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dioptre-hertz · 4 years ago

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Pathologic 2 ending thoughts

i don’t really use tumblr much anymore, but i recently finished Pathologic 2 and i have thoughts on the ending, which i felt was somewhat incongruous with the rest of the game’s themes and ideas. and tumblr felt like the right place to put a long-form post about it. so, here i am, haha!

MAJOR spoilers for Pathologic 2 below, obviously. this post will probably only be interesting to you if you’ve already played the game, so if you haven’t, be warned! hehehe!

okay, so. i have a lot of thoughts about the ending stuff, but basically it boils down to: i think the ending as presented would have been a good ending for a different game.

quick summary: towards the end of the game, Artemy learns that the Polyhedron, a physics-defying tower and architectural wonder, is rooted into the ground with a long metal spike that pierces the Living Earth. destroying the Polyhedron would therefore open a gaping wound in the Earth, spilling rivers of blood that could be used to mass-produce a cure for the plague. however, doing so would not only destroy the Polyhedron, but also kill the Living Earth, and by extension the Kin. alternately, Artemy can choose to preserve the Polyhedron, which would prevent the Living Earth from bleeding out and dying; but it would come at the cost of the lives of everyone in the town, since the plague would then be unstoppable.

so, the ending choice is principally about this: you have to choose between preserving the magical wonders of the world, the Kin and the Polyhedron and the Living Earth, but at the expense of the actual living humans of the town; or, you save the town and all its mundanities and its ordinary people you've worked so hard to protect, but at the expense of your cultural heritage and all the magical, impossible things of the Steppe. do you choose a world that is dreamlike, enchanted and strange, even if there is no place for regular humans in that world; or do you choose an ordinary, realistic world, one in which there is life for common folk but not for magic and fairy tales?

here’s what irks me though: this dichotomy is not at all what the game is about. or, to be more precise, it never felt to me personally like this was what the narrative was setting up. the choice as presented is fine in a vacuum! there’s nothing wrong with telling a story that creates this kind of clash between magic and realism, and asks you to choose between them. but it doesn’t feel congruous with the rest of the game’s story. let me elaborate.

so, part of what’s going on here is that the game is asking you to make a sacrifice. as the game itself repeatedly tells you: “you can’t save everyone”. either the Kin, the magical steppe creatures, and the Polyhedron are destroyed; or, the ordinary humans of the town are destroyed. you can’t protect both. Pathologic 2 goes to great lengths to show you that you are not a magical fantasy RPG hero who can complete every quest, rescue every NPC, overcome any obstacle and get the Perfect Ending. that’s the whole point of the overly punishing hunger and exhaustion mechanics; that’s why you die so easily in combat, why you’re always running out of time, and why the game is perfectly willing to punish you for every single mistake you make. it’s not a game about being the chosen one, who has magic powers and is uniquely capable of saving the day. right?

except... it kind of is precisely that, if you think about it. Artemy’s story is very clearly a traditional “chosen one” narrative! he is the sole inheritor of his father’s legacy, he is the town’s only menkhu, and so much of the story revolves around his spiritual journey. over the course of the game, Artemy undergoes a coming-of-age of sorts, reconnecting with his heritage, unlocking the secrets of being a menkhu, brewing magical tinctures that slow down and ultimately cure the plague. multiple characters make it explicit that Artemy is important - Foreman Oyun, Aspity, Isidor, and various minor characters of the Kin (like Nara) all talk at length about how Artemy is special, and his role (should he embrace it) is to lead the Kin once he is ready. and the entire conflict with Rubin revolves around the fact that Rubin isn’t the “chosen one” the way Artemy is!

this whole plot thread reaches its climax when Artemy ventures into the Abattoir to seek answers. there, he undergoes a series of harrowing spiritual experiences. several really important things happen here, and i want to focus on two of them.

firstly: upon reaching the central chamber of the Abattoir, Artemy is tasked with performing “surgery” on three seemingly random objects: a candlestick, a fingernail coin, and a spindle of thread. he has a metaphysical conversation with the odongh he meets there and then “connects” these objects into a living, beating heart, and the heart speaks to him. this scene is either hallucinatory or supernatural (or both), but it doesn’t matter which; the point of the scene is that Artemy has finally learned to read the Lines, learned to see how seemingly disparate objects can be spiritually connected into a singular whole. he takes three items that appear to have nothing in common, and he forges a beating heart out of them, a living thing. as Artemy himself learns:

This system isn't symmetrical. It's not just "Nerves, Bones, Skin." Or "Nerves, Bones, Flesh." Or "Spirit, Hair, Blood." Any triad is correct.

Truth is not a set point, but an intersection and confluence of many small truths. Knowing this, I can match and connect anything.

furthermore, shortly after leaving the Abattoir, Artemy has a dream in which he returns there and speaks to the ghost of Isidor, his father. here, he learns a difficult truth: that Isidor intentionally brought the plague back to the town, believing - essentially - that it was necessary for the town’s growth. the decision seems monstrous. Isidor justifies it thus:

This town was… connected wrong. Its parts were tied with artificial seams—so different, so awkward. One could say that Simon, the Mistresses, and I held it all together by force.

So I tore it apart, so you can sew it all back, better than before. Because you're better, and smarter, than I am.

so here we have the high point of Artemy’s spiritual journey, the part of the story where he finally understands why things are the way they are, and what it is he must do.

and this is where things start going wrong, in my opinion.

because all of this, all of what we’ve seen, seems to point in one very clear direction: Artemy will find a way to connect the Kin, the Town, and the Polyhedron into a single coherent whole. it fits so perfectly! Artemy learns that there is a way to mass-produce a cure, but doing so would require him to destroy the Polyhedron and the Living Earth. it appears as though the Polyhedron, the Living Earth, and the Town cannot all coexist; something must be sacrificed. but this choice is presented right after we’re told that Artemy’s destiny is to “sew it all back, better than before”. it is presented once we’ve seen that Artemy can connect a coin, a candlestick, and a spindle of thread into a living, beating heart, no matter how impossible that may sound. knowing this, he can match and connect anything.

and yet, he... doesn’t. the game does not end with a solution that connects the Kin, the Polyhedron and the Town. ultimately, Artemy fails to sew it all back together - and it’s not just that he fails, it’s that the game itself seems utterly unconcerned with that possibility once it heads into its final act. the mere idea that there could be a solution that “connects things right“ goes unexplored. even if the game wanted to be pessimistic and suggest that it can’t be done after all, it should at least acknowledge the thought! the game does admittedly have a focus on the idea that “you can’t save everyone”; this is one of its core motifs. so, fair enough! but since it fails to address that cynicism, it feels less like a statement on the game’s part and more like a lack of awareness.

but that’s not all! there’s a second thing that really bugs me. see, there’s another major event that takes place in the Abattoir: Artemy finally has his fateful encounter with Nara, the Herb Bride who has haunted him throughout the game, insisting that their destinies are intertwined and that he will one day kill her. here, Artemy finally comes to understand what it all means. in the depths of the Abattoir, Nara is waiting for him; the other Herb Brides give Artemy a menkhu’s knife, and they task him with cutting open Nara’s body without killing her:

We know how to open things up. Our way. You know how to open things up. Your way. Do you want to know why the sand pest passes us by? Show yourself.

Cut a living sister in such a way that she stays living. You can do it, if you know the Lines.

Artemy follows through, and he converses with Nara even as he cuts into her flesh; they talk to each other right until the end, when Artemy retrieves a spindle of thread from her body, and she dies.

now, this scene is somewhat tricky to interpret; Artemy must show that he can “cut a living sister in such a way that she stays living”, but in the end, Nara does die. so was he successful or not? well, i would argue that he is; even though Nara dies, he proves that he is able to read the Lines with such precision that she can speak calmly with him until the very end.

more importantly, this scene is the high point of a recurring theme in the game: Artemy’s skill as surgeon.

on Day 1, the very first part of the game, Artemy is sent by his old friend Bad Grief to perform surgery on Piecework, one of the thugs in Bad Grief’s gang. Piecework has gotten in a fight and been stabbed in the gut with a lockpick; without Artemy’s intervention, he will die. you can choose to save him, flub the surgery and kill him, or ignore the sidequest altogether; in any case, this early quest introduces the player to the surgery mechanic and serves to establish Artemy’s unique skills as a surgeon.

on Day 11, the last day of proper gameplay, you have a repeat of this encounter. while pursuing the main quest for the day, you wind up in a pub, where a gang of local bandits have set up shop. they threaten you and order you to rescue one of their pals, who has been shot in the stomach and is about to die. here you again perform surgery to save a man’s life, but this time you don’t do it through the usual surgery minigame - it happens entirely through dialogue choices, and i’m actually not even sure if it’s possible to fail this interaction. in any case, you retrieve the bullet from the man’s stomach and inform his friends that he’ll live.

so what’s the point of all that then? well, the way i see it, the point of all this is to foreshadow a climactic conclusion: Artemy will remove the Polyhedron without killing the Living Earth.

the game spends a lot of time setting this up! on Day 1, Artemy saves a man by removing a long metal spike from his gut non-lethally; in the Abattoir, Artemy proves his spiritual growth by demonstrating that he can “cut a living sister in such a way that she stays living”; and on Day 11, the game throws yet another surgery vignette at you in a scene that frankly feels a bit out of place otherwise.

all of this feels, to me, like it's foreshadowing and setting up one very obvious result: Artemy, having mastered not only practical surgery but also the art of reading the Lines, of being a menkhu, is the one person who can remove the Polyhedron without killing the Living Earth! the game spends all this time explaining that in the Steppe culture, cutting open flesh, or the earth itself, is taboo: only a menkhu is allowed to do so, because a menkhu is someone who knows how to read the Lines, who knows how to cut in a way that will not harm the Living Earth. the culmination of the story, therefore, needs to be that Artemy puts this exact skill to use. that was the point of his character arc, right?

except... no, it isn’t. in the end, there is no way to surgically extract the metal spike from the Living Earth. the only two choices we are presented with are: botch the surgery, or leave it be.

...

in the end, i feel that the ending(s) of Pathologic 2 aren’t appropriate conclusions to the ideas, motifs, and overall narrative progression we’re shown throughout the earlier parts of the game. Pathologic 2 is in many ways brilliant, and i do not hesitate to call it a masterpiece, aforementioned criticisms notwithstanding - but that’s precisely why i cared enough to write all this down! it’s a story that gets into your head, really stays with you, and maybe that’s the reason why i have such strong feelings about the direction the story takes in its final act.

if you reached the end of this post: thank you so much for reading it! i hope you enjoyed my thoughts, and i hope you have a great day!

#pathologic #pathologic 2 #artemy burakh

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mel-at-dusk · 4 years ago

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SEX, LIES AND CHEAP COLOGNE: AN ORAL HISTORY OF ABERCROMBIE & FITCH’S SOFTCORE PORN MAG

The story of how an oversexed, strangely intellectual magazine by a polo shirt brand completed the improbable task of changing the course of sexuality in America’s malls, homes and moose-print boxers

Abercrombie & Fitch CEO Mike Jeffries was a shrewd businessman, but he didn’t always make the best decisions. Between the blatantly racist T-shirts he signed off on, the child thongs he called “cute” and the series of public statements he made admitting that his brand intentionally excluded anyone who wasn’t “cool” and “good-looking” with “great attitudes and a lot of friends,” it’s no wonder that he spent the majority of his reign at Abercrombie in hot water. (For the uninitiated, Abercrombie made what fashion writer Natasha Stagg calls “sexy versions of the clothes kids already wore to school: T-shirts and jeans, stuff you could toss a football in or throw on the grass if everyone decided to go skinny-dipping.” More importantly, as she writes in her book Sleeveless, it was “for those who were casually peaking in high school.” It, meanwhile, peaked in the 1990s.)

An exception to Jeffries’ questionable CEO-ing would be A&F Quarterly, the glorious, controversial and questionably pornographic “magalog” he created at the height of the brand’s popularity in 1997 in order to connect “youth and sex” to its image. Woven in amongst surprisingly thoughtful interviews with A-list humans like Spike Lee, Bret Easton Ellis, Rudy Guiliani and Lil’ Kim was a cascade of naked photos from photographer Bruce Weber which showed nubile youngs in various states of undress. They were frolicking, they were caressing and they were deep in the throes of experimenting with types of sex that — at the time — had never been portrayed by mainstream brands.

With issue titles such as “XXX,” “The Pleasure Principle” and “Naughty and Nice,” the Quarterly dove headfirst into the risque. During its 25-issue run between 1997 and 2003, it printed interviews with porn star Jenna Jameson, offered sex advice on how to “go down” in public and suggested — on multiple occasions — that its readers dabble in group sex. One issue published an article on how to be a “Web exhibitionist,” another featured a Slovenian philosopher barking orders to “learn sex” at school and big-dick Ron Jeremy even stopped by to talk about performing oral sex on himself and using a cast made from his own penis.

The actual Abercrombie clothing being modeled in the magalog was an afterthought, appearing in Weber’s photos as more of an impediment to nudity than an actual, purchasable item. The whole thing was, as journalist Harris Sockel put it in an Human Parts essay, “20 percent merch, 20 percent talk and 100 percent soft-core aspirational porn.”

None of this would have been vexing had a more adult-oriented brand been the ones hawking it, but Abercrombie & Fitch was — and still is — marketed toward suspiciously toned teenage field hockey players named Brett. Though he might have looked like a man in his big salmon-pink polo, Brett was but a child. Abercrombie was fond of saying its clothing was for college-aged clientele, but we all knew where its real haute runway took place — inside the crowded halls of every middle school in Ohio.

The Quarterly, too, was intended for college kids, and to prove it, Abercrombie shrink-wrapped it in plastic and sold only to those over 18 for $6 a pop. You could buy it as a subscription, of course, but it was more commonly found in-store, nestled alongside A&F’s cargo shorts and “thongs for 10-year-olds,” a questionable placement that prompted concerned parents, conservatives and Christians to accuse Abercrombie of sullying their children’s minds with impure thoughts.

As such, the Quarterly became the subject of a mounting number of boycotts, protests and controversies that some believe were responsible for its eventual demise. By the time circulation peaked at 1.2 million in 2003, it had been denounced by organizations like the National Coalition for the Protection of Children and Families, Mothers Against Drunk Driving, the American Decency Association, Focus on the Family, the National Organization for Women and, of course, the Catholic League.

Yet the outrage against the Quarterly was matched — if not exceeded — by its cult following, who found its frank portrayal of sexuality to be transcendent. Journalists, artists and the teens whose hands it fell into adored the magazine, and its rarity — plus its utter absurdity — makes it a sought-after collector’s item to this day.

At the same time, few people know about the Quarterly and even fewer realize what it meant to the generations of young people discovering themselves and their sexualities through the unlikely lens of branded content. As journalist Emily Lever puts it, “There’s no weirder way to learn about sex than to pick up a magazine by Abercrombie & Fitch — a brand for hot, mean mostly white kids who shoved you into lockers — but, I guess I’ll take it?”

This is the story of how an oversexed and strangely intellectual magazine by a polo shirt brand completed the improbable task of changing the course of sexuality in America’s malls, homes and moose-print boxers.

AND IN THE BEGINNING, THERE WAS ASS

The first issue A&F Quarterly debuted in June 1997. With 70-ish pages of full-color hard bodies, it was relatively tame compared to later editions, but it quickly became popular when Abercrombie’s nubile clientele realized it was a paper-backed portal into an adult world of sex, nudity and the kind of unbridled sensory hedonism their parents warned them about. As rumors of its legend began to spread, people began to wonder: What the hell is A&F Quarterly, and why is it printing ass for teens?

Emily Lever, journalist and chronicler of the Quarterly’s absurdist philosophical leanings: A&F Quarterly was an in-house magazine put together by Abercrombie & Fitch that published a who’s who of literati to accompany their images of young adult and teen bodies in order to hawk expensive distressed jeans and polo shirts to kids who would shove you inside a locker.

Alissa Quart, author of Branded: The Buying and Selling of Teenagers and director of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project: From what I recall, it had a Bruce Weber-y vibe — gorgeous young men and teens unapologetically objectified, a leering retro pin-up element, also sort of like the highly stylized, sexed-up, nostalgic 1980s and 1990s black-and-white Guess ads. Men — boys, really — were photographed without their shirts, elaborately muscled abs, sometimes naked.

Harris Sockel, in his Human Parts essay: [It was] Playboy crossed with Fratmen.com and a bit of Field & Stream. The Quarterly made my hormones do a kick line across my frontal lobe. I wanted to nibble the soy ink for snack until sunrise. To absorb it so deeply I sweat grey drops onto my pillow. To rip a page from that issue and fold it into a paper flower and stick it all the way up my ass until it came out my mouth.

Lever: Yeah, it was hot. But it was also extraordinarily literary. It featured big-time thinkers, writers and philosophers — stuff that was supposedly intended to expand your mind. It was way too high-brow for the average Abercrombie teen, and its existence made almost no sense given what the brand represented.

Savas Abadsidis, editor-in-chief, 1997-2003: There was nothing else like it. We were the first mainstream brand to combine playful, irreverent, intellectual content with sex and youth in this beautiful, high-art magazine format. Was it controversial? Sure. But it made the entire country take notice.

What they didn’t necessarily see, however, was what was going on behind the scenes. Not only were we the first brand to do this kind of advertising, we were also the first big brand to normalize gay culture for a mainstream audience, expose America’s youth to some of the era’s most progressive thinkers and use our platform to address sexuality in a useful, hands-on way. And you wouldn’t necessarily expect that from Abercrombie. That’s what made it so cool.

It all began in 1996. I was 22 and working at a temp job for a prominent New York architect who happened to be friends with Sam Shahid, a big-time creative director for Calvin Klein, Banana Republic and later, Abercrombie & Fitch. He was looking for an assistant. I had taken a deferment to go to law school and was looking for a job for that interim year, so I applied. I got in.

It was a horrible gig at first. Just awful, Devil Wears Prada-type stuff. I left crying many nights. But I had two things going for me. The first was that Abercrombie had a really small office in the West Village. Mike Jeffries, the president and CEO of Abercrombie, used to come in. He wore flip flops, had a desk made out of a surfboard and began each sentence with the word “Dude.”

Mike Jeffries, ex-CEO of Abercrombie & Fitch, speaking to Salon in 2006: Dude, I’m not an old fart who wears his jeans up at his shoulders.

Abadsidis: I didn’t know it at the time, but Mike was gay (I wouldn’t find out until much later). I think that was part of the reason why he and Sam — who was also gay — took me under their wing. They actually didn’t realize that I was, too — it’s not like we all sat around a bonfire at Fire Island and talked about how us gay guys were infiltrating Abercrombie — but that dynamic dovetailed nicely with Bruce’s photography for both the brand and the Quarterly, and it certainly set the tone for what was to come. I was grateful to get what amounted to an unofficial apprenticeship from both Mike and Sam, and eventually, they had me doing much more involved tasks than I was hired to do.

One of them was sitting in on important meetings. At the time, Mike was inviting all these different editors from magazines like Interview, Men’s Journal and Rolling Stone to come in and brainstorm ideas for what the Quarterly could be, but their ideas were flat. They felt like ideas coming from 45-year-olds writing for college kids, and I could tell Mike was getting frustrated by how little they seemed to grasp what he wanted.

One day in a meeting, one of the magazine editors threw out an idea. Without even acknowledging him, Mike turned to me. “Savas,” he asked. “What do you think about that?”

My mind raced — I could tell he was testing me. If I flubbed the answer, I’d be done. I briefly considered censoring myself, but then I thought better. What did I have to lose? I was young. Surely, I’d find another summer job. “I don’t think it’s a great idea,” I told him.

Apparently, that was the right answer. Mike practically threw the guy out of the room.

After that, I started to think more about what I’d want to see out of a magazine. I was just out of college as a French comparative literature major at Vassar, and I was super into that sort of 1950s-style Esquire journalism with the dapper closing essay. I was deep into The New Yorker, Interview Magazine, 1990s-era Details, MAD Magazine and 1980s pop star mags like Tiger Beat, too — those were all an influence. I also loved philosophy, social theory and comics. And graphic novels. You know — college stuff. Then it hit me: If the magazine was for people like me, why not get actual college kids — not 50-year-olds — to create our content?

I suspected my ideas were what they were looking for and knew they’d look fresh compared to what other editors were throwing out, so I decided to take a risk. I got up at 2 a.m. and typed out a 20-page proposal for what I thought the Quarterly should be. The next morning, I faxed a copy to Mike. I left another on Sam’s desk.

About a (very anxious) week later, Sam called me into his office and told me to pick up his phone. Mike was on the other line. As I reached for the receiver, he leaned over to me and said, “Who the fuck do you think you are?”

I didn’t even have time to comprehend what that meant before Mike’s voice was in my ear. “Congratulations, kid,” he told me. “You get one shot.”

Shortly thereafter, I was promoted from Sam’s assistant to the completely green, 23-year-old editor-in-chief of the Quarterly. It was a Jerry Maguire moment. I was thrilled and terrified at the same time.

They gave me a month to put together a staff and get the first issue out. Bruce Weber was named as its exclusive photographer — he’d already been shooting ads and campaigns for Abercrombie — and Sam was the creative director. As for me, I knew I’d need an editorial staff, and stat.

HOLY SHIT, THERE ARE NO LIMITS

Abadsidis quickly throws together a team composed of two college buddies, Patrick Carone and Gary Kon, who he describes as “pretty funny and stuff.” Carone became the only straight guy on the editorial side. Kon is Jewish and gay. The three of them vow to stay as true to the idealized college experience as possible with their content — even if it means chasing white whales.

Abadsidis: I can’t remember the exact starting budget, but it was upwards of a few million, probably much larger than most magazines get for their first issue! But our budget was also Bruce’s budget. He was getting advertising money, so we were well taken care of in that regard.

We weren’t really expected to turn a profit, though. That was never the point. Come to think of it, I don’t even think we tracked how much the magazine impacted clothing sales, although from what I can remember, clothing sales bumped up double digits every quarter after we launched (for a while, at least). [This statement is unverified.] But that didn’t matter: Our mission was just to set the brand image and make people aware of us. That was our version of success. We were also our only advertiser for a while, so we could get away with a lot of stuff that other publications couldn’t.

Gary Kon, managing editor, 1997-2003: When Savas offered me the job, I jumped at the opportunity. I’d already interned for Sam, and I’d have to scan hundreds of Bruce Weber images that he shot for Abercrombie as part of the job. And I fell in love with his work. It was the visual connection that seduced me. Weber’s photos were like a new Greek mythology; the men and women depicted in the photos were both idealized and sexualized. As a gay kid, who was pretty comfortable by that time in my own skin, I had no problem recognizing the eroticism in his work.

Abadsidis: Me, Gary and Patrick was definitely something special. I don’t think I’ll ever have an opportunity to create anything like that again. I was a huge comic book fan. If I had to describe it, it’s the closest thing I’ll ever come to Stan Lee’s Marvel comics bullpen. Pretty much everyone I hired was super unique. We weren’t all gay (maybe half of us were) but few of us really adhered to the Abercrombie image.

I think Sean came on in 2001.

Sean T. Collins, managing editor, 2001-2003: I was a little skittish about it at first because Abercrombie & Fitch represented everything I was not. They marketed, almost exclusively, to the lacrosse players that called me names I cannot repeat. It was very preppy, and that was not me at all.

I was alternative, maaan. I was a big fan of Nine Inch Nails. I wore a lot of black. A&F was everything I wasn’t, and in a way, everything that had tormented me as a kid. The irony of me working for them was palpable, but what I learned very quickly was that at the Quarterly, you could do anything that you wanted.

One of my first articles was an interview with Clive Barker, the writer and director of Hellraiser (he also wrote Candyman). Now, if you’ve seen Hellraiser, you can imagine just how far of a departure a sadomasochistic horror film was from Abercrombie & Fitch, but getting him to sign on was easy. He’s gay, and at the time, he was super ripped. I think he appreciated the extravagant gayness of the Weber stuff in particular. He was also a photographer, and his husband was, too. I think he recognized what was going on with the photography.

We had an unlimited expense budget, so I took him out for drinks at the Four Seasons. I talked to him for hours, and then he invited me to go back to his house and hang out and see his art studio. He had three mansions in a row on Sunset in Los Angeles, up in the hills. One for his office, one for his actual domicile and one that was a painting studio. I got to see that. I was just a 23-year-old kid. This was my first job out of college, and I felt like Cameron Crowe from Almost Famous. After that, I was like, “Holy shit, there are no limits.”

Kon: I have to credit Savas with pushing us to work without limitations. We were very lucky. At some point during my tenure, I realized that as long as we worked within our (sizable) budget, we had almost full autonomy. We could plan trips to Hollywood to shoot our favorite actors. We could travel to Thailand to reenact our version of The Beach. We could tag along to London or Rome or wherever Bruce was shooting the catalog. We could stroll into the office at 11 a.m. and work until 11 p.m.

Collins: If I wanted to talk to Bettie Page, the pinup model from the 1950s, they’d be like, “Okay, sure.” If I wanted to feature Underworld, my favorite electronic music band, it was, “Sure, go ahead.” It was total editorial freedom, which was so strange knowing how specific of a person the “Abercrombie type was.” I’ve been writing for two decades now, and I’ve never experienced anything like it since.

Abadsidis: Everyone wanted to be in it, too. At first, it was just indie musicians. But then, in the second issue, we snagged Lil’ Kim. That’s when I knew we’d made it big. She was into it — she loved everything about the Quarterly. A lot of people did. The whole high-brow/low-brow thing was really appealing, and the idea of going to college, reading good books, getting drunk and having sex felt uniquely nostalgic and fresh in the context of America back then. Clinton was getting impeached for getting a blow job. It was just a weird, puritanical time, and the Quarterly gave people a national platform to let their freak flag fly.

We had Rudy Guiliani, early Britney Spears, Paula Abdul. There was the New York issue where we talked about the Harlem Renaissance. Spike Lee — one of my idols — asked me if he could be in it. He’d done advertising, you know? I remember him being like, “Yo, this is the deal. I’ve got to give you mad props. This is the dopest thing out right now, advertising-wise.”

We had big-time philosophers and literary figures, too. They were great. We wanted to mimic the experience of being in college and having your mind expanded, so we got writers like Bret Easton Ellis and Michael Cunningham on board. There was a whole Sex Ed issue plastered with musings from Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek, a friend of a professor’s from college. I believe Jonathan Franzen was in there, too.

Jonathan Franzen, award-winning novelist and essayist: I gave hundreds of interviews between 1997 and 2003, almost all of them at the request of various publishers. One of them must have thought it was a good idea to talk to A&F. The fact that I apparently did (I don’t remember it) signifies nothing except that I felt grateful to my publishers.

Collins: We got a lot of weirdos, too. John Edward, the guy who talked to dead people. Chuck Palahniuk, who wrote Fight Club. At the time, it didn’t have the meathead reputation that it does now. It was legitimately looked at as this piece of anti-corporate, anti-capitalist art, the irony of which was just delightful given that we were a capitalist brand trying to sell polo shirts and $90 ripped jeans.

Abadsidis: The only guy who refused an interview was Donald Trump! I have a feeling his 90-year-old secretary had something to do with it. Though we were technically a magalog and did belong to the brand, our stuff was just really visionary. David Keeps, who was the editor of Details at the time, always defended the Quarterly as a real magazine and publicly said that we were doing more innovative stories than most “real” magazines at a time.

ASPIRATIONAL HOMOEROTICS

It’s no secret that the photography and creative direction of Weber and Shahid contained homoerotic undertones. Irreverent, minimal and moody, it was suggestive without being literal, spinning entire storylines into a single frame. At the same time, it was too idealized to be “real.” The queerness that their photos showed was, as Collins puts it, “aspirational,” meaning that like the mostly white, ab-riddled models instructed to sell cargo shorts by taking them off, they didn’t necessarily represent the full reality of what queerness actually was.

Still, the photos that the Quarterly published during its seven-year run did more to normalize and represent queerness and non-monogamy than any other mainstream brand at the time — weird, considering that Abercrombie’s target market was hegemonic suburbanites whose parents bred genetically pure golden retrievers and had cabins in Vail. Without these photos, the Quarterly might have read more as a minor-league Esquire or Ivy League MAD Magazine, but with them, it became one of the least-discussed, most under-appreciated items queer history.

Collins: Our editorial content — which almost functioned as a parody of so-called “Abercrombie people” — was always accompanied by this extremely beautiful photography that was also extremely queer. But it was never explicitly so. It was all this nudge, nudge, wink, wink stuff. I don’t know how you could miss it, though. The homoeroticism was so overt.

Abadsidis: You’d have had to have been blind not to consider the imagery homoerotic (though, it was really in the eye of the beholder). We had the Carlson twins posing on the cover and riding a motorcycle. We had a drag queen named Candis Cayne. There was a lesbian couple kissing at a wedding.

Kon: David Sedaris, Gus Van Sant, Gregg Araki, Avenue Q, Stan Lee, Peaches, Fischerspooner… you could teach a queer theory class with everyone we featured.

Abadsidis: At the same time, we never labeled anything as “gay” or “lesbian” or “queer.” We never came out and said, “Welcome to our gay magazine!” and we never had a meeting where we were like, “Okay, guys, let’s figure out how to make this thing gay.” It was more nonchalant. The imagery implied it without saying it.

Hampton Carney, A&F Quarterly spokesperson, 1999-2003: The message we were sending was clear: “You do you, whatever that is. Have fun!”

Abadsidis: That was a very 1990s thing.

Collins: There was a specific brand of Abercrombie gayness that got shown, though. The word that they always used to describe Abercrombie as a brand was “aspirational.” They didn’t want to make it like an everyday, normal-people brand. They wanted it to be associated with money, glamour and that WASP-y aesthetic. So all the gay raunch of it was presented within the context of what appeared to be a very square, nuclear family: white, wealthy and secure.

At the same time, that was really when same-sex marriage was kicking off as a political issue. I think you can see a commonality in how Abercrombie was essentially making an argument that you could be a normie and also be gay. That was a newish thing at the time (though I’m barely an expert as I’m not gay myself). Still, I can’t help but see a resonance between coming up with this clandestine content that normalized being gay at the same time this big political fight that was brewing.

Maybe being more forward about it would have come across as “too political.”

Abadsidis: Part of me wishes we’d gone a little further with being more outwardly queer, but I don’t think the time was right. Maybe with a braver CEO — no one at the time was brave enough to take on queerness or gay rights as a mainstream brand, including us — and that’s why few people remember the Quarterly as the sort of transcendent queer thing that it was.

Kon: It’s never been credited as such, but the Quarterly is really an item of gay history. I don’t think we were pushing a “gay” or “metrosexual” lifestyle on people as much as we were showing that it already existed, even out in Middle America. Perhaps that’s what made people uncomfortable. We took that thread of counterculture and taboo that ran through the imagery and continued it into the editorial content. We dealt with topics like drinking, drugs, religion, politics and sex. Again, these are issues young people dealt with daily, but were rarely editorialized.

At Vassar, there was a yearly party called The Homo Hop. It was one of the biggest parties of the year and leaned on Vassar’s history as a women’s college. I bring this up because, on the night of my freshman Homo Hop, I was instructed that each student had to do something sexually that they had never done, and one drug that they had never done. It wasn’t that you had to be gay, but you had to experience something that was new and different. I think that translated well into the Quarterly. Yes, there were a bunch of gay guys writing and shooting and drawing images. But we were simply trying to expose Cargo Short Brett to ideas, images, artists, books, writers and directors that he may have never heard of before. Our shared experiences would become his.

Collins: It was culture jamming, really.

Abadsidis: It was also very “college” to be fluid or experimental without labeling it. I think it’s safe to say that college is one of the gayest places there is in life, maybe not sexually, but definitely in terms of having your mind expanded about different types of people.

Carney: I was in a frat. I’d see fraternity brothers streaking across campus together. It was never a big deal. There are a lot more people in the middle of either extreme of sexuality than people talk about. We’re not one and 10 — we’re one through 10, if you will. That kind of stuff has always happened on college campuses, and that’s the kind of mentality we had around sex. We just happened to editorialize it really beautifully.

Collins: There’s a Barbara Kruger print that reminds me of the mood we were trying to capture: It reads: “You construct intricate rituals which allow you to touch the skin of other men.” That’s basically what Abercrombie & Fitch was. It was an intricate ritual that allowed sunkissed lacrosse players to metaphorically touch the skin of other men.

Carney: You know what’s funny, though? It was never the gay stuff people had a problem with. It was everything else.

LET THE CONTROVERSIES BEGIN

For almost every moment of its seven-year life, The Quarterly was a controversial publication. Parents, politicians and conservative-types didn’t appreciate its no-holds-barred approach to rampant fucking, and they could not, for the life of them, understand how such an adult magazine was making its way into the hands of their precious teens (who were probably jacking off to dad’s Playboys long before the Quarterly came along, but I digress). There was approximately one year — 1997 — where the amount of people it pissed off stayed below a critical mass, but after a certain somebody published a story that vaguely suggested underage kids drink, it was off to the races.

Abadsidis: We got in our fair share of trouble with Christian groups and concerned parents right off the bat. Let’s take one of the earlier issues — I believe it was Summer of 1998. It was my story. Basically, I suggested that people could do better than beer and that they should “indulge in some creative drinking.” There was one drink I made up called the “Brain Hemorrhage” and a few others you could play a drinking game with. We also included a spinner insert people could cut out.

None of it had anything to do with driving, of course, but the issue was called “On the Road.” It was a sort of beat-focused, Jack Kerouac thing, so some people interpreted that as us promoting drunk driving (though we did nothing of the sort). Also, the kid on the cover was underage. He was 16, if I remember correctly. Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) didn’t like that.

Karolyn Nunnallee, vice president of public policy for MADD: We had been really focused on underage drinking and had been instrumental in getting the country’s legal drinking age raised to 21. Then Abercrombie & Fitch comes out with this weird magazine that basically said, “Don’t go back to college drinking the usual beer. We’re going to show you a new way to drink.”

Not only did they have this drinking game, but they had recipes for these mixed drinks for young people to partake in. I was like, “Abercrombie & Fitch? Aren’t they in the clothing business?” What in the world were they doing? I mean, they were a high-end brand, not Walmart. Why would they take their focus off of clothing and put it toward alcohol? Were their clothes not good enough that year or something?

Needless to say, we weren’t happy with them. Curse words were handed out. We sent a letter to them and started a whole media campaign about it. We went on as many news media outlets as we possibly could with the story of how incensed we were.

Abadsidis: I was sure I was going to get fired over that. We had to remove the page with the spinner out of every single issue across the country. We apologized, of course, but it ended up backfiring against the protesters — that incident gave us so much publicity. It put us on the map. It also made us a target for conservative types. They hated us. After MADD, boycotts of Abercrombie started flaring up all over the place. That’s around the time we hired Hampton to do PR.

Carney: It was my job, at the time, to defend the brand. I’d go on talk shows like Entertainment Tonight or Today Show and explain away our latest controversy (there were a lot). It wasn’t hard, actually; each time, I’d give them what was more or less my go-to response: “It’s a beautiful publication intended for college-aged kids.” And that was the truth! It was way ahead of its time and was absolutely meant for people 18 and up.

Though not everyone saw it that way. The sex and nudity really got to people. A lot of them definitely thought we were making porn. That was the constant complaint: We were deliberately putting porn in the hands of young kids.

Lever: The Quarterly featured about the same level of nudity as a European yogurt commercial. Which is to say, a lot. It was a “clothing catalog” with almost no clothing. Of course [American] people thought it was pornographic!

Carney: Okay, sure — there were photos of like, six girls in bed with one guy and more than a few spreads that enthusiastically suggested naked non-monogamy — but it wasn’t porn. It was tasteful. And let me tell you — nothing we had in there was surprising to kids.

Abadsidis: The models ranged from 16 to 20. It was erotic. It was art. I don’t think there’s anything pornographic about the Quarterly unless you think that nudity, in and of itself, is pornographic.

Illinois Lieutenant Governor Corinne Wood did, apparently. In 1999, she called for a boycott of Abercrombie & Fitch because its “Naughty or Nice” holiday issue “contained nudity” and “even an interview with a porn star.” That porn star was none other than Jenna Jameson, who at the time was well on her way to becoming a household name. A so-called “child prodigy” occupied the neighboring page, sparking accusations that the Quarterly somehow intended to connect children to porn.

A cartoon of Mr. and Mrs. Claus experimenting with S&M across from the statement “Sometimes it’s good to be bad” didn’t help, nor did the “sexpert” who offered advice on “sex for three” and told readers that going down on each other in a movie theater was acceptable “just so long as you do not disturb those around you.”

The Illinois Coalition of Sexual Assault joined Wood’s boycott. Later that year, Michigan attorney general (and eventual governor) Jennifer Granholm sent a letter to Abercrombie complaining that the “Naughty or Nice” issue contained sexual material that couldn’t be distributed to minors under state law.

Carney: There were four states that tried to ban us after that. I remember Granholm. She was my arch-nemesis at the time — we really got into it. I respected where she was coming from, of course, but our whole thing was that we weren’t showing anything that wasn’t actually happening on college campuses. And I’d already made it pretty clear to the press that the magazine wasn’t for minors.

Also, it’s not like we were the only magazine talking about or showing sex. You could find all the exact same stuff in Cosmo or Playboy — it’s just that we were a clothing brand, and one whose major customer base just so happened to be teens and young adults. No one expected that from us. Brands weren’t “supposed” to be talking about sex period, let alone to teens and young adults. But we took it upon ourselves to pioneer a more open, honest view of it. That’s the wrinkle that made it so interesting.

We did come to an agreement with Granholm. We decided to wrap the magazine in plastic and make it available for purchase only to those over 18, that way, it’d be even more clear that we weren’t “selling porn to the underage.”

Kon: I believe it was one of the few times the company acquiesced.

Collins: Other than that, don’t remember getting any instruction from Savas, Mike or Sam to tone it down. It was kind of mutually assumed that we weren’t going to apologize for the sexual nature of our content. We knew we had to keep things sexy, as it were — that was our whole thing.

We weren’t deliberately trying to piss off people, but we were trying to push the envelope, and there was definitely an element of deliberate trolling of conservatives and Christian groups. It was a good thing if we pissed them off. It created the controversy that made the brand seem edgy and dangerous, which is what you want if you’re trying to appeal to young people.

Carney: We were also just showing real things that happened at college. And as anyone who’s been to college knows, it’s not just about reading and writing papers. It’s also about sex. Not only that, of course, but we’re sexual beings. We respond to images that are sexual. We were trying to take the stigma away from that and acknowledge that it’s not a bad thing to do.

But no matter how clear we made it, our stance on sex polarized people more and more. I could tell, because almost as soon as I started speaking on behalf of the magazine, strange things started to happen to me. I got stalkers. People left me messages saying I was going to hell and I’d have no afterlife. I got hate mail to my house. One person left a package containing their dirty, stained underwear at the front door of my apartment with a note saying they’d be “coming by later” to “talk to me about it.” I had to call the police on that one.

I was the face of the publication, so I got the vast majority of the harassment. But I didn’t mind. It was my job to take the fall, and I heard and respected every single person’s complaint and talked to them about it. Plus, for every message I got banishing me to hell, I got another from a journalist or a fan begging me to save a copy for them. People collected them. They really loved it, precisely because it was so sexual.

Abadsidis: Mike didn’t flinch about any of this stuff. He wanted to defend it because he could see it was working. We weren’t about to tone anything down (at the time).

Flash-forward to June 2001. The Twin Towers are still standing tall, tips are being frosted and Apple has just unleashed iTunes onto an unsuspecting populace. A&F Quarterly, now in its fourth year, is in hot water once again. Having survived a number of boycotts, lawsuits and controversies since its inception, it’s now in the midst of weathering another minor national conniption over its use of nudity.

Jeannine Stein, describing the Summer 2001 issue in an excerpt from a Los Angeles Times article called “Nudity? A&F Quarterly Has It Covered”: [It’s] explicit in ways that most catalogs and fashion magazines are not, and its use of male nudity is uncommon among general-interest publications. It features 280 pages of young, attractive men and women alone and together, in serious, romantic, sexual and party modes, wearing lots of A&F clothes, some A&F clothes and sometimes no clothes at all. Among the coffee-table book-ish photos by Bruce Weber is a man, covered only by a towel, surrounded by five women; a woman at the beach reclining body-to-body with three men; a back view of a naked man getting into a helicopter (we haven’t quite figured that one out yet); and a few topless females.

There are many naked butts and breasts.

Abadsidis: We also had photos of nude women in a fountain — which were inspired by Katharine Hepburn skinny-dipping at Bryn Mawr College — and a whole set dedicated to the Berkeley student that spent a day naked in class. It was par for the course for us, but even though we’d done the whole shrink-wrap and over-18 thing, people still felt it was too sexual for branded content.

In response, an unexpected alliance formed between cultural conservatives and anti-porn feminists to boycott Abercrombie & Fitch over the Summer 2001 issue of A&F Quarterly. According to Wikipedia, the offending issue included “photographs of naked or near-naked young people frolicking on the beach,” “top-naked young women and rear-naked young men on top of each other” and an “interview with porn star Ron Jeremy, who discussed performing oral sex on himself and using a dildo cast from his own penis.” Once again, Wood was at the helm.

David Crary, journalist, excerpt from a 2001 Associated Press article: Illinois Lt. Gov. Corinne Wood — a Republican who has been sparring with A&F since 1999 — announced the boycott campaign last week in Chicago. She has recruited a diverse mix of supporters more familiar with facing off against each other than with working together.

Wood, writing on her website in 2001: A&F is glamorizing indiscriminate sexual behavior that unsophisticated teenagers are not possibly equipped to weigh against the dangers of date rape, unplanned pregnancies and sexually transmitted disease.

Michelle Dewlen, president of the Chicago chapter of the National Organization for Women, speaking at one of Woods’ press conferences in 2001: It’s not a catalog. It’s a soft porn magazine.

Rev. Bob Vanden Bosch, head of Concerned Christian Americans, as quoted by the AP: It’s very important for people to get involved. The exploitation of sex and young people in A&F’s catalog isn’t only atrocious but also a psychological molestation of their teenage customers.

Quart: It was predatory in a few ways, really. One was that it confused the corporate identity of Abercrombie and the advertising with the editorial. It preyed on young consumers not understanding the difference between editorial content and sales content. Back then it led, I saw, to a way that girls were objectifying themselves and commodifying themselves. It ultimately led to boys also objectifying themselves and commodifying themselves — not to the same extent, but far more than they were when I started reporting Branded a little more than two decades ago.

I have the stats on the male body image dysmorphia at the time in Branded (which has only worsened). Then, male body shaming and “manorexia” was on the rise, for the first time on a mass scale. It couldn’t help for the most popular brand at the time to have a dedicated giant glossy magazine filled with pictures of male teenagers with zero body fat half undressed.

Abadsidis: I mean, sure, as much as any advertising does. It wasn’t like we were leading that charge. Any effect on self-image was certainly unintentional, but I do think it did make people want to be athletic. You definitely saw a lot of guys trying to look like that during that period, especially as time went on. If you look at the first few issues, the guys aren’t that built. Ashton Kutcher was actually in the second one — that was his first big break — and they get increasingly more cut from there. That whole era is when men’s body issues started to come out.

Lever: I’d also submit that all this was controversial because it was pre-internet. The internet mainstreamed sexual content in a way that makes A&F or other “scandalous” ad campaigns (like the 2003 Gucci ad with the model’s pubes shaved into the shape of a G) seem quaint, even obsolete. Like, do you remember that Eckhaus Latta ad a few years ago that scandalized people for five minutes because it showed people having real (albeit pixelated) sex? Neither does anyone else.

SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK TEACHES SEX ED

Always filled with philosophy, social theory and intellectually minded topics that likely soared over the heads of most Abercrombie consumers, the Quarterly outdid itself in the Fall of 2003 with its penultimate issue. A gorgeous romp of summer-spirited abandon accompanied by some delightfully incoherent, Dada-like musings from Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek, it connected a “back-to-school” theme with a pretty clear directive to fuck. Yet, the information it presented was actually rather safe and tame, a reality which confused and irritated Quarterly staff. Their content was legit, so why was everyone up in arms?

Abadsidis: The “Sex Ed” issue was the second to last one that we did. It got some of the most criticism, and was supposedly the reason everything was finished. I literally had stuff in there cited straight from the University of Michigan’s freshman student handbook on sexual conduct, and it still pissed people off! Then, of course, there was Žižek.

Lever: Žižek identifies as a radical leftist. He’s very famous for his work on cultural theory and critical theory. He analyzes all kinds of topics in his signature, impenetrable — but also approachable — style. And when I think of him, I think of his very distinctive manner of speaking, that some people have described as being on cocaine constantly. But he’s definitely kind of a cult figure, a favorite of people who consider themselves highbrow, but also fun.

He’s really touted as the greatest anti-capitalist of our time, and yet, here he was, “sexually educating” the mean girls and boys of your high school, in a brand catalog whose entire goal was to ensnare young people for the purpose of selling them distressed jeans.

According to the magazine’s foreword, the editor wrote to Žižek and said this: “Dear Slavoj, enclosed please find the images for our back to school issue. We’ve never had a philosopher write the text for our images before, so write what you like. We’re looking for that Karl Marx meets Groucho Marx thing you do so well. Thanks, Savas.”

Abadsidis: I love Slavoj. He was friends with one of my professors from school. He only had 24 hours to write this, so we actually sent someone to London where he was to drop off the images we wanted him to write text for. They hung out for a day and then flew back with what he’d written.

Lever: It was basically a series of insane, absurdist ramblings pasted over really hot naked people.

Žižek, excerpt from A&F Quarterly’s 2003 Sex Ed issue: Back to school thus means forget the stupid spontaneous pleasures of summer sports, of reading books, watching movies and listening to music. Pull yourself together and learn sex.

Lever: I mean, that’s like the first episode of every teen TV show, where these three nerdy boys start high school and they’re like, “Okay, we’re going to be cool this year guys. We’re going to lose our virginities.” It’s very formulaic. But there’s more.

Žižek: The only successful sexual relationship occurs when the fantasies of the two partners overlap. If the man fantasizes that making love is like riding a bike and the woman wants to be penetrated by a stud, then what truly goes on while they make love is that a horse is riding a bike… with a fantasy like that, who needs a personality?

Lever: The “go learn sex at school” part really struck a nerve with conservatives. But I don’t think it was that transgressive. Fourteen-year-olds are receiving messages to have sex all the time — what did it matter if some Eastern European anti-capitalist was hitting them over the head with it through the pages of a polo shirt advert?

Abadsidis: Fox News got involved, if I remember correctly. That was one of the few times I actually got pissed off about how an issue was being covered. I mean, the information in there was handed out to students by an actual university. Half the issue was quotes from this really influential philosopher. But for some reason, people really took offense to the language of it. That whole year [2003] was just a bad one for us.

THE LAST HORNY CHRISTMAS

For its final trick, the Quarterly released a holiday issue featuring 280 pages of “moose, ice hockey, chivalry, group sex and more.” It had oral sex, group sex, sex in a river, Christmas sex and pretty much every other type of sex you could think of, all which followed an earnest letter from Abadsidis which read: “We don’t want much this year, but in keeping with the spirit, we’d like to ask forgiveness from some of the people we’ve offended over the years. If you’d be so kind, please offer our apologies to the following: the Catholic League, former Lt. Governor Corrine Wood of Illinois, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund, the Stanford University Asian American Association, N.O.W.”

But the issue didn’t really hit. By fall 2003, Abercrombie was involved in a number of lawsuits and protests related to exclusion and discrimination, which left people cold despite the inviting warmth of a crackling, fireside circle jerk (a Weber offering which, I’m told, can be found on page 88 of the final issue).

Cole Kazdin, journalist, writing in a 2003 Slate article called “Have Yourself a Horny Little Christmas”: The challenge for me, when masturbating with my friends to the nubile nudies in the Abercrombie & Fitch catalog, is trying not to think about serious things like racial diversity; it tends to kill the mood. But because most of the models in the catalog are white and because a lawsuit has been filed against the clothing retailer for allegedly discriminating against a Black woman who applied for a job at the store, it’s hard for the issue not to rear its nonsexy head. [In 2004, Abercrombie also agreed to pay $40 million to settle a lawsuit that accused the company of promoting whites over Latino, Black, Asian-American and female applicants.]

Collins: As a brand, Abercrombie did a lot of things that were quite gross. I’m sure you remember when they came out with these T-shirts with these racist stereotype characters on them. You would just see it in the catalog and just be like, “Jesus Christ.” It was awful and stupid and self-defeating, just tone deaf. And we just couldn’t figure out how no one at the company saw the problem with it.

Stagg, excerpt from Sleeveless: Kids in my high school wore shirts that read, “Wok-n-Bowl” and “Wong Brothers Laundry Service: Two Wongs Can Make It White,” accompanied by cross-eyed propaganda-style cartoons. If you weren’t part of the in-crowd (and white), A&F was oppressive. Non-jocks made their own anti-A&F T-shirts, using the brand as a catchall for exclusionary, competitive behavior and old-fashioned bullying.

Carney: That stuff was indefensible, really. Those were the darkest days of my job — listening to calls and reading letters about how offensive those shirts were. Even though the Quarterly was quite separate from the brand and we had no influence over what they did or what clothes they designed, we did still have to print their stuff at the back of the magazine. It was pretty uncomfortable.

Stagg: By 2006, Mike Jeffries’ most controversial public statement on sex appeal was really just saying what we were all thinking: “Are we exclusionary? Absolutely.” Those remarks were followed by lawsuit after lawsuit, mostly involving staffing discrimination. An announcement about the store refusing to carry anything over a size 10 reportedly marked a noticeable decrease in sales.

Abadsidis: There were a lot of underlying problems at the company. The amount of negative press Abercrombie was getting was getting silly. No matter what we did, we’d end up in the news, especially if it was related to the Quarterly. After so many bad news incidents, it just felt done, like its moment had passed. It was bound to crash at some point.

Gina Piccalo, excerpt from the Los Angeles Times: Clothing retailer Abercrombie & Fitch has pulled its controversial in-store catalogs after outraged parents, conservative Christian groups and child advocates threatened a boycott over material they said was pornographic. However, a company spokesman said the move had nothing to do with the public outcry. The catalogs were pulled to make room near cash registers for a new Abercrombie & Fitch fragrance.

Abadsidis: People like to think that the boycotts and Christian protests had something to do with it, but that wasn’t the case at all. By 2003, Abercrombie’s stock was low — something to do with ordering too much denim. The store was having negative sales for the first time. There was the line in the New York Times, who covered our demise, that Mike was “bored” with it.

Collins: We had no warning. We were all there one day, and the next, we were gone.

Lever: The Quarterly was a relic of a different time. I feel like it could never have been made after 2008 for so many reasons — economic, and cultural and political. It would just never fly. It was made before feminism pervaded everything, at a time where you could be completely flagrant about gross patriarchal shit and still get away with it.

It was kind of like this last gasp of a certain conception of what’s desirable — a very hegemonic coolness exemplified by white Ivy League frat kids who got fucked up the night before their philosophy class. That doesn’t have much currency anymore. Abercrombie kept that image on life support until its last gasp.

Now, 20 years later, what’s cool is not that. What’s cool is to have depression and ADD. The ideal is out. The real is in. And the Quarterly, having always existed in the liminal space between, is neither here nor there.

EPILOGUE

In 2008, Abercrombie resurrected the Quarterly in the U.K. for a limited-run special edition to celebrate the success of its European stores. The original team was reunited — Abadsidis, Shahid and Weber — with the hopes that Britain’s more “open-minded approach to culture and creativity” would provide a welcoming substrate on which to re-grow their original ideas of sexual liberation. The issue, “Return to Paradise,” was “more mature” than its American cousin. It was well-received — aside from the usual protests about sex and nudity — but it wasn’t continued.

Two years later, in 2010, the Quarterly was revived again, this time as a promotional element for Abercrombie’s Back-to-School 2010 marketing campaign, which bore the unfortunate title of “Screen Test.” The lead story Abercrombie put out on its website sounded like a cross between American Idol and a gay porn shot: “The staff of A&F Studios opens up to editorial to explain the steps the division takes to find new, young, hot boys. The cattle-call approach to herd young talent ends with the best of the beefcake earning a screen test that ‘could be the flint to spark the trip to the star.’”

Bruce Weber would be shooting, of course. This would become especially ominous after he was accused of a series of casting-couch style sexual assaults by 15 male models beginning in 2017. According to the accusations, he subjected them to sexually manipulative “breathing exercises” and inappropriate touching, insinuating that he could help their careers if they complied.

Arick Fudali, a lawyer at the Bloom Firm, which represents five of Weber’s alleged victims, declined to confirm or deny whether any of the alleged assaults happened on a Quarterly shoot. If they did, they’re not prosecutable as sexual assaults in New York. Because the states’s statute of limitations on reporting rape is only three years, anything that happened during the Quarterly’s run wouldn’t count toward a sexual assault charge (unless a minor was involved, which Fudali also declined to confirm).

No one I spoke with for this story remembers seeing, hearing or experiencing anything like what the allegations against Weber describe, but some expressed concern over how they might affect the legacy the Quarterly leaves behind. “The accusations are pretty grim,” Collins told me. “You feel for the people who are put in that position. People had power over them. It just makes you think, ‘Was any of this worth it?’ Not really, if people were getting hurt.”

As such, it’s difficult to conclude with definitive sign-off about the Quarterly’s legacy. Either it was a bastion of progressive and transversive sexuality that simultaneously trolled and nourished the very audience it sought to mine, or it was the product of darkness and pain. Either way, Sockel sums it up just right: “The Quarterly was discontinued in 2003, after the American Decency Association boycotted photos of doe-eyed bare-assed jocks in prairies and glens,” he wrote in his recollection. “It was nice while it lasted.”

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sirpoley · 5 years ago

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On the Full Plate Threshold and the Nature of Money

"Can I buy a magic sword?"

This is a question that seems straightforward, but is actually fraught with follow-on implications that are not obvious. It is also one that's asked at some point in any D&D campaign. You might be thinking, as GM, that you're making a choice about the setting of your campaign (is this a high-magic or low-magic world, a desert island, a major trade city, etc). While you are making this decision, you're also deciding (perhaps without knowing) what money is in this game. You're deciding whether your adventuring party will build castles or not, whether they'll hire armies or not, whether they'll go adventuring or not, whether they'll be greedy or not, and whether they'll care about rewards at all after the fighter gets her hands on a set of Full Plate.

In my experience, money in RPGs is used for one of six things: character power, narrative power, oxygen, skill, XP, or nothing.

Money as Character Power

This paradigm is the one most familiar to 3.x veterans such as myself, and is the direct result of allowing magic items to be purchased freely for money. This allows players to invest money in their character's powers and strengths in the same way they do with skills and feats. There is a slightly different set of constraints on how money is spent than skill points (which is to say, the party must find a city), and may be further restrictions still (such as 3.x's limitations on the most expensive items that can be bought in each size of settlement), but at the end of the day, players can pretty much buy whatever they have money for.

In essence, if a player can convert currency into better stats, damage, armour, etc., then in your system, money is character power and should be treated as such. The GM should keep a close eye on how they hand out treasure and quest rewards, as too little or too much money can easily result in difficulty balancing encounters. Third edition D&D came with a table stipulating how much money each character should have at each level (the (in)famous "Wealth by Level" table) and balanced monster CR based off of this assumption. In my younger years, I GM'd several campaigns in which I restricted purchase of magic items because of campaign setting reasons (it was a low magic setting, or the party was far from civilization, or whatever), and then was shocked as the party struggled against ethereal monsters or monsters with damage reduction, yet with CR far below their level. Additionally, such restrictions won't affect all characters equally—a 3.5-era sorcerer, for instance, can operate just fine despite absolute poverty, while a fighter will really feel the lack of a level-appropriate magic sword. Monks, despite not using weapons or armour, are ironically among the classes most dependent on magic items because of their dependency on multiple ability scores.

Determining whether your system assumes money as character power may not be immediately obvious, but as a GM, it is crucial that you find out. D&D's modern-era spinoff, D20 Modern, does not use money as character power, as you can't simply buy better and better guns as you level up—once you've realized that the FN 5-7 pistol and the HK G11 rifle are mathematically the best guns and you've bought them (which you can easily do as a first-level character), you're set for the rest of the campaign. However, D20 Modern variant campaign settings, such as D20 Future and Urban Arcana, do allow you to directly convert money into character power, as the reintroduction of D&D-esque magic items of Urban Arcana and the "build your own gear" gadget-system of D20 Future allow unlimited wealth to be converted to unlimited power.

What to Watch as a GM: Ensure a steady trickle of monetary rewards that increase as the players level, realize that players will be increasingly antsy to reach town the more treasure they have, keep an eye on any game-provided wealth-by-level suggestions, and be wary about player-driven "get rich quick" schemes and item crafting systems. Be very cautious about allowing a PC to borrow money from an in-world bank or other lender, as they could quickly invest that money in magic items and destabilize the game balance.

Advantages: Combing through books to find perfect magic/sci-fi items is very appealing to some players, and it allows the GM to dangle money in front of his or her players to hook them on adventures.

Disadvantages: Can lead to very hurt feelings (and huge game imbalances) if a character is robbed/disarmed in–game, as it is functionally equivalent to erasing a feat from their character sheet. Further, the game can break down very quickly if there is a wealth disparity among the party, as there are more than simple roleplaying repercussions to playing a "rich" or "poor" character. Some players find this system "video gamey," and others feel that it overwhelmingly encourages players to steal everything not nailed down.

Best For: Combat-heavy games in which a "build" is important, high magic/soft sci-fi settings.

Money as Narrative Power

When money sees its most use bribing officials, hiring mercenary armies, building castles, or funding large-scale operations of any kind, money in your system directly converts to "narrative power." Players can use cash to influence the game world and the direction of the story, but not necessarily to deal more damage in combat (or heal more, or buff more, or whatever). This is where D&D 5e tends to get to after low levels (see "Crossing the Streams" for more on this). Many gritty, film noir-esque stories rely on key characters being dangerously in debt and are called to adventure by motivation to pay off said debt. Depending on the details of the campaign world, however, Players might stop caring about money entirely if it doesn’t directly relate to the plot or some kind of scheme.

What to Watch as a GM: If you come from a legacy of "Money as Character Power" games, you might have to remind yourself to loosen your grip if one or more characters seems to be accumulating "too much" money. Just because money doesn't have direct applications in combat and adventuring doesn't mean it isn't an important game resource—be sure to provide opportunities for players to use their money to solve problems, or else they'll quickly ignore it entirely.

Advantages: Allows a host of narrative options restricted by "Money as Character Power" games, such as managing businesses, organizations, or fiefdoms. Allows a wealth disparity between party members with only moderate issues. Additionally, allows stories involving borrowing and lending money without breaking balance in half, and overall can feel quite freeing.

Disadvantages: Can still cause problems if one PC is notably wealthier or poorer than the rest, depending on the players themselves, as they might end up driving the story. Unless finances are baked into the plot, using money as a reward is unlikely to garner much interest on behalf of the players.

Best For: Gritty realism, power politics, games that will eventually result in characters becoming lords/ladies/CEOs/etc.

Money as a Skill

In some ways, this is the exact opposite of "Money as Character Power"—when money is treated in your system as a skill, players have to sacrifice combat power in exchange for wealth. For instance, in the Fate-based Dresden Files RPG, if a player selects Resources to be one of their better skills, they are consciously giving up choosing, say, Weapons or Fists as a good skill. In such a system, a character's wealth is abstracted, and largely unaffected by major purchases or sales. Similarly, monetary quest rewards are pretty much off the table unless similarly abstracted.

This system strongly encourages huge disparities in wealth between party members, allowing rich and poor characters to solve problems equally well, just in different ways.

Note that "Money as a Skill" doesn't just mean that purchases are handled by skill checks, but rather that the wealth of a character is as core, internal, and untouchable as their other core stats, like Strength, Agility, etc. D20 Modern uses a system similar to skill checks to handle finances, but a character's Wealth score fluctuates hugely when they buy or sell things, so doesn't entirely fit in this paradigm.

Sometimes these systems do away with money altogether, such as the mecha rpg LANCER, which exists in a post-scarcity world entirely without money. Equipment is earned by getting progressively better "licenses," which authorize PCs to replicate increasingly powerful weapons and mecha shells.

What to Watch as a GM: You'll have to find ways to motivate players without monetary rewards, and be sure to find opportunities to reward players who invested in their "money" skill, either through narrative or scenario design, just as you would ensure to place a few traps in every dungeon for a rogue to disarm.

Advantages: Allows (and, indeed, almost requires) large wealth discrepancies between characters, and greatly reduces bookkeeping.

Disadvantages: Tends to be highly abstract, which can lead to a mismatch of expectations (such as if players start looting bodies to sell, with absolutely no mechanical impact, or being unsure if "+5 wealth" is middle-class or Bezos-class).

Best For: Narrative games without much focus on accumulating wealth and treasure, but in which money still matters.

Money as XP

This is the oldest of all old-school approaches, and in many ways the logical extreme of "Money as Character Power." When money is used as XP, acquiring gold directly leads to characters increasing in level. Sometimes this requires spending the money (i.e., donations to charity, training, or spell research resulting in XP gains), while other times, it only means acquiring the money (in which case, you have to answer the question of what players are to do with all this accumulated wealth after its primary purpose—giving them XP—has been achieved). This approach has largely been left by the wayside, and many modern players will discount it out of hand, but I'd encourage you to stop and think about it: we already accept that fighting more powerful monsters and overcoming more difficult challenges lead to greater XP and greater material rewards, so why not cut out the middleman and just say the material rewards are XP? One caveat is that, even moreso than with "Money as Character Power," this can result in PCs doing anything to get their hands on cold, hard cash—but, conversely, by removing (or downplaying) combat XP, it can also result in encouraging peaceful or stealthy approaches to solutions. This would lead into a whole conversation about when and how to give out XP, and what behaviours this decision encourages around the tabletop, but such a discussion is outside the scope of this essay.

This system works well for GMs that want their players to be treasure-hungry, like in Money as Character Power, but don't like the inevitable proliferation of magic items that results.

As with "Money as Character Power," under such a paradigm, GM's must keep a close eye on PC's pocketbooks. Taking away their treasure, either through in-game theft, a rust monster, or similar, will lead to frustration and hard feelings. Similarly, anything that lets players turn a profit without adventuring, such as item crafting or simply by getting a day job, could destabilize the game unexpectedly—many systems specify that only treasure found while adventuring counts towards XP, though determining what counts as "while adventuring" can be something of a headache (albeit not an insurmountable one). Additionally, this system strongly discourages wealth imbalances between PCs, as they directly result in some PCs being higher level than others.

Given how out-of-style this is in tabletop games, it's perhaps surprising that several modern video game RPGs fall into this category in the late game. In Skyrim, for example, after I'd bought the best weapons and armour that could be found in shops, future resources went into buying all the world's iron and leather to grind up my Smithing skill again and again, giving myself easy levels.

What to Watch for as GM: Same as with "Money as Character Power."

Advantages: Eliminates post-battle XP calculation entirely, encourages players to avoid direct confrontation, and gives players a very strong monetary motivation (which can also be a disadvantage) without resulting in a high-magic world.

Disadvantages: Can strike some players as unintuitive, and strongly encourages desperate treasure-hunting (which can also be an advantage).

Best For: Games involving treasure-hunting and exploration.

Money as Oxygen

With Money as Oxygen, money becomes something that players need a steady stream of just to survive. Maybe they're deeply in debt, have to make rent payments, have to maintain their equipment, or just have to feed themselves. The reason for their regular thirst for wealth might be narrative (rent, debt, etc.) or mechanical (equipment maintenance, etc.) in nature. In Traveller, a huge source of motivation for the party is just trying to keep ahead of mortgage payments for your starship. Money becomes the same as food, water, and air—a vital necessity that you simply always need more of.

With Money as Oxygen, players constantly have to eye their dwindling bank accounts and do cost-benefit calculations before accepting a mission, or else disaster could strike. This is a very, very different genre from "Money as Character Power" or even "Money as Narrative Power," as it rarely results in the party spending their money on anything other than survival. Unless they really hit a gold mine, they won't use money to upgrade weapons or armour, or to buy land and power, because doing so runs the risk of starvation/bankruptcy/etc.

This probably isn't the paradigm to use for most D&D-esque campaigns, as it can (and should) result in players actively avoiding heroic archetypes—if survival depends on a paycheck; the crusade against evil is someone else's problem.

What to Watch for as GM: This paradigm is bookkeeping-heavy, so make sure the players understand that from the get-go. Also, anyone expecting "Money as Character Power" might find themselves frustrated by their ever-dwindling resources. Make sure you have a very good handle on the math of the players' survival (that is, exactly how many gold pieces/dollars/credits they need to survive a week) or you might accidentally underpay them and lead them to ruin. Not that this shouldn't happen; it just shouldn't happen by accident. If you accidentally give them too much money, feel free to timeskip ahead several months until they're broke again, or dangle another moneysink in front of them, like a one-of-a-kind, now-or-never opportunity to buy a shiny magic item or spaceship upgrade (dipping judiciously into Money as Character Power).

Advantages: Makes the players feel poor, desperate, and downtrodden.

Disadvantages: Both the players and the GM have to keep a very, very close eye on finances in order to maintain tension. If paired with a mechanical system that doesn't result in substantial character progression from XP (such as skills, feats, etc.), then players can feel stuck and lacking motivation.

Best Used For: anything that can be accurately described with the words "seedy underbelly."

Money for Nothing

We've all played games in which money is straight-up useless. In many Zelda games, for example, like the classic Ocarina of Time, monsters drop rupees all through the game. In addition, there are secrets, hidden chests, and puzzles that pay out rupee rewards as if the game thinks they would make you happy. After the first hour of the game, it becomes blindingly obvious that there's no point to this money, as the things you would buy (arrows, sticks, bombs) are just as freely dropped from monsters and bushes. Many other video games hit this point after the early game as well (like Diablo II, where monsters continue to drop thousands and thousands of gold throughout the game, but there's nothing worthwhile to spend it on).

I personally can't see any advantages to this system, as I don't think it's chosen by design.

Crossing the Streams

Of course, few games fall strictly into one of the above categories, and most aim to do two or even three, which can lead to some common pitfalls. For example, the 3e splatbook the Stronghold Builder's Guide allowed players to spend tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands, of GP on elaborate castles and mansions. These was very cool, and the rulebook is one of my favourites from the edition… but I've never seen it used in actual play, because any player who did so would find themselves handicapped for the remainder of the campaign, as they hadn't invested their gold in magic items, as the system requires you to. (Again: the math of monster design in 3.x assumes and requires that player characters gain magic items at a set rate).

Some of the paradigms play nicer with each other than others. For example, many variants of "Money as XP" practically require a secondary output for money. Unless the XP is only gained by spending the money, all of that accumulated loot has to go somewhere—typically either into magic items (Money as Character Power) or into strongholds (Money as Narrative Power). Games that have large-scale battle rules (which, I've been told, ACKS does, though I haven't played it firsthand) blur the lines between Narrative and Player power, because the castles and hirelings a player buys actually do something, mechanically, though they typically don't help you in an actual dungeon. "Money as Oxygen," similarly, may require temporarily dipping into another paradigm to bleed off surplus money from the party to keep them permanently poor (something Traveller does gracefully by allowing incredibly-expensive spaceship upgrades).

The Full Plate Threshold

The Full Plate Threshold: once the players have bought the most expensive item available to them, the nature of money permanently changes.

One very common dynamic is for games to have Money as Character Power in early levels, and transition to another paradigm (or fall into Money for Nothing) at later levels. This is particularly common in video game RPGs, where after the early game, nothing anyone sells in stores is of any value whatsoever (or if they do, the price is trivial), yet despite this, monsters continue to drop thousands upon thousands of gold. If these games have a multiplayer aspect, players usually settle on a rare item as the de facto "currency" for trades.

This is also the dynamic that results when the sale of magic items in D&D-esque games is restricted, as in early levels, players save up to buy half-plate to replace their breastplates, warhorses to replace their feet, composite bows to replace their shortbows, and so-on. Once the most expensive upgrade has been bought (in D&D, the last character to make this transition is typically the fighter, as the best mundane armour available is a steep 1,500 GP in 3.x and 5e—a friend of mine dubbed this the "Full Plate Threshold" after my 5e paladin bought full plate, and we all suddenly stopped caring about gold), money is no longer convertible to Character Power. At this point, which can happen between level 3 and 7 depending on character class, system, and GM generosity, the nature of money in the campaign will change. This could result in the widening of scope in the campaign, as players invest in land, armies, and castles, or it could result in money piling up like in Diablo or Final Fantasy, totally meaninglessly. Similarly, many campaigns that start with "Money as Oxygen" can escalate into "Money as Narrative Power" as players finally hit the jackpot, and no longer need to worry about maintenance/mortgages/etc.

As a GM, handling this transition can be tricky. If it sneaks up on you without realizing (many 5e D&D GMs might not know (because they weren't told), for instance, that the nature of money changes dramatically the second someone buys full plate), they might suddenly find their players disinterested and bored around the table even though seemingly nothing else has changed. Their adventures are just as gripping, their monsters just as scary, their dungeons just as unique... but the players seem to be just going through the motions If your system or campaign doesn't have an endless supply of increasingly-expensive bits and baubles for players to buy, you're going to have to manage this transition, whether you want it or not.

Wrapping Up

There is no objective "right" or "wrong" way to handle money in an RPG, but some methods definitely work better for certain genres than others, as changing the "rules" of money in your campaign will massively change the feel and pace of the game. On the same note, be careful of follow-on effects from changing the rules: simply saying "magic items can't be bought," without making any other changes, will lead 3.x campaigns into a series of very predictable roadblocks (weakening martial characters, unevenly and unpredictably increasing encounter difficulty, and potentially eliminating motivation to go on some adventures) that you have to have solutions to. Similarly, adding a "magic item store" to a system not initially designed for it, such as D20 Modern, can lead to massive imbalance and weird behaviour. For instance, due to bizarre math, even relatively powerful magic daggers fall below the threshold at which rich characters lose wealth points in that system, making them literally free, while buying an unenchanted, off-the-shelf AK-47 (which is just above that same threshold) permanently drops the wealth bonus of any character. This leads to the system incentivizing any problem that can be solved with thousands of +3 Daggers being solved with thousands of +3 Daggers in a way that neither GMs nor (I assume) game designers intended.

These incentives matter. If a game penalizes one option and incentivizes another, that second option is just going to be taken more often. Maybe a lot more often. If you can align your campaign's incentives with desired behaviour for your players, you'll save a lot of headache, frustration, and counter-intuitive behaviour for everyone involved.

#D&D #D&D5e #d&d 3.5 #RPGs #TravellerRPG #Traveller

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wildlyminiaturesandwich · 5 years ago

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🏠 Tiny Living Stuff Pack Review 🏠

Thank you to the EA Game Changer Program for providing me with the opportunity to play with Tiny Living Stuff early!

I didn’t have a lot of time to play around with this pack because I had some real life obligations during the early access time frame and the embargo time was once again at a ridiculous hour of the morning for me (don’t get me started on that mess), but here’s what I did learn about the new Tiny Living Stuff Pack.

I feel like I need to say straight away that this is my favourite stuff pack so far. The reason I feel the need to say that is because when I sat down to go through the notes I’d made during early access and type up this review, the more I got into it, the more it started to sound... aggressively ranty 😬

I was going to try to tone it down a bit, but honestly there are already so many reviews out there that gloss over the glaring bugs that I figured I might as well just leave it. It’s my honest opinion of the pack, and what’s the point of doing a review if I’m not giving my honest opinion, no matter how ranty? lol

I’m gonna put this under a cut, because spoilers.

— What I loved —

🏠 Create-a-Sim:

I’ve been saying for a long time we need more comfy casual clothing for our sims and with this pack we finally got some! LOOK AT THOSE JAMMIES!

To be honest, I wasn’t expecting any CAS items with this pack, but we got some amazing clothing that I will no doubt use on literally every sim I make lol

The hairs are good too, and more options are always appreciated, however I honestly feel like we already have different variations of most of them.

The best part about the hairs is that every single one of them has been made available for kids and toddlers! Apparently one of the gurus found a quick and cost effective way to convert hairs, so hopefully we’ll see this happen more and more with each future pack!

🏠 Buy Mode:

The Buy Mode objects are 100% the star of this pack for me. I don’t think there is a single thing in the buy catalogue of this pack that I didn’t absolutely adore! Some of the objects have issues — and I’ll get into that in a bit — but overall I love, love, LOVE the general concept of everything.

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The objects in this pack were based off the Scandinavian concept of Hygge and I really think they hit the nail on the head! Everything feels so cozy and comfy, with a little hint of Ikea to the furniture and I just... I can’t even really put into words how much I love it all. I honestly can’t remember a single previous pack (expansion, game or stuff) where I have loved every item in the buy catalogue, there’s usually always something that’s like “Meh” or “I don’t like this at all” to me, but the objects in this pack are 10/10.

I also love that they combined so many things. Like the murphy bed with the couch on the front (though I do wish we were also given that couch as a separate couch as well) and the TV unit that’s also a bookcase AND a stereo. And I really appreciate that they went back and redid some of the old book ends to make them functional bookcases.

— What I didn’t love —

🏠 Create-A-Sim:

I say it with every pack and I’m going to continue to say it even if no one is listening...

WHERE ARE THE KIDS, TODDLERS AND ELDERS CAS ITEMS!?

I know the kids and toddlers got some hairs but that doesn’t make up for the serious lack of CAS content that every age range besides young adults has and it’s getting really hard to make unique sims when there isn’t enough content to choose from.

🏠 Build Mode:

For a pack dedicated to Tiny Living, I was really disappointed to see literally only one door in the build catalogue. ONE. I was expecting some small windows, maybe some sliding doors, but nope; just one door. Hell I would have even been happy to have less CAS stuff in exchange for some build stuff!

I get why they haven’t added bunk beds and spiral stairs yet, those are a lot of work and I’m ok with waiting until they perfect them BUT this would have been the perfect pack to add ladders. We already have ladders in game that are fully animated (pool and island living ladders) it really wouldn’t take that much work to make ladders work between floors. I HATE the idea of having to put stairs outside in tiny builds and ladders are the ultimate in space saving “technology"; I feel like the team really dropped the ball on that one.

🏠 Murphy Beds:

Listen, I love the concept of the murphy beds and the design of them looks really cool but I can’t see myself using them at all as they are currently.

I was almost immediately disappointed with them when I realised they were remote controlled. I know that it makes it easier for the Sims Team so they don’t have to work so hard to animate them, but I really wanted sims to pull them down by hand. The reason I wanted murphy beds in the game was because they would fit better with small apartments and homes of sims who don’t have a lot of money, and to me a remote controlled murphy bed sounds incredibly expensive.

Oh but don’t worry, because apparently the remote control is invisible?

Now, the version of the game that the Gurus were using for the stream didn’t have invisible remotes BUT they use a dev build of the game that isn’t the same as ours, and many other Game Changers are also saying its invisible for them too, so I dunno what happened but that’s just one of the things that needs to be fixed.

The other issue, which is the biggest deal breaker for me, is that the damn things constantly break! And I do mean CONSTANTLY. You know how when you buy a cheap stereo or sink it’ll last a few days/uses before it breaks? Yeh, not the case for the murphy beds. They break instantly, and they break often.

I was REALLY looking forward to murphy beds being added to the game and I thought if there’s one thing I need to do above all else with this pack, it’s test out those glorious murphy beds! Well... I managed to play for roughly three sim days and here’s what happened during that time:

Bed 1 (never used before) got stuck on first use and squashed Sim 1

Bed 1 got stuck on second attempt and killed Sim 1

Bed 1 got stuck on third attempt and squashed Sim 2

Bought brand new bed

Bed 2 pulled down without issue for Sim 2

Bed 2 broke at 11pm while Sim 2 was sleeping and squashed Sim 2

Sim 2 refused to sleep for 3 hours out of fear while Sim 3 was able to sleep in broken, sparking bed for that time without issue because they weren’t in it when it squashed Sim 2

Sim 2 repaired bed while Sim 3 continued to sleep

After 3 hours Sim 2 went back to sleep and Bed 2 broke again almost immediately

Bought brand new bed. Again.

Bed 3 got stuck on first attempt and squashed Sim 2

Bed 3 got stuck on second attempt and squashed Sim 3

Bed 3 pulled down without issue on third attempt for Sim 3

Sims 2 and 3 slept for another 2 hours before Bed 3 started sparking again but didn’t squash them

Woke Sim 2 up to repair bed and immediately sent Sim 2 back to bed (the fear moodlet only happens if they get squashed but the bed can break without squashing them apparently?)

Bed 3 broke again 3.5 hours later and squashed both Sim 2 and 3

I rage quit.

For the so-called “Hero” object of this pack, this is just unacceptable. The percentage for breakage REALLY needs to be turned down because in my opinion they’re not usable as they are.

And even if it weren’t for all the bugs, I probably still wouldn’t use them in tiny homes because I don’t think they’re space saving at all. They take up exactly the same amount of space as normal beds do; 6 tiles. You can’t put anything in front of them or around them if you want them to be functional on both sides, and you can’t even put dangling lights above them because I guess, realistically, the bed would hit them on the way down?

It’s especially annoying with the murphy bed that has the couch attached. It would have been really nice to add a small coffee table or ottoman in front of it but you can’t because then your sims won’t be able to use the bed. I really wish they had have made at least the little round coffee table and the ottoman from this pack inventory-able. Sims could have them out during the day, and throw them in their inventory when they need to use the bed at night, then place them back down in the morning when they wake up.

I think it’s this aspect — not being able to put things around/in front of the murphy beds — that actually annoys the most; the bugs will probably be fixed eventually but I can’t see this ever changing. I spent most of the three days we had for early access trying to work out how to fit a murphy bed into a 32 tile micro home without having it just sitting in the middle of an empty room and let me tell you, it’s not worth the frustration.

— The Verdict —

🏠 7/10 Would go Tiny again

As I said, this is my favourite stuff pack so far and I will get a lot of use out of the CAS and Buy stuff, but because of all the things I mentioned above I can’t give it a 10/10.

I do love the content of this pack, but right now I’m getting kind of fed up with the issues that keep happening with every pack lately. It’s all stuff that should have been caught by QA testing, stuff that is glaringly obvious to the average player, and stuff that would have only taken two minutes of gameplay to find out was a problem. I don’t know who tests these packs, but whoever it is needs to step up their game in a big way.

Overall I really do love the pack, but some major aspects fell a little flat for me. And the fact that that’s not at all a surprise, and that this feeling of “I like it, but...” has become the norm with new packs is really quite sad.

If you have questions about Tiny Living Stuff, feel free to drop an ask in my box, anon will be on right up until the release 😊

#The Sims 4 #Sims 4 #TS4 #Tiny Living #EAGameChangers

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demonfox38 · 4 years ago

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Completed - Zelda II: The Adventure of Link

Oh, my language is going to be vulgar on this one.

So, I'm a crusty millennial who likes old garbage. Most of the media I like is old enough to drink and be a member of the US congress, but probably couldn't be due to the country that produced it. Now, I'd like to think that I've got good reasons to like older media, particularly when it comes to video games. It's a bit hard for my NES to bug me for microtransactions/DLC and emanate the screams of children and man-children alike. But, as much as I like my retro junk, there's one thing I'm very, very happy about regarding modern video games. The variety of game types now-a-days is a blessing. It's rare that someone is stellar at all game types, and I sure have my weaknesses.

It took me a long time to realize that I could be good at video games, and I wholly blame the glut of 1980s platforming games on that.

Look, platforming is not a forgiving genre. Particularly, back in the day where you had characters dying in 1-3 hits before factoring in death pits. It existed then for the reason that fourteen million instakill indie horror games exist now. Instantly killing the player is a lot easier to code than, say, having to track a health bar or their new position as an enemy swats them into a different room. Sometimes, a coder's gotta do what they can to keep themselves sane.

But, from a player's perspective, this style sucks!

Getting good at a platforming game requires practicing the same levels over and over again, developing a sense of your character's inertia and limitations. Without a save state or a warp to narrow in on a particularly troublesome location, it's hard to get learning to stick. You could lose a lot of games and time trying to put it all together. And some poor little character is always suffering because of your ineptitude! Such failure feels like a fork in an electrical socket. Succeeding in these circumstances requires a great deal of emotional resilience and a contrary attitude. And you know what? That's just not something I had as a kid. In fact, one could say I had my aggression and competitive drive scolded out of me. I'm just now getting that back.

So, yeah. I had a little trouble with "Zelda II: The Adventure of Link."

"Zelda II" is part of a trifecta of NES games that get routinely shit on by retro reviewers. Like its peers "Super Mario Bros. 2" and "Castlevania II", this game is generally considered an inferior game due to an extreme change of gameplay and appearance from its predecessors. And you know what? That attitude sucks. I'd rather have a variety of different games with a cast I like than have them pigeon-holed into one genre. In "Zelda II"'s case, however? The game mechanic shift was so extreme that I can easily see the ire it raises. Hell, I felt it. I wouldn't go so far to say that it's the worst Zelda game ever, but man, does it have structural defects.

In "Zelda II", Link's goal is to save an ensorcelled Zelda from eternal slumber by picking up a Triforce chunk that was pitched into a fuck-off palace way at the edge of Hyrule. (No, not the Zelda from the first game. Another Zelda. Same Link, though.) To do that, he's got to slap six gemstones into various temples across the countryside. Naturally, that includes picking up his trusty sword, leaping into battle, and then maybe straight into a death pit.

That's right. This Zelda is actually a Mario.

Further complicating the matter is a sharp switch in battle style and item accruement. While the previous Zelda game was about room management and ranged combat (or at least, as much as that was allowed), this game is all about jamming Link's dinky sword into an enemy's face and running off as fast as he can. Now, Link can learn a few tricks to help with the slash and dash, like directional stab mechanics and spells. But, as far as getting new weapons to help you? Sorry, bud. No bombs or boomerangs here. Well, except for the assholes throwing boomerangs at you, anyway. You just can't steal them.

The game encourages polishing the player's skill with Link through a level system. After acquiring XP through good ol' fashioned monster murdering, Link can cash his points out, improving his life, magic, or attack power. As the player levels him up, stats become more costly to improve. If Link gets a total game over before you use your XP, it is wiped out. Alright, fine. Fair, I guess. But, I wouldn't recommend looking at Japanese footage of this game if you don't want to give yourself a migraine. It turns out that as a part of some rebalancing, the level-up system was stacked to try and keep players from dumping all of their points into a single stat early into the game. Particularly, attack. Considering how painful and annoying enemy logic gets in this game, it's such a drag to learn that Japanese players literally could cut their way right out of that struggle. Thanks for dicking with the game design again, American publishers.

I guess we got better looking sprites and sound effects out of the deal? Hooray for wiggly Barba.

Even with leveling mechanics and a handful of heart and magic containers, this Link feels much frailer than the original Zelda's Link. Like, it's hard to believe he's supposed to be the same guy. Even at max health and defense, you could get Link wiped out with 8-32 hits (as opposed to 16-64 hits from the first game.) Exacerbating that is a life system that can yoink those health bars at any pit's whim and Link's range/health restoration being tied to a limited pool of magic. It feels like you're playing with a ceramic replica of the original character. You can make it work in a fight, sure, but you'd rather have a sword than a shard of a broken teapot.

If you don't have a bushido-level acceptance of death, you're not going to make it very far in this game. I'm not being hyperbolic. You have to accept that you are going to kill Link. You're going to watch that little fairy boy fade to black as the world flashes around him, and you're going to see that a lot. You're going to toss his bitch ass into the river to get a game over and restock your lives because fuck if you're going to wipe out inside a dungeon and have to start your bitch ass back at Zelda's temple again. That little counter on the main menu isn't how many times you have wiped out. It's how many times you've clawed your way out of the abyss with a middle finger raised.

Oh. Minor epilepsy warning on boss and Link deaths, by the way.

Having gone full bleak there for a moment, there are a few pieces of knowledge that can help slow down the cycle of life and death:

There are towns with nice ladies in red dresses and orange robes that will heal your ass for free. You should talk with them a lot.

There are classes of enemies that will drop items after they have been killed six times. Most of the time, this is a magic bottle that restores MP. Sometimes, it's a bag of experience. No monster will drop anything to heal your HP.

Also, some enemies are literal rat bastards that steal your XP. Some also give you no XP on killing them. Yeah. I know. Annoying.

The Life spell is in Saria. The downward stab is in Mido. (I realize these are very strange sentences if you're more familiar with "Ocarina of Time.") Getting these can make a night and day difference in surviving the game. So, keep that in mind.

You do get a spell that will turn you into a fairy. You can use it to game pits and sneak past lock doors. Just don't abuse it too much. It's expensive.

The dungeons have this little statue in front of them that you can whack with your sword. In most locations, it'll drop either a magic bottle or an Iron Knuckle. Game entering and exiting a dungeon as much as possible to restore yourself to full vitality.

You can get into random fights on the overworld (represented either by a little black blob or a more threatening human-sized blob.) Staying on gold roads will mean these encounters produce no enemies.

Also, you can use those random battles to override forced platforming sections. Not that I would recommend cheating in such a fashion. 😉

The game will give you a level up after you plug a gemstone into a dungeon. If you're close to leveling up anyway, turn around and grind up to the top, cash in what you've got, and then go pitch that gem.

Link has a crouch, not a duck. You think pressing down on the D-pad will evade projectiles aimed at your face, but it does not. Crouching is only good for blocking floor-level garbage. It's best not to think of the down button as much as possible, really. Only use it to pick up crap off the ground and cheese the final boss. Otherwise, jump.

I know that I said earlier that "Zelda II" is mechanically like a Mario game, but you know what other perspective might help? Try and play Link as a Metroidvania Castlevania character. There's an attack style in games like "Castlevania: Symphony of the Night" and "Aria of Sorrow" where you walk, jump, and attack in such a way that you never stop moving forward. That's what you've got to do. Walk, jump at an enemy, bonk on forehead. (Depending on how fast you press the attack button, you may need to delay swinging your sword just a teeny bit. At least, I had a bad habit of swinging too early.) With any luck, when you hit the ground, you will be able to keep on moving. You do not want to get stuck playing "poke-the-hole" with your enemies, particularly with how turtle-y some of them can get.

So, the game's a brutal bitch, but I don't want to spend the entire time shitting on it. Let's talk about improvements.

Honestly, I like the sprite style of the side-scrolling sections better than the previous game. Everyone/thing has more room to be rendered, so they look clearer. I can't say the monster or dungeon design here is my favorite, but hey. Easy to see. Yippie. Could have used a map though. Maybe some more tile textures in the dungeons?

NO. STOP. BE NICE.

There are more people around that want to help Link out. Like, whole towns filled with helpful healing ladies and dudes that will teach you magic and the occasional sword strike. Most of their conversation makes sense (although, there's a memetastic fault in translation regarding a character being named Error instead of what I'm assuming should have been Errol.) People good. Want to help people. People help me.

Except for towns where some of the people are monsters, and one of the times they overlapped a healing lady to get text box priority, and then they killed me. Boo.

I'M SORRY. I HAD A HARD TIME.

The music variety is pleasant. Only a few tracks have escaped the game to go into use elsewhere, but there's only one that I'm really iffy on. The NA release did a fine job transposing what they could using a different sound chip, and there are striking uses of the sample channel being used in ominous situations.

But…like…I struggle to see where fighting through this game is worth it. And maybe it comes down to the final boss. Like, the penultimate one? Absolutely cool. A bitch to fight, but I can't knock how massive and intricate its sprite is. But, the final boss? I suppose it comes down to personal tastes, but I find mirror matches/rivals to be exceedingly dull. Like, good for you. You know how I fight. I do too. Come back to me when you know the weaknesses of my style and use a fresh set of skills to throw at me.

Like, it's not the worst ending in the Zelda series. (My vote for that would go to "Link's Awakening.") You do get Zelda saved. But, given that the final boss is some kind of dark clone of yourself…it begs a lot of questions. Was there any concrete plan for the forces of darkness in Hyrule, or were various monster tribes just scuffling around, being dicks without any overarching plan? Were some monsters trying to keep you out of the Great Palace for a good reason? Would there have been any threat of Ganon reviving at all if Link just…sat on his ass behind a castle for the next century or managed his anxiety in a different way? Why does the manual bother to separate Zeldas and the game does not? Oh, wait. The Japanese intro correctly distinguishes this and the American one does not. Why am I not surprised? What's the difference if you don't see the Zelda you saved from the first game, anyway?

This game is a lot of work. I had to psych myself up to play it every time, and by the end, I was rattled enough by my nerves that I literally camped in my bathroom for a few minutes just to make sure I didn't get sick on the couch. Very stressful. And I'm not sure that stress was worth it, frankly. Life's hard enough as it is right now. I literally have a stress rash on my neck from the shit I'm going through in real life. No, you did not need to know about that. But maybe you need to know that I've been having a hard time lately, and this game did nothing to alleviate me from the stresses of reality. And what's the point in checking out from reality if a fantasy world is just going to make me miserable, too?

There are better games to play in this style. Hell, there are better games on the NES in this style. You know what you should go play? "Faxanadu." It's uglier than "Zelda II", sure. An absolute idiot when it comes to basic mathematics. But it's very chill about platforming and death. And maybe I just want to chill the fuck out for a while.

#post game evaluation #zelda ii: the adventure of link

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thebrideofthewizardhowl · 4 years ago

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Badminton, court or lawn game played with lightweight rackets and a shuttlecock. Historically, the shuttlecock (also known as a “bird” or “birdie”) was a small cork hemisphere with 16 goose feathers attached and weighing about 0.17 ounce (5 grams). These types of shuttles may still be used in modern play, but shuttles made from synthetic materials are also allowed by the Badminton World Federation. The game is named for Badminton, the country estate of the dukes of Beaufort in Gloucestershire, England, where it was first played about 1873. The roots of the sport can be traced to ancient Greece, China, and India, and it is closely related to the old children’s game battledore and shuttlecock. Badminton is derived directly from poona, which was played by British army officers stationed in India in the 1860s. The first unofficial all-England badminton championships for men were held in 1899, and the first badminton tournament for women was arranged the next year.

The badminton court is 13.4m long and 6.1m wide. For singles the court is marked 5.18m wide. The lines marking out the court are easily distinguishable and coloured white or yellow. The lines are 40mm wide. A court may be marked out for singles only. The back boundary lines also become the long service lines and the posts or the strips of material representing them are placed on the side lines. The diagonal full length of the full court is 14.366m. The posts are 1.55m high from the surface of the court and remain vertical when the net is strained. The posts are placed on the double side lines irrespective of whether singles or doubles is played. The posts or supports must not extend into the court beyond the side lines. Where it is not practicable to have posts on the side lines, some method can be used to indicate the position of the side lines where they pass under the net, example by the use of thin posts or strips of material 40mm wide, fixed to the side lines and rising vertically to the net cord. The net is 760mm in depth and a minimum of 6.1m wide. The top of the net from the surface of the court is 1.524m at the center of the court and 1.55m over the side lines for doubles. There must be no gaps between the ends of the net and the posts. If necessary, the full depth of the net at the ends is tied to the posts.

In this blog, I will cover the four basic equipment and gear required for a game of badminton.

1. Badminton Racket

Badminton rackets can be made from several types of materials. Depending on the material selection, this can result in different combinations of racket weight, balance points and string tensions. With so many different combinations, it will take time to decide which is most suited for your playing style. Instead of making purchases online, pop by a badminton shop. Ask for assistance and select a racket that you feel comfortable with. Swing the racket around to get a good feel of its overall weight and grip. Some popular badminton brands are Yonex, ProKennex, Wilson, ProTech and Li-Ning.

2. Shuttlecock

There are two types of shuttlecocks - plastic and feathered shuttlecocks.

Plastic shuttlecocks are far more durable compared to the feathered types which are commonly used. However, plastic shuttlecocks are only recommended for beginners who are just starting out. This is because feathered shuttlecocks are expensive and fray easily especially if the wrong technique is used. Hence, plastic shuttlecocks are good for beginners to use for training. Plastic shuttlecocks are usually used by young children who play badminton for recreation. Plastic shuttlecocks tend to travel shorter distances as they are heavier. Hence, they are good for building strength as you make the transition to feathered shuttlecocks. Most people will progress to using feathered shuttlecocks as they are used at all competitive tournaments.

3. Badminton Shoes

Badminton shoes are designed to give you better traction and grip to stop in time to return a shot. They should also be lightweight have good cushioning to absorb impact when you jump or land. Regular players will find heel cups useful to prolonging the lifespan of your shoes. Do not wear jogging shoes as they usually lack grip and traction. You might end up crashing through the badminton net if you are unable to stop in time to receive a drop shot.

4. Badminton Attire

For casual to non-competitive players, a comfortable pair of shorts and cotton or dri-fit t-shirt is sufficient. Some players may want to equip themselves with hand grips, wrist bands and ankle guards. Each of these items serve a purpose and might also add a dash of color to the entire get-up. When it comes to badminton equipment, select what is appropriate before turning your attention to aesthetics.

To be good at any sport you need to master the basics. Mastering the basic techniques and skills allows you to play consistently and improve. Badminton is a very beginner-friendly sport but difficult to master. Anybody can learn and master the basic skills for Badminton.

· Knowing how to warm up properly

· The basic forehand and backhand grip

· The basic six corners footwork

· The split step or the ready stance

· The basic shots

· Perception and anticipation

· Hand-eye coordination

· Rhythm and timing

· Tactical and strategic thinking

Knowing how to warm up properly

Warming up is a combination of skill and a bit of know-how. Players of any level should know how to warm up properly before stepping on court for a match. We wrote an in-depth article on warming up properly for Badminton. It’s so important to do a full warm-up before playing to help avoid injuries. It’s also important because you’re ready to go right from the start of the match. You won’t need to get four-five rallies into the game before you feel like you’ve finally got in gear.

Warm-ups don’t have to take that long either. You can perform a solid warm-up in less than five minutes. Here are some simple routines that really get the blood pumping:

· High speed skipping for five minutes (try to go fast without losing consistency and tripping over the rope)

· A simple set of jumping jacks, squats, burpees, lunges and knee tucks each for one minute

· Jog around the hall at a quick pace for five minutes

You get the idea, anything that gets you moving without overstretching. It should get your heart pumping and as my coach used to say; “you should have little beads of sweat from the forehead”.

The basic forehand and backhand grip

Learning the forehand and backhand grip is a fundamental skill. It’s so important to get this right as it’s the building blocks to learning every shot in Badminton. The basic forehand and backhand grip is easy to learn, you can practice getting the hold right sat at home. Practice swapping from forehand to backhand whilst sat on the couch at home.

The forehand grip is much like shaking somebody’s hand. Both in the way you hold the racquet and in how tight you hold it. You want to hold the racquet loosely, gripping the racquet too tight can lead to injuries like tennis elbow. It also makes it very difficult to hit the shot smoothly as you’re tensing up your muscles.

The backhand grip is for some people easier to get right. You simply take the forehand grip and roll the thumb over so it sits flat on the grip rather than along the edge. The use of the thumb makes it easier to stabilize the grip compared to the forehand.

The basic six corners footwork

Footwork is crucial in Badminton. It’s been known that some coaches in China only teach beginners footwork from the beginning. They don’t teach any racquet skills until the player has mastered the basic footwork. They do this because it’s impossible to play good shots if you cannot reach the shuttle. In Badminton, once the shuttlecock touches the floor the rally is over so you need to be able to cover the court in order to play well.

I wouldn’t go as far as they do in principals but I still believe footwork is one of the most important aspects of playing Badminton. Footwork can get very technical and complex but right now we’re just going to cover the basic footwork patterns in short. We have more full and detailed guides coming soon around footwork drills and breakdowns.

If you can master these six pieces of footwork for Badminton then you’re off to a good start. The six pieces of footwork are:

Travelling to the forehand side of the net

· Travelling to the backhand side of the net

· Covering the forehand mid-court

· Covering the backhand mid-court

· Moving to the forehand rear-court

· Moving to the backhand rear-court

For info please watch this video : https://www.youtube.com/embed/IidZFd6vCJk?autoplay=1

The split step/the ready stance

The split step is a technique used to get ready for the next shot. It’s used not only in Badminton but in sports like Tennis as well. It’s the basis of building good footwork and speed around the court. We have a great article detailing everything about the split step, make sure to read it in full.

Let’s summarize why the split step is so important. A good split step is for a Badminton player what a good start out of the blocks is for a runner. If you don’t have a good split step you’ll be playing catch up to your opponent.

So how do you do the split step? It’s simple but can be tricky to master. When you return to your base position on court you want to make a slight jump in the air and land with your feet apart. You want to time the landing of your feet just after your opponent hits the shuttle. That way you can land the split step and immediately push off to the next shot.

The basic shots

There are so many varieties of shots in Badminton. Variants of shots include slicing the shuttle, tumbling the shuttle or hitting it at different angles with different swings. But they all have one original basic shot. For beginners here is a list of basic shots you should master first.

· The serve (forehand or backhand)

· The lift (sometimes called a lob)

· The net shot

· The block

· The drop shot

· The smash

· The clear

That’s eight shots in total. It’s quite a lot when you’re just starting out and they can all be played backhand and forehand. These seven shots cover the majority of situations you’ll face in a match. Master these and you’ll have a good base in which to build on and start learning more advanced shots and variations.

Hand-eye coordination

It only comes with practice but having good hand-eye coordination is essential for Badminton. You can’t play Badminton if you can’t connect the racquet and shuttle. The best way to improve hand-eye coordination for Badminton is to play lots of Badminton. Who would have thought?!

Seriously though, playing and training will improve your hand-eye coordination significantly but there are exercises you can do at home alone or with another person to improve your hand-eye coordination. Here are some examples.

Playing catch

Playing catch is a simple but effective way to improve hand-eye coordination. All you need is a ball, you could do this with a shuttlecock too. Practice throwing and catching with someone else or bounce the shuttle or ball of a wall at different angles and catch it again.

Catching an object focuses your eyes on a single object travelling. It requires concentration and spatial awareness. It’s so simple but so effective.

Juggling

So not a skill for those with little patience, juggling is a difficult skill to master but for good reason. Juggling requires incredible hand-eye coordination, even just by learning to juggle you’re improving your hand-eye coordination without having mastered the skill. It’s something you can do anywhere with a couple or more balls or shuttles.

When you master juggling two items then you can move onto three then four etc. Adding more objects or changing the objects improves your hand-eye coordination even more. You have to track each item in the air and feel how you threw the last one. It’s also a great party trick to have in the bag.

Exercising your eyes

Believe it or not but there are specific exercises that you can do to exercise your eyes! They basically help strengthen the muscles in and around your eyes. They mainly help with focusing your vision which in turn will help with your hand-eye coordination. Some examples of eye exercises are.

· Focus change

· Near and far focus

· Figure eight

Rhythm and timing

If you watch the top players in the world like Lin Dan, Lee Chong Wei and Kento Momota etc, they seem to cover the court so easily. They make every shot look effortless and smooth. They have little to no break in their footwork and look to glide around the court. They have honed their rhythm and timing for playing Badminton over years of training and match play. Lee Chong Wei has impeccable timing with his footwork and if you watch the video below you can see how rhythmic his movement is. When you play Badminton, especially singles, getting a natural rhythm while you play is key to developing good footwork and creating consistency in your play. When we dance we use the music as our rhythm and that helps us relax and get into the flow. When playing Badminton you need to be able to find a rhythm of play that suits you. This can only come from playing a lot of purposeful practice and playing matches. Timing is similar but relates more to hand-eye coordination. Your timing will naturally improve the more Badminton you play. It’s important to have good timing so you can hit shots cleanly, a split-step at the right moment and so you can position yourself to hit the shuttle at the optimal time.

Perception and anticipation

These two skills become much more important the better you get at Badminton. It’s the difference between just getting your opponents shot back and intercepting or countering your opponents next shot. Perception means: “The ability to see, hear, or become aware of something through the senses.” For Badminton, this has lots of meanings. Being able to see where your opponent is in relation to the rest of the court, being able to hear if they’re panting and getting tired, the examples go on and on. It’s about how you perceive the current situation playing out during a match. Being more aware. Anticipation is a little different. Anticipation means: “The action of anticipating something; expectation or prediction.” For Badminton, anticipation means reading your opponents’ next move before they play it, to change your stance in preparation for the next shot and to advance your position before the play has been made. Anticipation is a very important skill in Badminton because if you can read your opponents’ next shot then you can gain the upper hand in the rally, the game, and the match. It’s not easy to learn this skill as everyone plays differently, no two players play the same. One player might play a certain shot when they’re in trouble and someone else might play an entirely different shot. You see top players Hendra Setiawan and Lin Dan do this very well. Before their opponent has played their shot they’re already anticipating their next move. Watch this video below and watch how Lin Dan changes the positioning of his feet in order to move faster to the next shot. As you can see he doesn’t always get it right but is able to recover and stay in the rally.

Tactical and strategic thinking

There are many ways to win a game of Badminton. Players and coaches use different tactics and strategies to win a match. Tactics are the shots we make, the set plays we try to repeat and the choices we make when backed into a corner. Tactics are the small steps and choices within each rally. Strategies are the overall plan for playing a match, they’re the long term plan. Strategy in Badminton is creating a plan on how you’ll win. An example strategy for a singles player might be to get their opponent to play a high lift so they can get back and smash. An example strategy for a doubles player might be to get to the front as fast as possible to intercept the shuttle early or kill it. These are basic examples. The elite players will have multiple strategies for when the opponent starts countering their strategy. I feel it’s always best to keep things simple when it comes to tactics and strategies. If you’re beating your opponent then there is no need to change anything. If you’re losing then you need to change something. Why is it important to learn about tactics and strategies? Taking a quote from Sun Tzu and the Art of War, a book we recommend for every Badminton payer to read. “The general who wins the battle makes many calculations in his temple before the battle is fought. The general who loses makes but few calculations beforehand.” If you plan on how you’re going to win the match or plan how you’re going to cope with your opponents’ big smash then you’re already a step ahead. You need to learn how to harness your best shots to gain the initiative and win points. It’s partly visualization if you can visualize how you can win then you’re more likely to win.

Technical Skills in Badminton

· The Ready Stance - it is a position in badminton wherein the right stance is readied by the player in order to minimize the amount of movements that would be needed in order to hit the shuttlecock

· Forehand and Backhand Grip - these are the two basic grips that new players must familiarize themselves with. By doing either of these, it would be much easier for players to control their shots

· Footwork - it is a necessary skill in order to play badminton. A proper footwalk would help in mastering the sports

· Strokes - initially, there are four strokes that the player can use.

· Underarm Backhand Serve - it is a type of serve that beginners can use

Tactical skills in badminton

· Applying pressure on hitting the shuttlecock

· Position yourself in the central base

· It would be easier to hit the shuttlecock on the corners of the court

· Deceive your opponents during singles match

Scoring System

A match consists of the best of 3 games of 21 points.

Every time there is a serve – there is a point scored.

The side winning a rally adds a point to its score.

At 20 all, the side which gains a 2 point lead first, wins that game.

At 29 all, the side scoring the 30th point, wins that game.

The side winning a game serves first in the next game.

Interval and Change of Ends

When the leading score reaches 11 points, players have a 60 second interval.

A 2 minute interval between each game is allowed.

In the third game, players change ends when the leading score reaches 11 points.

Singles

At the beginning of the game (0-0) and when the server’s score is even, the server serves from the right service court. When the server’s score is odd, the server serves from the left service court.

If the server wins a rally, the server scores a point and then serves again from the alternate service court.

If the receiver wins a rally, the receiver scores a point and becomes the new server. They serve from the appropriate service court – left if their score is odd, and right if it is even. Doubles

A side has only one ‘set’.

The service passes consecutively to the players as shown in the diagram.

At the beginning of the game and when the score is even, the server serves from the right service court. When it is odd, the server serves from the left court.

If the serving side wins a rally, the serving side scores a point and the same server serves again from the alternate service court.

If the receiving side wins a rally, the receiving side scores a point. The receiving side becomes the new serving side.

The players do not change their respective service courts until they win a point when their side is serving.

Officials roles are among the most important positions when planning badminton events as they are specialized roles filled by qualified volunteers.

Badminton events of all size – be it a local circuit tournament, county competition or even one of our major events – on a national and international level, require a team of officials. The officials are the judges responsible to ensure a fair badminton game is being played. They consists of:

· Umpire: The ‘main judge’ for the particular badminton game. He/she has the power to overrule any decisions made by the service judge or line judges. The umpire is the person ensuring that the badminton game is run smoothly and prevent any players from delaying the game play. Whenever a player requests to change the shuttle, the umpire will need to approve that the change could be made. The umpire also looks out for faults committed around the net area such as whether a player touched the net when returning the shuttle. Besides, the umpire is responsible to make a ‘fault’ call when the shuttle touches the player or the players’ attires except for the badminton racket. In badminton, it will be a fault/foul to a player if the shuttle touches any part of that player’s body or attire.

· Service Judge: The service judge is responsible in making a ‘service fault’ call and to provide shuttles to the players.

· Line Judges: Line judges sit beside the badminton court (right in front of every in/out lines) to determine whether the shuttle is inside or outside the boundaries of the court.

· Referees – The referee is the most senior official in a badminton tournament and they in overall charge of all matters which affect play and the players on and off court.

The referee shall have key responsibility for:

· Producing schedule and order of play.

· Amendments to the draw and schedule.

· The smooth running of play on the day.

· Liaison with Umpire and Line Judge managers.

· The correct implementation of regulations and the Laws of Badminton.

· Completion of a tournament report.

Citations :

https://basilioeduc.wordpress.com/2013/09/20/officiating-badminton/

https://www.masterbadminton.com/who-are-the-officials-of-badminton.html

https://www.badminton.mb.ca/page/18182/Officiating

https://www.badmintonengland.co.uk/play/give-your-sport-a-helping-hand/officiating-in-badminton/tournamentmatch-referees/

https://sportsphilippines.wordpress.com/2017/02/02/officiating-in-badminton/

https://www.masterbadminton.com/badminton-techniques.html

https://www.badmintonbc.com/page/2888/The-Laws-of-Badminton

https://www.badmintonsbest.com/blog/skills-you-need-to-play-badminton/#the-basic-shots

https://www.myactivesg.com/Sports/Badminton/How-To-Play/Badminton-Equipment/Getting-Started-for-a-Game-of-Badminton

https://www.dlgsc.wa.gov.au/sport-and-recreation/sports-dimensions-guide/badminton#:~:text=The%20badminton%20court%20is%2013.4,The%20lines%20are%2040mm%20wide.

https://www.britannica.com/sports/badminton

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smolbeandrabbles · 5 years ago

Text

Video Games - Nolan Sorrento x Reader (Ready Player One)

GIF CREDIT: X

Author’s Note: Well this was one scene long until I listened to this song. So, you’re welcome!

I always come back to this end scene for Nolan, and in all honesty it’s one of my favourite things to think about, so thank you @primadonna-girl23 for finally giving me a reason to write it! I hope you enjoy! Thank you for your request! 💙💜

Video Games - Lana Del Rey

Disclaimer: RPO characters not mine / gifs not mine / lyrics not mine. I tend to like writing Nolan like this, and I will live and die by it!

Premise: There’s nothing you love more than playing video games with Nolan. But hes good, and he doesn’t lose. All you vow is one day someones gonna beat him, even if you have to wait for another generation to do it for you...

Words: 2771

Warnings: Small swears / insulin warning

_______

Swinging in the backyard Pull up in your fast car whistling my name Open up a beer And you say get over here and play a video game I'm in his favorite sun dress Watching me get undressed take that body downtown I say you the bestest Lean in for a big kiss put his favorite perfume on Go play your video game

Singing in the old bars Living for the fame Kissing in the blue dark, playing pool and wild darts Video games He holds me in his big arms, drunk and I am seeing stars This is all I think of This is my idea of fun Playing video games

It's you, it's you, it's all for you Everything I do I tell you all the time Heaven is a place on earth where you Tell me all the things you want to do I heard that you like the bad girls honey, is that true? It's better than I ever even knew They say that the world was built for two Only worth living if somebody is loving you Baby now you do

---

This may well have been one of your favourite past times. Sure, you were dating Nolan Sorrento, who at any point in time – as the CEO of IOI and with the millions he made – could whisk you down town in one of the many sports cars he owned to a bar, or a club, or restaurant, where all the stars hung out, or on some expensive getaway to anywhere in the world; heck, Nolan and his money could get you anything, and often did… But there was really nothing better than sitting in his living room trying to kick his ass at retro video games. You failed more times than you won, and sometimes you thought he let you win just because of the pout on your face, but you didn’t see how you could enjoy anything as much as this. With the sometimes God awful graphics, and the very most the consoles could really do was occasionally vibrate the controller (which made you shriek and him cackle the first time it happened) these games were a far cry from the OASIS – and yet you preferred them. These old restored gaming systems and the various disks and cartridges that came with them, along with movies from years gone by, were Nolan’s pride and joy. The 90s into early 2000s were his vary favourites; staples from his childhood. But he had right through until the latest editions – just before this type of gaming became nearly obsolete. You could play them in the OASIS, of course, but Nolan didn’t see the point when you could get the real experience by putting your mind to fixing things. Essentially his only past time before he’d become CEO – and now he didn’t have a lot of time for things like that, but he could escape to play them. Sometimes you just liked to watch him on single player go through something a little more strategic – but he’d let you pick out what his character looked like, or maybe who they would side with, or the conversational track that he’d go with. And you liked the times Nolan would go quiet for just a moment and then almost shudder, and say something like, “Oh my god the soundtrack!” which made you focus on it for the remainder of his playthrough.

But on occasion Nolan would put in a multiplayer game and throw you a controller; and you’d either get to help him, or try to beat him. And it was fun to lie back on the sofa between his legs, head on his chest – tongue stuck out in concentration and yell expletives every time he beat you. “You can do better than that!” He laughed again and you smacked his leg, “You’re infuriating!” He gave you nothing more than a teasing grin; “Oh, I’m trying very hard I assure you!” “OH! SHUT UP!” But you were good humoured about it, and Nolan still laughed when you resorted to cheating, attempting to block his view or distract him from time to time. Which he used to say would serve you right if you still lost; sometimes he’d pin you between or under his legs so you couldn’t move, and you thought he was doing a little too much Kegel. Sometimes Nolan would even beat you with one arm around your waist, holding you close to him as you balanced on his knees so he was playing one handed, just to prove he could – or he’d give you a ten second head start. You had to admit that he was good, but he was also an expert – Nolan knew these consoles inside out, and he’d grown up doing this. So, no surprises there either. Today this wasn’t the plan, you were supposed to be going out on a date – judging by the fact you were wearing a sundress, and he was in a nice shirt and pants. But on the drive out of town Nolan had started telling you about games he’d been reprogramming, and fixing up and some new ones he’d managed to get hold of. That information didn’t come with a price tag, but you could imagine the expense – and before long you found that more interesting and you were on your way back home. But this was a little more casual, and after getting bored of losing to him for the umpteenth time, Nolan let you play it for yourself. “Y-You sure!?” “Mhm…” He popped the cap on his beer, “I’ll help you out!” You smiled sweetly; “Don’t you want to play it first?” “No…” He gave a shrug taking a sip, “I played it enough as a kid – you don’t even know what this game is, time I taught you. It’s one of my very favourites…” And so he did help you navigate around – or point out little hidden pieces of game play or items you would have surely missed, occasionally he’d take your hands and the controller in his to assist with some of the harder stuff where you insisted you didn’t have enough fingers to work it all out at once – but Nolan watched that smile on your face grow every time he did so, and felt that maybe you were asking for his help on purpose. Eventually you sighed gently; “I love doing this with you…” “What? Hanging out on my couch playing retro games and skipping dates?” Nolan chuckled, taking another swig of beer – he was surprised there was any left considering your practice of taking it from him when you thought he wouldn’t notice. “Don’t say it like that…” you tipped your head back to catch the amusement on his face; “This is nice and relaxed… And we’re together, how is it not a date?” He tilted his head both ways; “I dunno, I guess I kinda like taking you out…” Nolan paused thoughtfully, “I’m not saying you’re wrong though, this is… I could get used to it.” “Get used to it?” You paused the game and rolled over to face him, “Careful what you wish for Nolan Sorrento!” But he still laughed; “That doesn’t sound like it bodes well for me. Ah, I think I could put up with you for a while.” “Thanks!” But you were laughing along, until you bit your lips together, “I…Think I could probably get used to this too.” He stared at you for a little while, almost in adoration, before he leant forward, touching his nose to yours before kissing you. You closed your eyes to him, content, before wrapping your arms around him and deepening the kiss. Sorrento eventually broke it, arms still around you – before chuckling nervously, a faint shade of pink dusting his cheeks; “Aha… Okay, before we get a little too used to this… I say we don’t waste that beautiful dress, and you let me take you out for dinner?” You giggled, stealing another kiss – “Okay! Dinner it is!”

***

That feeling never changed, not through dating moving from months to years, or moving in with him, or getting engaged… then married… and not even the stage you were at now. You were getting better; you could actually beat him at these games now – and Nolan was only ever impressed. He enjoyed it when you won as much as you did, because of how happy you were that you’d actually beat him – and the excitement on your face; the way you’d start screaming sentences when you were nearly there. Or how he’d manage to reign it back (even if you still won), and you’d scream “NO!” so loud he thought eventually someone might knock on the front door to see if you were okay. Luckily it’d never happened. Right now you were supposed to be helping him on a campaign, but you were much more interested in watching what he was doing and snacking. “Are you actually gonna help, or…? Cuz I can go back to single player if you’d rather.” “No.” You said through a mouthful of Chex, “I’ll help, just give me a second.” He chuckled, and you held up the bag to offer him one, which he thanked you for. Truth was at 7 months pregnant you’d rather sit here quietly, head in his lap and watch him. Whilst you were sitting eating and watching Nolan do all he could in the mission solo, you’d balanced the controller on your stomach and every so often, as your baby moved, the controller wiggled around on its precarious balance. But that only made you laugh. This position was at least comfortable for you; and usually you sat like this to watch movies too – where Nolan would cuddle you close and rest his hands over yours on your stomach; where his face became a lot more interesting than whatever you were watching. Nothing really compared to the way he lit up when your baby made a noticeable movement, and would pretend he wasn’t welling up – but you knew Nolan was, he couldn’t hide that from you – though he tried. However Sorrento accidently ran himself into the levels boss fight before you were ready; and to let you know something important was about to happen, the controller vibrated. “AH-!” You gasped which caused Nolan to jump, “Shit! Sorry!” But you laughed harder; “Not only was the vibration kinda startling…Ooh-! Okay! I don’t like you right now!” You took his hand and placed it over your stomach as you were given a third little kick; “Ooops!” He laughed, “And I’ve got you into a boss fight!” “Oops-!?” You folded your arms, “I should just let you die!! If this continues all night-!” Nolan cringed, “I’d really rather I didn’t die – besides if you get attacked that controller is only gonna vibrate more, you realise that-!?” Well, that made you pick it up pretty quick. “You are okay though, right?” “Yeah. I guess.” You grumbled, “If I can’t beat you, the baby will!” Nolan chuckled before scoffing; “Yeah, that I’d like to see-!” *** “THAT’S NOT FAIR!!” “Come on its two against one how is that not fair?” “THE COMPUTER IS HELPING YOU!” “Yeah and it’s pretty useless! You two should have this-!” “BUT IT ISN’T FAIIIIIIIIIIIR---!!” “What, you think I’m gonna let you win-!?” “REMATCH! PLAY FAIR THIS TIME!” “You’re on!” You were sorting a few things out in the upstairs bedrooms when you were met with yelling from the living room. You laughed to yourself; this was the kind of argument that had transferred from you and your husband, to your husband and your children. And Nolan was still the one winning. You walked out onto the landing; balcony overlooking the living room to watch them. Your two eldest boys were sitting on the floor, having clearly just lost another match, arms folded and sulking as they threw glares at your husband, sitting cross legged on the couch with your little girl – your youngest – curled up in his lap silently watching the whole thing. You couldn’t help but smile at the scene; just another weekend in the Sorrento household… “What are you guys doing!?” They all looked up at you “Dad’s cheating!” “What-!? I’m hardly even trying-!” That made both the boys gasp and look back to him; Nolan laughed like he’d just said something he shouldn’t have and grinned at you. You rolled your eyes, smiling, and made for the stairs, “Alright hold on I’m coming…” By the time you were downstairs they were seemingly settled again into another round, although even as you padded over you could see Nolan was probably going to get himself another win. There was a smile on his face that had only appeared since you’d had children, and his laugh this time was absentminded as they both ganged up on his character. For that he turned immediately to your daughter, and indicated to her which buttons to press to help him with the powered-up finishing move. Which had the boys yelling about cheating again and Nolan and her laughing at them. And for a minute you stood back, heart full watching them all. But especially Nolan – things had been hard at IOI for him lately, and it wasn’t exactly going as planned. But when he sat here with his children, it was like everything else was forgotten; he was laughing and happy, and you didn’t think you’d ever seen him this happy – not for a while – and he was relaxed. Today he was dad, not Sir, no matter how exasperatedly anyone was saying it. Your eldest spotted you in the corner and called you over; “Moooom! Can you beat him for us!?” They had heard of the famed times when you’d managed it, but it’d been a while. Nolan’s head swivelled and his eyes narrowed at you; “Oh! If you DARE--!!” You held your hands up; “Hey, I’m not taking sides-!” Nolan clapped as your boys groaned; “Ha! That’s my girl!” “Okay, Dad, one more round.” “Oh god, no, don’t you get sick of me beating you? I’m getting too old for this-!” Nolan chuckled, then he exited back to the games’ main menu to set up a multiplayer quest, handing the controller over to your daughter as you settled onto the sofa next to him. His voice lowered as he lifted her from his lap onto the floor; “Go on sweetheart – show ‘em how it’s done.” The controller was a little big in her hands but she beamed, “Play nice boys!” But he knew they would, as they lay on their fronts waiting for the game to load up again for them. She threw her arms around his neck and kissed his cheek gently; “I love you daddy!” “I love you too…” She ran off to join her brothers and he watched her go – that smile somehow bigger. You tsked “Such a daddy’s girl.” Nolan scoffed, but then agreed; “Yeah. Probably.” He held his arms out for you, watching the boys help their little sister with the controls for a moment with pride. You snuggled into him, head on his chest and he kissed your forehead – “I mean, of course I love you.” You giggled as he continued pressing kisses into your skin; “Oh that was never in doubt Nolan Sorrento!” You sat in silence for a moment – Nolan was watching the game play, and every so often would suggest strategy, as he’d used to do with you. You instead watched your kids help each other out on the floor, everyone content with life for now. Exactly how it should be, before you voiced your question, looking back to your husbands blue eyes; “Why don’t you let them win?” His smile was mysterious for a moment as he looked back to you; “Because one day they’ll beat me, and I’ll never win again!” then he grinned, “Besides, I like that they’re kinda in awe of me at the moment, and as long as I can keep that up and help them in the harder levels, I’d love to.” He placed his hand to his forehead to a moment; “…God, I’m dreading the day that don’t need me…” You shook your head, before placing a gentle kiss to his cheek; “Don’t say such silly things, they’ll always need you – you’re their father.” That smile was back, and Nolan pulled you closer to him for another kiss, before you heard the kids all cheering at beating another level and had to both laugh. Yes, for now all was right, and long may that continue.

---

Thank you for requesting! Thank you for reading! 😘💜

@3134045126 @happyskywhale @wltz-bby #MendoTagSquad

#There will never be enough Nolan Sorrento on my blog #Nolan Sorrento #Ben Mendelsohn #Ready Player One #Nolan Sorrento x Reader #Linzi Writes #Linzi Writes Requests #Smol Bean Drabbles #137 #This is kinda how I wanted to end him #Him her and 3 kids #Evie #Lorena V.

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phoenotopia · 5 years ago

Text

2020 March Update

Happy New Year! Well, I guess it's a bit late for that...

Much of what transpired in the past few months will fall under polish and bug-fixing. Will and I have a mutual friend who got married, so I had the occasion to visit Will to attend the wedding as well as have Will playtest the game in its most complete form yet. He logged 24 hours of playtime and just reached the entrance of the final dungeon. Then we had to call in for the night since it was 5 AM, and I had a flight to catch in the morning.

His completion rate where we stopped was 42% of Heart Pieces, 33% of Energy Gems, and 44% of Moonstones. So... I think we have a pretty lengthy game!

This will take a while to playtest & polish... Will's daytime profession is QA Engineer so he's pretty great at catching bugs. From his playtest, we jotted down 200+ items to fix/adjust. Some as small as a simple misspelling, and some more significant (like Gail being unable to jump when standing at the edge of a steep slope). I'm about half-way through fixing that list...

(Will’s living room where much playtesting was done)

Here are some other things we've accomplished in the past few months. A lot of it falls under polish and bug-fixing, which won't sound outwardly impressive, so I'll dive in a bit under the hood.

-------------------------- Item Balancing --------------------------

There are over 200 items in the game. Of which, 90+ are healing items. While much of their flavor text was already written, their stats weren't yet finally decided. So a large effort was spent to balance them as well as possible. Initially, I balanced items by observation (ex: "The player is relying on this item a lot, so I will nerf it...") Now, I've moved to a more systematic way of doing things. I made an equation that takes in all of an item's parameters, and spits out a score. The higher an item heals, the higher the score. The longer an item takes to consume, the lower the score. And so forth.

As usual, I used google spreadsheets, since they support equations. I could tweak the values of a healing item, and immediately see how its final score was affected. I also made use of automatic color formatting, so a field becomes highlighted red, if it's particularly bad, or green, if it's particularly good. Of course, the sheet is just a guideline. The aim wasn't to make all items have the same final score, but that they made sense for what they were and when you could get them. Late-game items tend to have higher overall scores versus early-game items. Some items, like doggy biscuits, have notoriously low scores across the board - as a joke!

-------------------------- Cooking Systems --------------------------

Another thing that had to be done with the healing items was finally determine their cooking sequences. 38 healing items could be cooked and will transform into something else. The way I specified that an item could be cooked was to add a a little snippet to an item's "meta data". An example would look something like, "COOK,57,62,ABXY,10,1.5,1".

In order, this specified the item_ID that would result on success (57), the item_ID that would result on failure (62), the button sequence (ABXY), the time you had to complete the sequence (10 seconds), how quickly the cursor should move (1.5x speed), and if the item multiplied on success (1). The system appears simple enough - but it was actually extremely inefficient!

For one, this system didn't allow random button sequences - all "berry fruits", when cooked would have the same button prompts and in the same order every time (ABXY). Initially, I thought having set button sequences would be a feature, but in practice, it was less fun.

Two, this system wasn't human-readable at all. I'd see a sequence of numbers, forget what they were, and have to look them up over and over.

But the biggest problem was that you couldn't evaluate an item's cooking difficulty from these numbers without manual testing. At 1.5 cursor speed, how many times does the cursor pass the center panel in 10 seconds? Maybe that's 15 times... for a 4 button sequence, the player has 11 opportunities to miss - that's too wide a berth for failure. The system also had variable penalties - if you misspressed a button prompt you loss time on the cooking meter. If you didn't press anything, you missed the opportunity, but not the time - but the clock was still ticking, so you did lose time, just not as much. In the end, the difficulty of cooking each item was all over the place. It was also possible to create "unwinnable" scenarios if I made the button sequence too long, the time too short, or the cursor speed too slow. Testing each item manually to ensure doability was too tedious and unreliable - it was a mess!

Which is why, the underlying cooking system was revamped. The new meta data looks like : "COOK,57,62,seq_length,5,spd,1.5,ease_add,2". This is a lot more readable. Beyond the first 3 entries, the arguments could be specified in any order. And their meanings were easy to understand.

"seq_length,5" means a random button sequence of 5 will be generated (no need for me to personally generate it)

"spd,1.5" means the cursor moves at 1.5x speed. I could also leave this field out to get a default value of 1x cursor speed.

"ease_add,2" - the biggest improvement to the system is how we now approach difficulty. We streamlined a miss-press and a missed opportunity as the same level of "mistake", and difficulty is framed as, "how many mistakes is the player allowed to make and still have a successful result?" By default, the player is afforded the ability to make 2 mistakes, and "ease_add,2" bumps the number of allowable mistakes to 4. We then automatically calculate how much "time" the player should have to cook something based on its cursor speed, how long the button sequence is, and how many mistakes the player is allowed to make. This was a more sensible and efficient system that let me knock out all 38 healing item cook sequences in one sitting!

-------------------------- Badges Nearly Done --------------------------

As you may recall from the last update, I was working on implementing the badges.

Thinking up the badge and having its graphic drawn is just the first half. Underneath, the code also needs to be made to track all the relevant player stats - how many times the player fished, ate, got money, used a certain move, etc. Some badges require extra guards, because they can be spoofed. For instance, the "Treasure Hunter" badge is obtained when the player has collected XXXX RIN through the course of your journey. However, there is something like a "gold exchange" in the game, where you could circularly trade gold and RIN to boost this number artificially. It's important to guard against cases like those.

So far, 30 of 33 badges are implemented. The last three have to do with late-game things that have inter-dependencies that we're still figuring out. The Speed running badge for instance is still dependent on two things. One, I need to speed run the game a few times to see how fast it's possible to beat the game and decide finally what's a reasonable time-limit. Two, there's actually a time-keeping bug which can inflate the game time if the system is left in sleep mode. I don't expect either things will be too hard to figure out - just gotta find the time for it.

-------------------------- Script Extra Polished --------------------------

We continued to polish the script, which I thought was basically done before. We added some extra NPCs here and there, and fleshed out the world with lore text where it seemed appropriate. In the end, the game's script ballooned to over 100,000 words! Hah... It's definitely DONE now however!

Some interesting things I noted as I was polishing old text - there were quite a few instances where Gail talks. I began the game's development with the idea that Gail should definitely talk since I wanted her to be a more active participant in what she chose to do. But I discovered later that if Gail talks, but only talked a little, she comes off as a very reticent person. There's no middle lane here - you're either all in or all out.

If Gail was a silent protagonist, she still talked symbolically. She is understood to be talking based on how people react to her - kinda like Link. So that's the direction I went with in the end (again). When Gail has occasion to talk, it comes in the form of a player dialogue choice. She also has an inner voice when she needs to remind the player to do something.

Another reason I went with this direction, is for brevity. Take this exchange for instance: QUEST GIVER : Can you help me find this super rare ingredient? GAIL : Maybe. I can't make any promises...

If Gail is silent, I can reduce those 2 lines to 1. QUEST GIVER : Can you help me find this super rare ingredient? GAIL : ...

-------------------------- Business Taxes --------------------------

Not too exciting, but new year means I gotta do taxes for the business. They're a lot more complicated than personal taxes, and more expensive! Since the game hasn't sold anything, you would think there'd be nothing to file. Hah! If only... The business is there so we can act as a legal entity and record expenses for when we do start selling. I really want to focus on making games, but there’s a small percentage of it that is sometimes boring and dreadful (-_-) ... still it needs to be done.

------------- Why no Public Beta Testing? -------------

As you may have noticed, I haven't put out any public calls for testing help despite being at that stage. Some have offered to help, which I appreciate! But sadly, I cannot accept. Here's the story for that.

Two and a half years ago, I got my hands on a console dev kit - that's very exciting, so I hurriedly took the steps to convert my dev station to be console-capable. After about two weeks, I had the console version working and integrated into my workflow, so all appeared good...

4 Months later, an artist needed an updated PC build to test some new art assets, so I went to build a new PC version. We use Unity, so generally you just need to click your desired build target, and hit "build". However, I now discovered that by attaching the console "hooks" into my work environment, I could no longer build to PC... It was possible, from my end, to test the game from the dev station in dev mode, which was why it went undiscovered for so long.

I did try to excise the hooks, but proved unsuccessful after a day of work. I decided to take this as an opportunity to focus exclusively on the console version first, which afforded me some niceties. Knowing that there's a standardized control scheme meant I could make full use of the control stick for the fishing mini-game. I also didn't need to create a rebindable keys menu - which is a MUST for PC versions... Most importantly, it lets me focus on making the one version as good as possible before moving onto the next. I have NO idea how those other guys release on all platforms at once...

Chalk it up to inexperience. In my defense, this will be my first commercial release, so bear with me. Don't worry, I still plan to make the PC version! It's a bit unconventional, but we're just going to go in the reverse direction of the usual. Console first, then PC, then other consoles. Wherever it makes financial sense, there we will be. (Sorry Ouya!)

Back to the original question - that's why I haven't sent out any public calls for playtesting. Current playable builds of the game are locked to my console dev kit. So actual playtesting unfolds in a very closed setting. Like what I did with Will, I literally sit behind the playtester, breathe down their neck, and watch them play, taking notes all the while.

But since I'm observing the player directly, even just one playthrough nets me a TON of bugs and adjustment tasks. So it evens out I think.

-------------------------- Trailers, Release Dates, etc. --------------------------

Alright, get your frowns ready...

We finished two trailers, and they're raring to go. BUT! We can't show them yet... We're sort of at an awkward spot where we're waiting on some conversational threads to conclude. Say we win a slot in a show - that'd be a HUGE plus for us - but that may also be contingent on us having NOT shown anything substantial yet. The game in its unrevealed state is a negotiating chip. So we're trying to leverage that... and you can only do the reveal once...

We also want to have some "actionable" items in the trailer - a launch date you could mark on your calendar, a wishlist, a website you can visit, etc. So since those things aren't entirely lined up yet, we can't let the trailers rip just yet...

Right now, I can only say we're *aiming* for a late Q2/early Q3 launch. But I can't commit to anything concrete yet. As soon as we know, we'll happily sing it from the rooftops. I hope I can update this blog sooner with good news, but if things move slowly again, I'll send out the next "we're alive" update 2 months from now (end of April).

I know it's frustrating to have nothing major after so long still, so I captured some gameplay footage... May it sate your hungers!

-------------------------- Footage 1 : Fishing --------------------------

You've seen pictures of the fishing, but never video of it in action. Well, here it is!

youtube

(And right after I uploaded the video, I noticed there actually was a video of fishing before. D’oh)

The idea is simple. First, get the lure in front of a fish, and assuming the fish isn't scared, it will soon bite. Then begins a fight sequence, where your energy meter is pitted against the fish's energy meter. Whoever's energy outlasts the other's wins.

The fish's resistance is represented by a red moving circular subsection. You fight the fish by pushing the control stick and keeping it on the subsection, which will dart around and try to escape you. Bigger and tougher variants of fish will do a "shake" which will reverse the wheel. When the wheel is reversed, so too are the controls, so it gets extra tricky!

While fishing, your energy meter doesn't recover, so one of the ways you level up your fishing ability is by finding energy gems to increase your max energy. There's another way - but we'll keep that a secret.

-------------- Footage 2 : Kobold Boss Fight --------------

You can actually skip the next section if you'd prefer to be surprised and you find your hunger for info sated. That's how I prefer to consume the games that I know I'm going to get. If you're still hungering for info, and you don't mind the slight spoilers, then feel free to proceed!

The next video shows the new Kobold Boss fight. Let's take a moment to reflect on the old game's visuals and how far it's come...

(we've come a long way since the time of the flash game)

youtube

You'll notice the Kobold boss has a name now - Katash! He's a significant enough character that he's earned it. The second thing you'll notice is that he looks better!

Some people have humorously pointed out that the old boss looks like Wolf O'Donnel from Star Fox. There's a funny story behind that. Basically I asked an artist to draw me a space wolf. And the artist, whom I'm assuming wasn't familiar with Wolf O'Donnel, drew that - all of it - all the animations and everything. The first time I laid eyes on it, it was already done, so it was too late to ask for edits. So I just ran with it.

That was seven years ago. Nowadays, I know to involve myself more in the process. I ask for just the design first, and we don't move forward with animations until we're happy with the design. Life lessons!

By the way, if you like Katash’s personal boss theme, give it a lesson on Will's Sound cloud (LINK)

-------------------------- Fan Arts -------------------------- Lots of fan art came in over the past 3 months!

This one is a pixel animation made by Pimez, and shows Gail singing a Christmas carol in various parts of the game. So cute! Years ago, I too was making little animated gifs for my favorite games, so it really brings me back!

This one was made by cARTographer (twitter link) after a request by Deli_mage, so thank you both. Gail rocking stylish boots with a pose that shows confidence in her batting skills. Very anime - Love it!

Another submission of laptekosz of the Last Song of Earth area. Whereas the last picture depicted the night sky, now the orange trees are lit by a rising sun. Artfully done! Kinda makes me want to eat eggs. I hope you'll like the new Last Song of Earth area just as much :D

A new artist to the scene, Not_Quin, submitted two pictures, one of Gail and one of the Sand Drake re-imagined as a centipede. I'm always a fan of these re-imaginings! I like how it's spiky all over and appears to be wearing a skull mask. The Sand Drake is often pointed out to be too similar to Zelda's Dodongos, so maybe a long slithery body would have indeed served better. Fun fact, long ago, when we were working on Phoenotopia 2 in earnest, we actually had a giant man-eating worm planned - WIP animation depicted below. One day... one day...

Negativus Core made two cool new arts! I'm really impressed by their use of unique perspective! Having characters run towards the screen or reaching close to the screen from afar is tricky since the proportions get all distorted - but not an issue for Negativus Core! Love the blur on Gail to show speed, with 66 in focus - really skillfully done! And the cube. Amazing!

--------------------------

I'm really honored by the huge fan art community. Thank you all!

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duxgamecom · 4 years ago

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PAC-MAN first arrived in the market in the 1980s. The game is a Maze arcade title that was once one of the best games in the world. It was later released on home consoles and many other systems as well. But finally, the title can be played right from the browser in one of its most creative forms ever. Players can try out World's Biggest PAC-MAN here and enjoy an endless array of custom levels, all free to play and enjoy. The best part, the game works 100% flawlessly right from the browser.

9 Doom

The original Doom from 1993 will always be a cult-classic and for an excellent reason. The game took the first-person shooter genre into another dimension and gave players the freedom to explore hell. The over-the-top nature of violence in this title was very much appreciated. In fact, this was probably one of the biggest titles in the 90s with so much blood and gore. This is also the reason why the newer Doom games follow the same path. Original Doom is playable in the browser here.

8 Wolfenstein 3D

Wolfenstein has to be the granddaddy of every first-person shooter that came after. This is the title that made FPS games bearable when the world was full of 2D platformers and RPGs. While this might certainly look dated visually, it can still be enjoyed quite a bit. To anyone who wants to experience the evolution of games, this is the perfect title to play. The game can also be played right from the browser here, so not much reason to say no to this.

7 Sid Meier’s Civilization 1 & 2

Released in 1991 and 1996 respectively, Sid Meier's Civilization 1 and 2 are probably not the games for everyone. However, they are the best few games to play for strategy and turn-based tactics fans. Civilization games are quite honestly the pillars on which the genre of strategy games stands today.

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So there shouldn't be a shadow of the doubt as to why one should play this, especially since they can be played right from the browser here, without even installing.

6 Diablo

Many RPG fans might remember purchasing Diablo games on discs, only to install them slowly on a computer with 8MB ram. Comparing that to now, Diablo does need to be installed at all. It can directly be loaded from online servers here. Diablo series is easily one of the best RPGs to play, and even with their age, they are so full of details. Blizzard's hack and slash RPG has it all, from a single player to a fully functional multiplayer. Now that is commendable for the time.

5 Counter-Strike 1.6

If Wolfenstein was the granddaddy of FPS titles, Counter-Strike is the first-person shooter multiplayer game's granny. This is one of the best shooters in the market that are still played to this day. Obviously, being such an old title, there must be a way of playing this without any hassle.

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Well, luckily there is, and that is called the cs-online club. The game can be directly launched from here and only needs to be loaded once, even on a low-end computer.

4 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

Now, obviously, most retro 2d games from the Nintendo Entertainment System are easily available to play via emulators. But why download a whole different software to play these games when they easily boot online. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and many games like this can be played directly from the browser here. This is a must for retro fans, as they will no longer have to mess with downloading emulators, ROMs, bios, and whatnot.

3 Fallout

Another classic RPG that once required people to install a full disc onto the computer to play is now playable online in just a few taps. The Fallout comes from 1997 and has always been a PC exclusive. This is why not a lot of gamers have played the older titles. This is also because they are not easily available to everyone. However, things couldn't have been better because now the original Fallout can be played right from the browser.

2 Super Mario Bros.

This game has to be on the top of the list because of its sheer significance. Super Mario Bros. was released in 1985, and since then, many brothers and sisters to the game have released. However, the original remains one of the best console games of its time and one of the most famous. Luckily the game is easily available to play online and should cheer up everyone who decides to play this.

1 Stadia

While Stadia isn't just one game, it is an amalgamation of plenty of heavy-duty titles. It has games such as Destiny 2, PUBG, and Borderlands 3, which are directly playable right from the servers. The best part is, people who aren't so much into high-end gaming and purchasing expensive hardware, will find this way of playing games super easy. Since modern titles and technologies are still growing, it is not fair to assume the experience will be flawless. However, slowly and steadily it's shaping up.

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