nimrodinked

[nimrodinked]

Snakes, Flame, and the Cycles of History

Hello out there, missed me? Well office employment does so drain a person, though not of creativity. And, what with Elden Rings DLC out and me playing it, the time has come for more rambling. This is going to decidedly be more couched in theory and game lore, though Vaati I am not.

It goes to say that this will be a very spoilery talk, be warned.

For one, I am really quite pleased that the story has become clearer in the DLC. What with NPCs and very straight forward storytelling I am able to craft quite a more concrete picture of the goings on in the Lands Between, as well as implications beyond. For one, finding Bonny Village, Gaol, and seeing the jar people was quite horrific and visceral, and that coupled with Marikas own village being an empty place bathed in gold make for a heart tugging emotional moment. That connects nicely to Messmers theme, which also sounds a remix of part of the opening title. Messmer (foe of my beloved people) is quite the interesting character, even putting aside his yaoi MC proportions. Even if I haven't found much in the way of evidence myself, as far as timelines and just vibes go Messmer certain comes across as the oldest of the demigods sired from her. I'm fairly certain all of Rennala's children are older, but for Marika-Spawn he's certainly the oldest. He's also cursed just like his siblings, and here is where I am most interested and focused. Honestly the DLC gives enough that I may make more than one post, though I prefer to write here longform, and I'm not sure how much I could cook up from my brainpans secretions.

In any case, Messmer and his crusade are the first main obstacle most players will run across, seeing as the furnace golem is right smack dab outside. The closer one gets to his keep, the more and more fire-relations one can find. Messmers embers are described as embers of his fire, the fire knight armor and spells describe messmer giving his fire to his troops, the grease describes that everyone, even rank and file in his legions use fire. So, clearly, and obviously he is very connected to fire. But, and what most people will assume more sinister, he is connected to snakes. Snakes are part of him, both the winged ones that appear on his outside, and the "base serpent" that I am assuming resides within him, as he unleashes full snake attacks when he breaks his grace seal, while his first phase largely involves his titular flames. The snake, the 'abyssal serpent' within him was sealed by marika with the same bestowing seal that Radagon (presumably) had received. And that's stated.... Somewhere as the reason that Marika had shunned Messmer and sent him on his crusade. Given snakes and their already close connection to blasphemy, it makes sense. However, contrary to that, I have quite another theory.

Mainly I think that Messmer represented a threat to Marikas "eternal" ruling by way of his flames. Seeing how naturally the flames of the giants are feared and shunned by all who worship the erdtree, Marikas firstborn not only having the fire-red hair of the giants, but also a mastery over fire itself must have been not only humiliating, but a threat to all that Marika ruled over. And Messmer doesn't just have fire, he's got Messmerfire! Which sounds like it's the same but from every description and allusion, it's quite potent, potent enough to lay waste to the land of the hornsent through their largest of soldiers. The Furnace Golems, which may not be directly connected.... But they work in a land of fire, scoop up hornsent and burn them to ash, and you can even bring one to life by throwing a hefty furnace pot into it's head. A hefty furnace pot is crafted using messmers embers among other ingredients, and the description says that the flames burn away both body and soul, cleansing the victims. This would no doubt be a cruel fate for the hornsent that worship and revere souls... But it also puts Messmers flames on the level of extremely dangerous to the erdtree. It's consistent if not immediately apparent that fire is treated very poorly by most everyone within the Lands Between, so much so that the Lord of Blasphemy just so happens to also live in Volcano Manor, the semi active lava zone of this fucked up mario game. Snakes and fire... But while Rykard most certainly leaned to the snake side of things, Messmer is flame all the way, to the point you need his internal fire to break open the sealing tree and access the final area of the DLC.

So, the assumed firstborn of Marika possessed not only a horrid inner curse, but flame powerful enough that it is it's own incantation school. That's another interesting thing littered through the dlc and the game in general. Faith. Faith makes power, more than power draws faith. As shown by the faith talismans describing a mass of believers, faith is the strongest affirmation. Now, let us further this idea. Messmers fire, much like Melinas, was capable of burning a tree, the symbol of power in Marikas order. He was also afflicted with a curse of snakes, which Marika sealed away without helping. The blessing of marika is quite clear on this. "Once she made several of them for Messmers sake, but never again". So.... Why? Why not help her son after pushing on him the onerous task of crusading in her name? Or perhaps it was after the crusade began that Marika got an idea in her head. Messmers gear says that he made himself the symbol of fear and hatred for the hornsent, allowing all the feelings of resentment to flow to him. Not exactly deific.... But just as he was loathed by the hornsent, his knights venerated and even worshipped him. He was a demigod, after all. So this being of fire, gaining new worship and power in the lands between, would almost certainly represent an eventual threat to Marikas rule. As for why she never again made her healing flasks for messmer, I also have an idea. The kindling of messmer describes it as being eaten away at by a snake. the sbake within Messmer no less, his base serpent. Sealed away, it would have no way to sustain itself should it need to, the only things to gnaw on were it's host. So, rather cruelly, Marika may have realized that allowing her son to wither, his powers to wane, would be the smartest course of action, however horrible it may be.

It's a tragedy that, despite flame being his power and gift, Messmer hated it. The orb of messmers describes that he often wished to be rid of it, but ever would it burn. With that chestnut we might think that, rather than gaining worship on purpose, Messmer wished to impart his gifts so they would lessen. A description reads that he tried to implant his flame in others but failed, and the incantations are a way to make up for that. When you fight him he even maintains that he keeps eternal watch, and allows no one without light to pass. He even begs forgiveness from his callous mother as he plucks his own eye out to release the snakes. It's only when he's freed of both life and vigil that he curses Marika, perhaps as a realization of how far he's been betrayed, or perhaps a final damnation of his unrequited feelings of love for his deity parentage.

So! Messmer, poor deluded fool, was betrayed and left out of sight to guard a piece of Marikas mistakes, much like Maliketh. Everywhere you really look into it, the queen eternal seems to get worse and worse. It's interesting to look back on moments like the ashen capital, like gideons speech with new light. Marika, it seems, really is the worst. Tragedy colors her ascension and I really do feel for her, seeing how she didn't want to cause yet more death in her new golden order. But she has done horrid things to keep that order, and while her atrocities have a shinier, cleaner coat of paint, they reek of the same barbarism the hornsent employed to their enemies and underlings. It makes me wonder, really, if there is such a thing as a good ending for Elden Ring. While I haven't roflstomped tender miquella, I've heard his ending is quite seperate from the main game, meaning that we're still stuck with ages of mediocrity at best. And, even with an ascension to "perfect" order, it seems difficult to believe that all will be well, as the rune only claims to quell the hearts of men, and as you can see clearly across the lands between, there is a much deeper rot that spreads...

Anyway! This was fun, this is the first game I've really felt the need to sink my teeth into in regards to fromsoft, though I've enjoyed stories of theirs before. There's plenty more to discuss, so perhaps I'll make another lore/theory post of my thoughts. As for my closing thoughts.... Well-

CHAOS TAKE THE WORLD! CHAOS TAKE THE WORLD!

[nimrodinked]

A Tale of Two Triguns

Or, How I learned to Stop Worrying and Love the PLANT

Hello out there. I recently finished up watching Trigun: Stampede with a friend, after having a rather viscerally negative reaction to the first episode. Well, I've come here after watching the whole show to say that it doesn't get much better. My ramblings below were meant to be sent to a friend initially... but I had so much to say I figured that a blogpost would be easier to share around my frothing rage. So if the prose starts rather garbled and stream-of-thought-like, I apologize, but bear with it to the end, or at least as long as you can stomach. So, the show is a mess as far as a timeline goes. Looking at it compared to the original, there are similar beats, but they don't line up right. And the show is trying to tell the Vash vs Knives story, but in a garbled way. To spoil it, the entire 12 episodes is a small timeline of events that happen in the original show. The problem is that aside from the overarching event, everything else is wrong. It could be trying to tell a prequel to the original, but if that's the case then they didn't do a good job because plenty of plot points from the original are in the prequel. Vash encounters a number of Gung Ho Guns that he would meet in the original show, not to mention meeting Meryl and Wolfwood, all before the event in the city of July. So, if it's intending to be a prequel, why does it just throw in a bunch of extraneous details?

Speaking of extraneous details, the new show has a cultish obsession with the lore of Vash the stampede. Not who he is or what he's done. In truth, Vash accomplishes very little in the realm of deeds, that aren't done off-screen or talked about as past heroic actions. But the show absolutely loves to talk about and involve the Sci-Fi parts of the original show in all facets of the new show, including adding special powers to Vash and Knives. Episode one has Vash save a PLANT that's going bad somehow. The nutty thing is that, despite the increased focus on PLANTs and Vash and Knives as weird offshoot PLANT entities, the new show explains very little when it matters. At one point near the end, a scientist man just asserts that the PLANTs are energy sources because they're conduits for accessing a higher plane of existence. Out of nowhere. He also "Explains" that Vash somehow has the ability to access that higher plane. This is only an explanation of why Vash's arm was consumed by a black hole in an earlier episode, it's never talked about as to why Vash has the power to do this while Knives, who is also an "independent plant" as they describe, cannot. This is one of many examples of the show treating PLANTs as some kind of common knowledge while really flippantly, if at all, discussing what they are and why they are around.

On the matter of not explaining, and to touch on the earlier issue of "temporal problems", the show has a nasty habit of progressing story beats off-camera, to an almost baffling degree. To give a few examples, Meryl and her partner (The infuriating exposition reporter "Robert De Niro") are marveling at vegetation in a biodome, and robert wants to go find a smoking area. The scene ends, the episode continues on. two scenes later, Meryl and Robert are in the middle of the PLANT storage facility, in….. somewhere. It's never shown how they got there, they simply appear. Hilariously, both characters don't know how they got there either, and since it's never addressed it's almost as if the storyboard itself shunted these two hapless side characters into the next exposition dump scene without them knowing. That's perhaps the most blatant example, but little fragments like that happen constantly. A character blows up, end scene. An episode later he's shown with bandages on him, so apparently he survived. In that same episode a child falls out of Meryl's grip in a static shot, then the shot ends. Come episode end, he's bandaged up and wounded somehow. It adds up to the show being a disorienting mess to watch at times, there's just too many blocks of missing time seemingly hacked out of the plot.

Oh, and the plot. The wonderful plot. So, this is already a spoiler talk, for both the new show and the original, but this is where I really burrow into those details so if you really don't want to be spoilered, stop here. The plot is a topsy-turvy mess that can't seem to muster up the brainpower to make sense of it's own details. The opening of episode one reminded me of the first star wars prequel. That's a great sign…. Anyhow, you meet the twins when they're young, at the Big Fall event where the entire Seeds project fails and crashes to earth due to Knives' meddling. How did he meddle? Guess. No I'm serious, the show simply states that Knives did it somehow, and apparently Vash "gave him the passcode" which makes him "an accomplice" which is it's own infuriating mischaracterization, but we'll get to that. So, Knives crashes all the space ships because "humans bad." After that, Vash runs away, and that's the last we see of (new) flashbacks for a while. They love to use the same flashbacks so the first few episodes have kid Knives saying "Vaaaaaaaaaaaaaaash~" in his silly voice, which is an amusing anchor point. Not amusing in a good way. Every flashback is a sore reminder of how awfully they're piloting the show.

Now right off the bat, the show has problems because it's trying to fit in references from the original show in a season that's half the size. Our first nostalgia story is Vash Vs the Nebraska Duo, which starts out much the same. Unfortunately it starts out under different circumstances that make it a more infuriating ride. In the original, Vash saves a diner from some small-time crooks, driving them out and receiving a free meal as a reward. However, upon realizing that he's Vash, the 60 billion Double Dollar outlaw, the town decides that they can turn in this relative stranger for a huge reward. The diner owner, who I believe is named Rosa like in the new show, says she feels sorry for doing it because he seems nice, but the town needs the money to survive. Antics ensue, because this is the og Trigun, and Vash is still his happy-go-lucky normal self. The Nebraksa Duo come in, hold the town hostage, and Vash swoops in to save the day, even after they all collectively tried to kill him. This warms the peoples hearts, how sweet etc etc. now, onto the new.

The storybeats are the same, with Vash saving the town… but here the ship leaves port, drifting away from believable into wishy-washy emotional gobbledeegook. So, episode one Vash saves the town from July police officers there to arrest him. The officer, for no real reason other than to show off a big flashy budget, fires a cluster missile into the air that breaks apart and will scatter all over town with bombs, destroying probably the entire area, PLANT included. Vash saves the day, though he does so in the rather ludicrous method of throwing a rock at a cluster of missiles wide enough to saturate the town with shrapnel, then shooting the rock so that it spreads and somehow air-explodes the whole cluster missile payload. Again, it seems to just want to be flashy, and having any sort of sense or logic isn't a concern. So, Vash is the hero of the town, and they all celebrate. Now, before I say this next story beat, Rosa, the tavern owner now, explains that, in addition to him just now saving the town, Vash also came by sometime in the past to save their plant. So that's twice he's saved the entire town out of pure charity. So, they decided to hold him up for ransom. The given reason is…. the same, they need the money to survive. What? No, seriously, what? They don't explain anything, Rosa just says she's a mom and has children and needs to feed her kids. So they're going to cash in 60 billion double dollars… for groceries. They can't be using the money to fix the PLANT, because Vash fixed it already, for free. And if the power structure around it was failing and they had to make repairs Vash couldn't do, then… why not say it? They don't, they just do it because this is the "town tries to ransom vash" episode. Antics ensue, although much more toned down (in tone, not in wacky spastic animation) antics this time around.

More differences come as the Nebraska duo show up, and instead of Vash escaping the town, they catch him, and the Nebraska duo decide to just steal him and take the bounty. A short lived and lame chase sequence happens, and then the duo is defeated. They immediately return to town and decide that they'll just steal the PLANT instead, marking the beginning of the new show's obsession with the hitherto mysterious space-age power source. They take the PLANT to the top of a long hallway, presumably to attach it to a crane because it's quite large. This also serves as an ultra-obvious setpiece for a confrontation. A confrontation is had, and in contrast to Vash using his gun and bullets to beat the Nebraska's without even really wounding them, this Vash just hops around like a 3d jumping bean before finally drawing to counter the Nebraska father's gunshot. Yes. He shoots the bullet head-on with his bullet. That's…. Alright for those that haven't watched, the original trigun had Vash pulling some really incredible stunts with guns and gun avoiding. The closest I can reckon to this feat of improbable "accuracy" is the water thief episode. To make my point simply, Vash is able to dodge someone's bullets fired at him from close range. The one firing realizes that he's able to read the trajectory of the bullets whizzing by by carefully watching the gun in his hand and how he aims it. That's far-fetched, sure, but it at least makes some semblance of sense for Vash to have learned over the many years of getting shot at. And while the explanation of "bullet trajectory" isn't entirely accurate, at close range and with proper spacing, Vash could make enough room to dodge where the bullet could go. Because gun's aren't laser-accurate, but the body can be flexible enough to give it the extra space to whizz by.

Now, going back to that gun's aren't laser-accurate point, Nebraska Sr. fires what looks like a standard handgun (I'm not going to go super nerdy because I'm not a gun nut, but I understand enough to go through this) at Vash, and Vash fires back with a .22 revolver. From what I can tell, he draws while Nebraska is firing, and is able to hit the bullet dead-center before it travels too far from the gun. That's… I barely know why I'm focusing on this one dumb shot among a million other issues I have, but It's not so much an issue of "a normal person couldn't do that" and more an issue of a level of superhuman not only required of the person, but the gun they're firing. And considering Vash is shooting just a regular revolver… sure, it's a nitpick, but it's one drop in the pan of this nonsensical stew I'm trying to chew through. Let's move on.

So, after that "gunfight", the beam the Nebraska's are on begins to fall. Sr makes a run for it, but Jr grabs the big PLANT because it's valuable. He almost makes it, making sure the PLANT gets to safety first which seals his fate of falling. Thankfully, he's got extending rope-arms like in the original, so he's able to grapple upwards, but his arm is slipping. Vash naturally grabs it, and Nebraska Sr is about to as well, when Rosa comes in again to bravely shoot at him for taking their livelihood. She's going to gun him down, the villainous scientiest… but he has a son and he loves him! It's about family, that's what makes it so powerful, truly words to live by. After that the story goes off on it's own strange and strained beat, which leads me into my next point.

Characters. Vash, centrally, is barely given anything to do in the new show. He's mostly relegated to moping around, and trying not to use his gun at all, except for a bizarre scene where he's beating up thugs with it as a makeshift tonfa. Not to say that Vash was a powerhouse of awesome might in the original show, but he was a much more active protagonist that got a lot more work to do. Almost half of the total runtime are small stories about Vash's character, his past, and the kind of person he is. Just looking for clips I was able to find 4 different episodes where Vash is either helping to save people, or trying to talk someone down from the ledge of killing someone else. Compared to the almost saccharine sweet message most often played in the new show. Vash just wants to help everyone and save them. It's the same message… but it's barely portrayed outside of him directly saying it. Adding into this teeth-cracking sweetness is the bizarre character choice to make him a character with a guilty conscience.

So, as far as I can reckon (because again, they do not show the backstory of the Big Fall, it just happens and Knives talks about how Vash was part of it), Vash feels guilty because of the just-mentioned help that he offered Knives. This "help" equates to him knowing a passcode that Knives doesn't, when the twins are snooping around ships records in the specimen storage room. They find a supposed third independent child, and pulling up their file also happens to release them from the floor, in what probably should be a horrific scene. It is on it's own, but that traumatic event is never talked about or discussed, only vaguely alluded to in the future. The event in full is a series of glass containers that house the third child, or what remains of it. It's rather gruesomely torn to pieces, and the bio-signs read out that it's still alive even in it's flayed state. This is, in what appears to be a theme, never expounded upon. Who was the third child? No idea. Maybe it's the same child shown later on in the show, although the scientist that created him certainly didn't make it sound like his creation was stolen from the body. Maybe I need a supplementary brochure to understand the deep lore that this show insists on bringing up, only to drop like so much trash soon after. Getting back to the passcode, however.

Apparently Vash knows the master passcode. Somehow. Not explained. Him using it to access the third child documents apparently was enough for Knives to memorize the password. Or he copy-pasted it? Again, it isn't explained, but it's the only "password" shown in the show so I have to just assume that's it. If that is the case, Vash having a guilty conscience makes no real sense, because even if he gave his brother the password, he did it in a completely unrelated outing that they both thought was innocent snooping. Sure, it certainly turned out to be a horrific event (that they never bring up again) but that's a flimsy foundation for his guilt. It could be that he's motivated by the desire to stop his brother's plans as he states in a later backstory section, which would make more sense at least, but once more, that resolution is brought on by his foster caretakers discovering the black box that recorded Knives telling Vash that he helped him by giving the password. He has no other stated reason for wishing to atone, so once more I must assume that his desire stems from the guilt of helping Knives. Helping knives in an unrelated scenario when neither of them knew better. I understand that emotions like guilt are strong and often irrational in real life… but when the foundation of your narrative is built on the sci-fi equivalent of a rom-com misunderstanding, the story will suffer for it.

And oh, does the lack of character not stop with Vash. Knives has argueably come out much worse in the hack job. He's been boiled down from his old self, remade into a strange and cartoonish brooding villain that is almost never, ever, not playing a piano. The man who systematically tracked down the blood-relative of Rem Saverem, killing him before Vash got there entirely to break his brother. Who then forces him to activate his angel arm and scour July from the map (yes, the city of july in the og was a past event if you recall my earlier ramblings) and is still angry and hurt when Vash aims his PLANT-mutated death-cannon at him. Because Knives is a deeply disturbed individual with a central idea that humanity is a waste of space, but he does love his brother. NuKnives maybe loves his brother, it's unclear and not well explained because he, like many other characters, is obsessed with PLANTs. His only real stated reason for wanting to kill the humans is when he's shown to be reading a history book, and he comments on how humans never change, and always have wars. Which is sophistry, to the highest order. He is a child so it's not as if that's an unreasonable take-away from an alien's perspective, but once more, the narrative suffers from weak motivations like that, regardless of how "realistic" they might be. Knives' motivation is also skewed off-kilter, as instead of living on a new world with his beloved brother, he now wants to create a new generation of stable, independent PLANTs that will survive and thrive in the new world. Again, not inherently terrible, but it's confused, muddled, barely explained until the ending where everything is dumped all at once. In fact, Knives and Vash's relationship can be shown by looking at each respective ending.

At the end of the original show, the climatic battle is between two brothers with opposing ideals that can't reconcile them with each other. They have a gunfight with each using one of the guns the Knives made for them to have. While Knives gains the upper hand, Vash hears the voice of Wolfwood, and uses his gun to regain control of the fight, and win. It's simple, it's really fun to re-watch, and can even be a little symbolic, with wolfwood's cross representing Vash's connection to human beings as a whole, that burden to them turning into a blessing that helps him win. Contrasted to the end of NuGun, which is an obnoxious orchestral-blaring city battle where Vash zips around on his magical devil wing while Knives follows and blasts away with magical PLANT-conjured knives. Of course shortly before this epic big big bigly battle, there was an episode where exposition and nonsense was shovelled down the viewers face as Knives unveils his master plan to turn Vash into a tree which will simultaneously engulf the world to kill all the humans, and forcibly impregnate all of the PLANTs he's collected to birth new independent PLANTs which he will imbue with souls by going to the higher dimension and tapping into the consciousness there, using his brother which he turned into a tree as the portal to go through, after erasing his memories, because apparently in order to turn into a portal tree person you have to have no attachments or memories. Vash turns the tables after his memory is wiped of Rem, by remembering a song that she taught to him (off-screen). Now, Rem's song is a motif in the original show, but from what I can tell with an untrained ear, the little melody Vash is singing isn't that, just some song he was taught. So, Rem Saverem, a character that has had less on-screen impact to Vash than his adoptive caretakers on the crashed ship, is the magic spark that re-awakens his memories. That would make sense… if you've seen the original show, and know the background of just how much Rem meant to Vash. Here… it's just a copout really. Now, If all of that sounds like nonsense, you're correct. If you think there should be more explanation, well you're also right, but the show has no answers for you. At once too much and too little explaining happens so that a slew of new pieces of information are cast to the wind, without a single string to ground them to actual NuGun-established reality. Vash is still saved by his connection to humanity, but keeping with the new show's theme, he is captured and loses all his memories over the course of 2 and a half episodes, before finally mustering up some main character gumption to fight back. It doesn't hit nearly as hard. Frankly it misses the mark of a hit at all.

To finish off this confusing mess of a story, Knives dies trying to reach a mcguffin cube, because Vash is able to "condense the gate energy into a tesseract" that will still open the gateway to the higher dimension…. which, I suppose is still bad? Honestly I don't know why it's still bad, obviously Knives doesn't have pure intentions and wants to kill humans, but as was shown, his actions already resulted in a bunch of pregnant PLANTs. If they don't get souls from the higher dimension will they… just become normal PLANTs? Search me. Vash wants to get rid of the cube because Knives wants it and will eventually do bad things with it. Okay… alright, there's such a deluge of nonsense at this point that I barely registered that initially, but okay. So, in what I'm sure was cool to see for those still invested in the show, Vash unleashes his Devil arm. Looking back at the clips from the og, Vash had the angel arm, and Knives the devil. It was a simple characterization, and as shown in the finally fight, the arm isn't connected to the person; it's connected to Knives gun's. But Knives didn't make guns in this show, so now Vash can summon the power of the devil arm with his newfound power of anti-creation…. or whatever (look he sprouts a black devil wing and flies around while holding a cube made of gate portal energy that he also made and condensed apparently by accident, or maybe on purpose. There isn't time for explaining, it's time for BIG BIG BIG ACTION SETPIECES!!!!) Vash uses his devil arm and wing to fly up into space to blast away all the tesseract energy, but Knives won't let him. So, Vash blasts, and Knives, rather than go around the massive beam, puts himself directly in it's line so he can get melted down in slow motion. I feel my stomach churn as I write that sentence because it sounds like a cinema-sins nitpick. It kind of is, but it's also another ridiculous bit of contrivance that Knives can't bring himself to pull out of the death beam stream and grab the cube from it's completely exposed side-hole, so I'm touching on it. Vash kills Knives, even if accidentally, and Knives' last words to his brother, are "Nai is dead, you killed him." I am baffled, on the verge of hiring a private eye to research just what the hell that even means. I don't know where Knives feels this big betrayal happens, since he's literally using his brother as a frozen in time gateway to achieve his perfect world, with no promise that he'll ever unturn him from tree back to brother. But he's still sad about it? Suddenly? After all of this? Because he has shown not a lick of remorse or sadness towards his brother ever since they parted ways after the Big Fall? I'm rocked to my core at how nonsense this line is. Anyhow, that's how the story proper ends, which moves us, blessedly, onto my final point.

Everyone knows Marvel properties. Everyone knows the Marvel movies. And at this point, many of you probably know about the more recent movies and how they have an audience clap-pause for when something you recognize comes on-screen. Famously used in the third spiderman movie, where Toby Maquire comes on-screen to dead silence for just a bit to allow the marvel fans time to clap and holler in the theatre. Thank the lord above there are no such egregious references in Trigun, but there are an insulting amount of "remember the old property?" moments. To name a few, obviously there are the members of the gung-ho guns that Vash fights in this new show, including Zazie the beast, who has been turned from tragic esper child who can control massive sandworms, to strange native-dressed child that can still control worms… but might also be a worm? She bursts into literaly swarms of flying little glow-bugs when shot at, but they don't explain that. Go figure. She's just made of worms now. There's Legato, who is a reference for old fans, not a character. He appears in 2, maybe 3 episodes back to back to meddle with Wolfwood, then fades away without even a face reveal. Maybe that's for the planned second season. I say that these are all references, not characters in the new show done differently, because they really don't have a lick of substance behind them, beyond the most forgettable of the og gung-ho guns who has been turned into a roided-up bane out to kill Vash. He also serves as the "wolfwood murders a child" catalyst, although again, there is almost nothing done about that issue, and Wolfwood continues to hang out with Vash after it's over (Seriously, stakes in this show are so low they're nearly subterranean). Beyond that there are bits of a large robot that looks like the Nine-Lives gun from the og. Cute. The most offensive nostalgia and sequel bait combined references are saved for the last minutes of the final episode, however.

Meryl pays her respects to the annoying exposition reporter Robert De Niro at the wrecked city of July. A voice comes over her radio, telling her that if she doesn't stop slacking, she'll be sent over to the insurance agency (she was an insurance agent in the og, which is a funnier occupation and makes more sense, as she and her partner are following Vash because he's a walking liability.) The voice also tells her that she's been assigned a new partner, a woman by the name of Millie Thompson. Yes, stun-gun Millie, one of the more jovial and light-hearted members of the original cast. She was an amazonian woman with a minigun that fired "stun-rounds" which seemed to consist of metal bars that would whack into people's chest and stop them in their tracks. Possibly also break ribs, but Millie isn't known for being smart, yet she's a wonderful part of the cast that adds to the initial levity. She's also Wolfwood's implied romantic partner, though they do only share a single scene together. The scene is adorable though, I would look up Trigun Pregnant scene to find it. I know that sounds like a bit, but that's the youtube title of it. Anyhow, after that stomach-churning force-feeding of 'member berries, the scene changes to a familiar face, telling Vash that he'll be okay and get over his "amnesia" soon, calling him Eriks in a reference to the mini-plot where he went underground under the same name in a fit of manic depression. It's unclear whether he actually has memory loss now, since the July incident did cause him to lose his memory. But really, with the amount of faith I have in the show's writing for this season, an eventual season two will probably botch that plotline over 3 episodes.

So… that's it. That's the entire thing, I've been expelling the bile built up in my neck after watching his sad trainwreck for quite some time, so if you're still reading then I both applaud and thank you for being interested. I truly didn't wish to hate on a show, but it's because Trigun is such a beloved property for me that this new rendition being made sloppy and shoddy gets to me so much. It's a confused mess that's riddled with a baffling number of cliches, bad writing, over/under explanation, an obsession with a sci-fi aesthetic, and a desperate attempt to have flashy animation that is a poor, slipping mask for the rest of the trainwreck. I mean… the animation did (mostly) look quite good. Having 3d models affords a great deal more general movement and crazy action on a tighter budget. They seemed a bit too Gung-ho (hah, reference) with the movement though, as some scenes of just talking featured quite a bit of bouncy wobbling model flailing, which just looks off-putting. The animation team clearly cared and tried their best to get creative, and there's a fun amount of camera swings and reels for the few actual fights the show has. Who knows, the friend I watched this with said a season two was already confirmed. I was appalled at the ending of Dragon's Blood season 2, and then 3 had me in tears. Maybe they'll be able to scrape and salvage this flaming pile, and get their nonsense together for a season two, as that will probably be a re-telling of the original story, considering this first season ends with what was a past event in the og, and ends with setup for Millie. But…. Oh dear god, but…. The season also ends with a shot of Earth, and a radio broadcast as a few personnel confirm that the SEEDS project fired a signal, and Zazie the plot-exposition Beast warns Meryl… for some reason, that humans will be coming. I am not even going to ask why the sentient pile of bugs that looks like a child knows that. I'm just not. I can't imagine that MORE sci fi, more bigger blastier actionier flailing, and more over-explaining concepts will benefit this show, and I don't have much hope that their "humans are coming to the desert planet" plotline will be anything but disappointing.

But hey! I like to remain positive, so at least the original show is still there. I have the Blu-Ray box set of it, I might just dig it out to watch once more! I mean, what's stopping me from re-living the amazing show from my youth? And for that matter, what's stopping you? There's plenty of ways to get a hold of it either online or physically, and I promise you that the original Trigun is at the least a better-written show than the new trashfire. It might be antiquated, I'm aware that not everything ages gracefully… and I'm also aware that some people just don't know what good media is. Pearls before swine and all that. But I won't judge! Honest. So give the original a watch. And hey, you could try the new show, if you really wanted. I don't think it will hold up, but…. Well, again, some people don't know what good media is. Any way you slice it, again, thanks for listening to the longest ramble I've had in a good long while. I hope it gave you something to chew on, or something to chuckle at. I'll see you next time.

[nimrodinked]

The Power of Low-Design Games

Hello again everyone. I recently streamed one of my old favorite relaxation games on my YouTube channel (A link if you're interested in content even more glacial than my Tumblr: https://youtube.com/@nimrod3646)

And I was shocked that the game snuck in new little features in my absence of playing. I remarked a lot on it while going through, but for those not in the mood to tune into a 4 hour tinkering stream, perhaps this will better suit you.

Jalopy. It's a game I bought an age ago, with a simple overall design doc. You are someone living in Berlin, when your Uncle Lutfi comes by to teach you about travelling in his old Laika car. The game follows your simple driving adventures as you go from Berlin to Turkey, then back. That's really all the game has to offer. It's shocking, then, that I used to log so many hours into it. There are a myriad of simple yet enjoyable activities that keep you occupied and engaged throughout. You can find refuse or abandoned cars on your drive, taking engine parts and crates full of goods to sell off at stores on your drive. You can upgrade your car with engine improvements, tyres, and other extra upgrades that improve your driving experience. Nothing is too in-depth, but each mini system offers the player just enough to get lost in on an easy and relaxed playthrough. Now, I'm something of a magpie when it comes to games. I spot anything shiny or interesting and pick it up to hoard and (eventually) play. Jalopy was just what I happened to scrape up in my trawling net and try out, and I'm sorely happy that I did. What Jalopy does so right is in presenting all of the mentioned mini systems in a simple, sanded-down package. Your uncle, as well as every other body model is sculpted with simple polygons, lacking any facial features other than hair. Like an old cartoon, your uncle's jacket has a texture that moves when he does. That blocky polygon look persists with everything else, lending a simple and stylized drive through the countries and mountains you're passing through. It is... Profoundly tiny budget. When you bump into a car as a person, it plays one of only a few metallic smashing noises. A few lucky passes and proper route selections, and you can have a fully built car (as I did in my new game playthrough) before you reach turkey. It could absolutely be derided for the tiny scale the game operates on... But honestly, the charm captures me. It's done within means, and I'm much more happy to enjoy the simple environments and listen to German radio than I think I might be playing something like my summer car or the like. As I also said during play, the game feels small, but in a comfortable sense. Small in that I like the options I have, and don't want for too much more. Small in that, if it were ever remade as the developer teased at, I would hope that they preserved the original as much as possible. It's a miniscule little game that wraps me in warmth and comfort I cannot find in a great many titles I play. It's a game where you have a simple task, an easy, rewarding system, and just enough on your plate to plan ahead while you drive the highways and mountain roads of eastern Europe. The dev has since moved on to bigger and better things with Landlords Super, and I have played that enough for a lifetime (I'll still boot it up time and again to play from scratch, it is just as addictive and enjoyable). It's a wonderful contrast that simply manifested in my mind while I played. Because I had planned to swap over to Frostpunk at some point, and try for a challenge run win. And I just kept driving instead. One more station, one more upgrade, I was in turkey before I really looked at the time. And I filled four hours of time with semi-frequent ramblings alone in my stream, playing in game radio and out of game radios from other games I enjoy. No one but me, the road, and Uncle Lutfi to keep me company on a long rainy ride to somewhere. And that, is a feeling that I'll always want to come back to, and one that never goes away with age. When I want Jalopy, Jalopy is there for me to play just as comfy as when I first bought it.

Thanks for reading. The stream is up and, if you've time to run it in the background, I hope it imparts a bit of the comfort that I receive from playing it onto you.

[nimrodinked]

You Can’t Save Everyone (And Trying is Worse)

Hello hello, hope you’ve been keeping well up in the world. I’ve been fine, things have moved at about the pace I would expect. My free time has dried up significantly, as has my game spread, so pray forgive my impertinence with the already interstitial updates. But, if you’ll forgive the initial meander, I have actually linked my you tube channel at my header. For those interested, it is mostly short-form video edits I’ve made to please myself. I do plan, however loose that plan’s strings are, to put my thoughts to paper on longer videos, but the edits and such are fun for cutting my teeth and learning little tricks and skills. Anyhow, you’re not here for channel updates. What really saddens people is subjective. Like any emotion, really. People are angered, amused, saddened by unique things. I’ve seen joke posts that made me tight in the chest, and made light of things others thought horrendous and tear-jerking. So, to start this little tirade, To me, sadness is simple, and silent. Mostly unsaid, told through the background, the little actions. Not to say I can’t weep at other things... but when I find things sad I almost always find myself looking past the actual material, and reasoning what it means on a deeper level. To give example, the End of Evangelion movie, has a fairly soft scene, where a young Shinji goes to the park to play with some kids. For an extremely fast and dirty rundown, Shinji has a severe confidence problem, stemming largely from not having a mother, and from having an absent and cold father. To put it simply, he’s alone. Anyhow. He joins the kids building, before their parent scoops them up and away, and leaves Shinji alone to build the castle. He pats it, slowing down, before his hands just come to rest on it’s surface. Then, he shoves his hands down and smashes the measly structure. That’s about it, the movie continues on from there, but something about that whole exchange is so simple and haunting to me. I look past the simple bits to understand Shinji’s emotions. He doesn’t have anyone, and his attempts at reaching out all fizzle out. The kids just leave, there isn’t a whit of dialogue shared, but they have someone to go away with, and Shinji is still in the sandbox. Alone, patting a sandcastle with no one to share it with. Gut wrenching. For me, anyway. So, when I say that something is sad, deeply and gut-churningly sad, that is what you can expect, and what I will be telling in great detail presently. In the game Sunless Skies, you pilot a ship across the expanse of stars. It’s a fantastical game, full of both whimsy and terror. You can recruit officers to your ship that buff your in-game stats, and spending time with them unlocks their personal stories. If you manage to finish their personal stories on one captain (As in, don’t die before you finish with them) Then they move forward in life, and can be recruited as upgraded followers that give better stats. It’s a simple system, effective and lets you steer yourself towards a certain goal by picking the officers with the best lines of stats for you. But, I did say this was a game with horror in it. And not all of the companions have happy endings to their stories. No, there are plenty of charming completions to warm your soul, like giving a homonculus conductor a musical partner that could match his own prowess, only for him to balk and tell you that someone caring about him deeply enough to try was enough to warm his singing pipes once more. You can help a runaway mongolian haul his dead friend to various locations, deciding the best place that he could find his eternal rest. Charming... but we’re sailing for darker waters here. The Vagabond is a companion that most people pick up pretty early in the game. He’s the self-proclaimed “hobo king”, and jaunts around making your ship a lighter and happier place with his stories and songs. Starting his quest sets you off on a journey to find a long-lost hobo who was after some sort of treasure he claims is fake. You go through a number of hoops, including picking up a former friend of the Vagabond, and returning to the Vagabonds home to pick up supplies. Yes, the hobo king has a home. As you travel along this path, you hear tales scattered around of a massive whirlwind in an area of the game. The place is named Old Tom’s Well, so-called because of a legend surrounding the maelstrom. Supposedly, a wealthy man once descended into the well and asked it for something, some grand treasure. The well agreed, but, and I might be remembering wrong, spurned Old Tom and all that would come after for wishing. Now what’s in the well is entirely besides the point. Much of Sunless Skies is written in a lovely way where what is actually going on takes up a life of it’s own, and logic simply has to shrug and play along. You can, with certainly criteria, go down the well to see what lies at it’s bottom, but that’s got naught to do with Old Tom. And, if you’re naive, neither does the Vagabond. At the end of his story, and after having you imbibe a certain elixir, you travel down to the well with the Vagabond. There, he reveals it all. He is, in fact, Old Tom, and he wished to live forever. The well extended his life, but now longs to right what it once gave, as Tom was supposed to return there and give himself to the well to end his extended life. Instead, the crafty old weasel has been routinely setting up sacrifices, gullible people that trust a friendly face enough for him to get them to drink a certain elixir... At this point, the story can take one of a few ways.You can, at an earlier time, swap the elixir, and give it to the breakout you take with you. Doing so, Tom recognizes the same evil in you that he harbors in his own breast. After hurling your hapless hobo into the well, you and Tom leave, and he promises to make your crew and ship a lively place. Just... a crewman willl go missing. Every now and then. Nothing to worry about, you both understand. This is, while more than a bit cruel (and inconvenient if you really need the hands on deck) an ending that leaves Old Tom intact, if not punished for his sins. Secondly, you may choose to overpower the old man, and hurl him into the well to make good the debt he’s owed for so long. Doing so will net you an expensive, and hard to come be resource that can be used at certain points to progress. It’s a just punishment, though it permanently removes Old Tom from the game. He won’t be joining your crew anymore, and that resource is oh-so-temporary. So... Story-wise, as good an ending as you can get. Game-wise, you want an officer. But... there is a third ending. If you do certain things for Old Tom, you ingratiate yourself to him. Enough favor given, and he hesitates to betray you. He still reveals himself, but has a change of heart. AT the last minute he pulls back, and declares that he’ll bring another sacrifice, but it won’t be you. The well responds by dragging him in. You can save him at this point, but the well inflicts a horrific punishment. His arms and legs lignify, flesh turning to bark and branch as his extremities snap off in the whipping wind. You save Old Tom, but he’s been transformed. He can’t move any longer, though he’s still a capable officer, in his own way. This is... well it’s not a good ending. It’s a horrible ending. Just when you think you’ve gotten through to the blackened heart of an old trickster, the demons he’s tricked drag him down, and he doesn’t come out the same. He’s entirely changed, and his “upgrade” is an utterly gut-wrenching depression. From that point on, you still have your officer. But the Vagabond has been Dendrified, turned to a half-tree thing that doesn’t have a lick of the charm or energy he once did. Every description of him is painful to read, because it’s so soaked in that simple information that you can see into like clear water. When you find him at stations in future, he begs you to take him on, and offers what services he can for a pitiful price. When you bring him aboard you note that the crew are wary and weirded out by him, and no one talks to him. You can visit him in the menu, for a simple interaction, just like any other officer. It’s perhaps the easiest way to make me tense up I’ve yet discovered. From what I can remember (I’m not subjecting myself to more tears by reading it in full again): “He’s grateful for visitors. He tries to tell a story, but forgets the point halfway through. He attempts a joke, but stumbles through the punchline. He tries to sing, but the notes fall flat. As the silence becomes awkward, he begs you not to leave.” That. That final line I remember the most. Horrible. Almost cataclysmic. Old Tom was not a good man. But no man deserves the complete indignity he’s suffered. Reduced to an overgrown houseplant, stuck alive and robbed of the purpose and joy he used to have in his life formerly. He’s so starved  for company, but he’s unable to even keep it anymore. I recognize that as perhaps my biggest fear. The complete nullification of the self. Old Tom will most likely live forever. But he won’t be living as he’d like. He’ll in truth barely be living at all. To put it in darkly poetic terms, he will remember just enough to know how much he has lost. That, is what you get for trying to be nice, for trying to save someone. It’s a gut punch everytime I see him again. I hire him on, every time. But I can’t bring myself to give him a job. It’s small comfort, and ultimately it is just a game. But that horrible thought, that without me he would simply be a sentient corpse adrift and alone, that tears at my heart until it’s bare. Even writing this now that feeling floats in my chest. Perhaps this is my way of letting it go once more, until I remember it again. I hope I’ve not brought you down too much. I also hope I’ve conveyed my point well enough to gift you some of my sorrow, but don’t let my dour musings overly soak your day in blues. If I would end this on my attempt at a high note, take that simple example to heart. Remember the lone person. The unapproachable. The isolated. That one melancholic figure slumped against a wall, sat on a bench, anywhere they may be. Be kind to them. Treat them with warmth. Spread your joy to your friends, so they may never know that cold and sinking feeling of loneliness. And ever more, take care.

[nimrodinked]

Tangled Storylines, Strange Dreams, and Hurting Other People

Lightning may strike twice, but the second bolt got here quite a bit later. That's mostly due to me replaying both games in timeline for hotline miami, in order to better get myself familiar with the full story. Time was I drew up a timeline of the first hotline miami on a ragged sheet of paper, just to organize everything that occured. With the advent of Wrong Number, I think I'll need more than just one paper. Hotline 2 is, to say the least, an ambitious new direction from the first. In the OG, you play as Jacket, a nameless, speechless man with, as far as the first game lets on, no past and no future. I'll slice through a lot of the murk the first game intentionally puts in it's game, but I do like the game enough to have sussed these details out, so do check it out if you've got any inkling for top-down, fast-paced beat-em-ups with throbbing soundtracks and chunky pixelated violence. In no uncertain terms, you play Jacket, living through his life from the moment he was first introduced to the organization '50 Blessings' to the end of his essential journey. things rapidly deteriorate in game, with jacket seeing visions of those he's killed, along with a mysterious man that keeps getting closer to him. Eventually it's revealed that the game up to the current point has been a fever-dream, while Jacket languished in bed, comatose from a bullet wound given to him by the mysterious man in his dreams. At that point you mobilize, escape the hospital, and try to make sense of everything. The game ends with you storming the mafia's headquarters, killing the leadership, and walking onto a balcony at the russian mob estate. Jacket lights up a cigarette, contemplates a photo too small to see, and tosses it to the wind. end credits, done, bam.

If that isn't enough closure for you, you can collect small letter tiles from each level, and play the few ending levels as the biker, a rogue agent for '50 Blessings' that wants to get to the bottom of things with the strange phone calls. Considering this character was killed by Jacket earlier in the game, I consider all of this to be a figuring out of what's going on, speculative fiction on the games part. it does give you a clear picture, if you've been paying attention. You can actually collect a tiny purple letter tile from each of jackets levels, collecting them all unlocks a puzzle mode to figure out the password for a computer in the final level. Solving it allows the Biker to unlock a computer used by the two masterminds of the 50 Blessings organization, and figure out their aim. at this point, it's quite the simple tale. The two have been orchestrating the entire vigilante masked group, contracting individuals that didn't take their offer seriously or those, like the Biker, bored enough to want a change to their lives. All this was done in service to their goals, which are pretty simple: racism. In this case, a specific disdain for russian immigrants, deemed 'enemies from within' by the pair. After the explanation the Biker remarks that he's heard just about enough, hacking the duo to bits and driving off into the desert. Real End! Well, fake end, but full story ending.

So, all simple, a nice bow on it and wash your hands of the whole experience. Right? Well yes, though Wrong Number is heavily affected by the first game, and with the litany of other characters joining the narrative, story threads will get a bit... tangled. Don't worry, if you want the full, clear as I can understand story, I'll give it to you. Let's crack on then, shall we?

The game takes place, partly anyway, after the end of Jacket's rampage, where he is being put on trial for what he's done. Our story begins at the filming of a movie called "Midnight Animal", which is shamelessly stealing the real-world Jacket killings and turning it into an exploitative B movie. You're controlling an accomplished actor in the lead role, sporting a pig mask for the role and serving as the tutorial. He's introduced fairly early on, with his story concluded just as fast. (To make things easy and where possible I'll try to fully talk about each character, but keep in mind the game often has you swap for each level, and things can get quite confusing). The actor, Martin, finishes the tutorial with a (should you choose to see it) several second rape scene with the girlfriend character from Jackets real life. The scene ends, and the director tells both actors to play it up more. More violent and brutal for Martin, more feminine and helpless for the girl. It's a pretty on-the-nose bastardization of Jackets life, portraying him as a slovenly, overweight, and psychotic serial killer, with a sick fascination to a woman that he keeps around basically for sex. Contrasting that to Jacket, a misguided, even conflicted character who saved a woman from, ironically, a scummy hollywood movie maker. It's blatant, and establishes a common theme throughout the game; that no one really understands Jacket. people idolize or demonize him, wonder about why he did what he did, but he's only ever understood at all by the same man from game one, the kindly convenience store owner with dreadlock-like messy red hair. Anyhow, onto Martin's conclusion.

Hello again. My, it’s remarkable how much my motivation is murdered by the words resetting. In any case, however, I won’t dwell on it. Instead, I’ll change course. I had pretty much the entire game mapped out for anyone that wanted to read it, but I noticed that, through my musings, a lot of what I was saying sounded exactly the same. Because, I mean, really it is. Hotline Miami 2 is the end. The team who made it made that clear, and it’s sad in a big way. To sum up, through actions taken by extremists, the same extremists from 50 Blessings in the first game, the president of both America and Russia are assassinated while in a peace talk in Florida. As a result, Russia mobilizes to war, and nukes the states. The credits roll, as the few remaining characters who escaped death so far are vaporized in place. It’s a somber ending, and if you beat the game on hard, the only addition is a patriotic hymn about going to fight and die for the flag. Poignant, and simple really. It’s obvious through most of the game that the cycle of violence can’t be maintained. Most of the playable cast dies when pursuing that heady rush that they imagine Jacket felt, hurling themselves into Death’s jaws, while saying that they just don’t understand what Richard is telling them. That, Richard, is where I’d like to bring this home. Richard, the name for the chicken mask, the sentient dream-entity that speaks to almost all of the cast at some point and foretells their deaths. At first it appears that he’s just the thread that holds these stories together, a sort of narrator to drive us through this maze, but that all changes when you start a new game on hard mode. A special, before-game cutscene plays, featuring every member of the playable cast sitting around a table, with Richard placed at it’s head. They all declare, again, that they don’t know what’s happening, they don’t know Richard, and most seem convinced that they’re in some kind of dream. Then, as they all speak up, they die. One by one, starting with the least aware characters. Jake the snake, Martin the pig, all of the fans (it’s the last survivor Tony that speaks for the group) and the Son don’t really get anywhere talking to Richard. The latter few get some cryptic answers, and soon enough it’s just Richard and the fan-named character Beard. He’s the convenience store owner from game one, Jacket’s friend, and as you see in this second installment, he saves the former’s life in war, probably why they’re so close. Here is where things fall into place for me, and I’ll do my best to lay out why. So, I firmly believe that Richard, as close as one can be, is a stand-in for the player. He’s not called Jacket, the person we played, who is in the game world, but he is called the mask, the very first one that we meet in the first game. That game also featured him talking to the player, but here things seem much more tilted. He tells the Writer, someone who spends their story searching for deeper connections and meaning behind the Jacket killings, that he “Is the opposite of why you’re writing your book. I am something you will never understand.” Which, as far as I’m concerned, scores points for what the average player would probably think. After all, barring the ending that explains what’s going on to you in 1, you are simply drifting along, clueless and happy to kill, happy to hurt other people. The anti-thesis of a motive, a Mike Myers-esque killer that does what he does for no reason that can be understood. Another big tip in favor of my theory is Richard’s response to the Detective. He tells him that he doesn’t get him, and doesn’t understand why he does what he does. the Detective is belligerent, feeling like he can action-star himself out of the situation. It’s shown that he has movie-cop delusions, trying to talk suave to the ladies and going rambo on criminals with ridiculous odds. I mean the guy clears an entire dock-full of drug-runners with automatic weapons, single-handedly. It’s a little nuts. Anyhow, I don’t get the Detective really, it’s never really touched on about why he has the action hero complex he does, but I think Richard sharing in my confusion is a pretty compelling point towards him being a player surrogate. Finally, there’s Beard. They’re left alone, and Beard speaks up, asking Richard if they’ve met before. Richard says they have, and thanks him for remembering. Then, he apologizes to Beard, saying he knows the guy didn’t ask to be caught up in all of this. He wishes that they could have met under better circumstances. Beard agrees, and fades away, replaced with the irradiated skeleton he becomes by the story’s end. Richard flips on a projector, and the first level, all of which are shown as VHS boxes, starts up, back in the game in the eyes of a movie villain.It’s perfect, an exact expression of what I might say in the situation. Beard, the ever-friendly face from the first game, one of the only survivors from his unit. The man who’s dream was to open a convenience store, sit there all day, and relax. The man who saves Jacket’s life before the first game even takes place! He’s the most innocent in the game’s universe, insofar as the people he’s killed are at least in a war. That’s just the bitter sadness of it all, is that Beard can’t survive anymore than the rest of them can. The only one that survives it all is Richard, turning on the movie projector and playing the game again to see the characters as they are, on the road to their end. In a sort of way, it makes the meta-story evergreen, as it’s in part about how all of the players, besides Richard, are trapped in this loop of death, and we are just left to sit back and watch the madness all unfold over again. I like this game, a lot. Might even love it, and seeing the real ending, it’s hard to feel anything but empty. Everyone I know is gone, obliterated in a nuclear blast that leaves no room for sequels. It reminds me of the old press releases from when 2 was coming out, about the minor controversy with the rape scene in the intro, and about how, rather than showing their game at E3, the team showcased across the street in a van done up to look like the Fan’s own vehicle. And in a way, their actions there resonate with the game’s ending too. They could keep the sequels coming, just like they probably could have gotten a booth and showed off what they made on the floor. But, that isn’t Hotline Miami. If they had done anything different, I don’t think I’d love it as much as I do. That’s all. If you’ve been looking forward to this edit, I’m sorry it took so long. Thanks for sticking with me, I’ll see you when I see you.

[nimrodinked]

On Lighthouses, and Living Conditions Under Them

Another bolt of inspiration has struck me, and this time it’s in the forked form of two games. For this one, I’ll be talking about No One Lives Under the Lighthouse. It’s a lovely little horror game, simple and effective in what it sets out to do. I’ll tell you right now you should enjoy the game for yourself first, but at the self-same time I realize I never follow those warnings so, heed my advice or don’t, I’ll still go over the title.

No One Lives Under the Lighthouse, or Lighthouse for short, tells the small and simple story about a new lighthouse keeper arriving to their new charge, being left to your devices for a full week before the man who dropped you off returns with supplies and an aide. Things don’t take too long to get scary, and the game quickly lets you know that you aren’t truly alone on the island. Day by day (and there’s only a week to get through) things become more and more worrisome, aided by a wonderfully blended soundtrack that weaves in and out of silence, cutting in with sharp and rather spine-tingling interludes. It’s effective because of the simplicity involved. All you have to do is light the lighthouse every night, but that goal is difficult and uncomfortable to accomplish in new and upsetting ways. It isn’t long before you find yourself going under the lighthouse and delving into a cult temple, brimming with unnerving imagery of moths and draped spires, crawling horrors stalking the halls. The game quickly goes off of the established rails, and you go from lighting a large oil lamp on an island to out-maneuvering devil creatures that skitter and consorting with fever-dream entities. Honestly, hearing what the old endings were kind of makes things even less clear, but I do think I have what I believe happened sorted out. This is taken as best as it can be from the games cryptic and unclear storytelling, but the setting, atmosphere, the whole game enraptured me regardless, so I feel that it’s only fair I should try to make sense of something I like. So, starting from the top:

I believe that the initial setup of a new keeper coming to the lighthouse to be entirely false. Ala Hotline Miami, a good portion of game from the start appears to be a false start, set up to pay off later on in the story. I think this because, either way you choose, you end up inside a church at the end of the game, and an entity inside informs you that you’ve been stuck in this cycle for some time, and you cannot simply kill your demons and rebel, you have to learn of what you’ve done, and learn to move past it. This makes a lot more sense for me, because my first time playing I got the ending of wrath, killing an entity in the bowels of the occultic temple I had fallen into, only to find that, for some reason involving my (the character)’s son, the keeper seems to have gone mad, cutting to images of the various former townspeople on the island slaughtered at different places. The game then shows the keeper’s reflection, and a new, more sinister model overtakes their reflection through the wall. That is, I am near positive, a manifestation of the old keeper before he became so elderly, and, building off of the fact that he seems to quite enjoy the drink, his red, swollen looking face would match up with that of an enraged drunkard. So, erupting into anger at the death of his son, the keeper slaughters the other people of his small island town, and I sort of think that’s real. It’s a bit hard to tell whether that too is a facet of his torture or a consequence of his son’s dying. In either case, That ending shows what I think is the typical “struggle to survive, when the threat you’re facing isn’t what you think.” As for the road less traveled, when you’re in the final arena fighting the monster, you can, instead, jump into the pit from the center to see another side of things. Those things show you transforming into the monster, accompanied by you rowing away as the boatman, dropping off the new keeper. Things get twisted. That further lends credence to the “fever dream” aspect of things, as the next areas see you playing as the monster for various sections of the game where you were the keeper. Inter-spliced, you see the keeper wandering the isle, and you, newly turned into the monster roaming the island and killing villagers. It’s a bit messier, but you do get dialogue that the townsfolk seem to know that you as the drunk keeper are wandering the island, and you are refusing to actually take account for your sons death. The game makes it seem a bit as if the villagers did something to your son, but, seeing as these sections in past are at least chronological for themselves, I don’t think that’s right. Insofar as I can tell, the past sections start with the old keeper being told that the new keeper hasn’t lit the tower, and you go to check on them. you go into the basement room, pick up a lantern, and upon trying to exit, your light goes out. You turn and the shadow of a keeper is there, the self-same shadow that appears whenever you go into the basement of the lighthouse before day 4. Now, that, on top of the fact that the keeper drinks, and has a shotgun in his trunk, I think lend pretty good credence to him having an accident and killing his son. The next past sequence there’s much more booze, and when you look outside the lighthouse the town is having a funeral, most likely for your son, and the various people around keep quoting bible passages and religious platitudes to you. The third past sequence has the lighthouse covered in booze bottles, and you go to the basement, only to pass out in front of the door, short of going inside. As far as the monster side of things go, we get to see more of the old keeper, seeing him feverishly pounding on doors of the villagers, asking where his son is, only for them to knock him out and return him to “the sanctuary” so he can “remember what he came here to do”. These are all pretty big hints that, although the events of these past flashbacks likely did happen, and the keeper did eventually kill the villagers in a stupor of drunken rage, the words repeated are clearly more reminiscent of the entity in the church at the end. In fact I think that’s what they’re referring to when the townsfolk say they’re returning you to the sanctuary to remember, you’ve failed to come to terms with what you did, and are blaming the villagers for the death of your son (who you most likely killed accidentally). There’s a large portion of achievements to get in the game, all of them telling a vague story of the events on the lighthouse island, that don’t really lend a lot of insight to what’s going on, but serve as a sort of narration as you progress through the real story. Should you get a certain number of these achievements, ones that are all related to experiencing both sides of the story, you find that there’s a trap door in the back of the small church, and exiting it, you find yourself awakening in the basement of the lighthouse, with the body of presumably your son there, in a pool of hardened blood. From there you can see that the keeper has been living under the lighthouse, in the room before the basement where his son rests, and the final sequence has you taking his skeleton, burying it, and rowing away from the island. That’s pretty much a rock soild way of saying the character has moved on, and dealt with the trauma of their dead son. The achievements are all major arcana, and each one forms some of a sign, when strung together, they read:

“You’ve picked the wrong target. You’ve followed the false sign, You’ve performed the ceremony. You’ve proved your courage. As expected, you’ve kept your domain clean. You knew that faith will guide and protect you. When it called for you, you’ve answered. You went through the dangers. And if you could not - you’ve still held the urge. You’ve found the shelter where no one could. And yet both your fortune and doom are your own achievement. You’ve listened to no warnings. Then, your fate was revealed. Sometimes there’s only one way to get away from the darkness. Yet you were patient to continue your search. Once fallen, you would not allow another to fall. From day to day, you’ve fought the silence in the tower. Then came a sign brought through a blurry vision. You thought you’ve lost the way. But your inner light is enough. Now, when you’ve accepted the burden. The isolation ended. Now, you rest in peace.” Now, seeing how a major part of these achievements are gotten in what I determined to be a trial within the keeper’s own imagination, there isn’t a tremendous amount I can draw portent from. I can tentatively say that the first two phrases, “You’ve picked the wrong target. You’ve followed the false sign”, are important, mainly I think because they’re the achievements for shooting the seagull, and for getting the gun respectively. There’s a lot of imagery of seagulls abounding in the game, they gather and flock to certain places, during one day there are piles of dead ones buried on the island, and when you finally leave the island, one briefly lands on your boat to regard you. I say it’s tentative because there isn’t a whole lot to connect them, but it seems to me that the gulls are representative of the people that used to be on the island, seeing how on day three a large number are killed and buried by the monster that you later play as, perhaps a metaphor for the keeper killing the island village once he snapped. If they are representative of the people, then by “following the false sign” and picking up the gun, then “choosing the wrong target” would be firing on and killing the bird. Like I said I’m working with what I have here, so there isn’t always going to be ironclad connections, but based on what I’ve seen it could very well work. Anyhow, the easiest conclusions to draw are the final passages. “Now, when you’ve accepted the burden. The isolation ended. Now, you rest in peace.” These are all the achievements you get when you reach the end of the game, bury your son, and leave the island for good, the final being the “get all achievements” achievement that ties things together. It’s a bitter-sweet ending all in all. I had a wonderful time playing the game, even though while you’re playing a game that scares you you aren’t having a good time, afterwards you do think on it fondly. On top of the great gameplay, the more I peel back the layers on what I think of the story the more I like it, a process which I often do to better understand media, and the self-same process that usually determines what I want to do for scripts. I think I’d prefer just to talk about this one in written form because, all told the game is about an hour, though when really experiencing it it tends to be much slower. I know I’m repeating myself, but you really should check it out if you’re at all interested, and hopefully my lighthouse ramblings will sort of make sense to you when you finish, though feel free to scheme up your own story you think fits better. Thank you for reading.

[nimrodinked]

On MMO's, and Making the Player Matter

I have always liked the concept of an MMO. Having slow, but constant progress on a single character as they journey through the world, taking quests and slaying enemies from 1-5 for glory and fortune. The problem I had found for the longest time was staying invested for long periods of time. True, many MMO games boast a litany of opportunities to get yourself lost in the world, but of all the ones I've played, FFXIV has kept me the longest with it's content. I confess that I played plenty of old-school WoW, tried ever other free MMO I could get my hands on, and still found myself only really drawn back to Final Fantasy. It's a unique blend really, with simple (by MMO standards) class designs that forgo over-complications and far, far too many skills and spells to use for smaller wheels of abilities, augmented with a job-unique gauge to manage on top. This shifts gameplay from mindlessly hurling damage into the opponents face to a more streamlined, easier to comprehend system. That is to say, unlike playing WoW, where my poor goblinoid brain was overloaded by the sheer amount of Rogue damage buttons to press, FF keeps me engaged without overloading on which button to press in my 54-button combo. Not to mention that you can simply swap classes (outside of instanced dungeons) anytime you feel the urge, and I've taken that liberty quite often, rolling over to Dancer and Machinist for fun before rotating back to my tried and true Black Mage. Freedom of movement is quite liberating, and FF doesn't stop at classes for that, allowing instantaneous travel from any point in the world to any crystal station you've visited already, in addition to having a dedicated teleport location you can return to on cooldown, a la WoW's hearthstone. On top of that is the regular flying mounts, though FF gets a leg up once more because any and every mount I've come across has been flight-capable, even if it's a bit ridiculous for a behemoth to ascend to the air by clawing through nothing. This is bit of an exhaustive list so, suffice it to say that FF has quite a bit going for it that makes me keep coming back.

Beyond the gameplay however, Final Fantasy XIV actually reels you in with the story. I was frankly surprised when, after giving the game up for an extended period of years, I came back and pretty much remembered everything that had occured in the story to that point. The story quests are memorable, but beyond just being good writing they pretty frequently move into cutscenes, where it becomes quite a bit more difficult to just skip through the dialogue. Sure, I will admit that I skip some dialogue from lesser engaging story beats, but given a cutscene, I generally try to pay attention, and have found that I actually quite enjoy the events unfolding before me. I know the characters, their stances on certain topics, their job class, hell I remember Thancred's embarrassing tidbit of being a former street-prowling scoundrel, as little as that affects the major story. That's a testament to just how engaging everything is, and the cutscenes, voiced or not immensely help with that. What I find even better, and what's becoming even more prevalent in later story beats, your character is an active and important character in the story. You really feel like you, as the character in game, affect the story and have an emotional impact on those around you. Hell, I was nearly brought to tears seeing one of the major characters of the current arc killed off, due in no small part to how well the cutscene was executed. It's all got such a loving craft to it, and judging by some of the more colorful and wacky sidequests featuring a quirky inspector, someone is really enjoying the effort and time they're putting into the game. The end of the main content also caps off with a 47 minute cutscene that gripped me the whole way through, text-auto scroll making it feel more like an anime episode than a game.

I'm certain the game isn't for everyone. Not everyone likes the MMO genre, and differences do make for a spice of entertainment in life. I'm also certain, however, that the game is crafted from the ground up with care, and if you give it a chance it may just capture your interest. I mean really, the most popular meme from the game is just a homestuck-esque copypasta imploring the reader to try "Critically acclaimed MMO FFXIV now with free content up to level 60 including heavensward expansion" which, honestly is an amazing deal meme aside. So, to anyone out there that wants to dip their toe in, to the WoW fanatic on exodus, the newbie without a clue about keybinds, to anyone that wants to see what the fuss is, check it out. That's all from me, I've got a player market to flood with cheaply-produced high value player weapons. Ciao!

[nimrodinked]

The Chill of Home, Imperfect as it Is

With the season finally bringing snow to my area, I've been thinking, more prevalently than usual, about an old title I used to play back when you had to buy it. A game about brothers in the old times, fighting in the canadian wilderness to protect their sister. It's called Sangfroid: Tales of Werewolves, a game about setup and execution where you lay traps and defenses for the night of unholy terrors ahead, and beat the ever-loving hell out of all manner of folklore creatures, from werewolves to wendigos.

I don't think I'll be talking much on the story, it's very straightforward with a twist at the end that, to my knowledge, never led to a sequel. Instead I think it'd be quite a bit more enjoyable to talk about actual gameplay, one of the many aspects I think this game shines in. It is, all in all, a fairly simple affair, having a basic attack string and a special 'rage' attack to unleash once you've caused enough damage. In addition, the player, whoever they pick as their protagonist, has a rifle with a simple aided aiming system that both makes shots forgiving, and rewards accuracy with higher damage on properly aimed headshots. That's the extent of the fighting proper, but the game is about more than brawling with wolfmen in the woods. You get a preparation time before nightfall, getting exact information on waves and pathing so you can lay traps in the way of enemies. Your tools expand as you play, starting with simple bear traps and hanging rockfalls, building up to auto-attacking sacred trees and sniper crows nests allowing you to zipline quickly across the map. It all gets quite hectic, and the game shines quite nicely, especially on hard mode, which in itself is a welcome little change.

Rather than having a static character and scaling difficulty, players choose either easy or hard mode at the beginning of the game. A rather entertaining lore twist, 'easy' mode sees you playing as Jos, the younger brother blessed with a freakishly large build and Paul Bunyon-esque endurance. He's built like a truck and hits just as hard, capable of easily tangling toe-to-toe with werewolves and tougher enemies solo, freeing up more time in preparation mode to make money with log-cutting and spend on bought traps like black powder barrels. The harder mode sees you playing Jacques, the older of the two brothers and all around adventurous mountain man, now retired to a quiet life in the countryside at his log cabin. Jacques isn't blessed with his brothers strength, meaning while he can, if cleverly executed, kill a werewolf one to one, the encounter will eave most damaged and out of stamina for the next fight. So naturally, Jacques requires players to plan more carefully and set up a plan that will ideally be executed without an axe swung at an enemy, baiting groups of rabid wolves into spike pits and bear trapping Maikan shapeshifters under hanging rocks to crush them. Jacques makes you engage the game on a smarter level, forcing you to make elaborate plans and backups, rather than just wading thigh-deep into furry growling monsters.

With the constant evolving of traps usable, the expanding list of foes and their unique abilities, upgrading your gear and balancing out having holy armaments for unholy killing and silver for Maikan slaying, not to mention the skill upgrade system that augments your traps and combat abilities, not to mention that, to add additional difficulty, the area you have to protect gets larger and more difficult to traverse, it's a canadian sledload of tools and challenges to test your mettle. Not to mention the final boss, which, without spoilers, is magically hidden from sight and requires you to use every trick up your sleeve to triumph.

Gameplay isn't the only thing that makes me love this game, in fact there's not much I really dislike about my experience going back. The voice acting is, while at times a little on the corny side, in major part believable and enjoyable. The character models are a bit odd at times, though it's mostly the underused shopkeepers that look the most like unfinished models. Jos, Jacques, and their little sister all look very nice, and even the rather hellish model of the Devil (yes he shows up, rather immediately in the story in fact) looks good enough to pass. It's a shame then that there's a few 'off' bits in the game, mainly the axe models. The axes themselves lok very nice, but they're quite upscaled, to the point that the head is larger than the character models own noggin. That, and the character portrait for Jacques. I don't know who drew it, but I'd very much like to hunt them down and ask them why they think single-fire muskets possessed ACOG sniper scopes back in the day. Silly things, nitpicks really, and I only point them out because they're generally the exception to an otherwise fantastic direction.

Topping all of this off, the music. My word, the music. Exactly the kind of high-pulse, frenetic canadian pieces you'd expect of the locale, with musical stings to alert you when enemies have caught your scent or a new wave is spawning. Coupled with softer, more somber pieces during daytime shopping and planning, it's all a great accompaniment to your brawling and scheming. So, the game's great, what's the catch, where does it get awful or fall flat? Well, nowhere so grevious, though I do have a single major issue with how things are paced. Mainly the tutorials. They're very helpful if you haven't played the game before, but for me, who only really needed a touch-up on knowledge, the agonizing slowness of every new mechanic does grate, if only a bit. That's only for repeat players mind you, it was as I recall a lovely little learning experience seeing the videos drop down and a friendly, Gabe Newell-esque man teach me the intricacies of the wall of flames.

So, Sangfroid, a game I love, and started playing again. It's got a lot of love poured into it, has a satisfying gameplay loop that'll always keep you wanting to move one day further, and, best of all, as far as I've seen, it's free on steam. It went free to play a long while ago, and seeing how they didn't add any micro-pay oddities into the formula, I think this is a case of the dev team wanting to get their labor of love out to all the people they could, a notion which, if true, would be a nice sentiment. As far as I know they've made one other game, but seeing how Sangfroid is literally a free to play gem of fun gameplay and simple but effective narrative, they're a highly ranked studio. In my eyes anyhow. So, check it out, you've nothing to lose but time, a resource I'm sure many of us find we have much more of nowadays. Thanks for reading, and wrap up warmly; the forests are a cold place.

[nimrodinked]

Busying Oneself with Nothing

Cryptic title, I’m aware, so before you speculate I’ll just say that this is going to be me talking about the newest animal crossing game, my experience with it, and why I’ve found myself playing a lot more of another game with similarly unimposing gameplay. To start out, I bought animal crossing on release, and enjoyed it quite a bit from day of playing. Not too long after, the whole quarantine kicked into full gear, and I found myself engrossed in the gameplay entirely. I was hooked for quite a long time until fairly recently, when I dropped off entirely. I was, unsurprisingly, bored with the fairly monotonous grind of doing absolutely nothing day in and day out. After the final skyrocketted price of my home loan, there wasn’t really anything for me to work towards, and after cosmetic workings I eventually simply petered out to boredom. Now move to about a week ago, when I began to again play a game I had gotten quite long ago, by the name of Staxel. Similar to animal crossing in that there isn’t a mountain of objectives and achievements, but unlike it in that, well, there’s quite a bit more structured to actually work on. Both games take place on an island, though Staxel begins with a modest assortment of buildings already constructed. That’s about where the similarities end. Though you can catch bugs and fish like in animal crossing, and you have new villagers come to your town, these elements all feel distinctly different in Staxel. For example, the pool of residents is much smaller, but they all have their own actual personalities. Not to knock Pietro, Olaf, and every other performer-type poke-villager, but they all feel quite samey, probably because they do all have the same lines. Every villager in Staxel has their own personality, be that the town carpenter, the mayor, or the fishing enthusiast. They all have more to their stories than says on the tin, and you can sometimes receive quests for them that expand on their stories. For example, Riah, the cat-like villager that is characterised by her love of fishing, revealed that, while she does fish quite a lot, she isn’t really a major enthusiast. The real reason she fishes so much is that her estranged family is full of fisherman, and, rather than send her standard postage letters, they ship their missives to their sister off in bottles for her to catch. That’s already a lot more than any of the villagers (excluding the island staff) have for personalities, and that’s one villager of the about 6 I have moving around my village on any given day. On top of the villager interactions, this game charges you not with just living your life, but rather running a farm given to you by a relative. This gives a lot more direction to me, as I have a concrete list of things to do in a day before I go off and explore or do village quests. while it isn’t necessary, you can keep chickens, cows, pigs, sheep, and bees, not to mention all the crops that require your attention for watering and harvesting. So what, right? So there’s more to do in Staxel, that doesn’t mean AC is bad right? Well no, it isn’t bad, and I’m certain plenty of people are still playing the game and will for a long time. But for someone like me, that still yearns for the experience of playing the old harvest moon games, a game like Staxel is a lot deeper of an experience. I’m responsible for every new member of my village getting a house, and I have to build that house from scratch within a certain limit of blocks (think minecraft block building, with a voxel style for most of the models that aren’t blocks). On top of that, I’m the one that helps these villagers out when they need my help, whether it be with menial daily fetch quests they might have, or something to progress their story further. I’m the architect of the island, and I have full control without waiting days for the deconstruction of an old staircase so that I can free up a slot for a new one. And to me, having all that extra control makes Staxel a whole lot more engaging and long-lasting than Animal Crossing.

[nimrodinked]

The Revolver’s Click, and Warmth

Recently, in order to re-immerse myself and prepare for an (eventual) speedrun of the game, I played DEADBOLT. If you’ve played Risk of Rain 2, or even the original Risk of Rain you might know DEADBOLT as the sort of in-between game that Hopoo studios made after their original hit. Quite the departure from what was first made, DEADBOLT gives you control of a stealth and action-based gameplay loop while trickling in information about what exactly you’re really doing level to level. It’s not immensely hard to get at first but, there is quite a bit hidden behind conjecture, as seems to be the studio trademark. Someone at that studio for certain really enjoys sprinkling in lore to their game. In this case, the background information pertains to who exactly your main villain is. Named Ibzan, and leading the last group of damned undead, his ultimate plot is revealed near the final level. He wishes to cut through the purgatory home he and his bone-clad brothers suffer in, and return to a place of warmth. That place turns out to be the realm of your employer, a candle-lit Deity referred to as the “God of Life”. Now to easily summarize what I’ve slowly but surely come to know as canon, Ibzan is, or rather was, an employee of the god. His status as a reaper can be pretty much deemed certain considering his home contains a blocked-off fireplace, a fixture through which the main character contacts his employer, as well as his possession of an old, and broken lighter, which the player uses to transform to a cloud of smoke and enter vents. As well as these items he wields a revolver much like the player, and is the only entity in game other than the player to bleed pure black. Now, considering the skeletons have been deemed unworthy of truly passing on for their crime of suicide, it’s not that hard to realize that, wanting nothing more than an end to his agonizingly boring existence, Ibzan took his own life, realizing too late that such an action dooms him to his purgatory forever. Rather sad. What’s sadder is, while Ibzan is most certainly hostile to the player, and musters quite the burden of forces against them, he seems to harbor no ill will towards his former employer. During your final battle with him he’ll at first make comments jeering at you, becoming increasingly frustrated as you deter him further. “I’m not here for you, reaper.” and “Let me pass.” Are particular stand-out phrases. Unfortunately for Ibzan, the God of Life isn’t a forgiving sort, and tells the player upon their arrival to his house that “(Ibzan) cannot be free, I cannot forgive. A man... undead, cannot live with me.” So sad, too bad it seems. It is, even if inevitable, depressing to see the man who’s only real goal is to return to the warmth he once loved be denied that by that same warmth. Upon his defeat, he always appears at the front of the stage, on his knees and holding a revolver. With only one shot left, he raises it and fires at the player. Should you somehow survive this shot, or even manage to dodge it, he will continue firing in a desperate display, trying to end you as if that will somehow get him access. Killing him will give out one of a few phrases, and while it is still sad to see him die, and some of the phrases are quite crushing, such as: “I’m sorry... friend.” He does also on occasion say a rather hopeful line. “It’s... so warm...” perhaps implying that, through his death at your hands, he is finally able to move beyond the purgatory that you as a reaper patrol. Sad, but hopeful, a glimmer that maybe he did reach his goal, and finally dying brought him to the warmth he so craved. Unfortunately, while Ibzan’s status as a reaper is rock solid and his means of death and revival are near concrete, where he, or for that matter anyone else goes when they are killed by the reaper remains in blurry question. Somewhere in the back of my heart I fervently wish that, upon finally completing the monstrous project that is Risk of Rain 2, Hopoo might return to their idea of DEADBOLT and iterate on it with a sequel. I hope, but that is no less certain than Ibzan’s move to the afterlife. Ah well, in any case I’d highly recommend DEADBOLT as an interesting Hotline Miami-styled game about going door to door and killing the undead that dare to sell drugs in your city. Thanks for reading out there.

[nimrodinked]

On Spiting God, and Platforming

It’s been many a time I’ve tried to write the words I’m now penning. Honestly I couldn’t say whether that was due to a myriad of distractions plaguing my waking hours, or a complete lack of understanding for what I really wanted to say on the subject. But, armed with my renewed lust for banging out words of barely formed coherency, here I post again.

I picked up Blasphemous on a whim, that it looked interesting enough with a neat aesthetic to really grab my interest. What I found inside the game was a world dripping with motifs and visuals I’d not really seen represented so... well, viscerally as in this game. It practically oozes a sense of old testament ‘blood and fire’ faith that enraptured me. Didn’t hurt of course that the gameplay was tight and fun as could be. What really impressed me to keep moving however, was the dazzling way in which all of the world was presented to the player. You moved through a faith-filled wasteland filled to bursting with various deformed monsters that are, apparently, what is supposed to pass for the faithful. Your journey is, as many tell you, in the service of the deity of the universe. A capricious entity that doles out boons and curses in confusing order and size. For starters, the mythos began when a young man prayed fervently for some greater power to punish him. He had apparently done great enough injustice to lust greatly for penance, and was granted it in the form of a slow and torturous transformation. He held a log in his hand, and it sprung forth into a tree, growing about his limbs and constricting them in painful lashings, but the youth did not utter a single cry. The visual certainly sends chills doesn’t it? Maybe it’s because it’s such a fresh and untouched platform, but the game positively captivated me to see each new room and snag of lore. Every boss had a story about them, every back passage hid hymns of great sorrow. In one corner of the world I met with a penitent soul who struck out his pain by walking in a prostrated pose. In another, a single devout prayed before the altar of a woman lashed with perpetual pain, praising her cries of agony as divine. It all seemed so powerful and gripping at the time, and even now, months after I finished it, the visuals and experiences are easily called to my mind, and they still bring shivers! I’ve torn the game apart and nearly fully beat it just out of a greater lust for more experience with that grotesquely beautiful world, and that’s a special feeling I’ve not really had in the same way I’ve had with Blasphemous. There’s not really much point to my ramblings as usual, other than to check out the game if you are so inclined. I do caution you that should you wish to play it, don’t look up the trailer. It ruins a surprising amount of the bossfights in it, to the point that I saw many of them coming before I even played, which is a massive shame considering how amazing they all look. So, should you be so inclined, check out Blasphemous, and should you be further inclined, read on as I try to dump these various thoughts out in a more rapid manner. Farewell

[nimrodinked]

On Bitter Cold, the Rule of Law, and An Update

Hello again, been quite a while hasn’t it? You’ll forgive the absence, I’ve been trying my best to articulate the difficulties of my now expanded script to accommodate the new section. Other than that I’ve obviously been playing other things, among them, on recommendation from a friend, Frostpunk. Previously the game and its mechanics eluded me, such to the point that I lost interest and stopped playing, but a bit of extra perseverance on my part has given me quite the interesting game to talk about.

Frostpunk is an apocalyptic building simulator, wherein the world is freezing over thanks to the sun dimming, as well as other less understood factors. You take the role of the captain of a group of refugees, and must build up a civilization that can withstand an ultimate storm coming to dunk the earth into a true new ice age. To this end you’re given control of the colony’s construction, as well as the management of laws and fulfilling promises made to your people. I won’t go into a major amount of detail about  what the game entails since that isn’t what I’d like to talk about, but rather I’d like to talk about how the game warps and twists your perspective into becoming a tyrant. After a time, your populace panics, and you must choose a new set of laws, either order or religion. I chose order for my run, and passed laws that made my people feel safe. Watchtowers and guard posts to keep the real threat of a group of dissidents from causing too much havoc in my city, when a wrong move could plunge us all into chaos and despair. However the laws begin to take steps towards controlling the populace rather than just protecting them. I moved from guards and morning meetings to propaganda centers and coerced confessions, until at last I reached the end of the law, the only logical conclusion should I continue along the path of law. Under the New Order as it was named, dissidents would be executed publicly, and all who opposed the regime would be labelled as traitors to the colony. While this undoubtedly helps you complete the game as it completely eliminates the ‘hope’ resource in favor of an always-filled bar labelled OBEDIENCE, you’re faced with the realities of working such a tyrannical system, and your issues with the people begin to take on more authoritarian tones, punishing people just for speaking out in a manner you don’t enjoy, or reading inflammatory material. True there are dire circumstances at hand but, as the game asks when you finally finish the main story; at what point do we end? what is too far? I’m fairly certain that the route I went was too far, and seeing the faith laws it seems to head the same way, which leads to an interesting conclusion. It certainly elevates this game from enjoyable colony sim to hard thinking piece on the nature of despotism, and how tyrants rise exactly as I did. Little steps into the fire as the saying goes, and I myself grew less concerned with how well my people were doing and just surviving through this great apocalypse that drove us to protect ourselves. It’s really quite something that a game can blindside you with a revelation like that at the end, or rather I should say it’s quite something that a simulator can do that. It intrigues me to play more, and makes me think that maybe if I don’t go off the deep end I can try to preserve both my peoples lives, and their free will. Then again, as with a fair few titles I’ve played of recent, maybe the true goal isn’t winning, but getting you as a player to think about what you’ve really done. As with Frostpunk, I may have survived the storm, but at what cost?

Oh, and for those still reading, I’d like you to all know that I’ve finally finished the script! The first draft that is, but nonetheless this was a big hurdle for me, and I’m happy to report that it’s finally jumped. I’ll be working more on edits and cutting what I have down to a satisfactory tight ship, before diving into the mess of video editing and combining that I haven’t done yet. I suppose it’s good to take long for one’s first video, after all I doubt I’m really letting anyone down when I’ve yet to post any content to begin with. Still, it is in development, and I’ll keep you informed as to when I make more and more progress. Thank you for reading, stay warm out there.

[nimrodinked]

Sails, and Moving Left to Right

Just a few days ago, I once more found myself paying for a strange looking indie title on nothing more than a whim. This title in particular was 'Far: Lone Sails', a game about driving an old 'okomotive' engine across a barren landscape. It was a short experience to say the least, one of the achievements is beating the game in under 99 minutes. However it did offer a lovely little experience to enjoy for the day, and sticks with me as a surprisingly good game for the time. I believe a good portion of what makes it so effective is the combining of music and backgrounds, blending to tell a sad and reverent story on the slow end of this little world. It reminds me quite a lot of Girls Last Tour, though it's obvious that the cataclysm that wrought this worlds end was much more slow and steady than a war; the apparent drying up of oceans had left a good deal of people without livelihoods or methods of sustenence, and were it not for your father figure you as the character presented might very well have perished slowly along with the rest of humanity at large. I think that the game warrants a video in it's own right, and, dependent on whether I forsee a quicker end for my first script, I might very well end up presenting this game before my first planned project, though again, we'll have to see. I might be a very good deal of the way through my first script but as is the saying, I've reached the twenty percent of writing that requires the other eighty percent of my efforts. In any case I'd encourage anyone reading this to check the game out, it's a lovely little experience to go through in a day or two, or under two hours, if you're really that daring with your gaming mindset. Regardless, thank you for reading, I'll see you all soon.

[nimrodinked]

Further Musings

Hello once again, your local blogging oathbreaker here to cut through silence once again. At first I believed that spending too much time on this page of mine would distract from my work, but having dug through this game about three to four times now, I realize it’s more the game that stops me from talking about the game, if that makes any sense. Seeing how you aren’t offered any save points, I’m pseudo-forced to take notes as I play, a system which, while not ideal, is giving me a good amount of further insight into how I want to write these scripts. Along with that, I’m cracking deeper and deeper into the lore that the game presents, and while it is a bit boggy and complex I hope to have it pounded out nice and neat before too long. After that lovely bit of brain exercise will be more analytical dissections of the game, a process I have much firmer a grip on. Expect more posts from here as I see fit, but the radio silence isn’t benefiting my process, so I might as well get some more half-formed thoughts out the gate while I work eh? Thanks for reading, stay tuned.

[nimrodinked]

An Update and a Hotrod

It’s been some time since I last posted, partly so that I could devote my creative energies to my script and partly because this blog is only really updated on those same winds of passion that sometimes overtake me. But I feel like I’d be disappointing someone out there if I didn’t make it known what was happening. I’m happy to say my script is, as I see it, a third to halfway finished. I say this not in page length but in intent as the first bit of my intended structure is complete. I say a third to a half because I’ve just finished the DLC, and was debating putting it into my script, mostly for relevance, as it seemed like a mostly unrelated side story. However, with the revelation of the final conclusion, I’m not entirely positive that the DLC needs to be included, and with it, a larger technical context of the story itself. What I have done now focuses largely on themes that can be taken from the background, and my upcoming days will be spent pounding out a comprehensive explanation of what is actually going on in the dreary world. I believe it was Lord Mandalore that gave the advice for making a first video you’re passionate about. I admit that I started out with only minor interest in this title, but having completed the DLC, which does a good deal to improve on the designs of the game, I find myself more and more invested in the completion of this project. Anyway, for the few who keep up with me, there is my process out clear in crystal. I do hope my next post will be upon video completion, though I’ve got many passing fancies to also get out of my head. Either way, keep eyes open for me, if you so wish, I will do my best.

[nimrodinked]

Trains and Apprehension

I mark this day as the one where I finally move my aspirations from the start space. I’ve got all I really need to begin what I tell myself I want to, and all that stands in my way is mental blockades. I’ll talk a little on what I want to make my first video on, because that decision is still the final nail that has driven me forward to action. For a good deal of time I have wanted to talk about something I loved and held close to me, but was paralyzed by the fear that my efforts toward such a video would be much too small in regards to how much respect and love I carry for the subject, whatever that subject was. A good afternoon was spent trying and failing to even come out with an opening line to begin, where again my nature to disassemble my own creations shewed itself in all its frustrating enormity. I felt and still feel the damnable coziness of inaction as the days roll by, and have finally resolved to no longer suffer that embrace. I decided upon spying an old game I had played through, twice only, called the Final Station. There was nothing remarkable about it but it was the kind of endeavor I enjoyed, a mysterious end of the world scenario with an even more mysterious illness, one which melted humans down from individuals to tar black zombies of various shapes and mutated sizes. It was all around short and sweet, something I liked while I played and then stopped playing, but I have nonetheless decided upon making my first video about that. I can only hope that I will be able to begrudgingly accept the final project I craft, and watch it without the intense desire to press a delete button. So, to any listening to these ravings, eyes and ears up, with any luck I’ll have something to show for besides my pages of musings.

[nimrodinked]

Rainbow Six Siege, and Rolling Blackouts

I play a bit of Rainbow Six Siege from time to time, mostly with friends, as I don't enjoy the game enough for long solo sessions. I have found that despite the interesting cast of characters, I dislike pretty mucj every attacker in the game, and have only purchased defenders thus far. The concept of walling up a fortified position and repelling attackers pleases me much more than breach and clear gameplay. I do find it exhiliarating when I run through rooms as an attacker on occasion, but more on that later. I believe the best part of defending is the potential for ambushes around every corner. With my current favorite characters you can set down either leg traps or sonic assault drones, downing an enemy or blowing the inner ear of an unsuspecting attacker before finishing them off. I like both these options, and I mucj enjoy being in the right spot at the right time, which is most likely why I play so much with shotguns. The ambush predator is an entertaining contest to me, as it offers the challenge to me of approaching or ambushing an enemy, and to my enemy it forces them to act differently, as point blank contact with a load of buckshot rarely sees them alive afterwards. I even ambush on the heavy defenders, and have gotten several kills simply because my enemy didn't expect me to be where I was. Moving to my attacking experience, there is something intriguing about coming into a placw you aren't welcome and breaking through to your objective, but in my opinion the best and only worthwhile part of that experience is breaking their shit. That is where Thatcher comes in. He's my favorite attacker, a grumpy sounding old Brit with a fervent dislike for the technological. In line with that trait is his signature ability: an EMP grenade, capable of thwarting all electronic devices in a small aoe around it once it's tossed. I positively love this little gadget, and it makes me feel like a gleeful devil when I see the killfeed of all the devices broken by my cheeky toss. Seeing how a significant number of other operators gadgets and gizmos can be thwarted either directly or taken down temporarily by the toss of a grenade fills me with joy. In addition, according to the wiki, the grenade also disables special weapon sights, debuffing accordingly wheb it does so. Rather fitting considering in his trailer video, Thatcher does make mention of "fuckin laser sights" as a technological crutch. I really do enjoy playing the old codger, and while my defense plays will most likely be many and myriad, my attacking gameplay will undoubtedly be filled with the surly brit with a six inch blade. After all, that never loses reception.