acornerofnowhere

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It's #makeaterriblecomicday, my dudes!

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What happens when a team of precocious little sleuths solves one mystery too many, grows up and grows apart? And what happens when these noisy adolescents need to get the gang back together for one last case? Come find out in the exciting first issue of "M.O.D.S.", my new mystery adventure comic!

This handsome 32-page colour comic suitable for all ages is available to purchase via my website!

As well as ko-fi and Etsy:

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The Witcher 2: Assassins of Memory Storage.

In many ways The Witcher 2 is a quantum improvement over its predecessor - better graphics, better combat, better writing, better atmosphere, better art direction, better soundtrack, better characters - but it's still funny seeing the developers visually struggle with the hard limits of what PS360-era console hardware was capable of.

Lack of memory meant that all the fancy bells-and-whistles HD texture mapping could populate an area no larger and more complex than my back garden, which meant that despite the scope of the story being substantially greater than the first game, the actual physical size of the game world is massively smaller and less intricate, with working cities reduced to provincial villages and sprawling marshlands reduced to narrow loading-screen gulleys. You have to imagine this influenced the decision to introduce way more impactful branching paths with a totally different second half depending on your choice, described by many as effectively having two RPGs in one, but that seems less the intention and more that it was the only way to extract forty hours of content from the assets they were able to create.

I much prefer my RPG experiences to be one-and-dones, I don't do replays very often at all, but the straight shot to the end of this game was so brief that I feel I need the replay to get my money's worth out of it. But there's only so much I can complain when the story is so colossally better than CD Projekt Red's last go-round, like holy shit...

I was initially wary as I found the human/non-human conflict in the first game a bit contrived and this seemed to be treading similar ground at first (not to mention the Order was so obviously evil that you'd have to be psycho to take their side over the Scoia'tael), but it quickly becomes apparent that we're dealing with a distressed gaggle of bittereinders with no hope of victory being used as pawns in a larger game, as is their Blue Stripes counterparts hunting them to whom they're just one of a number of threats to their kingdom's security. Having an Evil Witcher as the antagonist deftly justifies Geralt's involvement in this situation involving kings, sorcerers and emperors that would normally be way above his paygrade.

Still, if there is one thing I feel the game jettisons from the books (and the first game was already hanging by a thread in this regard) is the sense that you're a glorified ratcatcher of no special importance, from jump you're immediately thrust into high-level political chicanery and the low-single-figure number of contracts you pick up in each hub are so perfunctory they may as well not be there. The elevation of book!Geralt from a passive POV to an active participant whose choices massively shape the world around him is even more pronounced in the second game than it already was in the first, in a way that makes the world feel smaller even though the cast of characters is vastly expanded and a lot more interesting.

Nuances in the dialogue, voice acting and motion performance completely absent from the first game are much more evident this time around, even in spite of the technical limitations that often lead to Triss's infamous dead-eyed stares. The only significant eurojank I encountered was an ongoing issue with accessing saves where the game would crash if I interacted with them for too long - the game is weird with saves in general, there's no way to have a dedicated "save file" and it doesn't delete old autosaves so I was constantly having to go in and delete old saves manually to avoid gumming up the hard drive. It's clear the developers really really want you to go back to earlier bits of the story and do them differently, and they built the system in such a way that makes sure you're always able to do that. Only issue is that I kinda do want to move onto the next game at some point, I hear vaguely down the grapevine that that's The Good One, but okay, I'll persevere here a little longer and see what I can make out of it.

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Webtoon is no more, long live Tapas?

I'm losing 1 year worth of effort, 1k subs and a small but dedicated group of readers whose comments I was excited to see on each new update. I'm not overly enthusiastic about Tapas either, but gotta keep the comic somewhere accessible until I get a proper own site.

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One thing that has always bothered me about Witcher 1, at least from an adaptation standpoint, Why doesn’t anyone tell Geralt about Ciri and Yennefer?

It would make sense that Triss doesn’t because she has ulterior motives, but Dandelion? Zoltan? The other Witchers?

I am wondering how they will handle this in the remake, since Ciri and Yen have become beloved and iconic characters in the game verse now having them completely absent will feel even more off than it originally did

There could be a metaphysical explanation, that their departure from this world left behind a miasma of obfuscation that clouded people's memories and rendered their existence more legend than fact. That's a bit of a copout, though. I prefer the mundane explanation that Dandelion and Zoltan could just be taking cues from this information clearly being kept from him and assuming there must be a good reason for it. The other witchers in turn are taking their cue from Triss who they reckon must be an expert on the subject.

Ultimately we're dealing with noughties video game writing here, the Doylist explanation is that no one mentions them so that the player isn't going "then where's Ciri" every five minutes. Plenty else in the story needed to be juiced through the Neverwinter Nights engine meatgrinder, since Triss has already been sanded down from a bubbly insecure collection of neuroses into...whatever the heck that thing was. Of course by extracting that foundational part of her personality, her subsequent actions look a lot more manipulative and less sympathetic to book-readers.

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Have finished the first Witcher game and realised that systemic RPGs give me anxiety.

More thoughts below the cut (spoilers ahoy):

1. It's taken until this moment for my opinion on the matter to fully crystallise but I just can't with systemic games. People look at me as if I've grown a second head whenever I say I prefer JRPGs but the appeal is very simple: A-to-B, straight line, emotional teen, magical airship adventure, kill god, bish bash bosh and you're done. I'm a doctrinaire completionist, I want to absorb everything a piece of media has to offer, complete every quest, trigger every cutscene, max every relationship, and my trouble with systemic games is that this mindset guarantees an utterly miserable time. You're supposed to go with your gut, let the chips land where they may and reconcile yourself with the game's circadian rhythms, and I'm just not built like that, it gives me anxiety that I'm missing content if I don't have a walkthrough next to me at all times, spoiling myself on every twist just to make sure I reach the point where there even is a twist.

2. There are very occasional glimmers of brilliance in the game's writing that make its frequent atonal clangers all the more inexcusable, like a drunken conversation between Geralt, Dandelion and Zoltan about what the witcher really wants out of a relationship with some genuine humour and pathos sandwiched between fetch quests that are constantly about to fall apart at the coding level. Line delivery is universally flat but that may just be the translation, and you're never sure whether the moments of levity are genuine or the result of engine limitations whacking all gravity out of a scene with a lump of plywood. You can just about spy the potential buried under layers of stitch work and technical compromise but the team's bizarre priorities make them very hard to extract.

3. I haven't investigated how involved Sapkowski was in the development of this game. I got the impression from the famous bad blood between him and CD Projekt Red that he signed off the name and pretty much left them to it, but there's various elements from the game that crop up five years later in his follow-up Witcher book Season of Storms (like the Golden Oriole elixir, the prophet Lebioda, the vodyanoi, even the ongoing sorcerer project to create "superhumans" that Sapkowski proceeds to take the piss out of), which suggests he either was involved and contributed ideas, that CD Projekt Red had access to his notes, or that Sapkowski had played the game much like everyone else and felt entitled to filch whatever he pleased as the whole shebang was ultimately his idea. We may never know.

4. The sexual escapades that Geralt IF/THEN logic puzzle's into are about as titillating as a cheese grater and I kinda love how awful they are? While he does get around a bit in the books he isn't nearly as big a man-whore as the game makes him out to be. But a larger incongruity between book!Geralt and game!Geralt is the inevitable product of being assigned the protagonist role in a tale where his decisions shape the world around him in major ways while in the books he is much more a passive observer of human behaviour and a point-of-view character for the real protagonist of the Witcher saga, Ciri. Incidentally, Yennefer and Ciri are completely absent from this game, and Triss (if you so choose) seems to take advantage of Geralt's amnesia to insert herself as the love of his life. One hopes future games will explore this tension but for now the mere existence of a personality beneath Triss's polygonal exterior requires layering a whole lot of book knowledge atop a very skeletal collection of jittering animations.

Onto The Witcher 2!

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I choose to believe The Witcher 1's eurojank and late-aughts dudebroness comes from the severe concussion Geralt suffers after the Wild Hunt spits him out.

Having bunked up on the entire Witcher book series I've finally delved into the games. And a good thing I did it in that order because a passing knowledge of the books does a lot of legwork to compensate for how the first game has aged like fine milk.

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The Lady of the Lake.

...don't look back, Ciri.

Don't look back.

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Swallow.

As in "gulp loudly."

Approaching the end run of my Witcher binge by finishing "The Tower of the Swallow", and as the slow burn pays off one striking image skates out of the page like a scarred shadow in the mist.

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Baptism of Croutons.

Just marked off the third part of the Witcher saga, "Baptism of Fire", an odd duck of a middle chapter nonetheless stuffed with moments of surprising levity amidst all the blood and carnage.

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The Heavy Mantle of True Neutrality.

Reached the halfway point of the Witcher series, "Time of Contempt", exemplified by a tired old grouch's quest to scoff as many vol-au-vents as he can before his hosts murder each other.

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It takes a village.

Continuing my tour of the Witcher series with "Blood of Elves", a book that's 100% setup, but Ciri bouncing between wildly different role models takes up a delightfully large portion.

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Brushed off the second collection of Witcher stories ("The Sword of Destiny") last night, and this seems to sum up Geralt and Yennefer's relationship. Am I warm?

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The totality of my exposure to the Witcher series has been listening to the game OSTs a bunch, so I thought I'd rectify that by going back to the beginning with the first short story collection, "The Last Wish".

Props to the translator, it was a fun read! It's been a while since I consumed a book in a day, I'd forgotten I was able to do that. I love how the framing device is Geralt being relentlessly nannied by a priestess.

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~LOYALTY! UNITY! LIBERTYYY!~

I'm coming to the end of my alt character's playthrough of Stormblood, and having depicted No'zaya's and Rain's adventures through ARR and Heavensward, I wanted to give this chapter a proper sendoff. Because this expansion slaps and I'm tired of pretending it doesn't.

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Chapter Seven of "String", an urban fantasy webcomic, is complete! Look forward to Chapter Eight, coming 2025!

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In today's update of "String", an urban fantasy webcomic, we wrap up with a glimpse of our heroes' next destination!