandemic. Konami's run by pricks. Then, there's the situation with the allegations of sexual coercion with Warren Ellis. Additionally, the terrible ending of "Game of Thrones" likely impacted how this season was developed, considering it seemed to be chasing its progression in construction. (I mean, look at Carmilla and Daenerys.) I don't know how many people were happy with the last season of "Castlevania," but from my POV, it double-tapped itself in the foot with the way it pushed simultaneous sex and violence in its last two episodes. My point is, there was little taste for additional darkness, considering everything that has been happening. Society is drained.

A happy ending was what people really wanted. And man, did this pull through, in that regard. But, there's a conversation to be had in if this swerved too far or if it violates some artistic integrity to give people what they want. So, let's have it.

Look. Man. Have you seen a "Castlevania" ending? When you do it right, it's crumbled castles and rainbow-colored skies. If you do it really right, it results in a pretty girl holding the main character's hand. There is happiness in these games. Hope. Forgiveness and redemption. If this is supposed to be any bit an accurate interpretation of these games, it absolutely should end in such a joyful fashion. (Okay, maybe giving Dracula and Lisa a second honeymoon at the end was a bit much, but I get where people would want that.)

Did some items need to be addressed more? Absolutely. Alucard staking people and Hector getting sexually coerced into servitude are some pretty big topics to just wave away. (Oh, shit. That second part is even worse now with what Ellis was allegedly doing, isn't it?) I suppose I'm just glad the series didn't go full Sephiroth with Alucard. And at least Hector finally took some stand in his situation, even if it wasn't the bombastic, hateful revenge I'm used to seeing from this character in other stories.

I think the creators of this series were trying to save this show from the fate of "Game of Thrones." (To some extent, perhaps the "Voltron" re-interpretation as well.) There's so much media out there anymore that if a production team doesn't nail the ending, their creation gets wiped out of the collective consciousness. To that extent, I think the creators were successful in saving their series. Did it do damage to itself in yanking out of its construction and themes? A bit. But, in doing so, it pivoted back to being more like a proper "Castlevania" product. (And of course, by proper, I mean anything ignoring "Lords of Shadows." God, people need to stop chasing other products when developing "Castlevania" stuff and just let the series be as it is.)

I am very curious as to how much of this season was part of an original draft and how much was revised in backlash to everything that has happened. It doesn't seem like Trevor was intended to survive, but to some extent, Sypha had to. (I mean, until she has a kid, anyway. See "Lords of Shadows" series for dickery regarding that.) I'm also wondering if there was more intended for the Carmilla subplot, as much as the series was banging on about her invading locations. I'm not even sure St. Germain was intended to be a villain all along. Getting into a bitchfight with Death? Sure. Doing what he did here? That's a weird arc, dude.

If you come away from my POV with anything, it should be this: GO PLAY THE GAMES.

Do it. Do it, you ghouls. Go to the Steam store and download the "Castlevania Anniversary Collection." Boot up your PS3 or 4 or 18 or whatever and get "Symphony of the Night." Throttle Nintendo's stores until "Aria of Sorrow" or "Dawn of Sorrow" or "Harmony of Dissonance" or whatever rattles out of their moldy pockets. Find a ROM. Find an ISO. Just play a game. Especially, one of the ones made before 2010.

"Castlevania" as a game series isn't about hordes of vampires dick-waving at each other or edgy swearing or being grim and dark. Some of that stuff's there, sure. But, at its core, it's what game developers created when they looked at Universal Monster Movie creations and went "That's cool. Let's fight that!" It's a series about pushing technology in MMC chips to make rich, vibrant music. It's about flourishing artwork and layers of sprites dripping particles and gore onto players. It's sober and goofy and very pro curry.

The thing is, "Castlevania" players have their own unique connection to the series. We're the weirdos you see clapping their hands when a mutilated dinosaur shows up on screen. It's not because the monster alone is cool. It's that we've fought and struggled and bodied that thing through several floors like a goddamn "X-Men: Children of the Atom" stage. It's kicked our asses. We've kicked its ass. We've got a connection to it that you just don't get from passively watching it barf lasers through a computer monitor or TV screen. Like, you know how people go, "Well, the movie wasn't as good as the book?" It's obnoxious, sure. But, those who read the source materials have to go to the effort of constructing their own sets and people to understand what's happening. In a similar fashion, game players build up their own skill set to reach that next rung.

Maybe you don't always get a payout when you invest your resources into something. But, there is a sense of accomplishment, seeing what you can do.

There's a reason this series got an adaptation. I mean, outside of Konami's head executives wanting easy money. "Castlevania" is a fantastic video game series. Has it got a few problems? Oh yeah. Especially after outsourcing and pachislot machines became all the rage. But, there's a reason Simon and Richter Belmont are playable in "Super Smash Bros. Ultimate." There's a reason I spent a significant amount of time playing these games and writing or drawing fanworks for it. These games are wonderful. Beautiful. Difficult, but inspiring. Reasons I will still bang on about them decades years down the road.

When I get exasperated by layers of angst and edge lord content this Netflix series generated, I want you to know why. The roots of this show are good games held captive under poor management. Some people on staff know this. I wish they had more scenario and writing control. But mostly, I don't want to shit on them or their work. (Well, other than perhaps the obvious target.) I just want you to see what I love in these games.

And also to watch Crashervania. Because that's legit.

[hmse-research-blog]

Overwhelming & Brutal

Overwhelming (verb)

Have a strong emotional effect on

Overcome with emotion

Affected by something very strongly

Synonym to: strike, move, affect

Brutal (adjective)

Unpleasant or harsh

Direct without any attempt to disguise unpleasantness

Synonym but not limited to: violent, savage, direct

Brutal & Overwhelming

A combination of both words have a negative-leaning connotation. The experience of course, is subjective to each audience. People who loves seeing horror or action film might find these emotion exhilarating while people who hates loud noises and jump-scare might hate the emotion and feel scared. Study by Lynch and Martins (2015) shows that low empathisers have more tendency to enjoy violent and gore media and vice versa.

Horror enthusiast seeks sensation from suspense and resolve. Suspense for example, is when a character is in threat of a masked killer and resolve is when the killer is finally caught or killed in retaliation. We often feel a sense of euphoria and relieve when a threat is resolved and such logic happens behind a horror enthusiast’s mind.

Zuckerman’s model of sensation-seeking mentions four related but different factors that includes:

thrill and adventure seeking

experience seeking

disinhibition

boredom susceptibility.

Bibliography:

Lissek S., Powers A. S. (2003). Sensation seeking and startle modulation by physically threatening images. Biol. Psychol. 63, 179–197.

Lynch T., Martins N. (2015). Nothing to fear? An analysis of college students’ fear experiences with video games. J. Broadcast. Electron. Media 59, 298–317.

Zuckerman M. (1988). Sensation seeking and behavior disorders. Arch. Gen. Psychiatry 45, 502–503.

Here are the examples of 11 artworks that feels brutal or overwhelming or both:

Requiem for A Dream

(viewer discretion is advised)

Requiem for a Dream (2000) is a film depicting addicts who are connected to each other. This movie often uses parallel cuts to indicate things are happening at the same time. The use of meditative music over heart-wrenching scenes creates a haunting effect. The editing choice in the final scenes successfully created tension and the continuously looping parallel shots of the characters proves to be overwhelming.

Before Your Eyes

Before Your Eyes tells a story of a boy who died very young due to an illness. This game utilises motion sensors and the game progresses every time the player blinks. Each scene is crafted with great details making the players holding their blink to elongate the scene. The first person perspective makes the audience sits in the young boy's place watching life flashing before their eyes. This game is overwhelmingly beautiful and heart-wrenching in its aspect to cherish whatever amount time we have left on earth.

Devotion

In Devotion (2019), the user plays as a father solving clues and puzzles as to what happens in his life. This game criticises the influence of cults in Taiwan. It also heavily criticises overbearing parents and the stigma of mental illness in Asia.

The use of red colour during revelation and flashback scenes and the silent jumpscare during most of the gameplays is very effective to keep the players anxious. This technique also does not over expose the players resulting in a more unpredictable jumpscares. Besides it’s graphic imagery and colour scheme, this game is brutal due to its harsh and raw depictions of cults and superstitions that affects vulnerable families in Taiwan.

Source:

https://www.jstor.org/stable/20059000

https://factsanddetails.com/southeast-asia/Taiwan/sub5_1b/entry-3814.html

Everywhere At The End of Time

This album created by The Caretaker depicts the mind of a patient with alzheimer. The 6 hour long piece involves a continuously degrading set of music. Each stage shows a deteriorated version of it’s previous stage. The album ends at static noises and ultimately long silence.

What makes this album eerie, overwhelming and brutal is the idea behind it. Exposing the audience to what dementia sounds like forces them to emphatise with the memories. The duration of the album also emphasises the slow and painful degeneration and by stage 5 the sudden void creates a horrible overwhelmingly somber aura knowing the memories are forever gone.

Ouroborindra (album)

Ouroborindra (2005) was produced by Jim Jupp under the pseudonym “Eric Zann”. Jupp stated this album was inspired by H.P. Lovecraft. Similar to Lovecraft, this album has a haunting and hair-raising aesthetic. A minute listening session gives the audience a taste of Lovecraftian cosmic horror.

The static noise and continuously evolving sounds creates an overwhelming eeriness while not being painful to hear. Some parts are accompanied by pianos giving the listener’s ear some time to rest. This arrangement choice proves to be excellent as it creates a pleasant bridge and outro.

Source:

https://ghostbox.greedbag.com/buy/ouroborindra-0/

Brutalist Architecture

At a glance, this architecture looks boring and unappealing. What makes a brutalist characteristic is the blocky and chunky design.

Some argue that brutalism is an egalitarian movement, this movement strays away from white painted walls with decorated windows typical of the time. At the time, the geometric and blocky design was considered modern. This evidence appears in futuristic movies and in spy/war movies symbolising rebellion, modernism, and revolution.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011)

Black Mirror (2011)

Source:

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10331867.2015.1032481

Shoujo Tsubaki (Camellia Girl)

(viewer discretion is advised)

Shoujo Tsubaki (1992) is a film adapted from the comic of the same title. The uncensored animation completed with voice acting added many layers of disturbance and the feeling of dread. Many people found this film very upsetting resulting to banning in several countries.

This artwork is one of the greater known titles within the ero-guro (short for erotic-grotesque) genre. The Ero-guro genre symbolises resistance and rebellion during world war 1. Some also enjoy it as escapism and sexual liberation. This film is brutal due to its depiction of grooming, abuse, and nonsensical grotesque scenes.

Source:

https://www.diva-portal.org/smash/record.jsf?pid=diva2%3A1570686&dswid=8039

Sistine Chapel Church

The wall and ceiling of the Sistine Chapel were painted by Michelangelo (1508-1512). It is not surprising that this work took an incredibly arduous time that Michelangelo dreads working on it. The details and paint stand the test of time and the colossus artwork will make every visitor gasps in awe. Each painting has incredible details and the colours are carefully coordinated. It only takes a single glance to feel overwhelmed by the presence of this artwork.

Source:

https://www.jstor.org/stable/1464068

Japan Sinks

Japan Sinks is a Japanese animation series created by Masaaki Yuasa. The animation was an adaptation of a novel with the same title. Each depiction of death are raw and uncensored oftentimes includes close-ups. This series was a contribution to Paralympics 2020 and was set to release as a promotional campaign.

It doesn’t take the brightest bulb to notice the brutality of this series. The main characters experienced sudden deaths of their loved ones and the grief was left unprocessed until much late. Naturally, this end of the world scenario includes a multitude of body counts. Many great characters did not survive and their final scenes include close-ups and slow motion of their remnants making their sudden demise even more brutal, leaving a gaping hole in the viewer’s heart.

Judith Slaying Holofernes (Artemisia Gentileschi version)

The painting showed an “uncensored” gory scene of Judith beheading her abuser helped by another woman. It is said that Gentileschi was inspired by her master, Caravaggio. Caravaggio’s version had a different composition and the painting shows Holofernes holding his blood, resembling strings.

Judith beheading Holofernes (Caravaggio)

Unlike her master, Gentileschi did not hold back nor consider making the painting palatable for the viewer. The more brutal interpretation made the intention behind the painting even clearer. It is one of the strongest depiction of complex independent women and a strong message of feminism in baroque era.

Source:

https://digitalcommons.butler.edu/urc/2018/arthistory/2/

Notre Dame Basilica (Montreal)

This gothic style cathedral is located in Quebec City, Montreal. The three-story-tall hall symbolises the church’s power and the huge size of a cathedral has been known to give psychological effects to the devoters. The blue colours represent the sky and heaven, the red colours complemented by gold accents gives a royalty and majestic look. The pillars will reverberate the sound of organs creating an effect of “heavenly sounds”, many believers are attracted to this sound resulting in higher attendance. The design of the cathedral makes the attendees feel small and overwhelmed as if the church attendees are “meeting” God.

Source:

https://www.mdpi.com/2077-1444/11/9/478/htm

https://askinglot.com/why-are-gothic-cathedrals-so-tall

Final short reflection:

Each of the artworks above shows a great amount of research and thoughts poured into the small details. They each have their own unique approach creating unique and impactful results.

[randomvarious]

Moby - “Bodyrock” Crossing All Over! Volume 10 1999 Big Beat

You all know who Moby is. He’s one of the most successful, talented, and eclectic electronic music producers of his generation. He’s the American who made big beat and sample-laden dance tracks achieve popularity in the US at the turn of the century. He’s an electronic music chameleon; he’s techno, he’s downtempo, he’s big beat, he’s ambient, and he’s even punk and alternative rock. He’s had a long, storied career, with plenty of hits and questionable decisions that have resulted in some really high highs and equally really low lows. 

By the time Moby released his fifth album, Play, which ended up becoming considered by many critics to be one of the greatest albums ever recorded in the history of music, he thought it was his final album. Just four years prior, he had released the critically acclaimed Everything Is Wrong, which Spin named its album of the year. He ended up selling a respectable 250,000 copies of the record worldwide, but for the amount of praise it received, and for being on a major label (Elektra), it was a mediocre showing. From jump, that appeared to be Moby’s curse, as it was for most electronic talents: good music, but bad sales; a niche market conquered, but little else beyond that.

Whatever likability Moby had accrued since the UK success of his 1991 techno track, “Go,” which sampled music from Twin Peaks, nearly disintegrated into thin air with the release of his fourth album, 1996′s Animal Rights, which saw him ditching dance music for a blend of alternative rock, hardcore punk, and ambient music. Fans and critics both hated this turn and washed their hands of him almost entirely. It appeared that everyone was just about done with Moby, and that Moby was just about done with himself. Animal Rights turned out to be an album that brought him within an inch of career suicide.

But by 1999, he had decided to go back to dance and electronic music and the result was Play. However, no one seemed to want to give Play any play at all. Moby shopped it to a number of big record labels, but at that point he was regarded as a has-been; a guy who’d run out of good fortune because of his uncompromising strong will and his insufferable need to be an artist. But Richard Branson’s V2 label, which was only three years old at the time, decided to take a chance on it.

From a quote in Rolling Stone:

First show that I did on the tour for Play was in the basement of the Virgin Megastore in Union Square. Literally playing music while people were waiting in line buying CDs. Maybe forty people came.

Most of the critics adored Play and saw it as a work of contemporary creative genius; a real mover-of-the-sticks kind of album. No one, at least no American, had ever made an album quite like it before. It was uptempo, it was downtempo, it had blues samples, it had breakbeats, it was more than danceable, and it was also quite emotional and vulnerable. It was an amalgamation of a lot of different things, and it was a beautiful representative mess of the post-modern, recently-formed digital age, which, at the time, appeared to be bringing the world closer together than it had ever been before, at least from a cultural standpoint. It was music that had a little something for just about everyone. But that was what initially appeared to have ben its fatal flaw, too. See, Play didn’t fit into any pre-defined, carefully crafted, easily marketable categories; It wasn’t rock, it wasn’t pop, it wasn’t hip hop, and it wasn’t R&B. So radio and MTV passed on every song. The album certainly had no home in America, and it didn’t sell all that well in the UK either. 

So Moby decided to sell the album out, literally. He licensed every single song off of Play for commercials, TV, movies, and video games, which were all industries that were more receptive to the varied sounds of the album. People would be exposed to Play through other indirect and less conventional means. And with every track licensed and songs appearing in nearly every medium that had audio, except for radio and MTV, Play, almost a year after its release, started to finally gain some commercial traction.

Here’s an illuminating Moby quote from that same Rolling Stone article:

Almost a year after it came out in 2000 I was opening up for Bush on an MTV Campus Invasion Tour. It was degrading for the most part. Their audience had less than no interest in me. February in 2000, I was in Minnesota, I was depressed and my manager called me to tell me that Play was number one in the UK, and had beat out Santana's Supernatural. I was like, :But the record came out 10 months ago.” That's when I knew, all of a sudden, that things were different. Then it was number one in France, in Australia, in Germany—it just kept piling on. [...] The week Play was released, it sold, worldwide around 6,000 copies. Eleven months after Play was released, it was selling 150,000 copies a week. I was on tour constantly, drunk pretty much the entire time and it was just a blur. And then all of a sudden movie stars started coming to my concerts and I started getting invited to fancy parties and suddenly the journalists who wouldn't return my publicist's calls were talking about doing cover stories. It was a really odd phenomenon.

Play only peaked at #38 on the Billboard 200, but it sold two million copies in the States alone. It was on charts across the world for several fucking years. And it finally brought dance music to the American mainstream.

There were two songs that almost didn’t make it onto Play though: “Porcelain,” which Moby hated, and “Bodyrock,” which Moby’s two managers hated. His managers complained that “Bodyrock” was a total ripoff of Fatboy Slim, which...fair..., and that it was tacky. But Moby wanted to keep it on there. He had sampled a classic hip hop song by Spoonie Gee and the Treacherous Three for it called “Love Rap,” which held sentimental value for him, and is the only vocal sample on the song (”Non-stop y’all, to the beat y’all, the body rock y’all...”). 

At the top of this post, I called Moby an electronic music chameleon, and “Bodyrock” is the song that saw him almost seamlessly morphing into a god of the big beat sound, somehow briefly placing himself among the ranks of The Prodigy, The Chemical Brothers, and of course, the aforementioned Fatboy Slim. And he managed to do it with just one fucking song. For “Bodyrock,” Moby basically took all the things that got those three big beat acts constantly lumped into the same category, as well as all the things that made them stand apart from each other, and then he mortared-and-pestled it all to death, reducing it all into a fine powder that he could re-arrange and re-apply into his own stunning creation.

“Bodyrock” is a song that’s layered wonderfully and fuses sounds from many different instruments and genres to make something that’s intense as hell, especially for a mainstream audience, but still highly enjoyable. It’s a perfect fusion of rock, hip hop, and dance music, all packaged together into one, solidly cranking song. 

Moby starts with the drum-and-vocal sample from Spoonie Gee and The Treacherous Three and then adds two layers of guitars, one with an acidified, throttling, crunchy funkiness, a la Fatboy Slim, that’s inspired by Gang of Four’s 1981 track, “What We All Want,” and one with a thin and whining kind of wah that’s also a bit funky, and which later on becomes an integral part of the chorus. Then Moby infuses the track with some hardness, with heavy drums and bass, as well as hand-claps. Rapper Nikki D, who released an album on Def Jam in 1991, then proceeds to appear out of nowhere for the chorus, pretty clearly trying to sound like MC Lyte’s nearly-forgotten 1996 jam, “Cold Rock a Party”. And along with Ms. D comes the most important piece of the recipe, the bow and ribbon that ties the whole song together, the streaming and high-pitched cinematic strings, which replace the Gang of Four-styled guitar, and are underlaid with a rumbling, motoring, thick bassline that also plays along to the string melody itself. 

Two unique and brief pieces then come later on, one that sounds like a combination of clean and dirty aquatics, with a brief, pleasant keyboard melody that sounds submerged in water, but still near the surface, and a swampy and swishy, mud-in-your-galoshes type of rhythm beneath it. Then, before the song’s final push, the other brief piece appears, which sounds like those frequencies you might hear from a hearing test machine, laced with Nikki D’s vocals, the drum break from Spoonie Gee and The Treacherous Three, and some bounding bass.

To close out the masterpiece, Moby lets the chorus ride, and then adds the “Love Rap” vocal back in. You’d think playing two vocals concurrently would clash and make the song unlistenable at that point, but somehow, they don’t. They happen to work really well, and when played together along with everything else, they yield the most intense and enjoyable part of the song.  

Play ended up having a total of twelve music videos and a quarter of them were for “Bodyrock”. The first two have a similar theme of British guys, all of whom except for one are white, dancing terribly, but also passionately:

The second one features a car explosion at the end!:

And the third one, which has a Run-D.M.C. cameo (!), shows Moby donning special sunglasses that allow him to see talented dancers everywhere:

Even almost a year after Play was released, it appeared that it was going to be Moby’s swan song and the death of his career. But the decision to license changed all of that, and if ever there was some kind of universal music award for “comeback artist of the year,” Moby would have absolutely won that thing. But in the immortal words of LL Cool J, “don’t call it a comeback,” because while the original best hope for Play was to return to the similar sales and critical appeal of Everything Is Wrong, it managed to far exceed that wishful and shortsighted forecast. Moby was comeback artist of the year and damn near MVP also. It was a wild, totally unexpected, and fantastic turn of events for his career and wellbeing. He almost stopped making music, but now he can’t stop making music. He released an album just this year.

I wholeheartedly agree with the critics who list Play as one of the greatest albums ever made. Not only is it fucking tremendous on its own, but It marked a much-needed turning point for Moby’s career, which undoubtedly kept him going, and still keeps him going today. And one of the many amazing songs on that album that makes Play what it is, is that consummate, brief bit of big beat greatness, that banger of a cut that almost didn’t make it onto the album, the one and only “Bodyrock”; a song that still manages to bop as hard as it did when it originally came out 20-plus years ago.

[panicpixeldreamgirl]

The troubled Friday the 13th video game is still a great horror MP

The rough waters of Friday the 13th

There hasn’t been a time when Gun Media’s Friday the 13th wasn’t in trouble. From it’s release in 2017, the licensing fight between Gun Media and Victor Miller ( who is the writer of the Friday 13th screenplay ) caused doubt on the future of the game, at one point halting the game’s progression entirely.

The focus of the game pits one player as the OG momma’s boy Jason against up to seven players who play counselors. The goal as Jason is to kill as many counselors as he can ( some of the kill animations are nice but brutal winks to the movie franchise). The goal for the counselors is to either escape or survive long enough that time runs out for the killer. Unfortunately it has been announced that it’s dedicated servers are shutting down. But even with it’s shaky past and even more turbulent future, Friday the 13th’s game format is still one to take notes on especially for replayability on horror asymmetrical multi-players.

(Friday the 13th the game )

The everyday horrors…of objectives

Horror games are terrifying to me. DBD and Friday the 13th are the first horror games that I could play regularly. As the horror elements scariness eroding away, the horror of objectives replaced it. While a silent Myers or a too close Jason still gives me a jump, the games themselves stopped scaring me overall, which isn’t bad. They became fun, frustrating, competitive and exciting ( sometimes all in the same game ). The thrill of the game became the calling call for an asymmetrical game , which is directly connected to replayability.

One of the banes of asymmetrical is it’s limited objectives. For DBD while there is the thrill of getting better, the game has the same almost singular objectives for survivors. This of course is to escape but by three means, through the exit gate, through the hatch ( both are based solely by generator repair ) or by death ( which is never recommended ). The matches are fun but limiting and repetitive.

While playing DBD, I also started playing Friday the 13th which was the fresh air I needed. Hectic and chaotic, the multiple objectives for escape not only had different levels of risk but also provided more ways to survive. There is even a way to kill Jason himself. Of course this may be hindered by your teammates but as I repeat to myself while playing online games “Maybe next game will be better.”

( Repairing is just the start, hopefully surviving is the end. )

Characters that are more than a pretty face

Dead by Daylight offers perks at first unique to each survivor and killer, but at a certain level both killers and survivors can receive perks from other characters even before reaching the necessary level 40 if you have enough shards for the shrine.

While the killer’s still have unique abilities that can allow a nice pool of choices on power / perk combinations, the perk distribution causes survivors to become just skins with no pro or cons except for visibility differences. In Friday the 13th, both Jason and counselors have perks as well but the counselors have a spread of stats of stamina, luck, composure and other qualities . These stats affect how they perform not only in the game overall but also how they would perform in specific situations. From working faster getting the car ready to dealing with the fear of Jason nearby, the added layer of stats with counselor provides the “hunted” with variety and customization which makes it easier for more choices to flourish without a too big of meta determinations.

( Tiffany is one of many counselors who each have a combination of high, low and so-so stats. )

To the turbulent future

It’s unsure what’s going to happen to Friday the 13th, but as seen even recently with horror multiplayer games like Phasmophobia or horror asymmetrical games like In Silence, the genre is consistently finding it’s mark outside single player campaigns. Friday the 13th’s subtle pushes that differentiates itself from others should be noted since it provides the much needed variance and robust character choices to help keep players playing even when the frights are gone and the true nightmare of teamwork and objectives go bump in the night.

[singingbun]

Demon Slayer/Kimetsu no Yaiba retrospect; economic storytelling

Perhaps it's easy to clarify a few things before I proceed: I have read/finished the manga. I watched the movie just recently. And as much as I love this series just as the next fan, I'm not really obsessed with this series as much as others I've been paying attention to. So you can imagine my surprise to find how the global audience seemed to love this movie more than what I'd expected to.

Now don't worry, I'm not a hype killer; nor do I want to downplay people's hype/love for this series. Personally, though it isn't one the top series for me, I can say though how I can see why this phenomenon happened.

As the title of this post implies, I think the perfect way to breakdown the secrets of its success as a lot to do with the economical approach of storytelling. What I mean by this? I am referring to how evenly paced this series as in both its anime runtime and the manga's formulaic approach in how it tells its tale. If I dare say it, I feel like Demon Slayer sums up the perfect balance of a shounen jump manga series; as it follows a beat-by-beat structure of events. Naruto, Bleach and One Piece all share the same troupes, but have the common complaints; too many characters. Too many long-winded arcs. Too many plot twists over plot-twists. Jump-cuts or overbearing expositions in its world building. Power-levels.

In an era of post Bleach and Naruto, its obvious that Shounen Jump editors sought to find mangakas to reach their expectations to the level of these two aforementioned titles. And so we get stories like My Hero Academia, Black Clover, Demon Slayer, etc. that appropriately share a similar story trend. And though MHA and Black Clover does deserve credit, Demon Slayer, in my opinion, works as the barest of the Shounnen formula.

From the get go, the story starts at the highest stakes. A family-oriented MC joins the Demon slaying corps to avenge his family's death while finding a cure to his sister who has become a demon. Sounds simple and direct as a motivation. But here's where the genius of the story comes in. Rather than add embellishing world-building surrounding the MC, the author throws away the 'fat' of its world-building and dives straight into the heart of its protagonist. We don't just have an encounter with the unknown, we see how Tanjiro suffered because of it. I think the failure of some shounen series is the many 'distractions' it gives to the reader when it came to the world-building. Demon Slayer becomes a very accessible series to dive into because it emphasizes on a very accessible theme of loss, love, danger and desperation. Again, I'm not dismissive of other series who follows the same formula, but this series takes a very realistic emotion into the context of a fantasy setting.

I think the kicker to add to this is because Tanjiro as a protagonist is not only likeable to read, but because his character is in many ways a breath of fresh air to the genre. Compassionate, protective, weak but he isn't compulsive nor brash. Most of all, despite his empathy, his morality does not prevent him to shy away the truth that sympathetic personalities doesn't excuse their heinous deeds. And that's the thing, most of the characters of Demon Slayer actually follow a basic trait or personality of its genre. But what the author does, instead of giving us extra layers of too many exposition of dialogue of why and how motivated they are to their goals, the author gives enough to make us understand and create the stakes to test and flourish the basic concepts that make up their characters. This kind of approach in writing characters are akin to one simple rule in successful fantasy novels. Why create a complicated magic systems when you can take a basic magic system but explore the capacity and influence of the world?

This brings me to another point: its magic system. Yes, its not spells, element bending, etc. But it's still a magic system, but with swords and breathing. The way the author takes a simple magic system of the art of 'breath' perhaps is the most unique, but not necessarily new. The fact that the system is basic enough also gives newcomers of the series less homework in how they understand the world of Demon slayer. The fact that it follows the basic framework not only contributes much of the story, it doesn't become overbearing enough to throw the audience to the deep end.

And that's as far as I've gotten today. Feel free to disagree.

[britesparc]

Weekend Top Ten #442

Top Ten Transformers Gimmicks

There was a time when I felt that this blog was pretty much wall-to-wall Robots in Disguise. Seems I couldn’t go more than two or three weeks without some list or another ranking my favourite Autobots, Decepticons, issues of the Marvel UK comic, issues of the IDW comic, my favourite artists, my favourite alternate modes, my favourite ways Optimus Prime came back from the dead… basically, what I’m saying is I used to write about Transformers quite a lot.

Recently, though? The last year or two? Not so much in the way of sentient mechanoids round these parts. I think partly this is a result of the ending of the original IDW continuity; whilst the rebooted Transformers comic is good, I must confess it hasn’t grabbed me the way the (for want of a better term) More Than Meets the Eye era did. I don’t think it possibly could; the interweaving continuity, the shared universe, the multi-layered world-building and puzzle-box writing, all combined to form a perfect storm around my most beloved of franchises. Did it go too deep, too dense? Occasionally. Did it end too soon, rushing into a climactic conclusion without the room to allow every plot twist and character death to sufficiently breathe? Yeah, a little. But on the whole it stuck the landing, not too shabby a feat for a galaxy-spanning epic that, under various creators, had managed to tell a more-or-less consistent story (papering over the cracks of several soft reboots) for over a decade at that point. As I’ve written before, I loved that Transformers so hard, it was almost inevitable that whatever came next would suffer by comparison, because by definition it could no longer be my Transformers.

So, yeah, that’s one reason. But another is, it’s been harder to think of things to write about. I’ve talked about favourite characters and stories; where else do I go but the increasingly obscure? However, I wanted to give it a try. Last weekend should have been TF Nation, the delightful Transformers convention held each year in Birmingham. I usually go; I gave last year a miss, but I’d been fully intending to make the trip again this year. And then 2020 happened, being all 2020 in our faces. This is a weekend where I might have shared my favourite moments from TFN! Pictures of cosplay! Of friends and creatives I admire! Of toys I can’t afford! But no; instead I’m watching my wife play Stardew Valley and writing this blog (which, I’ll be honest, is actually quite a pleasant way to spend the time, but let’s not get too deep into the weeds over here). Anyway, to celebrate TF Nation, and the stay-at-home “Big Broadcast of 2020” online show that they put on, I’m returning to the Nucleon Well once again with another Transformers-themed Top Ten.

This week: my favourite Transformers toy gimmicks!

Transformers, of course, are cars and whatnot that turn into robots or what-have-you, but across the years Hasbro has experimented with different modes and features to keep the toys fresh and unique, and also to sell a bunch of new ones to impressionable kids. Some of these are sublime; some, frankly, ridiculous. So this week I will explore my ten favourite ones; my ten favourite sub-brands of the franchise, so to speak. Some of these I think are genuinely fantastic as a concept; some, I just liked because it seemed cool, or was made cool by the fiction; and some are just daft crap that I enjoy. Make of it what you will! I’ve decided, incidentally, to focus on “gimmicks” here as being different modes of transformation, or other associated features, rather than define them by what they turn into. So there are no Insecticons or Dinobots, because whilst bugs and beasts are cool, really those are both normal types of Transformer that turn from one thing into another thing. Make sense?

Good. Now roll the eff out.

Combiners (1985): what’s better than one robot? How about, like, five or six, and they all clip together to form another massive robot? Clipping machines together to make bigger machines seems like a cornerstone of any sufficiently advanced civilisation, and whether we’re talking the complexity of OG combiner Devastator, the hot-swappable fun of the likes of the Aerialbots or Stunticons, or even Dreadwind and Darkwing combining in vehicle mode to form Dreadwing, it’s always great. Plus it makes you want to buy all the toys so you can make the big robot! Everyone’s a winner!

Headmasters (1987): robots whose heads – get this – come off and turn into little robots. What’s not to love? And the little robots (what are the heads) then can sit inside the big robots’ vehicle modes, and, like “drive” them and stuff. Although they had some plot gymnastics to perform to make sense of the fiction (quite why the heads had to be Nebulons and not just other Transformers I don’t know), but as a toy gimmick, they were fab. And that’s before you get to most-wanted Fortress Maximus, whose head turned into a robot whose head turned into a robot.

Pretenders (1988): man, I loved Pretenders, even if the concept outstripped the toys a lot of the time. Basically humanoid shells that hide Transformers, later iterations also allowed for animal shells, vehicle shells, even transforming shells; we got new versions of classic Transformers, and one of the all-time great villains in Thunderwing. All this despite the first lot of toys being bulky and awkward, and the whole idea of “disguising yourself as a thirty-foot human” being somewhat suspect in the first place.

Triple (and more!) Changers (1985): if a robot turning into a thing is cool, then turning into two things must be twice as cool, right? Right! Boggling the mind as to how this chunky figure could also be a car and a helicopter, Triple Changers were great, even if you ended up with a helicopter that really, really looked a lot like a car. Of course, they got bigger and better, with Six Changers, who turned into six different things that all looked a lot like each other.

Powermasters (1988): back to the “Masters” concept of little robots that interact with bigger robots (it’s such a shame Pretenders couldn’t have been “Disguise Masters” or something), the idea that the toys transformation – the big gimmick behind the whole range, remember – is unlocked by an “engine” robot is very cool, the smaller toy acting as a key. A tad clunkier than that, in real life, but still great fun, and of course it brought us one of the best toys of the eighties in Powermaster Optimus Prime.

Targetmasters (1987): robots turning into guns is quite cool, but for me the Targetmasters aren’t quite as successful as their other “Masters” siblings, probably because the guns aren’t quite that exciting to transform or play with. But the concept still rocks, and some of the toys were really good, and it was nice to see the Movie characters get folded into the line too.

Jumpstarters (1985): I loved the original Jumpstarters (Top Spin and Twintwist) because they were weird, with their sci-fi alien designs amidst a sea of Earth vehicles. But their gimmick was they transformed themselves. Pull ‘em back and they jump – literally – from vehicle to robot. Self-transforming Transformers are always cool, even if usually it means that their robot modes end up blocky and simple (Jumpstarters are the opposite, pretty cool robots with chunky and unreal vehicles). Also want to shout out other pull-back-and-go Transformers such as the Battlechargers (never had them, sadly) and the utterly, utterly fantastic Throttlebots. God, I love the Throttlebots. I had all six! How much did I rock.

Cities (1986): I guess now these guys are all called “Titans” aren’t they, and they have their own carved-out portion of the TF mythos. But back in the eighties, they were just big burly dudes, the biggest you could get; Transformers that turned into actual cities, playsets that the smaller Transformers could actually interact with. Metroplex was the OG city-bot, and we’d squint and pretend that he really was Autobot City from The Transformers: The Movie. Huge toys are always fun, of course, as are playsets for your other toys, so these ticket loads of boxes. Fortress Maximus, the later Autobot Headmaster base, was ginormous and never came out in the UK, giving him a mythic status few toys ever had; as I said above his head turned into a robot which had a head that turned into a robot, a sort of Babushka doll of robotic head-swapping. Shout-out too for any bot who had some kind of “base mode”, such as Powermaster Optimus Prime and his funky trailer.

Sparkabots/Firecons (1988): these were not necessarily the most fun toys to transform (the Sparkabots, anyway, I never had a Firecon), but their gimmick was cool – or rather hot. They breathed fire! Well, not really, of course; they sort of shot sparks, in what I thought was a slightly underwhelming fashion even as a seven-year-old. But having a Transformer that could, in some way, fire for real was a huge thrill. Also, Guzzle was always just legitimately cool.

Action Masters (1990): yep, I’m going there. What, did you think I’d have Micromasters on here?! Yeah, okay, the very concept of Transformers that don’t transform is inherently silly and counter-intuitive, but the toys themselves were cool, finally offering cartoon-accurate renditions of classic favourites, with nice articulation and fun vehicle playsets. There was definitely a sad sense of a brand in decline about them, but taken on their own, they were good, fun toys, full of character, and I’ve always thought they’d still be cool as a side-line to the main (actually transforming) toys.

I feel bad for slagging off Micromasters up there. They were good, I suppose, but their small fiddly nature and basic transformation just wasn’t as fun as some other toys. Plus there were so many, and they usually came in sets, so I never really had that same bond with individual characters that I got from other Transformers; they were probably the first toys I owned whose names I forgot. And they felt, even at the time, like such a response to Micro Machines that it was almost embarrassing. Action Masters were probably a response to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles but at least, y’know, Soundwave didn’t come with nunchucks and a skateboard.

Anyway, I think we can all agree, Transformers are cool, and I should write about them even more.

[thecreaturecodex]

Demon Lord, Zevgavizeb

Image © Paizo Publishing, by Luca Sotgiu. Accessed at his ArtStation here

[Commissioned by @monstersdownthepath​. I haven’t read the Extinction Curse Adventure Path, a series of Pathfinder 2e adventures that deal with Zevgavizeb’s cult, but I did read through the Pathfinder Wiki article, which draws heavily from that source. So this version might not be 100% canon approved. ]

Demon Lord, Zevgavizeb CR 26 CE Outsider (extraplanar) This hideous monstrosity is the size of a building. It looks vaguely like a carnivorous dinosaur, being a biped with a fanged maw and long tail, but bat-like wings grow from its shoulders and instead of arms it has tentacles tipped with extra, slime-dripping mouths. The stench is appalling, almost a physical presence.

Zevgavizeb, Lord of the Troglodytes CE male demon lord of caverns, reptiles and troglodytes Domains Animal, Chaos, Evil, Strength Subdomains Demon, Ferocity, Resolve, Saurian* Favored Weapon spiked gauntlet Unholy Symbol a twisted tentacle ending in a talon Worshipers chaotic evil lizardfolk, morlocks, chaotic evil saurians, troglodytes Minions fiendish dinosaurs, fiendish giant reptiles, phantosaurs For information on his Obedience and boons for his worshipers, see Book of the Damned *Zevgavizeb’s followers can use the Saurian subdomain to modify the Animal domain

Zevgavizeb is the Lord of the Troglodytes, a demon lord of great power but little ambition. In ancient times, he was a powerful qlippoth, but was transformed into a demon lord by a chorus of proteans who infused him with soul energy half as an experiment, half as a distraction. He dwells in the Gluttondark, an Abyssal layer consisting of multiple strange hollow worlds filled with cruel and wicked monsters. The residents of the Gluttondark wage war in his name, for once a realm is defeated, Zevgavizeb visits it to consume all of its denizens down to the smallest insect. When not feasting, he slumbers fitfully, lashing out at anything in his path if his rest is disturbed. 

Zevgavizeb is immensely strong, and he enhances his natural weapons with magic before charging into battle. The fluid that oozes from his body is filled with supernatural venom, and creatures that succumb to its stench are nauseated forever unless treated by magic. He can summon demons and demonically warped dinosaurs to fight on his behalf, and usually uses these to soften up foes for a few rounds while studying their tactics and learning their weaknesses. If his natural weapons are insufficient, Zevgavizeb can vomit forth an army of the ghosts of the greatest beasts he has eaten, and conjure meteors and walls of lava to crush and burn his enemies.

Zevgavizeb cares little for his worshipers except for as a source of sacrifices, but desires them to dominate other races in their strength and devour the weak as he does. Evil reptilian humanoids are his most common worshipers, with the species of troglodytes having been a fulcrum of his religion for eons. As Zevgavizeb retreats from actively nurturing his cult, his form has grown even more bizarre and debased. In addition, qlippoths are known to tolerate his worshipers instead of attempting to murder them on sight. Some scholars suggest that Zevgavizeb may be regressing into his original qlippothic form, whereas others insist that such a transformation is impossible.

Zevgavizeb                 CR 26 XP 2,457,000 CE Colossal outsider (chaos, demon, demon lord, evil, extraplanar) Init +8; Senses blindsense 200 ft., darkvision 120 ft., Perception +35, scent, true seeing Aura cloak of chaos (DC 26), frightful presence (150 ft., DC 33), impossible stench (30 ft., DC 33) Defense AC 41, touch 14, flat-footed 33 (-8 size, +8 Dex, +27 natural, +4 deflection) hp 635 (31d10+465); regeneration 20 (deific or mythic) Fort +29, Ref +31, Will +32 DR 20/cold iron, good and epic; Immune ability damage, ability drain, charm effects, compulsion effects, death effects, electricity, energy drain, petrification, and poison; Resist acid 30, cold 30, fire 30; SR 37 (43 vs. divinations) Defensive Abilities abyssal resurrection, cloak of chaos, fortification (25%), nondetection, unstoppable Offense Speed 50 ft., climb 30 ft., swim 30 ft., fly 120 ft. (average) Melee great bite +42 (4d6+19/19-20 plus grab), 2 tentacle bites +42 (2d8+19 plus poison), 2 wings +40 (2d8+12 plus trip), tail slap +40 (4d6+12 plus push) Space 30 ft.; Reach 30 ft. Special Attacks fast swallow, iron stomach, push (10 ft.), spectral stampede, swallow whole (AC 37, 63 hp, 4d6+21 plus 4d6 acid), trample (4d6+21, DC 44) Spell-like Abilities CL 26th, concentration +34 Constant—cloak of chaos (DC 26), greater magic fang (+5, all weapons), nondetection (self only), true seeing At will—cloudkill (DC 23)M, dispel good (DC 23), greater dispel magic, greater teleport (self plus 50 lbs. only), mind thrust VI (DC 24) 3/day—earthquake M, finger of death (DC 25)M, fluid form, empowered psychic crush IV (DC 26), quickened strong jaw, summon demons and dinosaurs, word of chaos (DC 25)M 1/day—clashing rocks (DC 27), dominate monster (DC 27), meteor swarm (DC 27)M, wall of lava M = Zevgavizeb can use the mythic version of this spell-like ability in his realm Statistics Str 48, Dex 26, Con 40, Int 19, Wis 29, Cha 27 Base Atk +31; CMB +53 (+57 grapple); CMB 75 Feats Cleave, Combat Reflexes, Critical Focus, Empower SLA (psychic crush IV), Exhausting Critical, Fatiguing Critical, Great Cleave, Hover, Improved Critical (great bite, tentacle bite), Iron Will, Lightning Reflexes, Multiattack, Power Attack, Quicken SLA (strong jaw), Stand Still Skills Acrobatics +34 (+42 when jumping), Climb +48, Fly +33, Intimidate +31, Knowledge (arcana, dungeoneering, nature, religion) +27, Knowledge (planes) +30, Perception +35, Sense Motive +35, Stealth +30, Swim +48; Racial Bonus +8 Stealth Languages Abyssal, Celestial, Draconic, Undercommon, telepathy 300 ft. SQ demon lord traits, no breath Ecology Environment any land or underground (Abyss) Organization unique Treasure incidental Special Abilities Impossible Stench (Su) All living creatures within 30 feet of Zevgavizeb must succeed a DC 33 Fortitude save or be permanently nauseated. A creature that succeeds its save is immune to the impossible stench of Zevgavizeb for the next 24 hours. This is a poison effect, and the save DC is Charisma based. Iron Stomach (Ex) Zevgavizeb’s stomach has his full natural armor bonus to AC. If a creature cuts its way free of Zevgavizeb’s stomach, it can use swallow whole again the next round its regeneration is functioning. Poison (Su) Bite—injury; save Fort DC 40; frequency 1/round for 10 rounds; effect 6d6 acid damage and 1d8 Con drain; cure 3 consecutive saves. The save DC is Constitution-based. Spectral Stampede (Su) As a standard action, Zevgavizeb can create a stampede of spectral dinosaurs and other prehistoric beasts that fills an area 30 feet across and 100 feet long, starting from a square adjacent to him. All creatures in the area take 15d12 points of force damage (Ref DC 33 half). Any creature that takes damage from this ability must succeed a DC 33 Fortitude save or be stunned for 1 round. Zevgavizeb can use this ability three times per day, and must wait 1d4 rounds between uses. The save DC is Charisma based. Summon Demons and Dinosaurs (Sp) When Zevgavizeb uses his summon demons ability, he may also summon dinosaurs with the half-fiend template. Unstoppable (Ex) If Zevgavizeb starts his turn suffering from any or all of the following conditions, he recovers from them at the end of his turn: blind, confused, dazed, deafened, dazzled, exhausted, fatigued, nauseated, sickened, slowed, staggered, and stunned.

[peoplelikegames]

Steam Games Festival: I played so many demos. My thoughts...

I spent a few days playing as many of these demos as I could and wrote down some rough impressions.

Black Book (Morteshka): Heavily atmospheric and steeped in Slavic mythology. You play as a Slavic woman named Vasilisa, attempting to bring back her husband, who has committed suicide, back from hell in an effort to save him from the eternal damnation that their religion believes befell those who commit suicide. She becomes a witch after venturing through the gates of hell and back. The gameplay takes several different forms, depending on what you’re doing. It’s got some point-and-click adventure game elements during the more exploration focused scenes. Sometimes you’ll find herbs that can be used as items later during combat. The combat plays out like Slay the Spire and other deck builder games of the ilk, with the key exception of the spell slots. Instead of the standard 3 energy system restricting card usage each turn, here you have 3 slots that can be filled with spells that correspond with the slot type. You have 2 Order slots (big spells) and 1 Key slot (little spells) you can fill each turn. It’s a small twist to the formula that opens up a lot of interesting possibilities and combinations. In between fights and the point-and-click scenes you’ll get to interact with people you meet along the path to your destination and make choices that effect the story and your character. Vasalisa’s journey looks bleak and full of death, and I’m interested to see where it goes.

AK-Xolotl (Daniel Piqueras Constantin): Fast paced, adorable and aggressive top down shooter. Very simple gameplay of shooting down waves of enemies picking up weapons and items that drop when they die. Feels great to play. Good movement, good dash, not much else to ask for. Really quick and snappy shooting and simple gameplay loop me keeps playing again and again just to get a higher score and see what new stuff it has to throw at me. It’s got really cute pixelated graphics and lots of forest critters with guns. The game also features an absolutely filthy death metal track that’s a perfect representation of how aggressive the game really is. Just a really quick and dirty time that definitely makes me want to see the finished product. Also, I love the lil axolotl guy.

Despot’s Game (Konfa Games): Rogue-like dungeon crawler where you control a mob of humans. It’s a pretty cool and complicated battle system my only problem is I can’t help but feel like I don’t have enough control on the outcome of the fights. It’s almost a little like Totally Accurate Battle Simulator in that way. Basically, your run begins with you purchasing a bunch of little humans and different weapons to give to those little humans which will give them a class. Give a little guy a medkit and now he’s a healer, give someone a gun and they’re a shooter now. Humans with classes have special abilities they can activate when there are enough classes of that type on the field. Like an Auto Chess (Auto Battler?) game, if you have, say, 2 or 3 Fencers on the board, your fencers will now have access to their special ability, a dodge roll. Position your people in what you hope is a tactical formation and start heading for the dungeon exit. Most rooms consist of a fight, which plays out automatically. When you press go on a fight, your troops and the enemies will all start fighting until only one side remains. This is where the game loses me a little bit as it’s unclear how much of a difference positioning makes or what more I should be doing to change the outcome. Did I win this time because that unit was farther up than last time, or did the AI just play it out slightly differently that skewed in my favor? I can’t tell if the changes I’m making are actually making a tactical difference, or if the AI routines are just clashing with slightly varying results each time. You’re gonna lose units a lot but they are pretty disposable, with frequent shops for buying reinforcements or new gear. And every unit contributes to your mob’s total hunger meter, which deplete with every new room you enter. You have to buy food to feed your troops to keep them from losing effectiveness. Bigger team=greater food consumption. Gotta find a balance with your money and spending it on new units, new weapons, and food. I really wanted to like this game more because I really dig the hook of building up a mob of little guys with cools powers and I like the unit synergy system as well, but the perceived lack of control over how the fights play out and the game’s edgy humor ultimately pushed me away.

Dead Estate (Milkbar Lads): Fairly generic zombie shooter rogue-like (there’s gonna be a lot of rogue-likes). Your standard twin-stick kind of shooting you’d find in the Binding of Isaac or Enter the Gungeon, except here you can jump, adding some verticality. Explore each room, kill the zombies, find the key and then find the elevator to the next floor. Sometimes you find a new gun or shop along the way. The movement feels pretty slow and the rooms feel small. Too many times would I walk into a room, fight three of the same zombie then walk int next room just to see two more of that same zombie. Too many times did I have to walk back across a whole level at a snail’s pace. Needs more enemy variety and to move a little quicker. The shooting is a little better, I like how the game makes its weapons feel distinct by how much it kick it has. More powerful weapons will push you back with each shot. Unloading the mini gun felt chaotic and rumbly that make you slide back and wiggle in a fun way. You can usually kill most enemies before they’re even able to do anything makes them unique, rendering most enemies the same “zombie that walk towards you for second before you finish them off.” Didn’t really draw me in or entice me to see what I might encounter on higher floors.

Foregone (big blue studio): This one feels a little like a watered down Dead Cells at first, AT FIRST. It’s a little slower and less snappy but it’s still very fun. Plus it’s more of a linear 2d action platformer with lots of loot. I like the loot aspect here quite a bit; watching a bunch of currency fly out of enemies is satisfying in a “headshot kill in Destiny kinda way.” Just a bunch of fun particles and a frequent gear drop that has you constantly popping open your inventory to equip your new gear and make those numbers go up. If that’s your kind of fun, you can definitely find it here. Lots of weapon variety on show here and most, if not all, of them feel unique. Just wish the combat was little tighter, which since this is a demo, I assume will come in due time. The game could also do a better job of informing the player that they’re taking damage, which made it difficult to hone the timing on the dash to avoid taking damage. And I’m hoping the environments of the full game become a little more diverse and sprawling, right now it feels like it’s mostly individual rooms/levels of engagement at a time. Excited to see how the full release pans out.

Tunche (LEAP Game Studios): Immediately drawn in here by the beautiful hand drawn art style. It’s a brawler roguelike and if you know what those two words mean in the context of video games, that’s all you really need to know. The brawler combat is what it is, very combo and juggle heavy, enemies that take dozens of hits to kill, fairly bland and just flat land environments. Walk forward until you’re stopped, fight a bunch of waves of enemies, rinse and repeat. Except this time you occasionally get upgrades after finishing rooms like “chance for attacks to cause burn” and “chance to regain health on hit,” your standard rougelike fare. With the territory comes the roguelike difficulty, and this game is plenty tough with the amount of enemies it throws at you and how limited your health pool can be. All of the art and the animations are what really shine here, and if you’re into that brawler style combat, this seems like a pretty good one of those.

Power of Ten (Pew Times Three): Next up we have a top-down space shooter roguelike. I like the minimalistic pixel art style in this one. It helps with atmosphere and you making you feel like a small ship in a large system. Your goal is to power planetary shields on inhabited planets throughout the system by gathering resources from asteroids. While you’re hunting asteroids, pirate ships will randomly attack a planet, pulling you away from resource gathering into a space dogfight against the pirates. That push and pull of gathering resources to fuel a planets shields while simultaneously protecting the planets whose shields are not yet charged is the core loop here that I really like. Conveying solid, core gameplay loop that’s engaging is exactly what you want to get across in a demo, and they definitely deliver that here.

Jelly is Sticky (Lunarch Studios): A lovely, casual sokoban puzzle game. Sliding around and rearranging cubes of jelly into oblong structures to match highlighted areas within a given space. You’ll encounter jellies of different qualities along the way, all with their own quirks around how they like to stick. I really like the non-linear structure in the over world, letting you navigate around between levels from all of the jelly-archetypes at any time. Solving sets of levels will unlock jelly in the over world you can stick to and rearrange to give you access to further levels gated behind walls and other triggers. It’s an appreciated extra layer of depth you don’t expect from a puzzle game that could have very well presented it’s levels in an ordered, level-select screen.

Potion Craft (niceplay games): In this game you play as a budding alchemist trying to make your mark on the world in your newly acquired (stolen possibly?) alchemy shop. Its an alchemist simulator. It’s presented in an “alchemy text book diagram-style” that’s immediately endearing. Every day, you collect ingredients like herbs and fungi from your garden and then it’s time to open shop. Customers come and share their plight, asking for potions of different types. They’ll offer different prices for potions of different potency which you haggle up further (or lower, if you mess up) through a simple timing mini game. The actually potion making is puzzling and unique, if not occasionally limiting. Ingredients you add to the cauldron determine a path that the potion icon in the center will follow across a fog covered map. Add more ingredients to add length and direction to the path, trying to build the path in a specific way that will lead to a “?” destination marked on the map. Name the potion, choose a bottle and label, and brew it. You’ll learn what it does, and can save the recipe for easy use again later. The only downside is how limited the ingredients are makes it very punishing when experimentation results in failure, all those ingredients are just lost. It seems like the game really wants you to just fill the orders at hand instead of blindly exploring into the fog to see what weird stuff comes up, which is my favorite thing to do so far. This is still easily one of my favorite demos of the bunch and has to be seen for oneself.

Aeon Drive Prologue (2awesome studio): This is definitely one of the ones I wanted to like more than I did. A self proclaimed “speedrun action platformer” and it demands that go fast. Very short 2d platformer levels with an ever ticking clock. If the timer reaches zero before you reach the exit, you fail the level. Consumables lined throughout the level can be used to add more time to your clock. This game is very punishing, one hit from anything, from enemy to stage hazard, will cause you to fail and restart. Very quick movement and a focus on chaining together different moves to find different paths through the level. There seemed to be benefits like special collectibles for taking more inventive, alternative paths, but the ticking clock really kept me tunnel-visioned on the most clear cut route through the level, meaning I only ever small a very tiny portion of each one. I’m not the type of person to butt my head against how to pull some crazy route as opposed to the clearly laid out one in front of me. Unfortunately, that clearly laid path just isn’t very fun to take. There’s also a dagger you can throw and teleport to, which I found difficult to aim and not as fun to use as it sounds. There is definitely something here, it’s just ultimately not for me.

Medievalien (dOOb games srl): Action RPG roguelike in a medieval world that has been invaded by aliens. You play an amnesiac protagonist trying to undo the calamity through repeated attempts from within a magical (or scientific?) time loop. Commence genre mashup. Nothing particularly stands out here. Two weapon slots and two throwables slots, lots of different items to fill them. Your weapons consist of bows, crossbows, and staves, and the throwables are bombs of varying elemental effect. It’s fun to play but fairly middling. The low poly art style doesn’t do anything for me and the soundtrack was forgettable. Still, if you’re like me and enjoy ARPGs and roguelike, it does the thing well enough to scratch the itch.

Minute of Islands (Studio Fizbin): Right out of the gate this 2d narrative platformer hits you with gorgeous hand-drawn art. A poisoned, decaying world that is beautifully drawn and animated. I’m gonna day this is not the best demo. The pace is very slow and the objectives are linear and don’t even register as puzzles. This game calls itself a puzzle platformer yet there were no puzzles to be found in this demo. I’m assuming the demo is trying to preserve story details so it starts at the beginning and only gives you a small slice from there. So maybe the game introduces more puzzle elements later in the game. But what’s left in the demo is not very compelling to play. The impressively detailed environments and atmosphere are only driving forces so far. But extremely strong forces at that.

Alekon (The Alekon Company): This feels like spiritual follow up to Pokemon Snap in all of the best ways. In its most basic form, the game plays exactly like Pokémon Snap, but builds on the nearly 30 year old classic in several key ways. Creatures in this game are called “Fictions” and whenever you take a picture of a new fiction, the creature also appears back in the game’s hub world. Once back in the hub world, you can talk to the fictions who have moved in and they’ll give you small quests to do that’ll usually reward you with key game features, like a zoom function for the camera. There’s a great feature that involves capturing photos of a fiction in all of its potential poses, which will unlock the ability to “see through the eyes of the fiction.” So when you’re looking through the album of your saved pictures, you can apply a fiction filter to see the image as a particular fiction would see if through their own eyes. Also, once you’ve unlocked all of the different routes in a specific biome, you gain the ability to “wander.” Wandering is free from the rails of the standard routes and allows to explore every inch of the biome and find other fictions that were previously hidden. It’s also a great space to snag that perfect picture of a fiction you couldn’t get while riding the rails. The creatures themselves are kind of hit or miss so far in their design. Sometimes it’s literally just a seal, sometimes it’s a ridiculous alien thing, but it seems like the personalities of the fictions are what makes them unique. Even though I didn’t care for the designs, I found myself endeared toward the creatures once I found them back in the hub and helped them with their troubles. There’s some good writing in these bits that really helps sell me on these creatures. Lots to love here if you’re into games about snapping pics of critters and throwing donuts.

Eat’n Eaten (Gaëtan Benoit): A cartoony tower defense game with bug plants. Bugs that grow from plants. It has a really fun and easy to understand “food chain management” system for building up units. It almost feels like it was designed to translate easily to touchscreens for mobile devices. Your soil has 100% nutrients, plants grow and feed off nutrients, plants grow apples which you can pick who will then become your units. When an apple dies it’s corpse returns nutrients to the soil and it’ll drop a seed that will grow into a new plant. If you don’t pick the apples off the plant long enough for them to consume extra nutrients, the apples will become a caterpillar. Pick the caterpillar off the plant and now you have a more offensive unit, who needs to eat apples to survive. The game only builds on the loop from there; the way bugs will level up into new or stronger forms after eating enough fruit, or how the game will add spiders to your team who will then need to eat caterpillars to survive. Manage this whole food chain to keep a steady supply and distribution of units against waves of enemies. I don’t know if that seems confusing when put into word like that but it’s really quick and simple to pick up they way it is presented. It can definitely get a little frantic at times but that’s when the game is at it’s most fun.

Dorfromantik (Toukana Interactive): Chill, colorful, tile placement puzzle game about building a village landscape. You start with a deck of 85 hexagonal tiles, and it doesn’t end until all the tiles have been placed. You’re placing tiles with the intent to line up as many like edges between adjacent tiles, making longer and longer networks of landscapes of matching type. The way the scoring works and how the game conforms matching sides together does a good job of making the best place to put your tile one that not only scores well but also looks good in the context of the interconnected village landscape you are ultimately trying to craft. I would kill for this game on Switch.

Unsouled (Megusta Game): An isometric pixelates dark souls-style action game. Described as an “ultra-brutal” game with “fast-paced and savagely rewarding combat,” Unsouled comes exactly as advertised. The combat in this game is very difficult and I am simply not the person to conquer it. It’s really fast paced yet proper movement and combat requires consistent timing and punished button mashing. Every thing you do has to be deliberate and calculated as it’s easy to lose control of the battlefield very quickly. Even just a few enemies can be dangerous as they all can dodge and block and roll just like you. The game is unafraid to put the pressure on and throw ten enemies at you all at once engaging from different ranges. The game demands that intimately learn the combat systems if you want to keep your stamina and health high in the heat of combat. I’d bet that if you’re a fan of Dark Souls or souls-like games, this game has all that difficulty but a different pace of combat that doesn’t feel derivative.

Rogue Invader (Squishy Games): Immediately I love the look of this game. It’s got this old school 1-bit black and white look to it. It also opens up with a fully animated and voice acted cutscene. The game is actually pretty difficult. It’s a side scrolling shooter where you’re part of an army in invading an alien planet one soldier at a time. You’re also managing weapon heat and breakage, and carry weight effecting run speed. Each soldier gets body armor and a pistol but you can equip them with a rifle and helmet from your armory. Which you’ll definitely want to do considering you die in one shot if hit in the head. When you’re soldier dies, they lose the gear you equipped them with and the new soldier needs to be equipped with whatever you can craft in the forge. This is where I ran into issues with hardy ever having enough materials to craft a helmet, go into a mission and die early to a single stray bullet to the head, and subsequently not earn enough materials to make a helmet. The evasive controls like jumping, running, rolling and taking cover all felt clunky in my hands, add that to fact that bullets often just miss even if you’re aiming right on an enemy, and it made for a pretty unsatisfying game to play.

Devastator (Radiangames): How is this not just Geometry Wars? Because this shit is just geometry wars. Fortunately, Geometry Wars slaps so this game is still pretty fun. But just go play Geometry Wars. There, I mentioned a different game like five times more than the game this was supposed to be about.

ANVIL (Action Square): Co-op top down shooter roguelike with space marines. It’s like a run-based Starship Troopers game. It’s pretty great. The three characters unlocked in the demo all have different weapons and abilities resulting in very distinct play styles between classes. There’s a fairly simple loop to each floor: search the floor for the boss, along the way areas will be filled with enemies, who’ll drop money, which can be used to buy passive upgrades from chests found throughout the floor. The upgrade system allows you stack multiple of the same upgrade for increased effect. Lots of variety in the enemy type really keeps you on your toes. Unsurprisingly, it just feels good to mow down mobs of space bugs.

Orbital Bullet (SmokeStab): A 360 degree shooter platformer. It’s a really cool gimmick actually, you move in 2d but in ring around a 3D space. It’s makes for some cool looking environments and depth from having inner and outer rings you can switch between. Really fast and arcade-y feeling. Snappy movement and gunplay. There’s seems to be a lot offered here among different weapons, in-run upgrades and meta upgrades that persist between runs. Which makes this a roguelite, as opposed to roguelike, which I tend to prefer. I like having something upgrade outside of my runs to make me feel stronger or different going into the next run. The games has a sort of ancient alien aesthetic, it feels industrial and monolithic. The bursts of neon in the walls, enemies, and weapons really pop among the ruins of the stone temple. Watching your weapons’ shot glide along the curve of the world is an effective visual as well. Just because I clearly like to compare to games so much, this game feels a lot like Resogun meets Downwell, and that’s just fantastic.

Chicory: A Colorful Tale (Greg Lobanov): A colorful and cartoony adventure game about painting that takes a small but welcomed bullet hell turn. You play as a cute little pup that claims the power of The Brush after it’s wielder (and your master) disappears along with all of the color in the world. Searching for cause and hopefully the solution, you embark on a journey to repaint the world and make your mark as the new wielder. Once you pick up that brush you can start coloring in literally everything in the world. It’s fun and charming the whole way through. You can help the townsfolk bring color back into the lives and color in their houses to their satisfaction. Use the paint to navigate the world by growing and shrinking plants by erasing/coloring them. The demo is a little thin but definitely makes me interested to see what fun stuff the game has in store for these paint mechanics.

Genesis Noir (Feral Cat Den): Okay this game was a trip. I barely have any idea what I just played but I know I really liked what was happening. It’s a heavily stylized point and click adventure game where it feels like you exist within an improvisational Jazz album. Train tracks becoming notes on a cello. Getting into a cosmic jazz-off that plays like a game of Simon and ends with your opponent on the wrong end of a mob hit. I think? Honestly this game is so trippy it was difficult to keep track of what was going on. And occasionally it was a little ambiguous as to how you’re supposed to proceed, which lead some random click and dragging around the screen until something clicks. It actually seems like it could turn out to be a really good example of a story and experience that can really only be through video games. Not quite an animated film, not quite a comic book or visual novel, but instead a fantastical, interactive amalgamation of many things. Whatever this thing may be defined as, it’s something unique and special.

[animebw]

Short Reflection: Mind Game

And thus begins my journey into the filmography of one last acclaimed anime director: Masaaki Yuasa. I’m familiar with Yuasa’s work from watching Devilman Crybaby and The Tatami Galaxy for this blog, as well as Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken, so I already know he’s the real deal. His stories are among the most visually imaginative, densely layered, and effortlessly rewarding anime on the market, bursting with his uniquely sloppy animation style and a visceral understanding of what makes people tick in their best and worst moments alike. That said, he’s also responsible for Japan Sinks, which I’ve admittedly softened on a bit over the past year but was still a catastrophic misfire on pretty much every front. So he’s clearly not an unimpeachable talent. He can make mistakes and put out bad results, same as everyone. So it’s a damn good thing I was already familiar with his work before checking out Mind Game, his debut film from all the way back in 2004. Because if this had been my introduction to Yuasa, I would have been tempted to steer clear of everything else he’s ever done.

Mind Game is a hard movie to summarize, because it’s one of those surreal art-house affairs where imagery and Big Ideas take precedence over basic coherency. It jumps between at least three different genres and tones, haphazardly pulling all sorts of disconnected tropes out of its ass and discarding them the moment it’s finished with them. Things start off like a romantic drama; wimpy college kid Kishi reconnects with his childhood crush Myon who’s getting married to a hot stud, and we spend like ten minutes just watching them talk and hash out their life stories in the bar run by Myon’s older sister. Then a couple Yakuza toughies break down the door for some reason I’m still not entirely sure of; I think Myon’s father cheated them out of world cup tickets or something? Anyway, one of the yaks tries to rape Myon but gets distracted and kills Kishi instead, at which point Kishi goes to the afterlife meets God- yes, actually God- represented by a series of rapidly changing characters from people to fish. God tells him his time is up, but Kishi doesn’t want to die such a pathetic death, so he literally escapes the afterlife and comes back to life right before he dies, at which point he steals the attacker’s gun with his buttcheeks and uses it to kill him instead, resolving to live a full, passionate life from now on. And that’s the last we see of God for the entire movie; we never visit him or the afterlife ever again, and it’s barely even brought up.

Anyway, after... that happens, Kishi pulls Myon and her sister into the yakuzas’ car and makes a getaway, at which point Mind Game becomes a high-octane Fast and Furious car chase with the yakuza’s partners trying to run them off the road. All the laws of physics and reality are broken as they make their mad escape, dodging other cars and enemies firing guns, until they’re run off a bridge and plunge toward the dark water below... only to be swallowed by a gigantic whale that shows up out of nowhere, drowning the yazuka in the process who also never show up and are barely mentioned ever again.

This is just the first forty minutes of the movie.

Mercifully, once our cast of characters actually finds themselves in the whale’s stomach, we stay in that location for the entire rest of the film. Kishi, Myon, and her sister meet a crazy old man who was also swallowed by the whale long ago and has build a little wooden village for himself to live in. From here on, Mind Game essentially becomes a trippy slice-of-life scenario following the characters living in the whale’s belly, the stress it puts on their emotional state, and how they all change and grow as a result of it, punctuated with sequences of LCD-induced lunacy as the characters let their emotions run hog-wild and we lose all sense of grounding in anything even resembling reality. Sadly, the jarring randomness of the film doesn’t vanish now that we’re stuck in a single location; every scene feels disconnected from the one that came before, every flight of fancy feels like a complete non-sequitor, and there’s basically nothing in the way of plot or character arcs until it’s suddenly revealed that the whale is dying and everyone decides they’d better try escaping despite its seeming impossibility. And then everything climaxes with, I shit you not, at least five straight minutes of the characters wordlessly running up a cascading waterfall as they try to escape the whale, with no variation and basically nothing going on but them running on vertical water and gradually losing their clothes in the process.

I don’t normally describe the entire plot of a movie or show in my reviews, but I need to give you the sense of how fucking nonsensical Mind Game is to watch. The closest thing it gets to a point is in some abstract notion of living your life to its fullest, which I guess is what all this insanity is supposed to represent, but it’s all so thoughtlessly thrown together that it comes off as little more than white noise. There are so many weird, bizarre, utterly unique images throughout this movie, and I remember basically none of them. I couldn’t begin to tell you why anything in this movie is the way it is. Why does it sometimes shift art styles so the characters are portrayed as photos of real-life people animated like stop motion? Why have the afterlife section at all if it’s never gonna come up again? Why is there a montage of moments in our characters’ pasts at the beginning and end of the movie? Is the crazy old man supposed to be Kishi’s father? Why does Myon have sex with Kishi after he tells her a story of tiny space explorers who live on her cells like they’re planets until she literally shits them out? Yes, go back, read that sentence again, that is an actual thing that happens in this movie. Also, we randomly get flashes of backstory for Myon right in the buildup to the big escape and she tells her that she’s sorry for always dumping the burden on her, which feels like it’s supposed to be the climax to a character arc, but I’m honestly not sure if they had a single conversation prior to that point, save for a brief moment in the bath that’s interrupted by Kishi and the old man perving on them, because of course it fucking is. Oh, and you better believe that Myon’s huge tits are a popular subject of both the characters’ conversations and the camera’s lens, even shortly after she’s almost raped. Because it’s deeeeeep, man, you just don’t get it, maaaaaaan!

Yeah, no, this movie sucks. It’s an incomprehensible clusterfuck of meaningless imagery mistaking confusing and obtuseness for profound insight and artistic brilliance. The only reason I’m not rating it lower is that it’s not offensive enough to really piss me off. It’s just baffling and annoying and a waste of time that no one should bother watching. Yuasa would go on to make actually good anime after this, with stories worth telling and visuals that supported them, so I won’t hold it against him. But even as a debut project, this is too stupid to enjoy, and I give it a score of:

3/10

Hopefully his future films will give me more to gush over, yeah? See you next time!