#not as much of a bug as an oversight but i guess that's a sort of bug

[risingsunresistance]

goodmorning everyone, i found a huge bug in skyblock KJFDHG

[galedekarios]

just musing about gale and his parents:

we only have a handful of conversations where he mentions his parents and when he does, it's usually only his mother, morena dekarios.

his mother is mentioned at several points in the game. during a custom protag playthrough, he mentions her in a datamined conversation that appears to be bugged/broken:

and he mentions her at the end of the game as well when he proposes to the player:

i was also able to find another mention in a banter with karlach that usually happens for me shortly after recruiting her:

from gale's origin, this aspect is explored even more deeply:

there's more, of course, and it very clearly shows that the bond he shares with his mother is a deep and loving one from both sides. it's also very interesting that he is called dekarios after his mother and not--even though naming conventions could certainly vary even in waterdeep--after his father.

who he doesn't mention at all.

the only time we do get a vague mention is during a conversation with the protag after saving mirkon from the harpies:

after that, i haven't been able to find any reference, indirect or direct, to gale's father in the game.

so, here we enter theory territory:

i feel that, from a narrative point of view, in keeping with what i think gale's themes are, gale's father may have abandoned gale and his mother when gale was still young.

gale's character is rife with what might be interpreted as abandonment issue and it makes sense to me at least that those weave through his life up until the point where the protag meets him in the game.

another theme with gale is that he appears to have a lot of female figures in this life, who all had a profound impact on him, whether that impact is positive or negative: morena, tara, and yes, mystra.

it feels like to me that he had no father figure--and i use that term a bit more loosely here--until later in his life with elminster. this is already hinted at in a game with a custom protag, but all the more solidified in a gale origin playthrough:

i think without directing telling you, the game does allow you to sort of guess at that part of his background in this way, and understand why gale is as he is as a consequence. you can also understand why he acts as he does with elminster. seeking his approval. yearning for it. being extremely hurt by elminster having to see him like this when mystra sends him to gale to deliver her... instructions. this almost pointed absence of a mention of his father in all his comments (and tara's too, now that i think about it) when it comes to family is glaring to me.

being left, being abandoned, makes it much more understandable to me why he doesn't speak of him at all: if gale's father had died, it would make more sense to me that he would remark on it or share it in some way or another. it might have come up in a banter with wyll, perhaps, who is struggling with the expectations his own father had placed on him.

"he died when i was still very young." perhaps, or something along the lines of, "i barely remember him; he died when i was only a child.", etc etc etc.

YET if gale's father indeed abandoned his mother--who he holds in such high regard, and not to mention his own hurt--i can easily see and understand why he wouldn't waste a word on him.

anyhow yes, this is long and ramble-y, and i 100% might be reading too much into what may be a simple oversight, but it was interesting to me and i still see it as tying in with the theme of abandonment, even though we don't know the reasons for it in this particular case.

was it not wishing to deal with a child with magical talents he couldn't control yet? was it for another reason entirely?

[mooncaps]

The Unanswered Questions and Potential of the Chibnall Era

So, I've been thinking, in the days since the end of Chibnall's era, about the elements I wanted more of.

1) Bel and Vinder. I want to know more about them and the society they came from. They apparently have a history of fighting Daleks and Cybermen. Their Academy teaches them how to escape all sorts of traps. They have a knowledge of Passenger forms, even though the Fugitive Doctor says that Passengers have long been barred from this dimension. Vinder immediately recognizes a TARDIS. Also Bel apparently met a creature in a bar who knows about Atropos and the Mouri? I thought when I saw Vinder in the trailer for Power of the Doctor that we might actually address some of these things, but honestly his role felt pretty minimal. He says he's there to track the missing Qurunx and I guess he just wanted to free it because he leaves without it. Just add that to the list of things he somehow knows about. Were the people on the space train part of the same interplanetary society the Grand Serpent used to rule over or was Vinder just coincidentally in the area with Bel and Karvanista before he decided to go wormhole surfing?

2) The Grand Serpent. Hi. Here's a rare creature with two heartbeats who either barely ages or can actually move through time. He's inserted himself into the entire history of UNIT from its founding to present day. He has tattooed operatives, loyal enough to kill themselves for him, on Earth in 1904 and in 2021. He apparently has some desire to interrogate the Doctor. He can apparently survive on space rocks that have no atmospheric shell. Aaaaand we're just gonna leave him on a rock.

3) The Division. This is where Chibnall's habit of introducing big ideas and doing very little with them really starts to bug me. They're supposed to have become this massive organization, existing outside the known universe, using everything and everyone at all points in time to do their bidding. They're powerful enough to have Weeping Angels as operatives and engineer anti-matter (!!) into universe destroying hurricanes. Then one person gets very easily dispatched by Swarm and we just drop the whole idea. Are we meant to infer that the Division was overstating their power so they could seem more intimidating than they really are? Are other members still out there, but they just chose to let the Doctor stop the Flux? And honestly, what an oversight from scientist and explorer Tecteun, a high-ranking Division operative, to release Swarm and Azure without accounting for the possibility that they could reach and kill her.

4) The Fugitive Doctor. I want her to get her own spinoff series. There's still so much to learn about her and I think Jo Martin is great in the role. We saw that Karvanista was with her in the Temple of Atropos, but who were the other two members of her team? Could they have been Lee and Gat? What led to her and Lee going into hiding. She escapes the Judoon, but presumably she, or another regeneration, eventually gets caught and mind-wiped. And if she got a series, there would obviously be opportunities to expand on the topic of The Division as well.

5) The Doctor's lost memories. Obviously more information about the Fugitive Doctor would include some of these, but specifically: The present day Doctor recovering their lost memories. There was a great moment at the end of Series 12 where Thirteen told the Master he hadn't broken her with this new information, but he had given her a gift of herself. "You want me to be scared of it, because you're scared of everything." Ryan tells her to find out about her own life and she seems to take it to heart. She spends most of Series 13 very interested in learning about her past...only to completely reverse course at the last moment. Really feels like Chibnall had big ideas, but then decided to walk it all back. (Or perhaps he was compelled to walk it back by higher-ups, with the change in showrunners taking place, but I can only speculate about that and the end result leaves me wanting more either way.)

I understand that he was trying to make the Doctor more mysterious, but shouldn't a mystery narrative eventually lead to some answers to the mysteries? And I understand the idea of allowing the audience to make their own inferences about certain things, but I still feel like not quite enough of the story was told on screen. He's left a ton of room for other screenwriters, comic writers, novel writers, and audio drama writers to expand on some of these ideas. His era seems to be one of throwing in dangling threads for other writers to play with, but somewhat lacking in clarity of focus about what he wanted to do with his own era. He put in a lot of huge concepts that I would've liked to learn more about, but ultimately did very little with most of those concepts.

I'm trying to imagine if RTD kept throwing the words Bad Wolf around, but never had the moment of Rose scattering the words. Or if Moffat kept having River show up and say intrguing things, but never gave us the information about who she was. That's kind of what Chibnall's era feels like to me. At least right now. Maybe after I adjust to it, let go of what I wanted to happen, and accept what actually did happen, then I might feel differently about it. Right now though, I just feel like there's a lot of untapped potential and it's left me wanting more to be done with a lot of the concepts.

[basket-of-radiants]

now that you've decided what nightblood is we can finally have the domestic au of ur dreams: two asshole roommates, their preteen children who won't stop bugging them, and their cat. and all those other losers i guess maybe

Oh my god, I was going through my very old asks, and how could I have missed this, this is literally the best thing ever, you’re right this is the domestic au of my dreams. Alright, here we go, a disaster family comprised of Szeth, Nale, Lift, Nightblood, and a cat. Actually a dog and two cats. Everyone’s backstory is basically the same, but they’re all retired now except for Nale. (And yes those other losers definitely all exist in this au, let me know who you care about.) 

If you’ll permit me to crib off of wtnv for a moment, Nale works for a vague yet menacing government agency wherein he has full authority to carry out whatever actions he deems necessary with zero oversight. He still works through legitimate bureaucratic channels whenever the need arises, but he has contacts in pretty much every institution willing to expedite paperwork for him with zero questions asked, and Nale has figured out that he can do pretty much anything legally so long as he knows what forms to ask for. He does. He’s basically memorized the entire legal code and memorized every obscure law and loophole in existence. Some didn’t think it literally possible for a brain to hold that much information, but he impresses. Nale’s actual job description is similarly unknown, but whatever it was before, it has unfortunately morphed into parole officer for a hitman, a thief, and a child with a criminal record that claims he’s a mass-murderer.

Szeth’s story is about what you’d expect. He knows a dozen languages and a hundred ways to kill a man. No one knows anything about him aside from the mysterious “assassin in white” suspected of carrying out multiple terrorist attacks and high-profile assassinations. I dunno, Szeth killed JFK or did 9/11 or some shit, wait no those aren’t modern enough examples, but he’s done some shit with that level of publicity and conspiracy. The kinds of crimes he pulls off are seemingly impossible to both perform and survive all the while escaping without his identity being revealed. He’s probably got a massive following in the serial killer fandom. Szeth lives his life following anonymous instructions sent to him remotely, and he keeps texting back for them to please stop making him do these things, and they don’t stop. He hates himself and wants to die, and he can’t for the life of himself figure out why no one’s stopped him yet. If only he weren’t such a criminal genius. One time he almost died and it was great, but then he woke up in a hospital to see a man and a kid waiting for him. Nale explained that he’d mined the data off of Szeth’s phone and knew everything about him, and complimented his criminal efficiency and his capability to follow orders so precisely. Basically he’d like to offer him a job. Szeth is like “wait seriously” because he’s still a murderer and Nale explains that from his phone history it’s clear that Szeth himself never had bad intentions, and it’s the thought that counts. Nale offers him a deal wherein Szeth will remain in his custody for a duration and work for him in exchange for no other legal recourse. His idea is to eventually make Szeth a field agent for his institution’s mysterious purposes, but for the time being Szeth really isn’t fit for that, so for the time being all he has to do is look after the kid.

Nale had intentionally sought out Szeth. (Everyone had, but he’d gotten to him first.) Lift on the other hand was a pure accident. After her mother died, Lift was resistant to entering the system, and so she hid from the government, surviving off of stealing food and clothes. When she got older, her shoplifting got a bit more bold. On her streets Lift is a legendary skater as well as being a pretty good thief. She and Nale crossed paths by accident, and she tried to steal his wallet without realizing who he was. Unfortunately she didn’t have her board on her at the time to do some sweet moves and then get out of dodge. He arrested her on the spot, but unfortunately his jurisdiction is different from that of normal police, and he had to file additional paperwork before he could hand her off to the local authorities. He took her to one of his local offices and handcuffed her to his desk while he filled out the papers. She kept making a bunch of requests for food and was so annoying about it that he acquiesced. Talking with her mouth full all the while, Lift completely dismantled his current psychological state, reduced him to tears, and hugged him, by which point he was a bit too attached to her to just arrest her. Still, she was a criminal whose whole lifestyle revolved around stealing, so he couldn’t just let her go, but he made her a deal and offered to take her into his personal custody instead of handing her over to the system. Lift was confident that it wouldn’t be too hard to run away from one person, and besides, it’d be funny to see how high she could get his grocery bills.

Nighblood is a pre-teen kid whose record ties him to hundreds of murders, none of which seem to be provable however. Nightblood mostly talks a lot and plays a lot of video games. Nale briefly looked into his past after he found him, but overall was too busy with his vague yet menacing government work to really focus on him. He decided it was best to keep the kid close, however. He didn’t have the time for babysitting either, but he would figure something out. Upon picking up Szeth, he found he was not psychologically fit for field work whatsoever, so he found another way to makes him useful while he was recovering. Nightblood also can’t move very well on his own, so Szeth has to stay with him at all times.

On the streets, there had been a dog that always followed Lift around. It was easily frightened by everything, and it would whine at her whenever she did something dangerous, but it always came back to her. Additionally, there is a cat that is incredibly shy and is pretty much only ever seen from afar, or off in a tree, or under something. For some reason Szeth refers to it as his cat. Nale apparently has a cat too, but no one has ever seen it, and he really doesn’t seem like an animal person, so it’s sort of hard to believe it actually exists.

Nale put up Szeth, Lift, and Nightblood up in his flat. Due to the mysterious nature of his work, he has to travel a lot, so typically it’s just Szeth and the kids. Szeth and Nightblood are always together, of course, because Nale said they had to be. Szeth will talk about his problems and Nightblood will show him the game he’s currently playing and will say “that’s really sad Szeth, but watch me do this cool move and destroy all these evil guys!” They talk a lot, that’s basically all they do these days. They’re both very fond of Lift, but she is understandably creeped out by two murderers, and she sneaks out of the house all the time. For her, yes her housemates are super messed up, but Nale stocks a lot of really good food and is barely ever around, so so long as she seems to be present and to be staying out of trouble, she can actually do as much trouble as she wants so long as she’s clever about it. One time as she’s sneaking out, she notices Szeth staring at her and she panics for a bit, but he’s like “no you can do what you want, I literally don’t care.” That ingratiates him slightly to her, so she does try to have conversations with him. He’s such a mess though. Nightblood offers to show her his video games, Lift is like “you think that’s cool, come outside and watch this” and then she does a flip on her skateboard or something. Nightblood has idolized her ever since.

When Nale is around, Lift bothers the hell out of him while Szeth follows him around doing pretty much whatever he asks of him while Nightblood keeps tugging on Szeth’s clothes and whispering questions to him. Ever since that first time with Lift, Nale has been unflinchingly stoic, but he lets Lift do whatever she wants and gives her anything she asks for. The same is true for Szeth and Nightblood as well, although Szeth tends not to make unreasonable requests, and whenever Nightblood is about to, Szeth whispers to him that maybe he shouldn’t bother Nale about it. So instead Nightblood bothers Szeth to ask Nale about it. Lift is just having fun exploiting this setup for all it’s worth. They’re all incredibly familiar with each other.

Basically this ends up as Nale being a super important government person with an unlimited budget which he ends up using to indefinitely house three criminals. Also in this au, Nale wears a suit, Szeth wears a hoodie, and Lift wears a baseball cap.

[aty-altiria]

Let’s Hang Out Sometime

October is upon us! Its the spooky season and this year I’ve elected to do Whumptober 2020 while also working full time, and collage... I’m gonna die. So! you’ll be getting thirty-one ficlets for my fem!Harry Potter mixed with various other characters based off the whumptober prompts! Though this one isn’t as... whumpy as you’d expect, I hope it still hits the prompts. I have trouble writing things really fluffy. The ficlets will get darker as time progresses (As they’re already written and I know for sure they do)

@whumptober2020

The first, is Sabo! Hitting No.1 ‘Waking up restrained’ and ‘Shackled’

---

"What's hanging?"

"Are we hanging out?"

"Hang in there."

"Er…."

"Oh, I win!"

"No, you didn't! Give me a second-"

"nope, victory is mine!"

Fortunately, consciousness was quick in returning; awareness came in with a pounding headache and a verbal battle. It didn't take Sabo more than a moment to realize where he was and what was happening. This also meant he knew exactly what sort of conversation was happening on both sides of his, formally, unconscious form. The insane pair that he'd been captured with were punning at each other. Mad, the two of them, they'd been crazy the entire time Sabo had known of them and apparently being captured by slavers hadn't changed that at all.

Sabo cracked his eyes open carefully; he did this out of experience. Sabo had been captured before and didn't want to, once again, blind himself with any unfortunately placed lights. Thankfully for him, and his concussion, the cell he'd found himself in was calmly lit, and therefore he wasn't blinded immediately. This allowed Sabo to give a bleary-eyed inspection toward his two fellow captives.

On his right was the woman. She had a mess of black curls and the brightest green eyes he'd ever seen, and Sabo guessed her to be about his age, twenty perhaps. She wore a white blouse, tight black jeans, and a previously possessed a cape of red and gold, which was currently missing. Despite being captured by slavers, she looked none the worse for wear. She was possibly the most relaxed prisoner Sabo had ever interacted with. The woman was almost boredly hanging off her shackles and had an expression of deep thought - for the next pun - plastered on her face.

On Sabo's left was the man, one half of a pair that he'd actually caught sight of. Oh, the pair of orange-haired twins were very good at seeming like there were, in reality, one person. Still, Sabo had picked on the subtle differences during the party. One of the twins was more outspoken, and the second had a slightly different scent coupled with a mole which the first was missing. But other than that, Sabo couldn't see any other differences offhand. Regardless, like the woman, the man was hanging lazily. He was also taller than her, and so had his feet on the ground instead of being left swinging. The man was also patiently waiting for his female companion to come up with the next pun, though she was struggling.

Like Sabo had said, they were the most relaxed set of potential slaves he had ever met, and yes, he included himself in that statement. Sabo was relatively calm himself about the whole thing. It was an unfortunate event, to be sure, he'd been at the party to gather intelligence on the country's noble leader, not to be captured. The island itself was plagued by poverty, starvation, suicide, and slavery. The noble king was suspected of selling his people off as slaves, and Sabo had been hired to prove that. The rumours were correct in the end. Sabo had attended the party and had been knocked unconscious by the very man he'd come to look into. And was apparently now being sold off. What Sabo hadn't known was that the noble himself was doing the capturing with a devil-fruit. An unfortunate oversight.

"'Let's hang out sometime?'" Sabo offered to their pun battle now that he was conscious enough, Koala would never let him live it down if she realized he'd joined into a pun battle. Though Sabo couldn't help it, not when the woman beamed, and the man started to argue that it was cheating.

"It's not cheating! Blondie is on my side!" The woman yelled, and it made his head throb; when he winced, she instantly quieted.

"It is cheating, or at the very least he's his own team! Therefore you still need a pun!"

"I do not! Shut up, Fred!" A name, fantastic, now he just needed hers, and he could move on.

"Are you two locals?" Sabo asked as he looked up at his shackles. He'd have to pick them or break them. A bit of haki, maybe? They weren't sea-stone, so he could probably manage it with enough force. But the angle? Picking might be a better option, so he didn't accidentally break his wrists.

"No." The woman answered, "just a set of party-crashers who wanted some good food."

Could he reach his lock-pick like this? It was hidden in his collar, and his arms were hanging above his head; he'd have to jump at reach it.

"Hey, Holly, can we leave now? He's awake."

Holly and there was the second name… wait what? Sabo glanced side as 'Holly' shrugged. He watched fascinated as she twisted her hands in her shackles, and… they felt apart with a flash of barely-there purple colouring. Sabo's eyes bugged out slightly as she dropped to the floor- wait- she'd been able to escape the entire time he'd been unconscious?! - and then she straightened. Was that a devil fruit? What kind- Holly turned toward them and flicked her hands again. This time Sabo saw the flash of light purple energy clearly as it struck his shackles, and they snapped open.

Sabo lowered his arms slowly, mind reeling: "thanks," Sabo inclined his head to Holly.

"Mhm, no worries." Holly stretched her body out and moved toward the door. Sabo immediately wondered if her useful little ability worked on all locks, the things he and by extension, the revolutionaries could do with a devil-fruit like that. Sabo observed as Holly flicked her hands at the door, and heard an audible click. That was fantastically useful; he would have to try and recruit her. As chief of staff, he didn't mind harping on her to get what he wanted; he'd even add in the set of twins. "And to answer your question, sure."

Question?

"What?" Sabo asked as Fred stuck his head out of the door, scanning for the guards. Only one was present; Sabo watched as Fred pulled out a stick from his pocket and tap the guard on the head before the man could so much as yell for help. The guard then dropped like a stone. At that moment, Sabo's interest was perked entirely, he wanted them, and he wanted to know everything about them.

"You asked if I wanted to hang out sometime," Holly elaborated, "I wouldn't say no to a date, are you free this afternoon for lunch? I'm famished."

A date?

What?

"Aww man!" another redhead, the other twin, appeared on the stairs before Sabo got his thoughts in order. "It was my turn to do the rescue; you're not supposed to get out early!"

"Yeah, well, Fred was impatient, and a hot guy asked me out so." Holly winked Sabo's way, Sabo's thoughts struggled to restart, "and you were taking too long."

Date?

Date.

It was a pun- he hadn't been- did he even want to take her on a date? Sabo looked Holly over cataloging, and… hm, why not then. He could use the date to learn more about her and push her to join the revolutionaries. It was win-win.

"I'm free now?" he offered because he was. He just had to pass the information he had on, and then he'd have some time to 'recover' from the imprisonment.

"Brilliant, let's go then!" Holly linked her arm around his and tugged Sabo toward the stairs while the twins argued with each other. "Oh, I didn't catch your name?"

"Sabo, a pleasure." He inclined his head toward her, and she grinned. The date might have been an accident, but Sabo did find her attractive, so he wasn't complaining.

"Oh, I'm sure it will be."

[touchingoldmagic]

Comic Review

Okay first an apology. Due to COVID and then my own 30-day challenge, this review got very delayed. But here we go, let's look at the fourth and final issue of GB Year One! As always, spoilers under the cut.

As is tradition, we start the comic with interviews. But instead of minor characters this time, we have Janine, Ray, and Peter talking about Egon. Janine says he's hard to get to know but generous with sharing his knowledge. I think that's a really in character thing to say, I can definitely hear it in Annie Potts' voice.

We cut to Winston chaperoning Rebecca to the firehouse, where Egon is working. This takes place a few weeks after the end of the movie (as established by Dana in the first issue) so the firehouse is still blown up. I have to say I really like that they included this, we rarely get to see the firehouse with this much damage. There's a police officer stationed outside to keep looters away, which I also thought was a nice realistic touch.

I guess this is a good place to point out that I find Egon in the IDW comics to be written quite a bit differently than Egon from the movies (or from RGB/EGB). Even in GB1 and 2, where Egon was very reserved and deadpan, he never came across as unsympathetic toward other people. To me, anyway. In the comics, I feel like Erik Burnham always writes him as a man without any patience for "normal people." Even his comic bio states Egon is someone who "isn't interested in what you have to say." I dunno, I just never got that vibe from him in any other GB media and it bugs me a bit. -shrug- Maybe it's just me.

Anyway, Egon immediately tells Rebecca he's only speaking to her because it's part of the contract for them getting paid for this book deal, and they need the money to rebuild the firehouse.

Rebecca asks why Egon got started in the paranormal, and Egon basically says he wants to explain all the things that mankind finds unexplainable, and ghosts were just the first thing he was able to prove. He'll move on to something else when he loses interests in ghosts.

Rebecca then asks why he built the Containment Unit so that it exploded when the power was cut. Personally I'm like "Wow rude much?" but I guess it's a legit question. Egon says it was because of the unexpected increase in ghost energy due to Gozer, and that he's going to rebuild it so it won't happen again.

I find Rebecca in this issue is a lot more antagonistic than she was in previous issues. I guess Egon pushes her buttons LOL.

When they start talking about their first case at the Sedgewick, Winston brings up the story that the green ghost escaped when they were putting it into the Containment Unit. Rebecca is very interested in hearing this other story of the Unit failing to work right, and Egon is not very appreciative of Winston speaking up.

Great lines: Egon: Thank you so much for bringing that up, Winston. Your memory is a real asset. Winston: Uh... I think I've got an errand to run. -leaves-

We jump to a flashback that takes place after the Sedgewick scene in the movie. The GB's return to the firehouse. Peter has a hilarious cowlick from the slime, which I love.

Ray and Egon go to the basement to put their first ghost in the Containment Unit.

But the button gets stuck and Slimer escapes. (His name isn't really Slimer in this universe, but I'm just going to call him that for simplicity's sake.) Slimer appears upstairs where he picks up a prototype proton grenade from Egon's locker and then... phases right through the front door, carrying the grenade?

I don't know if this is an oversight on the part of the comic or if they're trying to purposely show us that ghosts can take solid matter through other solid matter, but it really confused me. I mean, we don't see Slimer doing that in the movie. He drinks a bottle of wine and it goes right through him onto the floor, and when he goes through the wall dragging a food cart behind him, the cart crashes into the wall. So why does the grenade go right through the firehouse door? I have no idea.

Anyway, Egon and Ray run out after him to protect the neighborhood. (Peter and Janine apparently aren't there now to see this happen.)

Ray: Why would you store a prototype proton grenade in your locker? Egon: I don't feel as thought that's important right now, Ray.

Slimer zips around the streets, stealing people's food and brandishing the grenade. Egon cautions Ray not to take a shot at him, since their beams could make it explode. Ray runs off to a dumpster to find some food to bait the ghost, leaving Egon to stall him alone.

Egon: Luckily it was driven more by impulse than intelligence--sort of like Venkman in college.

And for some reason there's two times where the artist forgot to draw Slimer holding the grenade? It seems like an obvious mistake to make, so I dunno if they really forgot or if it was on purpose. The quality control in this issue seems to be lacking.

Egon tries to sneak up on Slimer, but the ghost sees him and clonks him with the grenade. He then gets distracted by a pizza and drops it. Egon ducks, but the bomb fizzles out, a dud. (How anticlimactic.)

With the spud distracted, Egon fires his thrower and catches him. He compares reeling him in to a memory of reeling in a fish as big as he was when he was a kid. That was a cute reference, at least. I'm trying to picture tiny!Egon and his reserved father on a fishing boat.

We cut back to Egon and Rebecca as Egon wraps up his story. Here he says that this incident proved to all of them that they should never take solo calls, ever. That comment felt weird to me because... nothing bad happened? Egon was able to wrangle Slimer by himself just fine. How did this incident prove that? But I guess the writer just wanted to slip in a reason why we never see the GB's going on busts by themselves, in any media. (As if it's not obvious how dangerous the job would be by yourself...)

At this point Rebecca is ready to leave when suddenly a red ghostly light swirls around her and she grows fangs and claws. I was super excited at first because I thought this was going to be a twist ending and Rebecca was going to be a ghost this whole time! Trying to get inside info on how to take down the team. How awesome would that have been!?

But no, Rebecca is only momentarily possessed by...something. Something that has a vague message for Egon that the Ghostbusters will be killed sometime, someday. That's it. I'm not even kidding, the ghost literally uses the words "Sooner or later, doom!" Like... yeah, buddy? That's just life?

The ghost vanishes and Rebecca is overwhelmed and quickly leaves. Peter shows up just as she's leaving, asking what that was about.

(Narrator Voice: He did not find out.)

So that's it! I'm a bit disappointed in this issue, I have to say. The story was okay, but there's a bunch of little things that don't make sense, things that look like drawing errors, and a weak ending. It all adds up to a disappointing feeling.

I think they are implying something about Afterlife with the ghost at the end? Is there going to be a ghost in Afterlife that claims to have been watching Egon since the founding of the Ghostbusters, and perhaps even eventually killed him? Man, I know ghosts can be patient but that's a pretty long stretch of time to wait before sealing somebody's doom.

But there we go, the four issues of Year One. I do think it's good to have oneshot stories. A comic series shouldn't be entirely made up of long storyarcs. I like a little variety. And I liked seeing some scenes that we only heard about in the past, even if it made the comic feel like a "clip show" sometimes, where they were just filling in things that were mentioned offhand in the movies.

I think the comic was strongest when it was giving us thoughts and motivations for our favorite characters and seeing them interact (like Ray training Winston for 15 min and calling it good, and Winston telling him how crazy that is). And I felt it was weakest when it was just redrawing screenshots from the movie or doing those interviews with minor characters at the start of each issue (I liked it at first but it got tiring quickly). All in all, I did like this series and I am really excited to see what is coming for the IDW GB's next!

[fizzingwizard]

So I played Snowy Escape this week! It’s my cup of tea! I watched LGR’s review (and Plumbella’s too) and yeah, as usual, I agree with both of them. The pack doesn’t give us a lot that’s really new, especially in terms of gameplay, and I really wish there had been even small interactive moments aboard trains and ski lifts. However, I also agree that it’s a really aesthetically beautiful pack. The way tourists who haven’t gone to Japan yet think of Japan might be like Tokyo Shibuya area, or Osaka shopping streets... but uh, Tokyo and Osaka are only two cities in all of Japan, and pretty much the entire rest of the country isn’t like that. The majority of Japan’s tourist attractions are nature- and history-based, after all.

The big question for me was just how touristy “Mt Komorebi” was going to come across. Sims is pretty noticeably America-centric, and Western culture is the norm. They put out Jungle Adventure and it’s like stepping into a 90s action movie. The most progressive thing you can say about the locals in that pack is that, due to being governed by the same rules that apply to all Sims, they don’t come across “different” enough to be straight up othered. The area they live in, of course, is underdeveloped in spite of the “culture” skill, and very much is meant to be an exotic adventure for Indiana Jones.

Komorebi’s not that bad though. I was impressed at first by the amount of detail there seemed to be. I never expected we’d get space heaters and kotatsu and nabe in-game without downloading CC. Taking off your shoes to go inside, using chopsticks, sliding doors (which I’ve wanted more of for SO LONG), are all true to life as well as modern and also just nice to have. There’s some weird bits, like how when sims sit at the kotatsu they don’t sit on their knees, their legs just disappear into the floor... I guess we can assume there’s a hole underneath (which is the case with some kotatsu just not usually the at-home kind). I also would have liked more every day interactions, like doing homework at the kotatsu or watching TV or even taking a nap.

The patterns for yukata/kimono are pretty awful though. The more understated ones I can live with, but anything with a splash of color is a fashion disaster.

The look of the houses in the towns are really nice. The interiors, not so much, but that’s easier to fix than the facade and landscaping for most of us. The non-interactive backgrounds areas really do look like Japan. It’s a pity we can’t explore it at all. (I would have LOVED just one interactive conbini. That’s one Japan staple that it’s simply weird to leave out. They probably figured conbini wouldn’t have anything the vending machines don’t have, but personally I’d rather have conbini than vending machines. Unless they made it rabbit hole, in which case fuck it)

Also liked the snow festival and the lights festival. It’s true there’s not a lot to do at them, other than take pictures, and it was really hard to get good pictures with my sims in them... When I went to snow festivals, you could do things like light candles in little snow cubbies, or have a meal in a kamakura, etc. That would have been nice. Otherwise it’s just look at the pretty sights and make normal snowmen. Same with the lights festival - it’s gorgeous, but... They do have food stalls but the variety is limited. You can get four different kinds of yakisoba and ramen but no okonomiyaki, no ikayaki. There’s no festival games. I’m currently festival-starved due to covid-19 so my hopes were a bit higher. Still... like I said, I enjoyed them. I guess I just like pretty things. And I do spend an inordinate amount of time just taking pictures of my Sims doing things anyway xP

The Youth festival is pretty dull. It seems more like a not!Pokemon festival than anything else. The crepes, however, are great. Also it’s really WEIRD that the koinobori (the carp flags) are out all the time, like a normal decoration, in the city. That’s one culture thing that I think got confused.

So as far as it goes... it’s not as touristy as I expected it to be. I give it props for that. It’s definitely still got a vibe of “non-Japanese foreigner goes for a visit,” as in, I think if a Japanese company made a Sims game with Japanese players in mind, they’d have done a ton things differently. But we got a more robust cultural depiction than we ever have before, so, nice.

The winter sports are fun! I weirdly didn’t get bored even though like LGR says, it is just watching the Sims do the same thing over and over again without any player interaction. That does suck but is also par for the course with Sims 4. Since I play multiple Sims at a time, it’s easy for me to stick one on the bunny slope and just let them ski until they level up while I do something else with another Sim :P (Sims is more fun when you cheat!)

The onsen is a let down. It’s nice, sure. It’s just a spa though. And it’s WEIRD that you can have sex in the onsen while other people are in it, even children, and they are not freaked out, but you can’t skinny dip in front of children. All they get is an uncomfortable moodlet afterwards because now the onsen water is dirty x’D I wonder if that’s an oversight that will get tweaked in the future...

However, onsen is very pretty too. I would have liked a smaller building and better landscaping with two or three hot springs to pick from. Also, there are gendered entrance curtains, but they don’t actually divide Sims by gender and all lead to the same place... I guess it’s good to have for pictures at least. If you want to put in the ladies room and mens room doors you could easily make his and hers as well as a mixed hot spring baths. I think this is one we just have to let the Sim builder greats take on.

So HIKING is awesome! I loved it! It’s relaxing for me. Some might find it dull, but it’s really just so pretty, and for me brings back a lot of memories. Hiking in Japan is pretty much like that (although a lot more mountainous of course). It’s somewhat dependent on your graphics settings - mine aren’t that high so like the bamboo forest vanishes as I cam through it.. can’t get that sense of really being inside it. Also when I came across the cemetery I had my spellcaster try to Necrocall the one grave that has interactions, but it didn’t work, even though the option came up. ?? I was expecting some sort of cool ghost. Oh well.

I’m interested in climbing. I don’t have Fitness Stuff so I never did it before. It’s way more boring than leveling the winter sports though. But I think the mountain climb will be worth it.

There are little kodama and sprites you can come across and interact vaguely with. I’ll accept that as a Ghibli nod. It’s more cute than cultural but it’s also a bit of fun surprise, though I haven’t noticed any real effect beyond a moodlet. (Was told one gave me a present but I couldn’t find it in my inventory so I think it was just the moodlet.)

Also the bugs!! That’s very Japan! And you can buy insect repellent hahaha that’s a level of realism I didn’t ask for but will take

I’ll talk about lifestyles and sentiments too. I don’t need them personally. The sentiments are kind of nice to see, but they’re predictable. You get the same ones if you do certain things. They give you a moodlet when the Sim shows up, which I guess I do like, but... tbh it’s damn inconvenient sometimes. For ex, I played by Tsubasa family to explore Mt Komorebi, and I noticed many conversations were inexplicably becoming “awkward.” The reason was - even though no one was saying or doing anything flirty - Kurogane and Fai were getting in the mood by just looking at each other thanks to sentiments, and Sakura and Syaoran were like -___-; I mean, it’s hilarious, but also annoying!

Lifestyles... eh. So far all my Sims just get the same ones. They all seem to get Adrenaline Seeker just for playing winter sports. Also I find the pop-ups warning me when a Sim’s going to lose their lifestyle annoying, and if a Sim gets a lifestyle I don’t want for them, it’s annoying to watch their mood change for dumb reasons like “didn’t spend enough time outdoors today.” It’s the same concept as traits. It’s kind of nice that you can change them around by doing different things, and since we’re limited to three traits I won’t say no to more (for example, instead of giving a Sim the “Loves the Outdoors” trait, you can try to get the Outdoorsy lifestyle and use the trait slot for something that influences their personality more). But all in all I find my Sims still just act the same as usual and the gameplay is all in pop-ups, so it’s just not exciting for me.

Also had a glitch where Sakura would take off her shoes to go inside but when she went out, she put on a pair of snowboots that I never even equipped her with, and she wore them with every outfit. Editing in CAS didn’t help. A reboot did though.

So pretty much, I definitely think they could have done more with this pack, BUT that’s been the case with literally every pack since the base game. There are no expectations for me anymore, that’s why I really just genuinely like this one. I’m happy they picked North Japan rather than Tokyo or Osaka, I think we got a lot more detail because of that.

[imdoingthismspaintadventure]

Worm 1.6 - In which we meet futuristic techno Dredd

II heard the cape arrive on his souped up motorcycle.  I didn’t want to be seen fleeing the scene of a fight, and risk being labeled one of the bad guys by yet another person, but I wasn’t about to get closer to the street either, in case Lung was feeling better.  Since there was nowhere to go, I just stayed put.  Just resting felt good.

Yeah it’s better you stay and try to explain what went down. Fleeing after all this..wouldn’t be a good look. And let’s try to stay far away from  the knocked-out fire demon while we’re at it.

If you’d asked me just a few hours ago about how I thought I would feel meeting a big name superhero, I would have used words like excited and giddy.  The reality was that I was almost too exhausted to care.

You have experienced a loooot of things just today girl. It’s not everyday you get into a life or death fight and then meet some people of dubious character, all in the span of like 20 minutes. Shame your first encounter with a bona-fide superhero is in a situation like this.

It looked as though he flew up onto the roof, but the six-foot long weapon the man held kind of jerked as he landed.  I was pretty sure I saw the tines of a grappling hook retreating back into the end of the weapon.  So this was what Armsmaster looked like in person, I thought.

Armsmaster! So...master of weapons? He seems to have a pretty badass one in one arm, which seems to have multiple uses. Good old Grappling Hooks! The way for grounded super heroes to keep up with flight-types!

The largest superhero organization in the world was the Protectorate, spanning Canada and the States, with ongoing talks about including Mexico in the deal.  It was a government sponsored league of superheroes with a base in each ‘cape city’.  That is, they had a team set up in each city with a sizable population of heroes and villains.  Brockton Bay’s team was officially ‘The Protectorate East-North-East’, and were headquartered in the floating, forcefield-shrouded island that you could see from the Boardwalk.  This guy, Armsmaster, was the guy in charge of the local team.  When the core group of the top Protectorate members from around Canada and the States assembled in that classic ‘v’ formation for the photo shoots, Armsmaster was one of the guys in the wings.  This was a guy who had his own action figures.  Poseable Armsmaster with interchangeable Halberd parts.

Wooaaah. So he’s a really big shot! Leader of the local Protectorate which seems to be this universe’s version of the Avengers/Justice League/big main hero organization. He lives in that badass flying fortess! And seems to be pretty marketable as well. Meeting him in the flesh like this in your first day, woah .

He really did look like a superhero, not like some guy in a costume.  It was an important distinction.  He wore body armor, dark blue with silver highlights, had a sharply angled v-shaped visor covering his eyes and nose.  With only the lower half of his face exposed, I could see a beard trimmed to trace the edges of his jaw.  If I had to judge, with only the lower half of his face to go by, I’d guess he was in his late twenties or early thirties.

High-tech superhero armor and professional gear! Sweet!

He’s giving me a mix of iron man and judge dredd vibes with that costume. Either way he seems to exude “veteran and skilled super” a lot.

His trademark and weapon was his Halberd, which was basically a spear with an axe head on the end, souped up with gadgets and the kind of technology you generally only saw in science fiction.  He was the kind of guy who appeared on magazine covers and did interviews on TV, so you could find almost anything about Armsmaster through various media, short of his secret identity.  I knew his weapon could cut through steel as though it was butter, that it had plasma injectors for stuff that the blade alone couldn’t cut and that he could fire off directed electromagnetic pulses to shut down forcefields and mechanical devices.

HE HAS A MASTER WEAPON WHICH CAN ACT AS ALL OF THE WEAPONS AT THE SAME TIME. THAT’S SO AWESOME

I knew he was gonna be technologically-focused, with that badass floating island and all!

A spear-axe hybrid strong enough to cut through steel, with plasma injectors and EMP blasts?? Fucking sweet.

“You gonna fight me?” He called out.

“I’m a good guy,” I said.

Stepping closer to me, he tilted his head, “You don’t look like one.”

Oof. That’s true. Miss looking-like-a-living-bug with dark colors and yellow lenses doesn’t seem very heroic at... all

Also I really like how that line was delivered for some reason. You don’t look like one

That stung, especially coming from him.  It was like Michael Jordan saying you sucked at basketball.  “That’s… not intentional,” I responded, not a little defensively, “I was more than halfway done putting the costume together when I realized it was already looking more edgy than I’d intended, and I couldn’t do anything about it by then.”

Your power is very hard to use in a kid-friendly way! You command a swarm of biting, stinging, maybe-venomous, maybe-flesh eating bugs! That grimdark look is actually apropiate

I wonder if this work will explore heroes who want to do good things but have characteristically “evil powers”. Taylor could easily be one!

There was a long pause.  Nervously, I turned my eyes from that opaque visor.  I glanced at his chest emblem, a silhouette of his visor in blue against a silver background, and was struck with the ridiculous thought that I had once owned a pair of underpants with his emblem on the front.

Pfft! Taylor your young fangirl self is adorable

Also gave me Deku flashbacks, as with the hero journals

“You’re telling the truth,” he said.  It was a definitive statement, which startled me.  I wanted to ask how he knew, but I wasn’t about to do or say anything that might change his mind. 

Lie-detector?? God his suit just has everything

I love technology based powers by the way. When a hero stacks himself up to the teeth in sweet tech it’s a sight to behold

He approached closer, looking me over as I sat there with my arms around my knees, he asked, “You need a hospital?”

“No,” I said. “Don’t think so.  I’m as surprised as you are.”

“You’re a new face,” he said.

“I haven’t even come up with a name yet.  You know how hard it is to come up with a bug-themed name that doesn’t make me sound like a supervillain or a complete dork?”

Hmm that’s true! Swarm sounds villanous, same with Plague, Sting, Hivemind, Pestilence...

Bug is probably too simple. (Insect) Queen maybe? Eh Queen is so general that it’s probably taken already. Control? Probably taken  and sounds villanous.

He chuckled, and it sounded warm, very normal, “I wouldn’t know.  I got into the game early enough that I didn’t have to worry about missing out on all of the good names.”

There was a pause in the conversation.  I suddenly felt awkward.  I don’t know why, but I admitted to him, “I almost died.”

“That’s why we have the Ward program,” he said.  There was no judgement in his tone, no pressure.  Just a statement.

Hmm, what is that? Some sort of superhero training?

I nodded, more to give a response than out of any agreement with the answer.  The Wards were the under-eighteen subdivision of the Protectorate, and Brockton Bay did have its own team of Wards, with the same naming convention as the Protectorate; The Wards East-North-East.  I had considered applying to join, but the notion of escaping the stresses of high school by flinging myself into a mess of teenage drama, adult oversight and schedules seemed self-defeating.

Oooh so it’s like the Teen Titans, and other young superhero groups! Young teenage superheroes! Nice!

Also yeah, that would probably be similar to school, and you wanted escapism with this. I don’t think you would get bullied though, but I understand your reticence.

“You get Lung?” I asked, to change the subject from the Wards.  I was pretty sure that he was obligated to try and induct new heroes into either the Protectorate or the Wards, depending on their age, to promote the whole agenda of organized heroes who are accountable for their actions, and I really didn’t want him to get on my case about joining.

He probably is obligated to ask, yeah. I suppose they don’t condone vigilantism. So changing the subject to the dragon man is probably a good idea!

“Lung was unconscious, beaten and battered when I arrived.  I pumped him full of tranquilizers to be safe and temporarily restrained him under a steel cage I welded to the sidewalk.  I’ll pick him up on my way back.”

“Good,” I said, “With him in jail, I’ll feel like I accomplished something today.  Only reason I started the fight was because I overheard him telling his men to shoot some kids.  Only realized later that he was talking about some other villains.”

Armsmaster turned to look at me.  So I told him, walking him through the fight in general, the arrival of the teenage bad guys, and their general descriptions.  Before I finished, he was pacing back and forth on the roof.

“These guys.  They knew I was coming?”

Yeeah that was a pretty epic misunderstanding there.

Also they probably knew you were coming thanks to the kinda-omniscient know-it-all in their team soooo yeah.

I nodded, once.  As much respect as I had for Armsmaster, I wasn’t in much of a mood to repeat myself.

“That explains a lot,” he said, staring off into the distance.  After a few moments, he went on to explain, “They’re slippery.  On those few occasions we do manage to get in a toe to toe fight with them, they either win, or they get away more or less unscathed, or both.  We know so little about them.  Grue and Hellhound were working on their own before they joined the group, so there’s some information there, but the other two?  They’re nonentities.  If the girl Tattletale has some way of detecting or tracking us, it would go a long way towards explaining why they’re doing as well as they are.”

Insteresting! So Regent and Tattletale are very well hidden! I imagine it must be easy for Tattletale to do so, but I still don’t know what Regent does... He’s definitely the most misterious of them all at the moment.

Heh, and he uses Hellhound for Bitch, he’s a hero so of course

It kind of surprised me to hear one of the top level heroes admitting to being anything less than perfectly on top of things.

“It’s funny,” I said, after a few moment’s thought, “They didn’t seem that hardcore.  Grue said they were kind of panicking when they heard Lung was coming after them, and they were casually joking around while the fight was going on.  Grue was making fun of Regent.”

“They said all this in front of you?” he asked.

I shrugged, “I think they thought I was helping them out.  The way Tattletale talked, I think she thought I was a bad guy too or something.”  With a touch of bitterness, I said, “Dunno, I guess it was the costume that led them to that assumption.”

“Could you have taken them in a fight?” Armsmaster asked me.

I started to shrug, and winced a little.  I was feeling a little sore in the shoulder, where I’d tumbled on the roof after being blasted by Lung’s flames.  I said, “Like you said, we don’t know a lot about them, but I think that girl with the dogs-”

“Hellhound,” Armsmaster said.

“I think she could have kicked my ass on her own, so no.  I probably couldn’t have fought them.”

Yeah they didn’t really seem evil per se, they were pretty nice to us! Maybe because they confused us for a villain...

And yeah I don’t think you could have beaten them. Of the two powers I sorta know of them, hellbeasts and kinda-omniscience beat bugs, I’m pretty sure. So yeah.

“Then count it as a good thing that they got the wrong impression,” Armsmaster said.

“I’ll try to look at it that way,” I said, struck by how he easily he was able to employ the whole ‘take a negative and turn it into a positive’ mindset I’d been trying to maintain.  I envied that.

Heroes tends to be more optimistic than most.

“That a girl,” he said, “And while we’re looking forward, we need to decide where we go from here.”

My heart sank.  I knew he was going to bring up the Wards again.

Yeaah and he’ll put you in an awkward spot again...

What do you want to do Taylor? Start as a standalone hero and then work your way up through your acts and deeds? Could you even do that and still be well-regarded by the Protectorate?

“Who gets the credit for Lung?”

Caught off guard, I looked up at him.  I started to speak, but he held up his hand.

“Hear me out.  What you’ve done tonight is spectacular.  You played a part in getting a major villain into custody.  You just need to consider the consequences.”

“Consequences,” I muttered, even as the word spectacular rang in my ears.

Oh, so he wants to talk about who gets the credit? Huh, didn’t expect that. It could be a good first step for her hero career, but it could also be dangerous to let villains know about her existence, especially if she’s going solo

“Lung has an extensive gang throughout Brockton Bay and neighboring cities.  More than that, he has two superpowered flunkies.  Oni Lee and Bakuda.”

I shook my head, “I know about Oni Lee, and Grue mentioned fighting him.  I’ve never heard of Bakuda.”

So he has two liutenants with powers! Oni Lee was mentioned before and now... Bakuda. Baku- makes me think explosions from Bakuha, so it could be explosions-based?

Seems to be a new member, anyways.

Armsmaster nodded, “Not surprising.  She’s new.  What we know about her is limited.  She made her first appearance and demonstration of her powers by way of a drawn out terrorism campaign against Cornell University.  Lung apparently recruited her and brought her to Brockton Bay after her plans were foiled by the New York Protectorate.  This is… something of a concern.”

Damn, terrorism against a University and a conforntation with the New York Protectorate? She seems to have some infamy even before joining

“What are her powers?”

“Are you aware of the Tinker classification?”

I started to shrug, but remembered my sore shoulder and nodded instead.  It was probably more polite, too.  I said, “Covers anyone with powers that give them an advanced grasp of science.  Lets them make technology years ahead of its time.  Ray guns, ice blasters, mechanized suits of armor, advanced computers.”

Oh sweet

So tinkers are the inventors, the tech-based superheroes who use futuristic technology and all kinds of high-specs gear, and that is their superpower?

Oh I love technology-based powers so much.

“Close enough,” Armsmaster said.  It struck me he would be a Tinker, if his Halberd and armor were any indication.  That, or he got his stuff from someone else.  He elaborated,  “Well, most Tinkers have a specialty or a special trick.  Something they’re particualrly good at or something that they can do, which other Tinkers can’t.  Bakuda’s specialty is bombs.”

I stared at him.  A woman with a power that let her make bombs that were technologically decades ahead of their time.  No wonder he saw it as a concern.

So Armsmaster is a tinker! Makes sense with his impossibly-amazing plasma spear-axe, lie detector and super armor. I suppose a tinker’s threat can vary a lot depending on prep time and current gear. I like them!

Super-advanced explosives? Oh boy, that sounds like potencially a fucking nightmare

“Now I want you to consider the danger involved in taking the credit for Lung’s capture.  Without a doubt, Oni Lee and Bakuda will be looking to accomplish two goals.  Freeing their boss and getting vengeance on the one responsible.  I suspect you’re now aware… these are scary people.  Scarier in some ways than their boss.”

“You’re saying I shouldn’t take the credit,” I said.

“I’m saying you have two options.  Option one is to join the Wards, where you’ll have support and protection in the event of an altercation.  Option two is to keep your head down.  Don’t take the credit.  Fly under the radar.”

Yeah I could see how Taylor could become the target of these two underlings, which would probably be more than she can handle.

So Armsmaster is offering her the possibilities of

a) Joining the teenage super-squad and take the credit for Lung or

b)Keep going solo but maintain your involvment in this a secret

I wasn’t prepared to make a decision like that.  Usually, I went to sleep at eleven or so, waking up at six thirty to get ready for my morning run.  At my best guess, it was somewhere between one and two in the morning.  I was emotionally exhausted from the highs and lows of the evening, and I could barely wrap my head around the complications and headaches that would come from joining the Wards, let alone having two insanely dangerous sociopaths coming after me. 

Aand one of those options is already giving Taylor a headache

On top of that, I wasn’t so ignorant as to miss Armsmaster’s motives. If I opted to not take the credit for Lung’s capture, Armsmaster would, I was sure.  I didn’t want to get on the bad side of a major player.

....True, politics could be at play here

Athough I don’t know if Taylor has just a bad view of power structures in general, considering she thought that autobiographical book she read was probably all propaganda

...Which could be true, and the whole system could be corrupt at least a little, and Armsmaster is offering her two options where he hopes he gets the credit and the glory

“Please keep my involvement in Lung’s capture secret,” I told him, painfully disappointed to have to say it, even as I knew it made the most sense.

He smiled, which I hadn’t expected.  He had a nice smile.  It made me think that he could win the hearts of a lot of women, whatever the top two-thirds of his face looked like.  “I think you’ll look back and see this was a smart decision,” Armsmaster said, turning to walk to the other end of the roof, “Call me at the PHQ if you’re ever in a pinch.” He stepped off the edge of the roof and dropped out of sight.

He seems very pleased at her decision, which reinforces my belief that he did want to get the credit after all. Or he’s happy she doesn’t get in trouble. Or both.

Armsmaster seems like an ok guy, probably a little vain, or glory-seeking, but in a way, all superheroes are a bit like that. I have defintely seen much worse examples.

You get a thumbs-up, cool plasma-spear man

Call me if you’re ever in a pinch.  He’d been saying, without openly admitting, that he owed me one.  He would take the lion’s share of the credit for Lung’s capture, but he owed me one.

Before I was all the way down the fire escape, I heard the thrum of his motorcycle, presumably carrying Lung towards a life of confinement. I could hope.

Oh true! Nice, you can call in a favour of a team leader of the superhero mega-alliance! Good start to your superhero career, Taylor!

And he just took away Lung so it seems she was indeed the push the situation needed to get him into custody! Yes!

It would take me a half hour to get home.  On the way, I would stop and pull on the sweatshirt and jeans I had hidden.  I knew my dad went to sleep even earlier than I did, and he slept like a log, so I had nothing to worry about as far as wrapping up the night.

It could have gone worse.  Strange as it sounds, those words were a security blanket I wrapped around myself to keep myself from dwelling on the fact that tomorrow was a school day.

It could have gone worse is a good mentality to have!

Let’s hope the three bitches aren’t too insufferable tomorrow.

[a-wandering-fool]

Sanders: I Will Do a Better Job ‘Explaining What We Mean by Socialism – Democratic Socialism’

“I think what we have to do, and I will be doing it, is to do a better job maybe in explaining what we mean by socialism — democratic socialism. Obviously, my right-wing colleagues here want to paint that as authoritarianism and communism and Venezuela, and that’s nonsense.

“What I mean by democratic socialism is that I want a vibrant democracy. I find it interesting that people who criticize me are busy actively involved in voter suppression trying to keep people of color or low-income people from voting, because they don’t want a vibrant democracy. I do.

“Second of all, what it means, Rachel, is that in the wealthiest country in the history of the world we can provide a decent standard of living for all about people. That’s just the reality. That’s not Utopian dreaming; that is a reality. Health care for all can be done and we can save money in doing it. We can have a minimum wage which is a living wage, and I’m delighted to see that you know, right now, five states already passed fifteen dollars an hour minimum wage. The House of Representatives is gonna do it. We have got to do that.”

The problem with “democratic” Socialism is something the Left in this country should be able to intuit–but sadly don’t: sometimes you’re the party who wins the argument. And sometimes the other folks vote in President Donald Trump.

So when economic institutions are run by consensus rather than economic institutions being forced to cater to fickle customers–there will always be a large minority of customers who are as unhappy as the Left is today with our Democratically elected President.

It also never ceases to amaze me how someone on the Left who is a Bernie Supporter or who supports “Socialism” will then post endless diatribes againstthe Government for doing something stupid. Like cops arresting the wrong man. Like a local zoning commission leveling a bunch of homes for a Foxconn factory. Like the government taking cash from an innocent couple.

Our government is already “democratic”–yet this doesn’t stop our government from doing incredibly stupid things. And we’re supposed to turn over the entire economy to this same government?

The reason why Socialism fails is not because it’s not sufficiently “democratic” enough. Socialism fails because it creates a single point of failure: centralized command and control of the economy.

Through a free market, price signaling (which is a way of signaling what customers want) allows multiple suppliers to make individual decisions about the products they plan to offer and how they plan to make those products. But when decision making is pushed up to a central authority–such as a government oversight bureau–price signaling falls to the wayside. Instead of giving customers what they want, governments tell corporations what to give to customers. And like the Left who is unhappy about the 2016 Presidential Elections, some customers don’t get what they want.

Instead they get what the government tells them the should have.

If you don’t think this description–that the Government should tell us what we can consume, rather than having corporations guess what we want by providing a variety of products–doesn’t apply to Bernie Sanders, remember his famous, but rather telling quote:

You can’t just continue growth for the sake of growth in a world in which we are struggling with climate change and all kinds of environmental problems. All right? You don’t necessarily need a choice of 23 underarm spray deodorants or of 18 different pairs of sneakers when children are hungry in this country.

But there is a rather natural result of companies (made up of and employing thousands of people) competing for your dollars.

And when they do: when companies are forced to compete for your dollars, by appealing to your desires and to your convenience, this is the natural result:

The thing is, though, one of the attacks against Capitalism by “Democratic Socialists” of all breeds, is this very excess. What many of us see as a feature, Socialists see as a bug: all that bread, just sitting there, waiting to be consumed, is somehow “proof” of either Capitalism’s waste, the excesses which are destroying our planet, or it’s proof of Capitalism’s “excesses”–the fact that the bread just sits there, when there are people who are going hungry.

These arguments was just used by an editoralist in the Guardian to argue we must end capitalism:

We need to fundamentally re-evaluate our relationship to ownership, work and capital.

The sad part, however, is that for most socialists, while they see the excess bread waiting at the store for someone to buy it as a sign of failure–they can’t envision a world where they themselves don’t have access to such a large selection of bread.

Which is what the Party leaders of the former Soviet Union did: they created two classes of stores–one for themselves and other Party leaders where there were plentiful supplies for the Party elite, and one where there were constant shortages as various 5 year plans were being “tweaked” to properly account for supply and demand constraints whose signals had been destroyed by decades of central planning.

Of course, Socialists of all stripes believe “fixing” the problem of oversupply (but perhaps limiting oversupply to an important few, ‘natch) will help the planet. Because we don’t need 23 different brands of underarm deodorant and 18 different pairs of sneakers when children are going hungry and the planet is on the brink of collapse, right?

And if a few people wind up with a temporary shortage–well, next year, with computers, we’ll somehow do better…

I remarked once elsewhere that I believed that people who call themselves “Socailists” are stupid and they hate people.

This was not just a vapid ad-hominem attack.

I believe self-described “Socialists” of all striped are willfully ignorant because they deny all this reality: they deny that the fundamental problem with “Socialism” is that it centralizes decision-making power to a handful of people who make production decisions through political, rather than economic, decision making tools. And by denying economic signals, they ultimately destroy the feedback loops that make the economy stable.

This is why things failed in Venezuela, by the way. Not because Venezuela was authoritarian (though it takes a degree of authoritarianism to tell farmers what to grow and at what price to sell their goods, and it takes a degree of authoritarianism to tell store keepers what price to charge and how much to stock).

But because Venezuela made it impossible for farmers and store keepers to do their job in an efficient manner.

And had Venezuela been run by a strongman dictator, a central committee of economists, an democratically elected board of governors, or by an on-line nation-wide plebiscite where everyone got to participate and vote–the results would have been exactly the same. Because the decision making process in all of those cases was removed from the economic forces which should motivate those decisions.

As an aside, if you’ve been following along, the smarter of you should be saying “yeah, but doesn’t this happen with large corporations?”

And you’d be exactly right. Large corporations often become inefficient because a central suite of corporate leaders decide what products to produce and at what price point to sell them at. Corporate leaders then can become fixated on providing the same products in the same way–even when market tastes or market forces demand they change–as Circuit City did, denying the rise of on-line retail of electronics, right up to the point of bankruptcy when hundreds of stores closed nation-wide.

Which is why it’s imperative that corporations which become inefficient be allowed to go bankrupt rather than limping along on government life support, such as Obama’s bailing out of General Motors. The resources General Motors would have lost in a bankruptcy hearing don’t get burned to the ground; they get purchased by other corporations who may be able to put them to better use.

Imagine the world today if Tesla had picked up a couple of functioning GM car factory plants back in 2008. It’s not unreasonable to assume we’d be farther along towards the all-electric utopia the Left keep asking for, had a Leftist President not interfered with the economy.

For a free market to function, you need two things: things governments often try to prevent. You need robust competition, such as the rise of Amazon destroying Circuit City’s business model. And you need to allow old, outdated companies to fail.

The answer to a rich billionaire is a thousand entrepreneurs pecking away at that billionaire’s business.

I also said that Socialist “hate people.”

The reason for that goes right to the heart of the “you don’t need 23 different kinds of deodorant and 18 different kinds of sneakers” remark, without considering why these things exist.

Each of these different products are, in a sense, like the bread waiting for customers: each brand, each variation, are all attempts to constantly figure out what consumers want. And we don’t all want the same thing. Me: I want a roll-on deodorant (rather than an aerosol), because my armpits don’t get that sweaty. And I want an unscented brand, because I’m sensitive to perfumes.

But if we were to decide by some sort of central committee the one brand that is allowed to be in the marketplace–because supposedly all that time and effort thousands of workers are engaged in trying to come up with a different brand that may appeal to consumers is better spent elsewhere–which brand should we have? Bernie Sander’s favorite brand? Will it be an aerosol antiperspirant which can dry out my arm pits, leading them to hurt? Will it be an “Old Spice” scented deodorant which can make me physically nauseous?

You may not want any one of the other 22 brands of deodorant in the store. But someone does. And when you eliminate them, aren’t you taking away someone else’s choice?

Are you ignoring their desires?

Isn’t that a little hateful?

So go ahead, Bernie Sanders.

Let’s have a conversation about Socialism.

Let’s allow you to get frustrated because you think–as policy makers in the past have thought countless times before–that the reason why the American public is rejecting your ideas is because somehow we’re stupid and we need those policy decisions explained to us in simpler words. Convince yourselves that Conservatives are genetically inferior, more susceptible in believing lies, and are just outright stupid. Never mind that conservatives actually do better on an ideological ‘Touring test’, meaning conservatives (and not liberals) are better at discussing oppositional beliefs without exaggerating them or resorting to negative stereotypes.

And never mind that conservatives actually understand liberal ideology better than liberals understand conservative ideology. Which is a trivially obvious conclusion, when you realize that left-wing ideology is taught in our schools and parroted on our television shows and news programs, in a country where “Das Kapital” is more likely to be read in college than “The Conservative Mind.” For most thoughtful conservatives (really, classical liberals subscribing to a brand of liberalism before “progressives” stole the term), we had to find our own way out of the weeds, guided by some references to Adam Smith and John Locke half-remembered in passing from a class on American History in high school.

I’d love to have that honest debate about socialism, not a one-way “conversation” where we are lectured to by our betters, and told by those with an agenda how their definition of “Socialism” has never been tried before because of some slippery definition that is full of double-speak and gobbledygook.

Let’s have that honest discussion, with people who know the difference between Milton Friedman and John Keynes, who understand what David Hume was trying to do and why Adam Smith’s “The Welfare of Nations” is more a book about morality than it is a primer on economics. Let’s talk about John Mill’s ideas about the use of forceable action against others.

And let’s have an honest debate over if economic decisions are better made by economic forces or by political forces.

Let’s have this discussion, as Phil Donahue did with Milton Friedman, several times.

But don’t be surprised if voters reject your ideas.

It’s not that we don’t understand them.

It’s that we understand them extremely well.

=====================

[journeysintowebcomics]

Worm Liveblog #94

UPDATE 94: Skitter Doesn’t Approve

Last time the Undersiders fought several of the white supremacists and managed to defeat them! Now it’s time to obtain their victory spoils: one of their foes shall join them, willingly or unwillingly. Skitter isn’t pleased. Let’s see how this goes.

“To use a cliché, you can do this the easy way or the hard way,” Tattletale said, a light smile on her face.

Victor had been the one to be chosen, he’s not really looking forward to any sort of cooperation. Guess this means Regent will have to force him. In a long-term plan, that may be good, but it also is very morally wrong.

As expected, Skitter is not okay with this. She disagrees entirely and is seething because nobody took the time to tell her they were going to force someone to be in their team. It undoubtedly is to have a chance against Coil, but Skitter has standards.

But I couldn’t shake the other possibility.  They could have left me in the dark because they knew I’d object. And now that I was filled in on this plan, I couldn’t object without making the group look weak.  Tattletale would know that.  She would know I wouldn’t screw us over, even with my objections, and this next part of the plan would go ahead whether or not I agreed or not.

That’s definitely what happened. Not only that, I’m sure they also are expecting Skitter to realize raising objections here in front of everyone is a bad idea. They knew she’d be unhappy and they count on her deciding their position of strength is more important than her anger.

It’s clever, but it also has the potential to turn ugly if done wrong. I just hope this won’t lead to a rift.

Appealing to his possibly inexistent good nature isn’t a good strategy, so instead they appeal to what he’d want: talents and powers. He’ll be in proximity to some skilled individuals, the cream of the crop chosen by Coil. It’s a good chance to gather skills! Will that entice Victor to agreeing to join them?

It won’t. In fact, he’s getting kind of cocky.

“The PRT trains its squads in resisting and reacting to master-category attacks.  I’ve picked up some things,” Victor’s chin raised a fraction.

I wouldn’t be surprised if what he has picked up from them is enough to resist Regent’s power. If that happens...well, I don’t know what other options there are. He seems difficult to coerce. Perhaps someone else in the white supremacist group can convince him?

Regent is actually looking forward to some resisting, because it could mean practicing against someone who is actually able to fight back. It’s starting to look like a stalemate in here, and nobody on any side is willing to relent. Actually...Skitter is willing, but she won’t, for the sake of not undermining the Undersiders.

If nobody is going to yield, then they’re going to force the issue by hurting the person Victor seems to care about, fellow teammate Othala. They even have matching outfits. Othala’s power is to give abilities to other people, but she can’t give them to herself. She can help others heal, she can’t heal herself. That’s what makes her a prime target, they don’t hesitate to start battering her up.

Well, if one shove of her head onto the ground counts as battering. It hurts, yeah, but it may not be the worst injury they have ever got. Victor is horrified nonetheless. He’s involved romantically with her, that’s why.

The story behind their relationship is that Victor was going to marry a general in Kaiser’s organization, but she died so instead he settled with her cousin. My guess is that they had to do that because you can’t just back off an advantageous marriage – for the family/organization, I guess – even if a person dies. This could have gone awry, but instead Othala and Victor genuinely like each other, so all is well what ends well.

“This is your plan?” Victor sneered.  “Hate to break it to you, but we’ve talked this shit out.  It’s called communication.  You won’t be revealing any big secrets to break us up.”

The only time someone resisted well enough Tattletale’s sly tongue is when Jack cut her face open. This bravado has already antagonized Regent and Tattletale. At this point I just wonder which one of them will get their vindication first, because I have no doubt Victor will be convinced somehow.

To his credit, he’s fighting back by arguing they love each other, and he sounds like he really does. Doesn’t seem like he’s saying all this stuff just to keep appearances or to defy Tattletale. I completely loathe what group he’s from, but he’s not misleading his girlfriend around, he’s got that on his favor. Othala agrees with everything he’s saying. It’s not a fairy-tale romance at all, but it’s their romance and that’s enough for them.

Tattletale stepped forward, “Or because your names and faces are known to the public, and instead of being part of your group by choice, you’re part of the group because nobody else will have you?”

I don’t think she’s wrong. A reputation is something difficult to leave behind. Skitter herself’s problems trying to assert herself as a heroine during the early arcs prove that. Victor and Othala are very unlikely to ever be redeemed. All they have is the group they’re in right now, and also each other.

Theeere it is, the moment where Tattletale’s insinuations and talking leads somewhere, just like I expected. Victor realizes everything Tattletale has been saying about Victor’s feelings isn’t to needle him. It’s to make Othala doubt him. That wipes his smirk off his face, which I’m taking as a sign there’s some progress here. Nice! I don’t think Othala really believed anything or is paying much attention to all that, but can Victor afford to have doubt sowed into his relationship? If not, then this could be the stick they needed.

“What other options do we have, if we want to pressure you?  You’re invincible for at least a little while longer, but even without that, if we beat and tortured you, I think we’d come out behind, just by virtue of how far we’d have to go before we got past whatever interrogation resistance techniques you’ve stolen.  Wouldn’t be much different if we beat and tortured Othala.  We’d piss you off, but I don’t think we’d break you. So at the very least, this is a more civilized route of attack.”

It’s pretty much the same logic they had when they were kicking Othala’s face into the pavement. She can heal others, but she can’t heal herself. Othala can help others, but can’t help herself.

Now that the jig’s up, they press on, intending to reel him in before he gets time to think or react. Tattletale tells him he’d fight them just to spite them, and that it’s not worth it. They also decide to give him some time to think about it while they go and loot the places these few people were at. I doubt the Undersiders are genuinely interested in anything left behind, this is just a tactic to give him some time to consider his position...and for Othala to sweat, too. She seems a bit desperate.

Silence lingered for a good minute.

“You can cheat,” Othala said.

“Not now, O.”

“We open up the relationship.  You do what you need to, just promise that if you don’t find what you’re looking for, you come back.”

Despite who she is, I feel kind of bad for her. Tattletale did manage to worm into her head enough, and Victor can see it. Skitter also tries to appeal to her, just to get shut down immediately. Suddenly I don’t feel kind of bad for Othala.

Victor tried to coach Othala so she wouldn’t give any signs Tattletale was getting under her skin, so Skitter intervenes by planting black widow spiders on his face. That’s dangerous! And she even says she’s not controlling their instincts! That part...I think she’s lying. Skitter wouldn’t be so cavalier about poisoning someone with black widow venom. I’m sure she’s lying, and Victor will believe it and not say or move at all.

These spiders also give her the chance to be passive-aggressive once Tattletale returns:

Tattletale turned to look my way, and I met her eyes.  I left the bugs in place.

“Could you please move the spiders?”  She asked.

“Of course.” I dismissed them, but I didn’t break eye contact.

She’s going to have plenty of words after this scene is over. Be afraid, Tattletale, ye have stumbled upon Skitter’s wrath.

Victor is undecided. That’s better because it’s not a ‘no’, that’s progress. Still not enough, though.

“Maybe you could provide me some incentive?”

He needs to win on some level if he’s going to make a concession, I thought.

Regent shrugged.  “I could keep you for seventy-two hours, if you don’t cooperate, or thirty-six if you do.”

Victor turned to look at Regent.  “That’ll do.”

Does that count as a victory? I’m not really sure it does, it’s not like Regent has conceded anything. It was simply a statement that’s, well, kind of fair?

That aside, it’ll be only for thirty-six hours? Hm...that’s awfully little time. I doubt Coil will be defeated during the next 36 hours. There are two possibilities, then. Either Regent will lie and keep him for longer than the promised 36 hours, or whatever Victor will do during this time will set the foundations for the Undersiders’ attack. Both scenarios are equally likely, although I’m pretty sure Skitter would object strongly to keeping Victor with them for longer than necessary. It should all be okay as long as she doesn’t take actions to let him go once the time is over. By now she wouldn’t dare to betray the team, but...her moral code is strong. She won’t turn a blind eye to this.

Leaving the area is a bit of a hassle. Everyone except Skitter and Imp leaves. The reason these two stayed behind is so Night can’t transform. Once the rest of the Undersiders are away, Skitter and Imp move, notifying their foes it’s okay to move once Skitter is so far away their enemies are at the edge of her range. Now that things are going more or less smoothly for the team, it’s confrontation time!

“I’m not going to ‘relax’.  You two deliberately left me in the dark, there.  Or it was an exceedingly stupid oversight to forget to mention it, and I know Tattletale isn’t stupid.”

“It was only sort of deliberate.  Regent didn’t have any part in that.”

I find it hard to believe it wasn’t completely deliberate. No way Tattletale didn’t know this would be Skitter’s reaction.

Skitter is okay with the controlling – sorta – because of the targets. Shadow Stalker...well, Skitter has bias there, of course. Shatterbird is a mass murderer and therefore there’s nobody in the world particularly concerned about her rights. Victor is different in that he’s not as bad as those two. Supposedly. Honestly, it’s hard to be as bad as Shatterbird unless you’re a mass murderer too, so he’s as bad as Shadow Stalker at most, and it’s not like Shadow Stalker is the worst person ever. She’s plenty bad but not worse than Shatterbird.

“See, that’s what throws me,” Tattletale said.  “I don’t see that big a difference between Victor and Shadow Stalker.”

It’s not like she’s wrong. Shadow Stalker and Victor are on the same level of awfulness, I just said that, just that instead of being relentless and unwilling to be anything near heroic, Victor is racist. Pretty bad, yup.

Skitter wants to give Victor the benefit of doubt, all because she doesn’t know him at all. Tattletale’s knowledge would have sufficed, yet she didn’t tell her anything. That’s her complaint here, that nobody took the time to tell her the plan. She’d have gotten all her objections out, she’d have been informed of Victor’s character...etc, etc. Communication! That’s what she wants!

“And, of course, now we’re locked into this thing, and I can’t help but wonder if I can trust you in the future.”

“That’s rich,” Regent said, “Coming from you.”

Pretty daring affirmation from Skitter. I doubt anyone is amused.

Indeed, her earlier betrayal leaves her with no room to argue anything about betraying or not trusting. For a moment I thought Regent was a tad rancorous about that, but he clarifies he doesn’t care. He’s just stating Skitter doesn’t have a moral high ground at all, and it’s not like he’s wrong. It’s somewhat hypocritical of her to be saying that stuff.

It’s established Skitter’s beef here is that she wasn’t informed of anything, and that now it’s her turn to show a bit of graciousness and forgive them. I have to side with Tattletale on this one, really.

“And how often can this happen before I can say we’re taking it too far?  Regent’s power is going to get us in trouble, one way or another.  If our enemies decide that the threat of being mind-controlled is too big, and band together against us, it might be creating more of a disadvantage than an advantage.”

I’m pretty sure all enemies worth their salt knew about that already. If they didn’t take any actions so far, then they’re not likely to do anything new. True, the frequency of this has increased to a grand total of...two. Two times. Nobody knows Shadow Stalker’s incident. Shatterbird’s incident is known by the heroes and the villains by now. I really doubt Victor or anyone else in his faction will let anybody hear he was controlled and coerced. Overall, that’ll be one incident everybody will know.

In terms of frequency, it’s still once in a blue moon, yeah?

“I’m saying we discuss it as a group before enslaving someone.”

I can almost guarantee the chance won’t present itself, and if it does, it’ll be agreed by the team beforehand, or at the very least there’ll be a good reason. Those discussions will be pointless. Skitter will most likely object, everyone else will want to do the mind control because it’s advantageous for them. I don’t think that’ll be different, ever. Then again, how often is Regent going to get the chance? Not very often, I’d say.

They’re aaaaaall about wanting others to be scared and paranoid of them, Skitter doesn’t want that because that can be bad. It could lead to all sort of reactions of the ‘a cornered animal will fight back’, because foes may feel cornered because of Regent’s powers. Skitter kind of has a point there, I think! That’d be troublesome! On the other hand, Tattletale is right, everyone is gearing up to attack them. Oh well.

Ah, here comes the crux of this plan! The reason why Victor has been coerced to be with them! I was wondering about that! Before I theorized it was because they needed his help to attack Coil, then decided that may not be correct because he’ll be with them for a short time. Perhaps I wasn’t wrong? Say it, Tattletale!

“Remember our attack on the PRT headquarters?  We walked away with data.  Data Coil and his best people couldn’t crack.”

I get it. So, she plans to make Victor absorb coding knowledge and then crack that code. Dragon’s code, may I add. Okay! That’s going to be really tough, because Dragon’s ciphers can’t be simple at all, can they? There’s a possibility Victor won’t be capable of this either, I think.

Skitter isn’t a fan of that idea. Of course she isn’t, hah! But yeah, in all seriousness, the worthiness of this depends on the content of that data.

“Hear me out. I told Coil that, and that got his attention.  I had something of an idea that Victor, Rune and Othala were looking to leave the Chosen, so I floated the idea to Coil that he could make them an offer.”

I doubt those three will join Coil. It’s inconvenient they join, too. Good thing Coil is likely to be defeated, eh?

There it is, something to make it worthwhile. Other than possibly cracking a very difficult code, Victor also could provide some insight into Coil.

“Like getting a read on Coil’s talents and skills, perhaps.  I can’t say for sure, but I’m thinking Victor could tell us what Coil’s day job used to be.  Enough of a starting point that I can dig up more details.  Know your enemy.  And with a guy that versatile, I can think of several ways he could be useful.”

Sure! Could be a good idea...if Victor can get close enough to Coil to get a read of that. That’s how I understood Victor’s power worked, he needs some proximity to his target. That aside, Coil surely is aware what Victor can do. He’ll take measures to avoid the leak of any information he doesn’t want others to know. Worth a try, though.

The last possible advantage is that Grue may pick a few powers and skills from Victor. Ah...possibly? You’d have to force Victor to cooperate, though. I doubt he’d willingly make Grue stronger.

That’s all. Skitter will trust Tattletale’s judgment. Guess that means everything is forgiven! Thank goodness. Also, she doesn’t trust Regent’s judgment. Yup, sounds about right.  Now that this is settled, they get going, Skitter getting startled when Imp approaches from behind. Imp’s power is a bundle of joy, eh?

“I stayed behind to keep an eye on Night.  Winking instead of blinking so I didn’t lose sight of her.  And you don’t even remember that I was doing it.  Fuck.  Ungrateful bastards.  I had to run the last block so I could be sure you didn’t fly off before I could ask.”

Huh. That’s such a simple way of making sure Night wouldn’t transform, yet I didn’t think of it at all. I wonder how many would have.

Anyway, Imp wants to ask for a favor, that’s why she stopped Skitter. I suppose this also means she doesn’t want the rest of the team to hear it. Also, since they suspect Coil may be listening to their phone conversations, she’s asking Skitter in person, although Skitter isn’t really very enthusiastic about having to do a favor. Not when she already has so much in her to-do pile. But hey, what’s one problem more?

The chapter ends here, but...hm. Although it’s taking a while to make an update, maybe I should read another chapter before posting this one? I think I will. Just to make this a juicier update!

Oh, it’s a bonus interlude. Kind of a bummer. Nooooot the best time for an interlude.

Whoever the character here is, is very stressed and frustrated. He’s hitting a punching bag rather hard, trying to release some of that frustration, and seemingly not being very successful at that. He’s even doing it in ways that’ll lead to injuries. That must be a lot of frustration!

“Jesus, bro. You look like you’re going to have a heart attack.”

He snapped his head around to see Aisha in the doorway.

Ooooooh well then! That sure tells pretty well who this person is. Hello, Grue! I see you’re not having a fun time right now! Shouldn’t this guy be resting instead of exerting himself?

It doesn’t take long for one of the many sources of his frustration to show up:

For a half second, he could see Bonesaw standing there instead, about the same height, dress, bloodstained apron glittering with tools and wide eyes darting about, taking in everything in her surroundings as if there was inspiration or tools to be found anywhere.

Looks like the incident with Bonesaw got him traumatized. No surprise there! It had been incredibly messed up! I thiiiink the term is PTSD? He may have a case of that. I hope it’s not going to cause him a lot of trouble...he already seems to be under a lot of stress.

Seems to me like Brian still worries a lot about Aisha joining the others. Brotherly worry, you see. Aisha should be safe as long as she doesn’t do anything on the caliber of trying to kill Slaughterhouse Nine members all by herself. Besides, Skitter’s costume is very resistant, so that’s a bit of protection. Not that Brian thinks it makes much difference.

Of course Aisha is worried when she sees Brian is pulverizing his own hands, and that anger turns into anger when Brian doesn’t care about the state of her hands. Also, he’s not resting. Even Aisha wants him to rest. Maybe he’d rest easier if he hadn’t been traumatized because...goodness, he definitely is remembering that awful moment.

I considered pasting the paragraph here but geez that’s some morbid stuff. Bonesaw is rather messed up.

Since talking with Brian and trying to convince him to not turn his hands into mincemeat isn’t working, Aisha decides to go make some remaining Merchants afraid. They’re no big deal, she thinks. Brian wants her to be careful, and of course she should be careful! Guns are pretty dangerous and I bet some of them will have guns. Good thing her power will be a big help.

Also Taylor is here. Forgot to note that, my bad.

Apparently this interlude is happening not too long after the last chapter? In that case, perhaps Taylor is here to do the favor Aisha was asking for? It must be something about calming Brian down and stopping him from self-destructing with his own actions and despair. She’s also here to ask him if he’ll take some of the skills Victor has acquired and turn himself into a more powerful person. I’m not sure if that’ll work...if I recall correctly, Victor would have to be in Grue’s darkness for Grue to be able to use powers. Worth a try, though!

There goes Aisha! To be with Regent and mess around. Brian doesn’t feel much better Regent’s going to be Aisha’s company, haha!

She said, “It’s fine.  He’s your buddy, and our powers actually work well together.  You and me, we can’t… what’s the word?”

“Synergize.”

“We can’t synergize.  I do my thing, you do yours, but we get in each other’s way.  You blind me, I wipe myself from your memory.  With Regent and me, I can set people up for him to mess with, give him a chance to use his power.  Or we mix it up a little, so I spook people, then he uses his power to make them feel like they’re being pushed around while I deal with others, to freak them out.  Or I go in first and then give him word on what’s going on.”

Ah, she’s right! Regent and Imp’s powers do mesh well together. I hadn’t realized it until now. Heh, it’s nice two parahumans’ powers can be used together effectively. Teamwork is always something I like when it’s about powers.

She’s trying so hard to be conciliatory, all to get Brian to calm down. She leaves, leaving Taylor and Brian alone.

Heh, they have a strategy room here, with maps of the city, pins, everything you’d think they’d have. It’s fun to think about. Looks like many enemy factions tried to get into Grue’s territory and stay there since he has a nice residential zone. Most of them had been dealt with, thanks to Aisha and Lisa.

He knew he should feel relieved.  Knew that he should appreciate that Aisha had tried to do something to help him even if she wasn’t the best at expressing concern or affection.

He only felt guilty.

Because they’re dealing with what should be his responsibility, perhaps?

He’d been wallowing, stumbling around their headquarters in a fugue, and Aisha had apparently been going all out, taking out their enemies and clearing their territory of threats.  It had been a big task for the two of them, and she was doing it on her own.

Why am I here? He wondered.  He wasn’t a leader anymore, he wasn’t doing his job with his territory, wasn’t protecting the people he was important to, wasn’t working towards anything…

I was right! Great! It has been just four or five days since the Slaughterhouse Nine left Brockton Bay, and since then Brian hasn’t really been able to do anything other than dwell in his despair. Honestly, it’d be surprising if he hadn’t. Bonesaw’s actions were absolutely horrible and it’s a miracle Brian is alive in the first place. I feel bad for him, feeling guilty about this...

Also, turns out he does want to deal with Coil. Partly because Taylor wouldn’t forgive any of them if they didn’t help, and partly because he does know Dinah deserves help. Nice! And he does want to help but...he’s not able to. Because of his current mental state. Brian really needs some time to rest, and a good handful of therapy sessions, poor guy.

He’s going to try to help Aisha so he doesn’t get stuck in a perpetual cycle of despair. Good for him for trying! But I doubt Aisha’s going to accept that. Everyone wants Brian to rest, not for him to help anyone. I suppose he hasn’t told anybody how he feels...

Oh, geez, the flashbacks continue. It’s still as heart wrenching as before.

“…I could give you a skull face like that helmet of yours, only real… and crank your power up to the max, always on, give you some biological imperative to encourage cannibalism, see how long it takes for them to eliminate you if they can’t see or hear you…”

I hope he’s not going to associate his villain identity with those words...the last thing he needs right now is to be unable to identify himself with something that’s so familiar to him.

Apparently I misinterpreted some stuff earlier and thought Taylor was here. No, she just arrived. Way to go, me. Anyway, she’s here to check on Brian as per Aisha’s request. She’s bringing groceries. Perhaps she intends to cook something for him? That’d be nice.

It’ll be a dinner! Come on, Brian, say something to her about how you feel. It’ll do you some good.

Taylor is trying to make some friendly talk, trying to make it look like everything is okay and normal. She even admits Aisha asked her to check on Brian. I’m pretty sure Brian already suspected that, but I think he’d be glad to have confirmation anyway.

He’s surprised to hear Aisha was the one who defeated Night. Sure must be shocking! After all, Night’s the one who almost killed them all, if I recall correctly. He’s worried she put herself in danger, Taylor says she didn’t, aaaaand I call bull. There’s nothing that isn’t dangerous when it’s about fighting other parahumans.

“We got Victor. Not sure if I like how Lisa sprung that on me, but we got him.  We were thinking you could try borrowing his power, see if you don’t get any permanent boosts.”

“Sure. Aisha mentioned that.  I don’t know if it’ll work.”

“No?”

Brian tried to organize his answer about why in his head.  What had Bonesaw said?  Something about passengers.

Oh, right. Not really sure yet what that’s like, but if there are parasites that give powers, then that supports my theory that Grue won’t be able to keep the powers and skills he gets from Victor for long. It’s not like Brian is acquiring more parasites that’ll build brain areas on him, it’s just a temporary enhancement.

Noticing Brian is distracted and thinking, Taylor asks what’s going on. He tells about his thoughts regarding these passengers, and he even says he doesn’t gain any powers because the parasites give the brain structures you need to truly use the powers. He should tell Lisa, so she doesn’t get her hopes up.

To practice, he’s trying to borrow Skitter’s power. It lacks a lot of finesse and Skitter easily takes control of the bugs, like it’s no big deal for her. Which it surely isn’t. She has a lot more practice. This prompts a short monologue about the role of tiny stuff in life. Getting philosophical in here, she is. She should have left aside the mention of skin mites all over us, that’s giving me the heebie-jeebies.

“I don’t know if that makes sense, but I usually try reaching out to these guys when things get bad.  In retrospect, it kind of centers me.”

By now it’s a coping mechanic of some sort, it seems.

It’s Brian’s turn to monologue, and he keeps his in his head because it’s all about Taylor’s physical appearance. Ah, getting detailed! This will make it easier to picture her, although I admit I have always pictured Taylor Hebert like the fanart I was sent eons ago. This seems to fit what I remember. Neat!

Okay, he definitely is attracted to her despite everything.

There’s what I hoped: Taylor reaffirms to Brian she’s going to support him and help him whenever he needs. Unlike the rest of the interlude, Brian actually feels better, it seems! Or at least he’s not reacting badly. That’s as good as it gets. I think it’s partly because, although Taylor right now is enveloped by Grue’s darkness and is blind and deaf, she’s calm.

Oh, come on, Brian, don’t ruin the moment by calling that ‘deceptive confidence’!

This all led to the pivotal point of this interlude: a hug. Really, Brian extends his arms, Taylor finds that out thanks to her insects, and she gives her approval. They hug, or at least Brian holds her against him. It’s actually kind of peaceful! I think I like it. Besides, if it helps Brian feel better, then great!

Alright, they’re staying close to each other, and not just physically. In his own words:

He’d been trying to do it alone.  He’d needed a rock, an anchor.  If he’d been asked months ago, weeks ago, even days ago, he wasn’t sure he would have believed that was true, or that it would be Taylor, of all people.

I don’t know, I’d have believed it easily. Taylor’s role as the protagonist and as the newest member of this team includes helping the existing members with their problems. It’s her duty as the main character, hah! But yeah, for real, Taylor and Brian almost always got along. I’d have believed Taylor would be the rock he needed so much.

The interlude ends with Taylor and Brian enjoying a rather intimate moment together. Brian even dares to kiss the top of Taylor’s head. It’s mellow, but a big step, as far as I’m concerned! It means Brian and Taylor’s relationship really wasn’t over with the whole betrayal thing. Still, this is just starting, there could be more stuff in the future.

That’s the end of the interlude. It was...different. Usually these interludes are sort of action-y and end with the character suffering in some manner, yeah? This one Brian seems to have ended better than when it started. It’s refreshing, honestly. But I’m not sure why I’m not really into it. It’s not like I dislike character development or fluffier moments! So then why didn’t it get my attention as much as I thought it would...?

To be honest, I don’t know.

Now that this interlude is over, I’ll stop for now. Thank you for reading and I’m sorry for the wait!

Next time: in two updates

[gamearamamegathons]

Trauma Center: Second Opinion: Surgery-Induced Rage

[Content warning for surgery stuff, and also bugs/spiders]

Circe here! I've covered two chapters this time, so there's a lot to get into. Let's get right to it. The first part of chapter 5 is just about treating a huge outbreak of GUILT. This gives the game an excuse to re-use a lot of its previous surgeries, just more difficult. First off, we have to handle five Kyriaki cases in ten minutes. This is actually pretty tense, but I'm glad I didn't lose. There's only so much fun you can squeeze out of doing the same surgery five times in a row. After this, they make a big deal out of there being a new airborne strain of GUILT, but it's actually just triangles again. This time, if you let the mist leave the surgery area, the infection spreads and you lose. But there's no reason for there to ever be a risk of that happening, so that plays out exactly the same. This game actually seems to pull that trick a lot, making a big deal about mutations that change the gameplay in barely-noticeable ways. Case in point, we now have a Tetarti case that they say is stronger, but I actually didn't notice a difference. There's some plot stuff about politicians obstructing the distribution of our GUILT treatment drugs, but that gets handled so it's not really worth making much of a fuss over.

Things get a bit more interesting afterward, when Delphi operatives break into Caduceus. The doctors make the logical step and decide that they should catch the intruders. This is a big government operation, are there no guards or anything...? Well, Dr. Meyers confronts one of the infiltrators and gets a picture of him, but she's infected with a new GUILT in the process. Introducing Paraskevi, which is a bit of an interesting one, and kinda fun to deal with. It's a sort of segmented worm thing, and we have to stun it with the laser, and cut it in half with the scalpel. We have to keep doing this until it's small enough to remove, creating new pieces moving around in the process. It's also burrowing through her organs, and if it reaches her heart, it's instant game over. So we just gotta get them all before that. They say you should stop the Paraskevi before it burrows, but it doesn't seem to telegraph that before it does. I eventually figure this out later, but we'll get to that.

We find out that the infiltrator was actually Dr. Blackwell, who is Angie's father who left his family behind 13 years ago. It looks like it's time to go raid Dr. Blackwell's lab, so naturally Derek and Angie are going with. There's a huge exchange about whether Angie's emotions will get in the way, but Angie insists she wants to go. I could complain about this scene, but it's not worth the effort, so let's move on. When we reach the Delphi lab, it looks like Delphi's higher ups have evacuated and left their researchers to die. Which seems like a bad move, these aren't just generic replaceable flunkies, but whatever. Naturally, we won't allow even the bad guys to die of GUILT, so we start treating one of them. Inside his organs, we find...well, basically little bugs crawling out of him. Gross. This surgery isn't very complicated, you just laser them as they come. When a lot of them clump together, they can form a larger blue bug that does a lot of damage to the patient, but if you keep at it, you'll clear them out without too much trouble.

The big one is the next surgery. We find Dr. Blackwell himself, infected with his greatest creation, Savato. This is the strain we just dealt with, but this time there's a whole boss monster here. It's basically a spider creature that makes a web around the victim's heart to drain their energy and make it stop. We have to cut away the webbing, but it *melts scalpels* so we gotta just keep getting replacement scalpels every time we cut a strand of web. Naturally, it can create more of the little guys, but they're not too hard to clean up as you go. After this part, you have to laser off a protective layer on the Savato's body. Once this is burned off, you can cut it with the scalpel. We have to repeat this a few times, and then we get a serum which can kill it. Injecting the serum causes it to flip out and start making lacerations everywhere, so Derek automatically uses his dark magic. Even then, though, it's too fast to kill, so you have to figure out that you need *double* dark magic to stop time completely and kill Savato once and for all. Uh, hope you didn't use up your healing touch already, that would suck. To be honest, Savato isn't that hard and even a little bit boring, since you have to laser it a lot and there's not a lot of visual indication of how long you have to laser it to get rid of its protection completely. But I guess it's not a big deal.

After this, we get Dr. Weaver's final episode. We see her at the Delphi lab pre-raid, where she's treating a researcher infected with Kyriaki. While she's doing this, we also see the medium-sized blue Savato again. But she's told to keep them alive while she treats the Kyriaki, because they need to be extracted to use as samples. This is a bit annoying, but not too bad as long as you keep the patient's vitals up. After the Kyriaki are gone, you get a serum to stun the Savato and extract them. After this, Dr. Weaver is told to evacuate, and they let her go since Delphi doesn't need her anymore. However, she kept the Savato samples, rather than handing them over. Seems like kind of a massive oversight that they just forgot to ask for the samples, but oh well, I guess.

The next section is mainly text, which is weird. I think this may be the bridge between the original content and a new remake-exclusive chapter, which would explain it, I guess. It's pretty sloppy, though. Basically it says that Delphi were exposed, and Dr. Blackwell cooperated with the investigation, so Delphi were effectively wiped out. Their home base was a fortified ship, which housed their leader Adam, who's essentially just an emaciated GUILT host at this point, I guess. It's weird. After this, we flash forward a few months, after Caduceus has largely been successful in eliminating GUILT.

Derek and Angie travel to Caduceus's European branch to see some new research they're working on. It looks like they've created a treatment for regenerating cells, which sounds pretty neat. We also meet Dr. Weaver again, going by her real name, Dr. Kimishima. The characters explain that there are still cases of GUILT cropping up, and they suspect that Delphi splinter groups are to blame. We treat a Tetarti strain that actually *is* harder, because rather than seeing their colors, we have to go by the toxic mist they emit, which is correctly color-coded. It's a neat idea, and not too tough to handle. Tetarti treatments are pretty chill, no matter what gimmicks they add on. Unfortunately, Derek collapses after the surgery. It looks like he, too, has been infected, and Dr. Kimishima will have to treat him.

This surgery is kinda tough, because we have to deal with Kyriaki and Paraskevi at the same time. This is right near his heart, so we have to deal carefully with the Paraskevi. Luckily, they're smaller this time, but it's a bit hectic between the Paraskevi and a much more aggressive Kyriaki. Oh yeah, I almost forgot. Dr. Kimishima also confesses her involvement with Delphi, and explains that she traded her services and the Savato samples to Caduceus Europe in exchange for immunity...so that's why she's here now. Good to know.

After this, we learn that the regenerative treatments are actually created from Adam's GUILT-infected cells. I don't see anything inherently bad about repurposing a disease for healing purposes -- that's the entire basis of vaccines, after all. But the other characters seem very unhappy about this development. After this is revealed, we move on to a conference where Caduceus Europe goes into greater detail on their research. There's a very strange exchange where they explain that the government wanted this research to heal soldiers, and Hoffman claims disapprovingly that this would 'remove the risk of sending men to war'. He seems to think this is bad, even though the soldiers wouldn't even be fit to fight after this treatment, they just...wouldn't...die. I don't know, I guess it's an anti-war message, after a fashion, but I can't really get behind the sentiment that soldiers should suffer more. It's not like governments care about what happens to them after they're no longer useful, so this whole angle seems...confused, and it's never brought up again.

Whatever, let's cut to the money shot everyone's waiting for. They bring out a patient who was treated with this stuff, but then something goes wrong and his...blood...explodes...it's not really clear. Point is, GUILT-infected blood just got over a room full of the best doctors in the world and that *seems bad*. Derek is immune because he was infected once before I guess, so he's gotta get to work. The first GUILT we gotta treat is Pempti, and again, they claim it's different somehow, but this one seems to play out...basically the same as before. Maybe it takes more hits? If you keep it under control, that really doesn't make much difference...so...eh.

It's the next surgery where things really get fun, and by 'fun' I mean welcome to hell. In this episode, we have to do four surgeries in a row, in ten minutes. But unlike the last one of these, they're all different, and they're mostly very difficult rather than pedestrian Kyriaki treatments. First up is triangles, and you might think this would be the worst one, but with some practice, I actually managed to do it without a lot of difficulty. After that is Kyriaki, and there's nothing to make it any more difficult than before, so this is the one easy one. Next up, though...the third one is Deftera. You might remember that Deftera is the one where you have red and blue moving tumors, and we want them to collide so we can suck their fluids out. This surgery has some issues. First, the patient is bleeding everywhere, so there's blood pools obscuring the area that we have to suck out to do anything with the stuff underneath. All the while, there's four Deftera are spreading tumors everywhere, and it basically comes down to sheer luck if they collide in a timely manner, and if the same-colored ones collide, it makes everything worse. And it's just straight up random. Worse yet, when I try to suck out the Deftera's fluids, sometimes I just get interrupted for no apparent reason. And don't forget, once you've weakened the Deftera enough that they can be cut out, they start wreaking havoc and doing major damage. If the patient is below 30 vitals or so when that happens, they basically just die. And because so much is happening, if you ever have to stop to recover vitals, you're going to fall behind and never catch up. I tried to reduce the load by using the healing touch, but somehow I was having a hell of a time inputting it correctly, so I was just wasting time while the patient bled out.

Readers, I am not an angry person by nature. But this really, really...really...pissed me off. The combination of the unfairness of the surgery combined with the fact that I have to repeat two unrelated surgeries every time I failed was really pushing me to my limits for the first time in this entire game. For my mental well-being, I eventually caved and switched the difficulty to easy. It's good that I did, too, because the fourth surgery requires you to deal with another Paraskevi, except this one is right next to the heart and full-sized. This is where I figured out what should've been perhaps easy to understand in hindsight: a Paraskevi piece will only burrow if it's left un-stunned for too long. So as long as you take caution and regularly re-stun all pieces present, you'll be fine. On easy mode, anyway. Still, just to tie off this hideous episode with a bow, I did lose at this surgery once more before finishing off the whole affair.

After that, the 'final boss' is a bit anticlimactic. We find that Hoffman was infected with Savato, so we have to fight it. This strain has a gimmick where the web can hurt the patient more if it goes for too long without being cut, but that barely made an impact, and it played out pretty much the same as the last Savato. Long, but not all that hard, in the grand scheme of things. After that, we get the epilogue, and there's not really much to say. It's the happy ending you'd expect, more or less. Caduceus Europe is very sorry that they tried to create a new life-saving treatment, and promise to never do it again. Derek and Angie go home. Beyond that, I'm not invested in these characters to be that concerned where their lives end up after this, but it seems like they're doing fine, so, you know. That's good.

Beating the game unlocks a new set of extra-difficult postgame surgeries. I...may just skip these. We'll see. But either way, we're not quite done with Trauma Center: Second Opinion yet. Join me next time, when I pull together the threads of the game's narrative to form a coherent whole that I have only hinted at until now.

[thegoddamnowl]

Owl on Warframe (part 2): Owlframes, chance games and butts

Ok so after some more time into it, I managed to advance on Warframe. Since the first part of this lil review thingie I spat out, there have been a few important changes and updates with the game but never the less the experience from it was pretty much the same when I tested it so let's go.

Table of contents

Retake: Your body is ready... not.

Gameplay Extended: By the Power of VoidSkull

Graphics Extended: The Forma of Water

Music: DUN-DUN DUN DUN-DUN

Advice extended: I'm trying to be a guide and a friend here

Current impression: the Owl thoughts:RELOADED

Retake: Your body is ready... not.

Ok so there's not a narrative intro here since we are midway through at this point. So far so good, the game has presented challenges and with a bit of skill you can pass them no problem. You go through the Sol System tackling down nodes, gathering resources and parts, getting more and stronger mods as well as fiding your style to play whatever frames you chose to keep. However, there is a point where the difficulty ramps up too much, its not really a bad thing other than a slight oversight on how the enemy progresses in stats as they level up. But never the less, things become harder from Jupiter as enemies sport better stats that are on par or can surpass yours, can take hits and can deliver more of a punch if you are not careful, as well as their mission objectives becoming a little bit more complicated to accomplish as they are getting smarter in some places.

It is when you reach Saturn that you'll be asking yourself "HOW AM I SUPPOSSED TO SURVIVE THIS??"

Jupiter's jump of difficulty wasn't so bad since now you are basically commined to throw a bit more of effort into getting better stuff, which is really not much problem, but Saturn is unforgiving if you didn't do that. Guess how I learned this.

So, once I had to make up the resources I needed to become stronger (which took some time) I could finally progress through the star chart as I used to from the start. You know you can do it when you can take down that one boss in just a few minutes/seconds of initiating battle.

This will go on the recomendations as well but let me tell you this: UPGRADE YOUR MODS. If you remember, I told you mods are a substantial part of the game, but it wasn't until I hit Saturn that I was forced to upgrade them as I went because until I reached there I actually never had need to upgrade them in the first place: just getting basic unranked mods was enough to carry me all the way until Jupiter and part of Europa. The boss I'm talking about too is actually on Europa so you are most likely to not progress if you went in like I did.

In any case, if you go upgrading your mods you'll find out you can progress as normal. But this also makes you upgrade any other new good mods you find along the way. In any case, is not something you can't solve but sometimes arrogance cant take the best of you. It will take some time to level and unlock stuff if you didn't already.

But anyways, once you have upgraded mods, the game's difficulty curve settles in a bit more and you can take on the following planets, at least until you reach Pluto. Having the right warframe for the job is also of help since some of their abilities are life-savers on some situations.

Personally speaking, among all my frames, my favorite warframe to use is Mirage Prime (thank you @mikonopants​ for helping me getting her, I’m indebted to you forever), or as I affectionally call her: (cl)Owlframe

She’s a clown, an owl, and a complete sweetheart, and I love her and her pretty, soft, round butt so much. But really her kit is useful for many situations so yeah she’s my to-go frame as she adequates to my play style. Besides she’s just so fun to play with and shes also the reason i got to finally try warframe in the first place

I still suck tho

Gameplay Extended: By the Power of VoidSkull

Now, everything I said on the first was good things but Warframe is not free of its problems. I’m not going to talk about bugs or glitches since the game on PC is technically still a beta so yeah this is strictly about gameplay features/mechanics. Trust me, I’ve had my fair share of encountering those but this is not of concern here.

As I mentioned before, enemies escale on stats the further you progress, which isnt bad, but because of the way that boost works you'll be hitting a big wall by the time you face enemies on the levels from 21 and forth, so getting your mod collection to higher ranks becomes a priority as well as upgrading your arsenal with more powerful weapons that suit your style.

Also worth mentioning is the change in layouts depending of enemy levels: the layouts themselves are not hard to navigate, but the more advanced the enemies are, the more you are required to kind of memorize the tileset's paths and shit to accomplish your tasks more efficiently since they become increasingly complicated as you progress. I dont know how many missions of Grinner Spy I've played but now I know the layout like the back of my hand and know how to approach situations best depending on which layout did I get.

There' also the inherent problem of getting your mods in place: you need a resource called Endo to increase your mod rank but you also gonna need credits as well. The credits are not much of an issue, but the Endo can be since its given on scarse quantities (a few hundreds) when you are gonna need thousands of it. There's also an inherent issue with how the weapon modding system works: any rankless weapon will start with mod capacity equal to your player rank, but because these are unranked you won't get any more capacity until the weapon's level exceeds your rank level. You can imagine how exhausting that could get for a player Rank 8 and not being able to throw some good shit until the weapon reaches rank 9 (since it will gain one extra point from here on).

With that last point comes about the double-edge sword of farming Affinity (experience): There’s just not a reliable way to level up stuff fast to get up to speed but there is nodes and issions that can help you mitigate that problem to an extent. The issue comes that without a proper set up, grinding Affinity becomes a tedious task, which eventually will get mixed in with credit farming as you are gonna get stuff that becomes pricier.

There’s also some mission types that can get you exhasperated becuase you either get lost on how it works or plain simple you just dont know what to do or the mechanics are half-baked. Although I like the mode, Archwing nodes can suck my ass because

You don’t get any mods for AW from normal play, you get them on AW missions. The problem: the mods don’t drop any reliably, so you are gonna die and die and die trying to get mods to make it bearable

You don’t get any blueprints for anything AW, you have to research those in the Dojo or spend platinum. And even then, if you do get the blueprints its just too much resources put into it since the parts for any of the AW weapons you get them by leveling up Syndicates to rank 3 minimum

AW is hard to control. Or rather: it keeps moving forward in space, and it doesn’t move quite right underwater. Combined with all the above I can see why people gets frustated with this otherwise neat mode

Pursuit is just bullcrap if you don’t have a Fluctus and Amesha at least

There’s also some things that can help you further down the line, but I’m writting them as recommendations instead since its not really that very important but can still be good to know

There’s also the important part: RNG. You know what this entails.

Also bear in mind: since I play solo, most negative aspects of the game hit me pretty bad.

Graphics Extended: The Forma of Water

Ok I didn’t talk enough of this but really, for what is worth the game features very nice looking graphics, and can also run on toasters as well. Its just a pretty sight to look when the game runs so fluidly with all GFX turned on and shit. Granted, some effects can be annoying for some people but deactivating them solves the issue.

Anyways, the little details, decals, and all that sort of crap going on gets me giddy

Now, for the extreme toaster guys, there’s also an option to minimize the internal game resolution by minimum 50% (20% if you edit the configuration file directly). It looks pixelated as all fuck but runs very nice.

All in all, the only thing that doesn’t run as smoothly is the Earth Jungle tileset as it features a lot of intensive stuff but if you can manage to run it its actually pretty neat. There’s also Cetus on Earth but its mostly due to the connectivity aspect of the node. Hell, even the Plains of Eidolon run nicely, and look that its a huge memory eater (it takes me a solid 10 minutes to load into the plains but it runs nice)

Music: DUN-DUN DUN DUN-DUN

Well, there’s not much I can add here: the game’s soundtrack is pretty good and now having gone through the main events I’d say it hits me a lil more harder cuz [spoilers]

They also got their own version of the Terminator theme

Advice extended: I'm trying to be a guide and a friend here

UPGRADE YOUR MODS. If you do it as you go the difficulty curve won’t catch you off-guard like it did with me. You’ll thank me later when you get to enemies of levels 21 and beyond

Deactivate Reverb on the Audio settings of Warframe, it will drastically improve your performance.

Build weapons and see if you can change your old ones for newer ones. Let’s talk about stats: You know what they say, the more the merrier! some weapons are straight up upgrades from the stuff you might get first.

Along the last point: SEARCH WHICH WEAPONS CAN BE USED AS CRAFTING COMPONENTS. I still regret having sold my Lato, cuz I later found out I needed it for a Bolto. When I made my Kulstar, I didn’t repeat that mistake. Nowadays I can just simply buy out these but still when you don’t have enough resources yet, it can hit you

Along the last two points: Max out your weapons. More ranking for you means better weapons on the long run.

Don’t be afraid of putting potatos on your stuff, you are gonna do that anyways. Just make sure you do it on the things you are more comfortable with first

DONT FORMA YOUR STUFF YET. Better save it for the moment you can unlock Sorties. Because Forma resets your stuff’s rank and you are gonna need those capacity points to keep the stuff good, otherwise leveling it up again is a chore

Nightmare missions give out supplementary mods for your stuff. Rhino is still a very good friend, and so is Valkyr (except on energy drain mode, then you are screwed if you dont have a tankier frame or better weapons)

Use a Ducat/Platinum price list to see which Prime parts are worth selling for platinum or turning for Ducats. When Baro visits the relays and you have Ducats you’ll be a happy person cuz you can get nice shit from him that will help you by the endgame. If you get plat you will be  ahappy person becuase you can buy stuff you need or stuff for your leisure

Seek out for groups to do particular activities. Its always best when you are with a group that has people all loking for the same thing, like running fissures to get an especific Prime, maybe scan synthesis targets, and the like, so don’t be afraid of looking for them

Spy missions give you lots of Affinity at low levels: easy to do, quick to do, I usually run Suisei on Mercury when I want to level up stuff fast, but other (harder) mission nodes may work best too, just make sure you can reliably do them quick and without trouble. Personally speaking, Grineer spies are the easiest in comparison imho, but don’t do them on Grineer Sealab tilesets. Gabii on Ceres is a nice Survival Dark Sector to get both Affinity and Credits at the same time, I never run out of credits thanks to this node, though it feels like a chore after the 200th time or so

If you get a stealth frame, like Loki, or weapons able to stealth kill, make sure to take advantage of the stealth kills affinity boost: they can give you up to 500% affinity you earn and combined with high affinity gain missions its the best way to maximize your time

Try to have Warframes for specific tasks if you want to breeze it: I generally use Rhino for Hijack and Nightmare Missions (press 2, get a bit of damage, press 3, have a grand ol time), Limbo for weekly Ayatan treasure runs (and pretty much anything that requires me protecting stuff that isn’t Hijack, his entire skillset), Frost Prime for Defense and Assassination missions (press 3, sometimes 4), while Excalibur, Nyx, Mag, Valkyr and Mirage Prime are my all-rounders but excel at specific tasks: Excalibur and Nyx for the crowd control (press 4 and 3 respectively, though Excalibur is also a to-go when is not Mirage), Valkyr for survivals and nightmares in some parts (press 2, then 4, have yet to test on further nightmares), Mag for anything Corpus, and Mirage Prime for Interceptions and pretty much everything that isn’t Defense (press 1, then 3, have fun; not defense since she can do it but is just not as efficient as i’d like to for average tilesets)

Current impression: the Owl thoughts:RELOADED

I am actually on Pluto and pretty much completed the main storyline so far (i just need to take care of a few sidequests before the arrival of The Sacrifice), which is probably gonna be the last but its gonna take some time since situations out of my control have left me unable to play for some time. Still, my impressions haven’t changed: Warframe is a great game with neat ideas and stuff. Some work excellently, some not as good, but never the less is an outstanding free-to-play grame that I recommend at least trying, especially if you like games like Diablo 2.

The exciting finale of this review thing will be seen on Part 3: Reloaded with FEELS, Regor Roll and space jackoffs

And as my send-off for this part, have clowlframe butt

those are her mirror clones btw, praising her butt. the game doesnt lemme put ass in the writing :P

[bedlamgames]

Q&A #68

Today among others image sourcing, decidedly rare text events, words that may or may not be words, and when the next update is coming out. 

Anonymous: Typo with advanced lesbian trained slave message. >Your convent slave Gigi slithered her well trained well trained naughty tongue down Carmen's crotch and lapped at their fancy slit. The slaver basked in the sensations, idly twisting and pulling on Gigi's nipples whenever they felt that she could be licking more diligently

Cheers for the spot and will sort. 

Anonymous: Hi, I have a question, I've searched every possible setting in art source info and couldn't find any mention of this action - I am trying to find the source of the left human futanari oral/fuck performance on a slave and failed, google search on image also didn't help. Can you help with finding source or you aren't helping ith this kind of question (I can perfectly understand why). picture with hentai futa succubus sitting on a throne and slave under her, right is lucien's futa succ fucking elf

Nah, that’s an entirely reasonable ask. The art sources is something I’m committed to getting done, but I’ll also more than admit that it’s slow going so it’s something I’ve very happy to take questions on. First SourceNAO is an incredible resource that’s been superb for me being able to back track to where I found stuff in the first place. As for that source it’s ‘member.php?id=15603′ on Pixiv or usatarou if you’d prefer to search on one of the ‘boorus. 

Anonymous: Bug Report: I have a slave who is hungover, and the status never seems to go away, so she can't be trained. Order of events was she was a slaver, got sent on quick as you like and failed. I planted a couple hypnotic triggers and then turned her into a slave. She'd still show up in the summary of slaver activities at the end of a day before getting hungover, but now she doesn't show up in either the slave or slaver section of the report. 

First how could you enslave a lass when she’s still the worse for wear from the previous night? C’mon that’s just evil :D

Seriously thanks for the spot and will correct the oversight that made that possible. 

Anonymous: In the future, will we be able to pick what race our slavers will be on startup? Yea there's Harmony and Shun others, but like if I want to play a human female "Goblin Queen" and have a full team of goblin slavers or something like that. Maybe just a way to pick a prefered race as "higher chance of starting slaver being X race", with your leader's race picked by default.

That shouldn’t be an issue to implement if you want it. Will see if I can include it for the upcoming update.

Anonymous: The latest hotfix had this line. >-Additional text for getting a tattoo while having either of the biomancy senses upgrades. < Ho can you get those upgrades on yourself? You can't use biomancy on slavers, can you? Is it a failure state, like growing your own ass/breasts or losing positive traits? If so, that's kind of a pain in the ass. Deliberately failing biomancy attempts and save-scumming until you get the 'correct' failure is going to be a real waste of time.

It’s really not something that’s vital to see, and really not something I’d expect people to go out of their way to see via saving and reloading. Someone suggested it as something they’d like to see added and it was quick to implement so I figured why not. 

Anyway if we’re taking obscure text it’s got nothing on a part to take account of changing outfits involving a very unlikely outcome of the Wrapped in Webs assignments. There was a bug report that really amused me by it being so unbelievably out there that I just had to give it some love :)

The joy of the game I’ve always aimed for number one is replayability so I’m really not expecting everything in the game to be seen in one playthrough or even ten or twenty. 

Anonymous: Sometimes an assignment result have the image replaced with a video player. I can't make the video to play and theres no result text so I'm wondering if this is a bug. This just happened on a critical success recapture mission and I know the same thing happened on a mission in the plains. Cant remember which one though. Maybe Scavange Unattended.

That sounds like a definite bug where RAGS doesn’t recognise the image being requested. Any assignment you spot this on please can you let me know about so I can sort them out. 

Anonymous: I asked a slave to become a camp bitch and got this text "...Of course with their training they were never going to say no, IRREGARDLESS of what you might have suggested. Most of your text is right on track! But if irregardless were a word, it would mean ir(not)-regard(related to)-less(not). Is my slave not going to say no, not not regarding what I suggest? Help me stamp out this abomination unto English and keep up the good work! =)

Cheers and will sort. 

Anonymous: I recently did the sissy farm quest and crit it and got the keldan but when i went to estimate value it didn't have a + value for the breasts despite the description listing her as truly titanic tits, I then did some biomancy on her and reduced her breasts and it still said it was truly titanic, but started showing up as the +40 value, not exactly sure how that works unless the game tried to spawn her with tits a size larger than truly titanic and the game then didn't count it as having a +value

My guess would be it sounds like you have the right of it. Will sort it out. 

Anonymous: Have a bug with a slave-turned-slaver through the training route with version 0.7802. When I examine her, it displays her description (looks, manners, etc., both paragraphs) twice. If it matters, she's a Wood Elf, got her from a crit on the Everwood caravan assignment.

Huh, not one I’ve heard of before so that is very odd. Will see if I can work how that happened. 

Anonymous: eta. on the next build? if it's out only like 2 weeks I'd skip this one.

I’m aiming for by the end of next week though that might slip as I’m going to be away for the holidays from the weekend. 

ultrabloed: Hey there! Two questions that came up when I revisited your two most recent builds. 1: Any plan on finally getting importing old savegames to work? 2: Mind spilling the beans on what hypnosis can do by now? Remember ages ago it was essentially a weaker dominate without any actual features outside mission success. Has that changed? I tried looking into some changelogs, but didn't realy found out much at all.

I feel that’s always going to have issues given RAGS being RAGS but when I’ve got the base functionality completely nailed it should be a lot safer. 

Hypnosis you can use now to implant triggers in your slavers to get them to be more likely to agree during respect checks. I’m planning to use it later to implant hypnotic mantras in slaves and also to deal with some annoying mental traits like unruly and poor morale. 

[mochivkook]

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[angstymarshmallow]

Some Thoughts About the Freshman Book 3 Chapter 10 - Part 1

Oh boy. I thought I wouldn’t do this but here I am - yet again ready to diliver another slice of selfish rant or thought provoking ideas, depending on however you view on what I’m about to share. It’s just that I have so many unresolved feelings, but I want to go about it in a cohesive manner that hasn’t as much attachment to how I felt in the moment that it happened. And who knows? Maybe there’s some of you out there that feel the same or similiar to what I want to disucss! 

Things to chat about:

1. The Opening Scene about MC and the progress of her novel.

2. The Scholarship scene with Zig, Arjun and Chris

3. The Friend Date Scene! With Abbie

4. The growing distance with Kaitlyn

I wanted to keep the order kind of how its sets up itself within the book.

1. The Opening Scene: MC’s progress report on her novel.

This chapter opened up with MC going to one of her professors, Professor Atiyah if memory serves correctly, for her to edit and look over her progress. I guess because James isn’t physically around and he’s probably very busy - she’s using other resources at school. It’s also Hartfeld’s responsibility considering its a scholarship program offered at the school. Professor Atiyah begins to address issues she’s finding - less details in her novel chapters was namely what she brought to her attention and kind of gently probes MC as to why this is the case. This gives MC an opportunity to kind of just explore what’s been going on in her life. I think this is important because we don’t get to see this often - someone else checking in on her that isn’t Zack, making sure she’s okay. I take it of course - because I like seeing MC worry about herself for a change and not someone else’s happiness.

In this playthrough, My MC’s technically single but she’s been spending a lot of time with Zig they have touching intimate moments and I write fanfics about it, so naturally this came up. I like that she feels comfortable enough with her professor to sort of briefly go over these things but I’m a little upset with the delivery. There isn’t anything wrong with what she’s saying per-say - I just find the word choice as choosing to associate Zig with being ‘a bad boy’ is oversimplifying things. Yes, I understand that it’s his trope - but we haven’t seen that particular side of him just…yet. Anyway, her professor gives her some advice before sending her off. This brings us to point number 2:

2. The Scholarship scene with Zig, Arjun and Chris 

Remember me saying that we haven’t seen the ‘bad boy’ side of Zig yet. Well surprise, surprise! We get to see it now. 

Yay?

This scene starts off after Chris texts MC with a surprise idea that he’s been working on (I assume) for the past couple weeks. MC meets up with him, along with Zig and Ariun. Chris and Arjun quickly summarise what they want to achieve. Ladies and gentlemen - I give thee The Second Chance Scholariship. Oh my gosh the word choice here is so cliche.

This is the basics of what they hope to achieve, @choicesmyway has more pictures that goes into more detail about it in case anyone wants to have a clearer picture. I’m under no delusions that there aren’t disadvantages and I like the fact that Chris and Arijun sort of discusses it here. Then again, I’m not a hundred percent sure how it works in the real world - how much do academic institutions care about a criminial past record?

If I have to agree on anything perhaps having a criminal record does work against them and this comes off as trying to level the playing field and a little pretentious. Although I can’t speak from personal experience; I assume anyone that has been through something similiar, can give a better idea of how influential this is but I imagine that it isn’t easy.

But, already I can see problems developing. They talk about it a bit more - how to reassure their peers that it would be going to the right people - with two reccomendations and a personal essay.

I was partciularly worried about funding, so I made my MC ask about it- where would they get the money from? A part of it, would come from Hartfeld University and the rest from what I understood would derive from donations. And in all honesty, it’s not a bad idea. But there’s still a lot of kinks they need to work out. In particular the kind of attention it would receive from not only Hartfeld but their applicants as well. Will they be able to come to some kind of agreement when they bring this to the student council? 

And speaking of potential applicants, Zig’s immediate response to this was:

Yeah.  I expected a reaction like this. But I’ll explain in just a second because it doesn’t end there.

For the first time we’re seeing a real glimpse into Zig’s thoughts. A different perspective from the flirty and fun guy we’ve gotten to know up until this point. 

More specifically, I think he means that he doesn’t think Hartfeld cares about people in his situation.

I can understand that - after all, while this is a huge opportunity - we can’t forget the other side. 

This scholarship will cost the school money. A lot of money. I don’t think this wouldn’t be so much of an issue if the school was certain about the payoff. The only way I could see this being implemented is on a trial basis. I assume this is where Zig comes in, or maybe other cases with people in similiar positions. My hope is that there are probably other academic institutions that’ve done this type of thing before and maybe their findings could help this idea - even without Zig. 

Immediately after Zig said his piece, he quite literally storms out. And at first I was left feeling just as flabbergasted as MC, Chris and Arjun.

What just happened? 

I was at a loss for words for a moment until my brain could get back into focus and finish the chapter.

Chris and Arjun are really surprised by this too. They don’t understand his reaction. They don’t understand why he’s upset and essentially offended by their offer. They thought he would be interested and ultimately happy for a second chance. In fact, not too long ago at Madison’s sorority birthday party - they bonded over their ‘criminal pasts’ in which Zig confessed it would be interesting to see a program much like they had discussed; allowing people with similar circumstances a great shot at continuing education.

This is what still bugs me. It isn’t a flip in his personality more so than an oversight. 

Don’t get me wrong - I love Zig as much as the next person, but I don’t agree with thinking it won’t work without giving it a fair shot. Call me crazy, call me an optimistic, but isn’t it worth trying? And maybe it’s more of miscommunication on both sides - with Zig being offended and them not understanding where he’s coming from. And with Zig not being able to see a different path, and a different way of life than just working. Nevertheless, I think my only true gripe was just the fact he stormed off.

In any case, Chris and Arijun both asks MC if she could kind of smooth things over with Zig. I know to some people that might have felt like an insult. But I approve of this because they recognized the only way to salvage this was to try and have someone with a personal friendship/relationship to discuss it with him again. It’s a rational and reasonable request. In this case, because my MC Dia cares about him, I don’t have a problem with her going to convince him. 

Oh, hey - he smokes.

Another development into the bad boy trope.  Seeing this and from what I very limitly know about smoking. In my head, I find that smoking signifies someone who’s got a lot on their plate and nowhere to put it.The writer in me was piqued with even this slightest development because up until this point as the readers - we didn’t know he smoked. I know for some people that might be a hard limit, but for me I’m left with more questions than answers. 

It’s also interesting to note this whole exchange of Zig smoking doesn’t seem to faze MC. In fact, I assume that since they’ve hung out a few times and based on her lack of surprise - she probably knows that he smokes. In any case; I admit that my own limited knowledge of smoking make this difficult to talk about. But I do have family that does smoke, and they’ve admitted to me it does help them with stress and probably an assortment of other feelings. So I can only relate to it in a similiar fashion.  I think he smokes as a sort of de-stresser. Maybe it helps him cope in a way that maybe other things can. For Zig, it appears to help him to remain centered, to be calm. I support this with his tight lipped responses to MC and especially with his insistence that she hands it back to him. I think this exchange is important and very telling about him. It’s a part of how he copes and I can understand that. Everyone has different coping mechanisms.

Oh boy. Granted, I like the character development - I got to know more about Zig and why everytime we’ve brought up education he’s clammed up about it. Such as the babysitting scene where MC asked why he doesn’t try to go back to school and he immediately closes the conversation. Some of it seems to be because he doesn’t think he deserves it. He doesn’t think anyone cares. It hit me so hard, that for a moment I honestly was just like; wow that’s really sad. Something in his life must have happened for him to think that it he isn’t worth it. And to make matters worse - when he said that he’d only try for MC truthfully made me upset. It isn’t some romantic gesture to me. He won’t try it because he doesn’t believe in it. He only changed is mind because of MC. Not for himself. 

As someone that believes its worth it to pursue an education; I firmly believe that you have to do it for yourself. You’ve got to be doing it for the right reasons and not flimsy whims that might crumble in the long run. This is a flimsy reason.

As much as I love them together, I don’t think your main motivitation should ever be because of someone else, especially not for something as important as the subject of education.

Ultimately, I learnt a lot of things about Zig today and honestly, I don’t regret a single bit of it. I know some people might have reservations about him now as a result of his reaction and behaviour this latest chapter but personally I liked it alot. I like it when characters aren’t one dimensional and can be more than one thing. I like that he’s fun and flirty; and then hotheaded and passionate - and even firercly loyal in a way to MC. 

These are the things that allows characters to be memorable and transcend from being just a simple character into more of a complex almost person.

Okay. Originally this was supposed to be one large drabble of thoughts. But as usual I get carried away and as usual I went on for far too long LOL. Part 2 I’ll touch on the other half of things that stuck out to me! At least this way I can give everything the attention it needs. 

Keep calm and choice on folks!

[barbosaasouza]

Review: R.B.I. Baseball 20 (Nintendo Switch)

MLBAM is getting into a groove with the R.B.I. Baseball series, but it still has some work to do. This time last year, R.B.I. Baseball 19 was one of the only arcade baseball games available for the Switch. Since then, Super Mega Baseball 2 has come on the scene and provided an incredible all-around baseball experience on-the-go. Let’s see how R.B.I. Baseball 20 has improved over last year’s edition and if it can compete in this growing genre.

First and foremost, R.B.I. Baseball 20 has some nice improvements. Let’s start with the biggest improvement: the pitching. The game had really basic pitching options last year. Players could control the movement of the pitch on its way to home plate, but it was limited to curving a ball inside or outside. Players could also do a pitch that looked like it was wobbling in mid-air and would land short of home plate as a sort of change-up/eephus pitch. Now, every pitcher’s arsenal is represented in the game. If there was a pitcher that had a 2-seam fastball, 4-seam fastball, and a cutter, those are now selectable when pitching. Players can select the pitch type from a radial selector and then choose in two dimensions where they want to place the pitch. As the pitcher gets tired, the aiming system adjusts to simulate that fatigue. It’s well done and definitely a step up from last year’s pitching. An added bonus is the game’s use of the Switch’s HD Rumble feature. If you’re aiming for the outside of the strike zone, the HD Rumble vibrates more heavily to let you know the pitch will not be called a strike. It’s a subtle thing, but extremely helpful!

The game also features improved visual details both in the player models and also with the stains that the players get throughout the game. Have a player that slides into 2nd base? They’ll have dirt on their pants when they come up to bat next. Grass stains are also there if a player dives in the outfield for a catch. Speaking of dives, that’s another new feature this year. Players can now dive on command, which adds some much-needed nuance to the fielding. The visuals seem sharper, and the performance has also improved. I reported last year that the home run derby and even the core game featured some weird stuttering. That no longer seems to be the case, even in handheld play. The game also seems to have more reliable out/safe calls, especially at first base.

You might be saying, “Justin, all of this sounds great!” Yep, but that’s not the whole story. There are some great improvements, but there are some missteps. The biggest problem I found with this 2020 edition is the new ‘Modern’ hitting controls. It’s absolutely the most frustrating control mode ever. Now, to the game’s credit, it does not force this mode on the player. Players can, at any time, choose their hitting style–and there are a variety of styles. What’s really sad is, even after attempting this supposed “new and improved, modern” hitting style, it just wasn’t working well enough to continue using. It forces players to hold the swing button down and then release when they want to swing. It seems simple enough, but oh so difficult and unreliable in practice. This new hitting mode has a more catcher-based view on the pitches coming in, much like Super Mega Baseball 2. However, even though there’s another dimension to work with in the ‘Modern’ hitting mode, you can’t actually control where your bat is going–it’s strictly timing. The ‘Classic’ hitting mode is pretty one-dimensional, but it at least allows you to move your player fully around the batter’s box in addition to timing your swing easily with a press of the swing button. You can more easily hit the ball the opposite way and really get a better sense of where you’re hitting the ball on the bat. The ‘Modern’ hitting mode needs major improvements even if they made it so you didn’t have to hold the swing button and release. Also, let us control where the bat is swinging! Just like I can move my player around the batter’s box in ‘Classic’ hitting mode, I should be able to move where my bat is going to swing in the ‘Modern’ hitting mode.

The new base-running controls are improved, but guess what? You have to use them in conjunction with the ‘Modern’ hitting controls. This is very frustrating–as the new baserunning controls make a lot more sense, but the ‘Modern’ hitting, as I’ve mentioned, most certainly does not. Hopefully, this could be resolved with a patch. Another strike against the game, specifically with the Switch version, is no online multiplayer. Now, last year’s version didn’t have online multiplayer but guess what? R.B.I. Baseball 20 for Xbox One and PS4 both have online modes. This seems like a huge oversight to not have online for the Switch audience, especially when Super Mega Baseball 2 has it, and it works well. I didn’t have too many ‘bugs’ but there are definitely some baserunning issues. Sometimes the lead runner wouldn’t advance, and if a player made it to the next base (2nd for example) without tagging up (for a long fly ball), you couldn’t get them to retreat back to 1st base and so the defense would get an easy double-play.

For the most part, R.B.I. Baseball 20 is the best the series has been in a lot of areas–even the soundtrack is better this year! That being said, they are no longer the only game in town. With other baseball games offering more solid gameplay, the R.B.I. Baseball series really needs to up their game. I prefer playing with real MLB teams, but if the gameplay isn’t as fun and engaging, more and more people will go to another arcade baseball title. R.B.I. Baseball 20 is a very solid experience, but not all of the new features hit a home run. And, no online multiplayer for the Switch audience makes the Switch version really hard to recommend over its console counterparts.

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