#I'm still doing the evil art challenge it's just this comic came to me in a vision this morning

[vaxxman]

"STOP TAKING THE HEALTH KITS"

He ubered the scout after this.

Additional sketches and some ramblings under the cut.

This is based on an encounter I had the other day, when a demoman took a medkit before my medigun connected with him. When he saw my health was down to 21, he would force me to stand at the spawn point and guarded me until I was healed. Wherever you are now, if you read this, you were a good lad and I love you.

Sometimes I think about how medic is emotionally very invested in the missions (which shows in his voice when he shouts at his team), but off-duty and during friendly taunts he seems to be among the most giggly, and fun-loving mercenaries in the team. I like to think he can get agitated very fast, but cools down just as quickly.

[scaphismpriest]

which of your comics/fanfics did you have the most and least fun writing and if it's okay to ask, why?

If I had to rate them from most fun to least fun this is how I would rate my II fanfics/comics/AU series 1. Liminal Insanity: Revival 2. Paint Cans 3. Thy Evil 4. Haunting Relapse 5. Liminal Insanity 5. Yang's Trial I would say the most fun I've had writing is Liminal Insanity: Revival, which I'm currently working on, its been super fun to make horror series alot like Paint Cans but in an ARG survival setting where it merges existential horror and infection horror, It's still a work in progress and I've been having alot of fun coming up with all these spins on it. Paint Cans is what got me into writing more, since it's a year old I've learned ALOT from it that I can do better, I kinda didn't really mean for the series to get big as it is now since it was a challenge for myself to write how to portray downwards sprials better since Paint Cans merely happened because I was annoyed with how other II darkfics portrayed the villain with no reason or motivation or just made them purely evil out of nowhere, I also wanted to try to write a villain you could sympathize with, making the art scenes was really fun! Thy Evil has been something I've been working on that's been on the back burner for awhile, I want the story to be sort of epic moralistic thing, I have alot of fun ideas for it and the one-shots are clearly prototypes for now and not really canon for TE, I dont really got the time to actually focus on it now but when I get the time I'll develop it into an actual series! Ohhh boy, Haunting Relapse, I think after Paint Cans I could outdo myself, and I did for sure, but I had set such high expectations for myself into trying to perfect things which had caused me to stress out over it which I shouldn't have done. It was awesome to write some things like Knife's dream, OJ's hallucination, Origami's appearance etc, but other than that I had less control over writing some things because of my co-writer which shout out to him for fixing pacing and writing. I think I can say that Liminal Insanity is just Liminal Insanity: Revival, but less fun and more goofy and cartoonish than its Revival counterpart which has become way more serious toned, It was cool back then when I made it but now looking at it it's pretty underwhelming in my eyes since I see revival as its successor and way more creative when it came to existential horror themes. Yang's Trial, jeez where do I start this comic was SUPER time consuming, this is when I realized making a comic in the first place would be very labourus, especially if you put effort into the art and keeping track of colors. Plus the story didnt really have a solid bridge when it came to finishing it, I just had the idea that was like "hey what if this happened" situation-fic, but other than that, that was about it, It was kinda doomed in the beginning. I sometimes have thoughts about finishing it, but it's not fun to work on. Plus the concepts I had for it didn't age well in my creative eyes so I didn't really want to work on it anymore.

[davidmariottecomics]

I'm 100 Hours in and I Still Don't Know if I Like Baldur's Gate

Hello there and welcome back! 

As the title suggests, I've been playing Baldur's Gate 3 a lot recently. I picked it up slightly before starting my new job when I had a lot of free time and have continued to put in a few hours on some weeknights and weekends. I've been playing for around 100 hours, or right around 4 full days of my human life, and I still don't entirely know if I like this game. This week, I wanna talk a bit about why I both continue to have complicated feelings about this game and why I continue to play it, some games that I have grouped together as similar play experiences and why I have different reactions to them, and more generally, why all of this makes for making comics based off of games such a challenge that feels so rewarding if you manage to do it right. 

Baldin' the Gate First and foremost, let's talk about Baldur's Gate 3. It came out last year and has since won a number of notable game awards, received nearly universal good reviews from critics, received lots of praise from players, and has all the good indicators that it's a good game. I also have no idea what sort of presence it has in the public consciousness because while it's sold millions of copies and I see lots of fan art and my friends talking about playing and whatever, I also know that I particularly inhabit spaces for people who like games like this and in part because of it being new and in part because of it being an adaptation of a sort, I don't think it has entered the overall cultural osmosis in the same way as Mario or Sonic or Halo or Call of Duty or Overwatch or whatever.

How it plays is it's essentially single-player (or multiplayer if you have friends you want to connect with), Dungeons & Dragons. Literally D&D, it's a licensed game set in the official Wizards of the Coast D&D world. Like, they talk about Drizzt a couple times. Minsc, a character who was featured in some of the D&D comics I worked on, is playable later in the game. There're all your core mechanics digitized, including many of the things you do being determined by a "die roll." You can journey with a party of 4 companions--a number of whom are major pre-built characters and you can build your own guy and choose their specs in traditional D&D fashion and solve puzzles and charm your way around town and fight enemies and pickpocket people and all the D&D stuff you'd like to do. Kinda. We'll get to that in a moment. 

The last bit of table setting with this is you're on an epic journey with a couple possible end goals. Within limits, because there have to be limits to your options, you can self-determine how the game goes in a lot of ways. Technically, you don't have to play with any of the pre-build, story-involved companions. You can be evil. You can be good. You can choose to usually kill or choose to try to just knock people out. You can do what I do, misunderstand a prompt that was going to unlock a character to your party, and accidentally have them get killed in the fight because they weren't one of your guys (whoops). Again, one of the things that is really rightfully praised in this game is that you can experience it for so long and whatever way makes sense to you. 

But that's also the rub, at least for me, and why I'm still struggling to decide whether or not I really like BG3. I personally often feel the two competing forces at the core of the game: To be D&D like, it needs to give you options for how to play it and tries really hard to cast a wide net to do so, but simultaneously, for you to actually progress the story, you do need to play by the rules of the programming and stay relatively "on rails".

For example, one of the items you can acquire in game is rope. And, while at some point it might've had more reason to be in the game, in the final product, you can't actually do anything with it other than sell it, I guess. But I didn't realize that, so I spent a good amount of time in my early game acquiring rope, sure I'd need it at some point. Finally, say 8-10 hours in or so, I forget what exactly it was, but there was some issue where I figured rope was the way to go! Like, it'd let me climb up and down from somewhere without being hurt or I'd be able to use it as a lasso for a far off lever or something. But, I couldn't use it for anything and had to look it up and discover, nope, you just can't use rope apparently. And while I figured it out otherwise, it became very apparent in that moment the limitations of the game for the ways in which I would usually engage with this type of gameplay and storytelling in a different medium.

When you apply that to the actual story decisions though, it can be really frustrating. There're a number of places where I've gotten into a conversation and none of the options even come close to how I'd otherwise approach the situtation. Again, I get why they have to be limited in that way, it's a programmed game and not my friend who can roll with my unique character decisions, but there are times when it just feels so limiting. Keeping it vague, but SPOILERS for this game: There's a companion in the game who I think is really compelling. And to my understanding, there are like 4 ways their story can resolve and none of them is particularly good, which feels bad because I want this person to have a happy ending. For as much as I can recognize the why, it doesn't change my emotional reaction to that being the case. 

So, I like a lot of the storytelling. I like a lot of the decisions available to me. I largely find the actual play mechanics fun, even if there're things I'd like to tackle a different way. I like just how big the game is and I find it appealing that by the nature of the game and the branching decision paths, you can find different ways to play it. But I don't know that once I finish this playthrough, I will come back.

Persona 5tar Rail

I like video games. Cool. Great. I am not personally someone who tends to put 100+ hours into a game--certainly not a single playthrough. I tend to like shorter games and games where I can dip in and out. If a game's working for me, I'll put a good chunk of time in. But--and recognizing that there are probably some games that've lost time in not syncing properly or the account being on multiple computers over a number of years or whatever--I just went through my Steam library and of those 270 games, BG3 is the only one I've put in over 2 days on. Most of the games that I've played, I haven't cracked 20 hours on. Most of the games, generally, I haven't cracked 20 minutes on. Getting me to invest so much time on a game is really rare. 

But two games that instant came to mind when I was thinking about BG3 and it's replayability and how that affects my experience playing it are games I've also put a stupid amount of time into: Persona 5 and Honkai Star Rail. While P5 and HSR are closer to each other than BG3, they do all have a fair amount of overlap. They're all modern roleplaying games where you've got a party of four characters that you take through fantastical worlds and solve puzzles with and battle with and have interesting stories. As I think I've talked about before on this blog, Persona 5 might--despite some flaws--be my favorite video game. If I'm pretty hesitant to put 20 hours into a game, it must speak strongly to how much I like P5 that I've put in almost 200 hours across two playthroughs (one of P5 and one of P5 Royal). 

One of the things that really works for me with Persona 5 is that I know each playthrough will be different, but not radically so. While there's a decent amount of flexibility in decision making in Persona 5, most of it is about choosing how you spend your time. There are certain things you want to do to progress the game to it's "true ending", but in terms of building your stats and your relationships and determining what to do when and how, it's wide open specificially because the actual ticking clock mechanic has such clear goal posts that you know you are on rails toward an endgame and can dig into how you want to play it in the meantime. It's a weird sensation, but because the limitations are clearer for what you can do and when, it removes a lot of the burden of "is this choice going to propel me forward in the way that I want with the game" and becomes "this choice matters only in so much as it reflects what I wanted to do and will ultimately fall into place for how I played the game this time." To me, that's more freeing, I guess. More compelling. Because I know how I like to play the game, and because that's how the game kinda wants you to play it, it feels like we're working in unison and each time I revisit is to see what I had missed before and how I can track different experiences to the same conclusion. 

Honkai Star Rail, meanwhile, is this middleground between the two. Similar to P5, to play the story of the game, everyone's going to have a pretty similar experience. The differences come in what characters are available to you and because it's a live-service game (that is to say, a game that is constantly updating), what limited time events you choose to partake in. It doesn't have the same social webbing structure as BG3 or P5--there isn't the same ability to chose to be good or bad or to ignore certain relationships in the same way. And I think that is a big part of why I haven't kept up and I find games like this so hard to come back to. I was an early adopter and I played a lot and I got caught up and now there've been a number of updates since my last real play session, and I feel like because there's now so much more that I could do, I'm overwhelmed with the options of trying to catch up, while also knowing that even if I do, I'll only hit the end of the current update, and not the end of the game. HSR has no replayability from the beginning, really, because you want to continue what you've started because the game's continuing in your absence. 

Okay, so Comics!

The parallel I can draw to comics is so while they're all pretty different, the similarities of BG3, P5, and HSR have created a grouping in my mind. I am taken on all three with the worlds that're created, I enjoy fan art of them, I get the same sort of satisfaction from how they control because that style of gaming is something that I like. But 100+ hours into each, I have a very different emotional response that changes how I want to interact with it going forward. I just want to finish BG3 and if this is my one playthrough, that's probably fine. I spent less than $1/hour of game. I know at some point in the probably not-too-distant future I'll revisit P5 (maybe I'll use it for some Japanese practice...). And I'll continue to check in with HSR because I feel like I've put a lot into it and I want to like it as much as I did at the start, but I really don't know that I can recapture the magic until it's done. And if that doesn't sound like the comics reading experience, I don't know what does! 

BG3 is a series that I'm invested in, and keep picking up, even though there's part of me that just wants to bail because it isn't bad, but it isn't quite what I want it to be. P5 is... I dunno. Young Justice. Crisis on Infinite Earths. Secret Wars II. The sort of dumb thing that I want to revisit over and over and over again, because each time I do, between me and the game/book, I find something different and new in a familiar comfort. And HSR is a book that I dug and missed an issue and it isn't easy to track down, so now I have to decide whether I dedicate that time to going back or if I wait for the trade and maybe to deal with a bit of redundancy or if I just let it go because I liked it, but maybe not enough. 

All of which is part of why I think it can be so difficult to translate video games into comics. I'm spending all this time deliberating over how to experience the story--what decisions I want to make and what decisions I have the ability to make, ultimately do I as an individual think I can revisit and make different decisions or am I just going to play basically the same because that's how I interact with the medium--which is something that comics storytelling doesn't really afford you. Not to say there aren't comics where you do have more input, but for the most part, you experience the story as presented to you because that's how the team wanted it.

I asked the question a lot working on Sonic, why would you want to read Sonic, when you can play a Sonic game? And if the characters are compelling and you feel like you're adding to the world and you truly want to engage in the sort of storytelling that only comics can to, that makes it a unique medium from something like games, you can probably find something. But you have to overcome that gap for a player who might be interested, because while both comics and games have plotted content, the difference of how the reader/player is engaged makes a world of difference. 

I hope that all makes sense. And if not... hey, I'll revisit this sometime! See ya next week! 

New Releases this week (2/7/24): Godzilla Valentine's Day Special (Editor - IDW)

New Releases next week (2/14/24):  None

Announcements: Happy Black History Month! This week, I want to spotlight N.K. Jemisin! I finally started The City We Became this week and I'm already really liking it. She also wrote the first story in Out There Screaming, the horror anthology from last year that I've talked about here before and that I really loved. She wrote Far Sector, a DC Green Lantern book that's quickly becoming one of my big recommendations for"a standalone Big 2 superhero book that shows you why superhero comics are actually pretty fun! She is becoming a favorite writer of mine and is one of the modern names in science fiction, fantasy, and horror that I think you should know! 

Usually, this is where I plug my Patreon! And I still will because you can *usually* read this blog there, get cool bonus stuff including some free comics and, at higher levels, stuff like podcasts, sneak peeks at things I'm working on, and more! BUT, Patreon's also not working right for me at the moment. I'm troubleshooting it now, but there's a slight delay in things going up, sorry! 

You can also check out my webstore where I'm sold out of Transformers vs. the Terminator (wow!) and have a very limited stock on everything else, my Kofi (I updated the Anti-AI Zine--Pay what you want for a brief, printable explainer on why AI sucks!), and Becca's site (still pending a new update, sorry)!

Bluesky is now publicly open! You no longer need an invite to join. You can find my account here. You can find a bunch of other cool people through my follow list! And there's a really good skeet going around with a bunch of helpful block lists for not dealing with dummies on the site! 

I mentioned last week that we're finally firming up plans for our wedding after a lot of back and forth and exploration on what makes the most sense. We've landed on some stuff we're happy with and will be sharing our registry soon (maybe later today???), if you'd like to contribute! 

What I enjoyed this week: Nancy (Comic), Yu-Gi-Oh: Duel Links (Video Game), Baldur's Gate III (Video Game), Blank Check (Podcast), Solve This Murder (Podcast), The City We Became (Book), The Sopranos (TV show), The Afterparty (TV show), Rent (Movie), getting some wedding planning done, Becca and I did an early Valentine's Day yesterday and I'm glad we had the chance to do that for ourselves. 

Pic of the Week: Here's a very cute picture of Becca from our date yesterday at SUR, the restaurant from Vanderpump Rules.