#i was able to solo the main game for world but quickly had a problem with timing out in iceborne x_x

[lokh]

howdy what monster hunter games do you play? also which is your fav monster 👀

hello! i play rise (switch) and world (pc)!!!! i only have the expansion for world tho lmao. favorite monster................ honestly i dont know if i have a favorite LMAO i think a lot of them look cool... maybe nargacuga?? sleek and cool? but the only monster i can think of that made me go Oh Shit!! Nice when i saw it for the first time is banbaro (but that could also be because i didnt realise they made monsters like that agfdsfbgd)

also im at the stage where i need to play with other people but dont know any people (safi'jiiva) and dont know the etiquette of public servers if anyone ever wants to help out Hit Me Up

[sanstropfremir]

I’d love your thoughts on BTS and their current image and music if you have them and aren’t afraid of the mindless internet hoards.

Personally, I liked a lot of their older stuff, but haven’t liked anything since I think the Fake Love promotions 3+ years ago. They’d started losing their personality and soul before that album cycle, but it feels like the sanitization of their image and artistry really kicked into hyperdrive after that. Now most of what they do seems like a sterile money grab driven by the Hybe hive mind which is a shame.

ok alrighty (cracks knuckles) let's get into it.

now that i've fully given myself a headache watching the majority of the bts videography, here are three points i'm going to cover:

performative character and the lack thereof

interesting aesthetics and the lack thereof, and

the inevitable cracking of perfection

ready, set, let's begin.

1.

idol music is very clearly definited by spectacle based aesthetics. and it's had that structure for its entire existence. so i gotta hand it to hybe for this one, because they managed to revolutionize being utterly fucking average. the triumph of bts is that they're just some guys and they look like just some guys. hybe found a niche in the system and then gamed that system to the tune of one of the largest musical acts in the world. they're not marketing bts as a romantic parasocial relationship, they're marketing them as your friends. and that is just as insidious to lonely kids as a run of the mill romantic fantasy. but that's not what i'm here to talk about today.

there's a pattern i find very interesting with bts mvs and that is that i don't remember anything about them. specifically, i don't remember the stuff that's happening IN the video; not the styling, not the setpieces, if i didn't know the members i doubt i would remember them either. what i DO remember, is how expensive the production is, and specific shots. i couldn't tell you what a single member was wearing, but i sure as hell remember that first upward angle shot of jungkook and the rusted park ride in spring day. or every single time they do that birdseye shot of jin in like every video. honestly as far as i'm aware jin has only ever worn a loose fitting beige longsleeve shirt.

it took bts a long time to establish any kind of consistent visual character. and the character they did establish.... i don't know if you can call a family-friendly-style clean aesthetic 'character'. they debuted as a hip hop group to little (comparative) success, and then made a switch to doing an early version of where they're currently at right now. if you've seen any of the mvs, you know that this is a pretty significant visual change. i don't think it is inherently a bad change, since the visual branding for hiphop based groups always tips over into iffy terrritory, but it is dramatic enough and early enough that it doesn't strike me as a natural evolution. concept switch ups are common, but they usually work because the members have established a bit of character for themselves, used their performance abilities and presence to fit into a niche in the group. the idol mould is perfect for showcasing the performers; that's its function. the groups that are the most fun to watch are the ones with stage presence, the ones who know how to perform, who can act all the parts they need to play. and bts? 4/7 actual performers on a good day. in my personal opinion it's 2/7.

i'm gonna expand on what i said about jimin here (this is technically the first part of this series), because it does apply to the rest of the group on the whole:

and i think here is where we see the main crux of the difference between taemin and jimin as performers: taemin has both an artistic and an idol persona. we know and understand him to do solo work that has a separate artistic meaning to just him being an idol. even though this performance was pre-move, i would still say this applies, because he's hot off press your number, where he's acting in a story based mv. jimin on the other hand just has his idol persona. he's not known for creating the same kind of storytelling that taemin is.

bts has been very insistent on the image of the group as a single unit. despite having the size of fanbase and the revenue that would make any official solo debut a massive success, none of them have done any substantial solo work. this isn't artistically a problem, and i think it's very admirable of them to be so dedicated to the image and the legacy of the group, when that can be an uncommon trait in the industry. i do however, think it starts to become an issue when we want to discuss what the artistic visions and images of groups are. shinee taemin and solo taemin have two distinct artistic representations, and taemin himself will attest to that. it's the same with all the shinee members that have solo careers, and the same with other groups. jackson, bambam, yugyeom, and jaebeom's solo work is all very different from got7. yixing's solo work is very different from exo's. even the subunits within exo all have their own character (cbx and sc). kpop groups all ostensibly are trained under the same system, so why the disparity with bts? mostly, it's their brand of "authenticity." it's impossible to perform authentically, by the nature of performance as a medium it is unnatural, and tragically, not everyone is naturally interesting, or suited to performing: that's why the performing arts even exist in the first place. it required painstaking training to be good at performing; it is a complex set of skills and those skills are not learnt by "being authentic." being an idol is not just the singing, dancing, rapping; that's only half the work. you need to be able to act to be a compelling performer. pulling your true self and emotions out on stage every night is a fast track to burnout and psychological issues, there's plenty of evidence. the only member of bts of whom i can say for some certainty has a persona and a stage presence is jhope/hoseok, a) because he's kept up a very specific brand in the solo work that he has done, and b) he has actual dance training, not just kpop dance training. the rest of them may have the kpop dance and the kpop vocal training, but what they do not have is the ability to market themselves as compelling performers on stage. taehyung is the only other member i would hesitantly give a semblance of persona and ability to, but i think he stumbled onto that mostly by accident. and if all the pieces don't each have a distinctive colour, how can the whole machine be visually interesting?

2.

bts may never have been able to establish an aesthetic brand, but what they did establish is an intellectual one. if you talk to a fan, the schtick they give is that "it's about the lyrics." as noble as having an intellectual or cerebral message is, what does that look like? how do you portray intellectual on stage, on film? what about intellectual is interesting to watch? cerebral, by it's literal nature as a descriptor, is very difficult to communicate in visual language because it is internal. to successfully communicate cerebrality and intellect in a short form medium like music videos requires a deft hand with metaphor that can elude even an experienced designer. and honestly? i don't know whether to applaud hybe's visual team for being the most successful subtle contemporary designers i've every seen, or to decry them as worst kpop designers i've ever seen. maybe both. regardless, i don't think they're able to cross the gap.

there are exactly four mvs where i actually remember the content of the mv and not the frame it sits in, and those are dna, idol, the singularity comeback trailer with taehyung, and war of hormone. and of an eight year career......that's not very many. these four mvs have at least an inkling of interesting spectacle and character, but even then, it's still a stretch. there is absolutely nothing to write home about in the styling for dna, other than it's well colour matched. I don't even know if I should include singularity because it involves none of the other members. idol is probably their most interesting mv because it actually has alternative styling and varies (at least a little bit) from the standard hybe boom crane shot-that-shows-off-how-we-can-afford-big-studio-spaces-and-locations. the company and the group would be loathe to admit it, but war of hormone is a well designed and interesting mv for the time it was made, with a well crafted gimmick and some actual showing of character from the members. it was the start of a potential that they squashed quite quickly because it wasn't picking up in the hiphop-group-saturated market of 2014. but the rest of their mvs? remarkably uninspired styling. like it's truly impressive how boring the styling is. and like i've said, that is the triumph in their aesthetics: they all look like normal dudes (if you had professional skin + makeup techs looking after them for the last 8 years).

all of this is a carefully crafted image that's tailored to hooking an audience, especially an international one. the mvs are boring in the relative scale of kpop, but they're just different enough from a western pop mv to catch attention. and once you do sink a hook, there's a direct clickfunnel of content that bills itself on these men being "authentic" and "self-producing," which is a huge draw to international fans, because people are racist and believe that the kpop industry is a factory that produces idols like clones, where none of them know how to do anything other than sing and dance and all the music is just handed to them by companies. and they have SO much content that there's no way a new fan can get to it all in a timely manner, so they'll never have to engage with any other kpop artists' work if they don't actively seek it out. but that's another essay for another time.

3.

that brings us to current day, in which at least the last five bts releases have been in the same aesthetic vein of positive, sanitized, and pristine. i said it in one of my txt responses and i will say it again here: money scrubs the humanity from the aesthetic of living. minimalism is for rich white people. hybe and bts may have pivoted their style and brand directly into the lane of mass appeal, but when you pair that with the amount of money funding them, there's a cognitive dissonance between the message and the aesthetics in which it's portrayed. some people do like the clean cut looks, and i won't say that they don't work, but as you've likely gleaned from this response, it isn't my style and if you've been around and reading my writing for longer you'll know that my tastes runs much closer to the messy and the weird, so very little about any of bts' visuals have appeal to me. i do find the contradiction of applying the appeal of radical relatability with the aesthetics of expansive (and expensive) minimalism interesting; it's an extremely fine line that hybe is walking and eventually they are going to tip over, the porcelain mask will not hold forever. maintaining the all ages aesthetic is going to be difficult now that all of them are grown ass men. with other groups of this member age and generation there's very obviously been a shift to a more adult tone, and not necessarily explicitly. got7, mx, nu'est, btob, shinee, 2pm, and groups that have older members like a.c.e and sf9 have all made slow shifts in tone that are undeniably aimed at a maturing audience: they know their core fanbases are aging with them and they (the fans) are not as interested in the 'boy' in boy group. and most of them have telltale visual styles, enough so that i can distinguish a specific group's mv. the last year and change of mx mvs have a very distinctive character; got7 too, since easily as far back as if you do. i can always tell an a.c.e mv by its impeccable fashion and formic styling, and although shinee has always had a more experimental aesthetic edge, their sound and voices are unmistakable.

honestly, i can't predict what bts is going to do in the future, but i personally don't believe they can keep up their clean aesthetic indefinitely without some fallout. part of the fun of following bands is watching them grow musically, and the last couple of years of bts haven't felt like growth. there are fans that have already started realizing it, and there's likely to be more soon.

---

the third part is here, which is a short followup about some of bts' industry influence.

[novantinuum]

Fandom: Steven Universe

Rating: Teen Audiences (TW: language)

Words: ~3K

Summary: Lars has no idea what he was expecting the moment Steven texted him in the middle of the night to ask if he could come over, but being immediately tackled in an intense vice-grip of a hug the second he opened the door probably wasn’t it.

Set mid SUF.

I don’t think I’ve ever gotten to write Lars’ POV before this, but it was really fun! If you read this and enjoy, I’d greatly appreciate your support through reblogs here, or kudos/comments on AO3. Thank you! <3

____

Besides the quiet lull of the TV and the electric hum of the attic’s rickety old heater, all is silent in the Barriga household. The nighttime streets outside are vacant. Not a soul roams through his section of town, not even the newer Gem arrivals, who thankfully have been informed of humanity’s biologically mandated curfew by now. Sheesh, it’s about time.

After all, silence is peace. And in this day and age, in a world where the barriers between human and intergalactic politics are becoming increasingly blurred by the hour, peace is a gift.

Which is why having free time to play whatever old video games he wants in complete and total solitude at one AM is probably the single thing keeping him sane at this moment.

Lars’ fingers expertly flick at the joysticks of the controller as if by innate memory. It genuinely feels like forever since he’s been able to lose himself for hours in a solo campaign like this, and quite honestly, if given a choice he prefers it to any other leisurely activity. Chatting with his online friends or with that Gem gang of his is fun, sure, and working the counter at his bake shop can often be emotionally satisfying, but pushed too long and any kind of social interaction feels draining. He shifts on his bed, paying little to no attention to the slight chill against his bare chest. He’s pretty sure it’s like, near freezing outside and yet somehow it’s no more an annoyance to him than having to pause to reload an ammo clip in this game. It’s weird. Really weird. But then, at this point everything about his dumb life is.

It’s the Steven effect, he thinks with a soft scoff. Weird practically orbits him and his moms, and inevitably, every person he comes in contact with is brought into the fold. He’s a good kid, though. Don’t get him wrong. Steven always tries his best to be thoughtful when dealing with people he doesn’t understand— even when initially those people just act like dicks in return— and he for one is grateful for that, for the gift of a... a second chance. He knows full well he didn’t deserve it, (he still doesn’t), but he’s grateful.

The kid’s still on his mind when his phone lights up on the nightstand beside him, like the now familiar glow of Gems synchronizing to fuse.

(And goddamnit, does a part of him still balk almost two years later that it’s so normal to be casually relating everyday things to outer space Gem stuff anyways. What is he, with his pink hair and alien friends, the main character of an anime?)

Eyes skirt away from the grainy television set he’s been playing his favorite Immortal Combat on, and glance at the new notification.

Steven, the name at the top of the text reads. Well, lo and behold. The true shounen protagonist himself. Somebody’s ears must have been burning. Though, hmm. Come to think of it, that’s actually unusual. They pass bullshit memes back and forth sometimes, yes, but he never sends him anything this late at night.

Lars frowns, failing to obscure that annoying, instinctual worry that seizes him like the long lost sensation of hunger rising from the pit of his stomach, and scoots forward on his bed to grab his phone. What’s he want at this hour, anyways?

Steven: hey, sorry i know its late but can i come over ?

His frown deepens as he glances down at himself, clad in only a pair of boxers. He doesn’t mind having an unexpected visitor— after all, it’s not like he requires sleep anymore— but he’s not exactly dressed for company, here.

yeah but gimme a mo, he types back. kinda need to put on a shirt

Steven: k

Yawning out of sheer habit, he leans over the other side of the bed and grabs the first decent smelling tee he can find off the floor. It’s got an overlapping triangular emblem on it, a symbol from one of the game series he used to be obsessed with as a kid. He quickly shrugs it and a stray pair of sweatpants on, then returns to his phone.

decent now, he updates him.

The response is almost immediate.

Steven: be there soon

With a heavy inhale, he leans back against the headboard and begins to mentally prepare himself for the passage of One Whole Teenage Boy through the portal in his hair. For the most part he’s grown used to the changes caused by Steven’s literal magic resurrection, but not this. Who the hell knows how his pet lion puts up with it all the time. Quite frankly, how that creature has remained so docile and patient after years of interloping within Steven’s chaotic world of Gems eludes him, ‘cause it sure as hell isn’t a side effect of all the death-defying space voodoo.

Also, he’s like, 97% sure that “docile” and “patient” aren’t words anyone would pick to describe him at any stage of his life, ever.

And yet, yawning in his boredom, Lars waits.

And he waits.

And he waits.

And when eventually he breaks his stubborn streak and dares to check the time on his phone to see how many minutes have elapsed, how many minutes of his thrice-damned maybe infinite lifespan he’s wasted sitting up against the far wall of his room waiting for that kid to tumble right out of the literal inter-dimensional door hidden amidst the curls atop his head, he’s mildly surprised that his first emotional response to this delay is... dare he admits... disappointment.

It’s been nearly fifteen minutes. For whatever unknown reason, it seems as if Steven may not be coming over after all. Huh. He wonders what changed his mind. Pressing his lips into a thin line, Lars decides to check his texts. It’s possible the guy wrote something else and he just didn’t see it. But when he pulls up his latest conversation, all that comes up are the last messages they sent to each other. Be there soon, he said.

He hovers hesitant fingers over the keyboard, caught in the midst of trying to decide whether or not it’s too invasive and prying to send some sort of casual check-in, when he picks up on a very timid knock on the front door downstairs. And given the lateness of the hour, there’s really only one person it could be. He blinks for a moment, his mind still doing somersaults in order to process the mere concept of Steven not gleefully taking the opportunity to explode out of his hair for once in his life, and then drags himself up to his feet. Walks out of his attic room and down the stairs, being careful not to disturb his slumbering parents. Unlatches the locks on the door.

Truth be told he has no idea what he was expecting the moment Steven texted him at one fucking AM to ask if he could come over, but being immediately tackled in an intense vice-grip of a hug the second he opened the door probably wasn’t it.

He struggles not to stumble backwards at the initial force of the teen’s silent yet yearning embrace, eventually regaining his stability and... slowly, delicately... hugging him back. Honestly, he’s never been much of a hugger himself, but eh. He’ll give the guy this one. After a brief moment Lars gives him a few awkward pats, clearing his throat.

“Uh, Steven? You good to let go, now?” he asks quietly, still keeping his voice in a whisper for his parents’ benefit.

“Oh! Y-yeah, yeah,” his younger friend stammers, immediately pulling himself away. His eyes are drawn to the floor as he wrings his hands together. Timid. “Sorry, I just— I just needed somewhere I could clear my head tonight. Thank you, by the way.”

“No problem,” he throws back, gesturing for him to follow up the stairs. “‘S not like I ever sleep a wink now anyways. So I might as well have company.”

The two of them tiptoe towards the attic, a familiar setting for both. Steven’s been in here quite a few times before, so— already knowing the lay of the land— he plops himself down in the beanbag chair Lars keeps at the foot of his bed. They don’t talk about much of anything at first, merely passing back and forth brief updates about their lives. Small talk, nothing more. As expected though, Steven’s update is infinitely more interesting than his. Apparently he went on some mission to an alien planet with that Lapis friend of his the other day and had to deal with the attitude of some stubborn terraformers who didn’t want to stop working on their shitty old Homeworld assignment. (Meanwhile, the only update he has to offer is how he’s teaching Blue Lace Agate the art of bad baking puns while at work. Gotta leave behind some sort of legacy before he leaves with his fellow Off-Colors, of course.)

When the small talk finally dries up, (which seems... uncharacteristic, given the typical enthusiasm of his current visitor), Lars offers him a second controller.

“We can play the go-kart one, if you want,” he says, knowing full well that his friend isn’t a huge fan of all his war-themed combat games. Still, he figures the guy could probably stand to blow off a little steam. He looks super stressed, with his brow all creased and his stare unnervingly glassy.

The sixteen-year-old nods, adjusting his hands around the grips of the controller as Lars switches out the disk.

They race a few rounds in relative quiet, wholly insulated by the reassuring stillness of the night all around them, before Steven decides to open up again.

“Where do you think the line is?” he asks when they finish their current course.

His whole face scrunches in confusion. “Huh?”

“Between like, doing bad things, and outright being bad?” he continues, seemingly unaware of the comedic pulse of Lars’ initial response.

Lars blinks.

Considers these words deeply and thoroughly for a moment, as any good friend should.

And then...

“Where the heck did you pull that question from?”

Steven merely shrugs, his shoulders drooping a bit lower than they had been when he first entered his house a while back. “I dunno, just musing, ‘s all.”

The edges of his mouth curl downwards as he lets this corker of a conversation starter wash over him, not so much intended as a frown at Steven, but a frown at... whatever force of this universe would lead his friend to start musing about such depressing philosophical quandaries in the first place. Acting numb and brooding at the rest of the world is supposed to be his job, not this kid’s! And sure, yes, yes, yes, he knows he can’t exactly call him a kid anymore— at least not to his face— and that he’s been a teenager for a good three years now. It’s just that... well. For all his complaints about it earlier in life, Lars kinda grew to respect and feel uplifted by his cheery, upbeat, never-give-up-hope outlook. Dare he says, he kinda misses it.

(And for Steven’s sake, he kinda hoped he’d never discover the burnout and cynicism waiting on the other side. Alas, he fears that ship has probably sailed.)

“Sorry,” the sixteen-year-old mumbles upon noting his extended silence, his cheeks flushed with shame. “Probably not something anyone wants to think about at two in the morning. Just- forget I said anything, okay? Let’s play one more round, and then I can lea—“

Eyes widening, he holds up a hand to intercept that train of thought. “No, that’s— you asked an interesting question. Deep, but interesting. It’s fine, I don’t mind. I...”

He inhales deep, collecting his wits and whatever years of wisdom he may or may not have accumulated ever since dying and coming back to life.

“I suppose in my mind, people aren’t truly bad unless they intend to cause harm, y’know?” he begins, meeting Steven’s eyes. “You can still hurt others without meaning it, and like... that’s still not great, and you should still try and make up for it however you can, but... life’s complicated. People are complicated. It’s all a huge mess of emotions and ethics and beliefs all the time.”

He pauses, a twinge of melancholy rising within his chest as he catches a glimpse of a photograph hung on one of the wooden support beams at the far wall. It’s a selfie of him and Sadie he printed out a few years back when they were still low-key dating, one that— for the life of him— he can’t bear to take down. She’s kissing his cheek. He’s caught in the middle of laughter, playfully trying to nudge her away. They look... so young.

So naive.

(So human.)

“And sometimes it can be so, so easy to convince yourself that you’re always in the right,” he continues, quieter, “that people feeling hurt because of something you did is just their problem. In that case, it’s not that you wanted to harm anyone, it’s just... that you were blind to it, I guess.”

(And he was blind for a long, long time.)

“Like I said, it’s messy.”

Lars sighs, willfully averting his glance from the photographic reminder of all the ways he ignorantly fucked up with Sadie as a friend and partner, and with everyone in his life, making the same stupid mistakes over and over with nearly no improvement until he literally died to his old self.

“So, yeah. There. I guess that’s my opinion,” he mumbles, absentmindedly fiddling with the collar of his graphic tee. “Everyone makes bad choices sometimes, but you’re not actually a bad person unless you literally want to harm others. I don’t think people are bad once and bad forever, though,” he adds, pulling his hand away from his shirt.

Inhaling deep, he splays his palm wide, admiring those same old loops and whorls at the tips of his fingers, identical in every detail to his old, living, human self... but now pink. It's haunting, sometimes.

“People can change, y’know? If they make the effort to.”

When he finally glances back at Steven, he seems thoroughly spaced out by all his impassioned rambling, his gaze walleyed and void of any identifiable emotion. He scowls, unsure whether or not he should feel offended, and gives an exaggerated shrug to defuse the sickeningly earnest atmosphere out of this room.

“But hey, I’m biased,” he mutters, letting that instinctual, age-old self-depreciation coat his tone once more. “For all I know, everything I said could be absolute bunk, and I’m still just an asshole.”

“I don’t think you’re an asshole, Lars,” Steven finally speaks up, his expression still perplexingly unreadable.

“I—“ His eyes blow wider, the sheer frankness of this comment catching him entirely off guard, overturning all of his once-impenetrable defenses. “...Thank you. I’m trying not to be.”

The conversation doesn’t advance any further from there, both parties content to fade back into the understated comfort of silent companionship. They play a few more rounds of their racing game, Lars beating Steven handily each time. (Truth be told, he’s not confident he’s bringing his A-game, though.) Then, sometime around three AM, his friend drags himself out of the beanbag chair and announces that he should probably head home and get some rest. Apparently he’s got a lot of planning to do for Little Homeschool's graduation ceremony that’s happening in a few days, or whatever. Which, is fair. Not everyone is blessed enough to be a sleepless zombie like him.

“Y’know, it’s been nice, getting to hang out, just us,” Steven says— quiet, but genuine— as Lars leads him back down the stairs. “We should do this more often.”

Purposefully, given the unusual emotional atmosphere of this whole visit, he decides not to mention the fact that he's planning to leave Earth again when his all Gem friends finally graduate. Later, he thinks, when everyone's in a better place.

“Well, if you’re ever bored, you know where to reach me,” he replies as they reach the bottom step, fondly rolling his eyes. “The good ol’ inter-hair-mensional express. Just, y’know— text me. And not during work hours.”

The teen gives his thanks once again, and then exits out the front, making sure to be extra gentle shutting the door on his way out for his parents’ sake. Huh. Seems that even when he’s (seemingly) in a funk, he’s capable of being uber courteous like that. Goodness, how does he do it?

Lars stands motionless at the entryway for a few moments after he’s gone, staring blankly at the now empty space the sixteen-year-old just occupied. His brow furrows, his fingers curling in perplexion at his side. He doesn’t have enough insight into Steven’s inner life to claim anything for sure, but he can’t help but feel like something with that boy was... off, tonight. Like, beyond your standard teenage moodiness. His demeanor, his bizarre and specific question, his relative silence... it all seems to be pointing towards something, lurking in the background. Still, there’s little he can do for a person who’s not volunteering information. And it ain’t his job to drag it out of him, either. He always hated when his parents tried to do that when he was younger, and it almost ruined their relationship entirely. That’s the last sorta scenario he’d want to force upon Steven. He’ll open up when he’s ready, in the end.

And until then... well.

He just hopes that the kid knows that— beyond the bizarre magic portal in that pink lion’s mane— he’s always got a brother on the other side who’s willing to at least listen. To be but a small source of support.

If he wants him to be.

[sirpoley]

On the Four Table Legs of Traveller, Leg 1: Mortgages

Mongoose Traveller's starship mortgage-payment-system is the most brilliant game mechanic I've ever encountered, as a DM. It's also the first rule I'd ignore if I wasn't consciously trying to play the game exactly how it's described in the book.

A Bit of Background

I've been involved in two Traveller campaigns in the past as a player (both with the same DM), and am currently DMing a third. All of them are using Mongoose's first edition. I've never played any other edition of traveller, and know almost nothing about the history of the game. I don't know which mechanics are unique to this edition of Traveller and which have been around for decades.

In the campaigns in which I was a player, I think the DM was continually frustrated with the rules of the game. He wanted to run a tight, story-focused campaign and picked up Traveller assuming it would be, essentially, D&D in space. For his second campaign, he chopped out huge chunks of the ruleset and replaced it with homebrew ones, removing space travel and Traveller's quirky character creation entirely. This worked for the game he wanted to run (he's an extraordinarily talented DM), but I think we all came away feeling pretty lukewarm about the actual rules.

Bored out of my mind in lockdown, desperate for anything to shake up the daily routine, I picked up the copy of Traveller that had been sitting on my bookshelf, untouched, and skimmed through it. In a mood of "I'll humour this weird rulebook," I followed the random subsector creation chapter to the letter, creating a surprisingly-well fleshed out chunk of space to play around in.

It was then that I realized I'd never actually played Traveller. So I dragged my partner along in an experiment: let's play Traveller, exactly how it is described in the book, no matter how flat-out insane the rules seem to be. I will only consider houseruling or changing a rule once we've both figured out what it's for. I learned a ton in this experiment, so, during my kid's naps (oh, right, I have a daughter now, that's where I disappeared to, Internet), I'll write about what I've learned.

(The Carlia Subsector. Not pictured: along with this map is a LONG word document describing the atmosphere, gravity, population, tech level, cultural quirks, government, etc. of the main world in each of these systems, plus a huge table of the price of dozens of trade goods on each planet. These, it turns out, are crucial game aids. I'll get into them later.)

Traveller, I've learned, is a table held up by four legs: Finances, Character Creation, Patrons, and Random Encounters. If you remove any of these legs, the rest of the game stops working. Following them, as described, gives you a rip-roaring swashbuckling adventure of fighting pirates, escaping bounty hunters, smuggling, jailbreaks, and all that good stuff you want in a campaign—but it happens spontaneously. I'll get into it more in detail, but for now, we're going to talk about finances in Traveller.

Yes, the Game Is About Mortgage Payments

The central driving mechanic of Traveller is making mortgage payments for your starship. The assumption is that the player characters are part-owners of an FTL-capable starship that's more expensive than any one person, or any ten people, could ever afford outright. The game (thankfully) provides a quick way to calculate your starship's mortgage payments (something like the value of the ship/240 per month), and for all of the example ships in the book, gives them to you pre-calculated. In the case of my solo campaign, my partner owed the bank a whopping 500,000 credits a month for her Corsair. For scale, that's the exact same price as the single most powerful gun in the game (the "Fusion Gun, Man Portable"), owed monthly. In D&D terms, she had to raise the equivalent of a +5 Longsword every. Single. Month.

(In addition to mortgage payments are smaller fees: life support (i.e., food and water), crew salaries, fuel, and ship maintenance, but the mortgage is by far the largest single expense, so that's what I'll focus on).

I started my partner out with a fueled up and fully-crewed ship (we used pre-generated NPC stats from the middle of the book for her crew, plus an NPC who was generated during her character creation, which I'll get into later). Character creation started her with 10,000 credits, and I told her she had until the end of the month to multiply that by fifty times.

Debt Leads to Trade

The fastest way by far in Traveller to make money is to interact with the very well fleshed-out trade rules. Each spaceship has a certain amount of tons of cargo it can carry, and each world has a list of trade goods for sale at various prices. So the clear way to raise that 500 grand was to speculatively buy trade goods, pick up passengers and freight, deliver mail, and so on. These rules are generous; by stacking modifiers, it's possible to reliably quadruple your principal every time you reach a new planet (which happens every week).

I think my old DM severely nerfed the trade rules (he also didn't enforce mortgage payments, leaving them on the cutting room floor like D&D's Encumbrance rules) due to this seemingly-unbalanced generosity. Again: the best gun in the game is 500,000 credits—so how on earth can a system that lets you make hundreds, even millions, of credits by trading stand?

Well, it turns out, the bank simply taking 95% of your player's earnings every month severely dampens potentially-snowballing nonlinear growth, so my partner and I never saw the kind of wealth explosion that looks inevitable from the rules as written, despite her scraping together everything she could do maximize profits. In all the time we've been playing, despite having already made millions of credits, she actually hasn't been able to buy a gun better than her starting laser pistol, or, in fact, any armour at all. I'll get to why in a moment, because the most important thing about the trade system is that…

Trade Leads to Travel

Garden worlds sell cheap food. High-population worlds buy food for a high price. High-population worlds sell manufactured goods that are in high-demand on non-industrial worlds, and so on. In a quest to maximize profits, the party was locked into a continual tour of the subsector I generated earlier, constantly moving from place to place. Staying put for any length of time meant letting time trickle away (time that could be spent raking in cash for crippling mortgage payments), so that wasn't an option. What wound up happening was that the party went on a self-guided tour of the subsector, stopping in at colourful worlds I'd generated earlier. This happened entirely without me, as DM, having to dangle bait in front of the party the way that I always have to in D&D. Travel is good, because…

Travel Leads to Conflict

I've already spoken at length on the subject of random encounters here, but Traveller really builds the game around random tables in an elegant way. Every time the party jumps from one world to another, there's a chance they'll get waylaid by pirates (the rulebook has a fun, albeit hidden, 'pirate table' that describes different tricks and hijinks that pirates use to attack). 'Pirates' in Traveller are spaceship owners unable to pay their mortgages by legitimate means, so turn to piracy. The fact that the party is always carrying their life savings in trade commodities whenever they travel around makes them a prime target for piracy, and leads to combat with stakes beyond "fight till everyone's dead." The pirates aren't orcs, and don't want to kill the players for no reason. They want to take their cargo and get away as quickly as possible, suffering the least damage as possible, and the players want the opposite. Thus: pre-combat negotiations, tricks, hijinks (my partner, carrying a cargo of "domestic goods," chose to have her crew throw individual toasters out of the cargo bay each in different directions to ensure that the pirates had to engage in lengthy EVA-missions to catch them each, thus allowing her ship to escape without suffering damage).

Traveller's starship battle rules are fun (and integrate into boarding actions that results in player-scale combat), and are triggered primarily just by moving around. Conflict is fun by itself (that's why combat rules are most of the rules in most games), but in this context, have the added advantage, as…

Conflict Leads to Tradeoffs

It became clear to my partner after her first run-in with pirates that her ship and crew were under-gunned. While buying powerful weapons and armour is trivially cheap compared to the amount of money she was raking in through trade (most weapons cap out at a few thousand credits, and she was moving hundreds of thousands a week), actually getting her hands on some was another matter.

Good weapons in Traveller are advanced ones, which have a high-TL (tech level) rating. These weapons are only available on high-TL worlds (each world has a TL rating generated in subsector generation). Making a detour from trading to buy 'adventuring equipment' wound up being an extremely costly endeavour, taking the party weeks out of the way of the most profitable trade route. The closest world in which these weapons exist also outlaws all weapons (various laws are generated procedurally as well) which means engaging in black market smuggling (which is fleshed out in the rules) and risks run-ins with the law.

Compounding this problem was that her Corsair took minor damage in the combat with the pirates, and the nearest world with a shipyard capable of repairing the ship was different from, and out of the way of, the high tech world with fancy fusion guns. Also, getting the ship repaired meant that it would be in drydock for days or even weeks, which incurs an opportunity cost of almost a million credits that could have been made during trade…

Tradeoffs lead to Debt

In her case, she wound up getting her ship repaired, forgoing arming herself and her crew, and skirting dangerously close to bankruptcy kicking her heels as her ship was patched up. There isn't an easy answer to what she 'ought' to have done, which was fun as hell. Further, as a DM, I wasn't annoyed that she was 'messing up the plot' by staying put (or frustrated that she wasn't going to my elaborately-plotted narrative that would occur when she tried to buy black market weapons) because there was no plot. Everything that came about emerged procedurally.

The 'Loop'

The beating heart of a Traveller sandbox campaign is this loop:

Without DM intervention (or Patrons, which are sort of procedurally-generated adventure hooks), this loop can sustain a campaign pretty much indefinitely. What this means as a DM is that any DM-interventions (i.e., adding in pre-written adventure hooks or encounters or whatever) can be attached to any of these steps to allow it to come about during play. It also means that if you don't have any pre-scripted content (to choose an example completely at random, let's just say your hypothetical one-year-old threw your notes in a toilet) you can just sit back and let the loop above take care of providing entertainment.

To bring this back to mortgages, if your players don't have the threat of having their spaceship repossessed by the bank hanging over them like the Doom of Damocles, then the whole system breaks down, and the DM has to do all the heavy lifting of providing character motivation to go explore new planets.

Next, we'll talk about how Traveller's patron system ties into all of this.

[sazorak]

Every Game I Played in 2020, Ranked

2020. Boy, what a garbo year huh? Didn't actually play that many games this year all-in-all. Happens! My backlog is getting pretty big, but I just find it hard to focus on games when I could be working on something. Or put off working on something, as it may happen to be at times.

My arbitrary decision from years ago to only attach a numbered ranking to same-year releases is getting increasingly silly, especially given my propensity to wait on playing games until I’m in the right mood, but whatever. That order matters than the dumb numerical numbering anyway.

2015 | 2016 | 2017 | 2018 | 2019

Later Alligator – 2019 – Steam – ★★

The style of this game is very cute, and the jokes are funny enough. But… ok, look, I’m not one to be precious about what is or isn’t a game. But this really isn’t a game. It’s a series of disconnected, unrelated challenges clipped from Atari Free Mini Game Collection 100, wrapped in a very non-interactive adventure-game. It’s cute, it’s kind of sweet, but it’s dull. Dull dull dull. There’s a pointless, mandatory sliding block puzzle early on that infuriated me by its mere existence. Them giving the ability to skip it because “wow you’re bad at this huh”, which, while accurate, also just sold the whole point meaningless of the “““interactive experience”””.

Also: when a huge part of your game is WOW WE ANIMATED EVERYONE REALLY GOOD, text boxes that reveal word-by-word, far away from the animations that occur when said characters talk? Kind of stinks!

8. Carrion – 2020 – Steam – ★★

What Carrion does well— the whole “You’re controlling The Thing and just rippin’ people apart!” shtick— is really neat. They made that bootleg The Thing animate real-ass good.

The actual game as a whole though? Kind of garbage. Imagine a Metroidvania with zero actual exploration, where every opportunity you have to venture off the path instead results in immediate railroading with constant, utterly inexplicable one-way pipes. It’s not that it’s linear, it’s that it actively slaps you when you attempt to explore. It’s very frustrating! Add the fact that the tentacle-monster-shtick makes challenging to actually, y’know, move around and control all your bits…  the only reason I finished the game was due to foreknowledge of its extreme brevity.

I think if the game were more open and less obsessed with constantly handing out upgrades, as well as having less of a focus on pure combat, I think I’d have enjoyed it more.

SD Gundam G Generation Cross Rays – 2019 – Steam – ★★

It is well documented at this point that I am both an active Gundam fan, and as well as an on-again-off-again tactical RPG aficionado. A SD Gundam game appearing on Steam with a good English translation and localization is… exciting, to say the least. That said, I have never had much context for this game series beyond the basic facts that the combat tended to be pretty well animated CG, and that it’s vaguely similar to Super Robot Wars. Turns out… it’s really different from SRW? I dunno how the rest of the series fairs, but Cross Rays is weird as hell.

For one, there’s zero tutorialization at all. None. Almost all of what I’m going to explain here is me figuring stuff out by trial and error, or by reading junk online. Gundam is insanely popular, you’d think they’d be interested in explaining how it all works, but… nope. Even Super Robot Wars has multi-level introductory bits for new folks to show them the rope these days.

So: Cross Rays is a tactical RPG where you can playthrough the storyline of various Gundam AUs. You can play through them in any order. These playthroughs are fairly literal translations of the stories. You take control of the lead mecha from those series, fight enemy mobile suits that show up in SRW-like tactical RPG combat, until all reinforcements cease. Pretty straight forward. There are occasionally mission variants like “prevent enemies from reaching X” or “prevent enemies from destroying Y”, but even those can be just reduced to “kill everything very quickly please.”

But here’s the thing: while there is a story progression, the characters in the story itself actually have no character progression. These characters and mecha are actually considered guests, despite it being ostensibly their story. Instead, you are able to field “permanent” mecha and pilots of your own choosing, which do have progressions. There is no plot justification for this or anything like it. The game does not recognize that it’s weird that during Iron-Blooded Orphans intro where nobody knows what a Gundam even is, you can have 25 Gundams show up at once and just fire lasers at everything. That’s because this game is actually about repeatedly grinding the same set of missions over and over.

Pilots are recruited by completing certain in-mission requirements. Mecha are acquired by either by getting enough kills with the progression-less “guest” mecha, combining mecha you already have gashopon-style, completing certain quests, or by leveling up mecha and then “evolving them”. This is the actual core of the game.

SD Gundam G Generation Cross Rays is basically Disgaea, it turns out? You’re grinding story missions at various difficulty levels in order to complete missions, try to recruit specific pilots, equip them with stats and levels to make them stronger, and then hitting mecha together in a sort of quasi-SMT fusion system until you get all the powerful mobile suits you desire.

The combat itself is kind of… bland? There’s a lot of systems, but they mostly seem in service of making an already easy game easier, or burning through tedium. There are four different difficulty modes, because there’s not actually that many different missions you can play through. The expectation is you’ll just work your way through every story beat while ramping the difficulty up over time to where the “guest” mecha would not be able to handle on their own. In fact, letting the story mecha act out the story beats is actually bad after a point, unless you’re still trying to get those lead mobile suits, or if you’re trying to complete some mission requirement in order to recruit Named Wing Grunt Pilot #246.

There is something to the notion of “I want to get N and N and N and N on a team, piloting weird but powerful mobile suits, and just solo every Gundam AU in a row,” but the whole premise seems kind of against purpose. Why bother recreating story beats at all, then? It’s not like the game even acknowledges any of that going on.

If the point is that I’m supposed to be, like in other grind-heavy tactical RPGs, breaking the systems to my own end in order to proceed… why not make the missions you play challenges focused towards that? The story progression literally only exists to facilitate the mission-based unlock conditions, which makes all the energy put into making them JUST LIKE THE ANIME really damn pointless.  

I like tactical RPGs, I like breaking RPG systems so as to beat hard challenges (I beat all the insanely hard extra bosses in FFXII for crying out loud), I looooove Gundam. I should like this. But I don’t really have the “god, I NEED TO FILL THIS LIST” gene that some folks have… except as an excuse to continue to engage in gameplay I enjoy. The gameplay here seems in service of the collection, rather than the way around.

7. Pokemon Sword: The Isle of Armor – 2020 – ★★★

Pokemon’s first foray into actually doing DLC is… a mixed bag. As a positive, they’ve improved the Wild Area concept I liked from the main game, and even brought back buddy Pokemon walking behind you. That’s neat. On the other hand: the actual progression in it is completable in like an hour, it doesn’t scale with you, so you’re bound to be over leveled for it, and all the raid stuff, while still conceptually neat, is just as flawed as in the base game. And so, you’re just left with even more new Pokemon to RNG grind on to continue to catch-them-all. Nah, I’m good.

Astral Chain – 2019 – Switch – ★★★

Platinum knows how to make good character action games. They’ve made a bunch of them. Bayonetta, Nier: Automata, Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance. They also know how to make some kind of mediocre character action games. Transformers: Devastation, Wonderful 101, their various shovelware character action games like Korra. Astral Chain falls somewhere in the middle, I guess?

Astral Chain has all the production of their good games. It has some stylish, cool action. It has a neat core mechanical idea, in that it’s essentially a two-character action game where you control both characters at once. It has a lot of the old mechanics from some of their best games brought in; witch-time last second dodging from Bayonetta, Nier’s shooting-and-slashing combination, the Zandatsu mechanic from Metal Gear Rising, even Wonderful 101’s multi-unit shenanigans. The setting is different, and there’s some neat world flavor all in all.

But, of all games I’ve played over the past few years, Astral Chain made me more vividly angry than any other. It’s not that it’s too hard— far from it, really, I found its combat incredibly mashy. No, the problem is that it has so many shitty mechanics slathered on that it become a chore to get to the “good bits”.

Why would you put forced stealth sequences in your character action game, especially when your movement controls are not suited for it?

Why the HELL would you put platforming sections in your character action game, constantly, especially when your stupid ghost buddy can accidentally yank you off the edge, your auto-combos can just throw you off the edge, or literally anything can knock you off the edge and make you lose life?

Why would you put so many constant excuses into the world to force me use the digital sensor in the game, that also makes it miserable to walk around while using it?

WHO THE LIVING FUCK THINKS THESE SHITTY BOX BALANCING MINI-GAMES ARE FUN???

These games are supposed to encourage me to perfect everything, right? Why keep putting fucking fights you need to complete in order to get an S rank behind backtracking, or Legions I don’t have yet? That isn’t adding replayability, that’s just wasting my time. There are even in-level missions that have fail conditions that you never even know about. Surprise!!! A lot of them involve chasing after guys and catching them with your chain, which is really obnoxious to do!!!! SURPRISE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The story is just Bad Evangelion, straight up. Every story beat from Evangelion is here, executed worse. They also make your character have a twin just so they can have a character who can talk and feel emotions, because your boring-ass protagonist is stuck being an emotionless audience cipher. Cool!!!

Tetris Effect – 2018 – Origin – ★★★

It’s drugs Tetris. I personally don’t use, or have synesthesia for that matter. I imagine this game is better if you do. It’s an enjoyable enough experience but it feels incredibly slight for what I was expecting from it, or even compared to something like Lumines, which has tons of replayability by way of its difficulty. Tetris just isn’t that hard, unless you’re forcing yourself to do weird shit to get points. I WILL NEVER LEARN HOW TO T-SPIN. Never.

Castlevania Anniversary Collection – 2019 – Steam – ★★★

Kind of an unremarkable Castlevania collection. Neat that it has an official translation of Kid Dracula in there, but also… look, I prefer Metroidvania Castlevanias, OK?

6. Spelunky 2 – 2020 – Steam – ★★★

I’m not entirely sure why this doesn’t click for me where Spelunky 1 did. More annoying intro levels? Too many fiddly requirements for different ending-progression? Gameplay additions that just make things more annoying? Spelunky 1 was hard, but there was a kind straight-forwardness to it, even with its weird secrets, that made it much easier to grok and continue banging your head against. I’m just not having as much fun with this. Difficulty should be challenging, not a hassle.

5. Stellaris: Federations – 2020 – Steam – ★★★

This is the year that Stellaris just broke for me.

Federations itself is a good DLC; it adds some really interesting mechanics tied to various types of multi-national unions (the titular federations, as well as the Space UN), as well as the addition of unique “origins” that allow you to further specialize your gameplay. The origins in particular are a great addition that allows more specialization and roleplay.

I’m just tired of the sheer amount of busywork Stellaris forces you to do. Every DLC adds more junk you need to keep an eye on, and the fact that the AI doesn’t even bother with it (compensating with copious economy boosts in order to keep up) makes the whole thing frustrating. It’s like playing fetch with yourself; you just get tired of chasing after your own ball after a point.

I have to wonder if they’re pivoting towards a notional Stellaris 2 at this point? Might not be a bad idea for them, though it is weird with all they talked up adding more origins when Federations came out.  

4. GranBlue Fantasy Versus – 2020 – Steam – ★★★★

This is probably the fighting game I got most into over the past few years. There’s just this nice, almost Street Fighter-esque ease of execution to the controls, and that Arc Systems Works 3D-as-2D style continues to just do work. I don’t give a single shit about GranBlue Fantasy (frankly, I think I’d enjoy this game more if it wasn’t attached to a property) but the characters are fun enough to play and look at.

The big problem here is two things: no crossplay, and no rollback netcode. In the span of a month, this game became a total ghost town on PC, and it doesn’t sound like PS4 faired that much better. 

Ring Fit Adventure – 2019 – Switch – ★★★★

I’ve fallen on-and-off this game all year. At its heart: it works, it’s a fun exercise game. I don’t think it really feels like a “game” (in the sense that I’m not really coming to it for riveting gameplay or anything) as much as just a guided exercise experience, but… that’s fine? The in-game story is kind of flat, but funny in the fact of it existing at all. Buff Nicol Bolas and all.

XCOM 2: War of the Chosen – 2017 – Steam – ★★★★

XCOM2: War of the Chosen is a great answer to what XCOM2 struggled with. As I discussed back in 2016 (Jesus Christ), XCOM2 tried to push against player’s worst instincts by incentivizing them to keep being aggressive through a whole bunch of timers— which, kind of just weren’t fun given how much accidentally walking into an ambush could “ruin” dozens of hours of play. War of the Chosen dials that back in some intelligent ways, by instead making the encounter designs themselves, as well as much more grab-and-bail mission types, encourage players to push ahead instead. Smart!

The addition of the Chosen makes the game feel more alive, and they really do make missions harder— particularly early on. But they’ve somehow accidentally fell into the hole, where XCOM just… isn’t that hard? Early on it’s challenging, particularly with the resource restrictions and all. But they keep giving you more and more options (that aren’t especially meaningful choices) that make your team more and more powerful, without increasing the strength of the enemy as time goes on. By the five-hour mark, you basically know if you’re going to steam roll the game or not.

The amount of additional character and variety in the gameplay is great, I just wish it had a more challenging difficulty curve. Maybe make the meta-layer of when enemies show up more targeted to where players are at. If a player is doing well, ramp up the difficulty, if they’re struggling, pull it back a bit. I should always feel like I’m just barely keeping ahead with XCOM, not like I’m bored. And by the end of War of the Chosen, I was kind of getting bored, really. Oh well.

3. Animal Crossing: New Horizons – 2020 – Switch – ★★★★

This is probably the video game that I spent the most time with hours-wise this year. I’m not entirely sure why? It’s a nice evolution of New Leaf, in that the crafting, environment shaping, and general quality-of-life improvements made are quite nice. There’s clearly been some thought on how people play these games, and ways to make the experience less frustrating.

… and yet, they kept so much tedium in the game. Like yes, the schedule stretching is the point, I get it. As someone who for some reason decided not to play with the clock, I only just recently finished the fish, fossils, and insects for the museum. But there’s just so many weird, little things that just make it hard to keep coming back to it. It’s like… to what end? When I’ve unlocked everything, and basically seen the entirety of the item list at this point, and the holiday events all being the game meaningless collectathons…. Why? I’m not going to try completing the collection; the museum stuff is about my limit, really (and even the paintings I can probably pass on).

I guess even an idealized, digital representation of a quasi-domestic life has the spiritual emptiness of consumerism-for-consumerism sake. Thanks???

Hypnospace Outlaw – 2019 – Steam – ★★★★

I grew up on the internet of the early 00s. I had an AngelFire website, mostly consisting of shitty sprite webcomics and hosted Gundam pics. I remember when Google wasn’t really a thing and you would heavily rely on website compilation sites like the Anime Web Turnpike in order to find anything of value online. It was weird, it was wild. It was exciting!

The internet seemed so different back then. There was a ton of garbage online, but also, like… there was a sense of optimism to it. Folks were shitty, there was plenty of bad stuff online, but it felt so disconnected from the fabric of the physicality of real-life that it was at the same time a perfect escape.

I was young when I first got “online”, something like 12. I remember having this notion that the internet was going to be this great equalizer, that it had infinite potential to change how people behave and interact. Boy, huh.

Hypnospace Outlaw is essentially a splendid alternate universe GeoCities recreation, where you’re a volunteer moderator of a grouping of websites on HypnOS, an internet-analog you access while you are sleep. At the surface level, it’s mostly about poking around the weird alternate-historical version of the internet they created, full of kids feuding, bizarre historical divergences, and plenty of amazing bespoke weirdness. All of this is great; there’s an incredible amount of content that’s just great to poke at, listen to, and explore.

Below the surface, there’s also a rolling plotline about the ethics of this industry-owned platform, those who run it, and the way corporations handle new technology, new platforms, and emerging digital societies. There’s a late game turn that’s pretty damn affecting. And as someone who has moderator his share of internet forums in his time, trying to balance ‘do it for the community’ and what your ostensible ‘bosses’ require of you, it was kind of a weird throwback in more ways than one.

Minecraft – 2011 – PC – ★★★★★

Turns out, Minecraft is really as good still who knew??? Started playing a bunch more of it this year due to Giant Bomb deciding to do so, and yeah: still good!

2. Hades – 2020 – Steam – ★★★★★

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again— Supergiant makes damn good games. I’d been holding off on checking out Hades until its full release due to my tendency to burn out on games easily, and I’m glad I waited. Hades is a fantastic rogue-lite experience. The way it makes narrative progression part of the reiterative, randomized rogue-lite structure is just perfect.

It’s got all the usual Supergiant bullet points. Great characters, voice acting, narration, and music. In terms of gameplay, it’s probably their least ambitious game— playing something like a cousin to their original game, Bastion— but it’s also been polished to a mirror sheen. It just feels really damn good to play, over and over and over.

That being said, the second (final?) ending feels kind of…. Tacked on? It’s fine as a goal to go for while continuing to do the game’s relationship mechanics for additional story bits, but it ends up feeling kind of unfulfilling compared to the payoff of the first one.

1. Crusader Kings III – 2020 – Steam – ★★★★★

I never could get into Crusader Kings II. Despite my interest, the sheer mechanical heft and unintuitive interface made the game a wall that I just couldn’t get over. I’m sure if I’d dedicated myself I probably could have learned it, but… ehhhhhh.

Crusader Kings III, on the other hand, has a good tutorial, a cleaned-up UI, and a very helpful highlight and tooltip system that make it much easier to understand how to actually play the game through resources inside the game itself. And, as it turns out: I rather love this game.

I mean, conceptually it’s an easy sell, isn’t it? Historical politics is something I enjoy broadly. I liked Stellaris but wish it had more narrative, roleplaying elements. They outright say that “winning” isn’t really the point of the game. Instead, it’s more about emergent storytelling and playing with the different systems and seeing what you can do with it.

My current game has had me taking the Haesteinn dynasty from its Viking origins into England, forming a London-seated Northern Sea Empire that encompasses all of Britannia, Iceland, Holland, Norway, and Denmark. I am currently working on hegemonizing Norse religious control over enough Asatru holy sites to finally reform the religion, such that more unified feudalization can occur. To that end, my current ruler’s predecessor invaded West Francia and conquered the whole of its territory, substantially reducing the foothold of Catholicism in mainland Europe… which seems to have kicked the hornet’s nest, given the Crusade I’m going to need to contend with next time I boot up the game.

Of course, a complicating matter is that my current ruler— the Emperor of the North Sea, King of Ireland and the Danelaw, liege of the King of Denmark, was elected from the extended Haesteinn family via Thing, the Scandinavian council of his erstwhile vassals. Where the previous emperor, the one who manufactured the invasion of Francia, was quite religious and beloved for his adherence to the old ways, I discovered as I took over as his successor that he really, really is into just boning down across Europe. We’re talking constantly attempting to seduce neighboring Queens and Princesses. His vassals are not thrilled with this. They also don’t care for his propensity for torturing people to death, constantly.

I had no real say in this; attempting to stay on top of a dynasty is kind of like riding a bucking-bronco, so many things are only tenuously under your control that some weird shit can happen. This is especially true when you use the systems that make it easier to maintain the coherency of your domain. The Norse religion encouraging concubinage results in you having a lot of kids, which means there’s a lot of domain partition going on (someday, primogeniture, someday). Naturally, using Thing election reduces that, but also makes you sometimes end up having to play Emperor Stabbo-Fucko because they thought he was the best candidate at the time. Hell, I thought he was the best candidate at the time until I discovered just how many people he’d be laying with on the low. But you just have to roll with it.

The way the game forces you to play ball with character traits is great. Doing things that match with the character’s traits makes them lose stress. Doing things against their character increases stress. Too much stress can force you to make the character take up vices (which can make them suffer health or opinion maluses, as well as altering their aptitudes), or even die outright. And sometimes those vices and attitudes can be boons, given they open up opportunities for different character interactions.

Emperor Stab-and-Fuck-Kingdom is perhaps the most relaxed person alive, it turns out, because his sadism makes him really enjoy sacrificing infidels, which makes the gods happy. It also freaks the fuck out of all of his vassals, so they’re a good supplicant mix of both appreciative of my religious sentiments and also utterly terrified of my skull piles. Some especially brave vassals occasionally try to assassinate me, but my lovers keep jumping in front of the knife and saving my life mid-coitus. Iiiiiit happens! :D  

The game can be incredibly fun to just watch, as it becomes emergently weird. Georgia right now is incredibly Jewish in game. I’m not sure how that happened; I guess someone made a random Jewish guy into a vassal, who somehow moved up enough in the world to make it a movement? The Byzantine princes elected a Coptic as Emperor, which over the course of the decade resulted in very accelerated balkanization as Byzantium just lost its shit. The Middle East and notional HRE haven’t really unified in a meaningful way, so I’m curious how things are going to go if/when the Mongols unify and roll-on in.

It’s one of those “Just one more thing” games that can completely devour time. I have more than a few times checked the clock mid-game to see that it’s 4AM and that I’ve totally ruined my sleep schedule in the process of play. Oooooops.

I highly recommend checking it out if you’re curious; the introductory, pre-release video series Paradox put out showing off the game does a pretty good job of showing the core gameplay loop and also how weird it can get.

[silvershoelaces]

HPWU: A One Year Retrospective

Harry Potter: Wizards Unite turned one year old last month, and over the past year, it has improved a lot.

This review is looking at HPWU as a standalone game, devoid of the context of the book series, any views of its author, the movies and spinoffs, or any other media associated with the Harry Potter franchise.  I have plenty of opinions thereof, but they are not directly relevant to my opinions of the game and how it functions.

The game at its core is not particularly inventive, and at the beginning of its first year, it mostly felt like a reskin of Pokemon Go.  Spawns appear on the screen based on a map that a player traverses in real space, and players must tap on the spawns and then attempt to collect them in order to complete their collections.  But instead of catching Pokemon to fill the Pokedex, players are rescuing “foundables” from “confoundables” to fill their stamp collections.  Unlike Pokemon Go, multiple copies of each foundable must be collected in order to acquire the stamp, and once the entire page of stamps is collected, it can be prestiged in order to start the whole process over again.

Traversing the world, though, can prove to be complicated in anywhere but the most urban of areas.  I live in an urban area, close to my local downtown, and at the game’s inception, I had to walk pretty far in order to complete my daily F2P chores each day.  See, all of the POIs (points of interest) on the map are auto-generated from the data in Niantic’s original game, Ingress, and each POI is randomly assigned to one of three types.  Inns, where players can acquire spell energy, are the most common.  Next are greenhouses, where players can acquire potionmaking ingredients and occasionally, more spell energy.  And the least common of these POIs is fortresses, which allow players to enter timed dungeons either by themselves or with other players to fight baddies and get prizes for their efforts.

The randomness of assigning each of these three types of POI is a real drag for many players.  When the game was first released, I had two greenhouses and one fortress reasonably close to my home.  This was enough to play the game, as greenhouses also occasionally awarded spell energy just like inns, except that the dailies explicitly required me to interact with two inns each day in order to get any premium currency.  And as I mentioned, the assortment of POIs was completely random!  Some players found themselves with nothing but fortresses around, while others had only inns and no fortresses for multiple kilometers.  I considered myself relatively fortunate that I only had to walk 1 km to get to a nearby inn!

But unlike Pokemon Go, while the game encourages exploring, the core mechanics are not well suited to walking.  In Go, a rare spawn can be easily subdued in 1-2 attempts, and curveballs are quick and easy to throw.  In HPWU, the rarer the spawn, the more difficult it is to capture, and the more likely it is to run away.  Foundables are captured by tracing patterns on the screen, and they all have a rather low acquisition rate, which means the rare ones are more likely to flee than to stay put unless the player pours consumable items into their capture.  And even so, a player having to trace the same pattern multiple times just to capture a single spawn means that there is much more time standing in one place and less time walking.  This is not an exercise game.

And this is one of the core flaws that has plagued Wizards Unite since its inception.  It’s a clone of Pokemon Go, but every single mechanic that differs from Pokemon Go brings it further away from Go’s vision of an exercise game.  Wizards Unite is an augmented reality exploration game, but it’s more about exploring a story and a setting than about racking up burned calories.  This is especially apparent in limited-time events that encourage players to spend multiple hours standing still by the same POI, challenging hordes of enemies.

Monthly Community Day events aside, the regular cycle of in-game events was fun and engaging at first, but it quickly grew dull as players finished the main story quest and found the primary content of the game to be the fortnightly events.  This is always a struggle for F2P games, especially games that rely on collections rather than PVP mechanics.  The events weren’t even new content, merely recolored versions of content that already existed in the games, spawning much more frequently than other foundables and with featured spawn rates.  What was fun in the game’s first few months had quickly become tedious, especially when the featured foundables had low catch rates.

Despite this stagnation, the game has changed over time, and many improvements have been made.  The tonic for trace detection, a craftable potion that allows players to summon foundables to wherever they are, was long overdue when it was introduced into the game, allowing players who were less mobile to encounter more foundables when they had time to play.  Inns and greenhouses were rebalanced so that inns in less urban areas dropped more spell energy, and greenhouses’ spell energy became guaranteed, rather than a 50% drop rate, which was an important improvement for areas with a low POI density and an active playerbase.  Adventure Sync was added, which allows the game to track steps.  (Unfortunately, this feature does not function well, as the steps counted toward daily tasks only begin after the player’s daily login bonus, and AdSync requires the game to have access to the player’s GPS while the game is closed, which drains phone battery in the background. Players who already have AdSync enabled for Pokemon Go will not notice much difference.)

The most significant overhaul, of course, came with the onset of coronavirus.  In order to allow players to continue playing from their homes, the daily requirement to interact with inns was removed, and the Knight Bus, which allows players to remotely access fortress challenges and even engage with other players remotely, was implemented.  I have found that the implementation of the Knight Bus almost single-handedly revived my interest in the game when I had grown completely bored of it, as it was a lot more fun to play fortress challenges with friends, which I had barely been able to do before, than to play the game solo.

But these improvements also serve to highlight the flaws in this game that have not been improved since its release.  Trace completion always takes a particular shape, and its right-handed bias is clear the moment one attempts to complete a trace off-handed.  The swirl of Ebublio, in particular, which takes an “e” shape, feels much more natural in the counter-clockwise direction in the right hand than in the left.  Mirroring traces in a left-handed or “mirror” mode would be an easy fix!

SOS assignments have not been updated since day one of the game, and they have said “new assignments coming soon” since I completed them.  In my first few months of playing, that was the real draw of the game for me, finishing the story quest and continuing on to the next page to see what would happen next.  Each event feels like filler, while what would have made the most sense would have been to add four or five new pages of story quests every few months or so.  And they (and all other events) aren’t replayable, so when WB/Niantic/whoever is responsible finally gets around to adding them, we’ll all have forgotten what happened.  I already don’t remember.

Finally, the entire story as a whole, which is told as a haphazard, shoddy, zigzagging extra flavor to the repetitive, bland events, could have been told with just a week or even a day of gameplay in a regular game.  “What is causing this calamity?” the characters ask.  “I don’t know, but let’s patch the problem and investigate the cause later.  Maybe the identity of the next problem that arises will give us a clue.”  The game relies on half a dozen characters who show up just to give the player instructions, and it is somewhat over-reliant on the draw of the property to encourage players to invest themselves in the game.  This is not good for a game that is mostly divorced from the primary story of its franchise.  Assuming I knew nothing about Harry Potter or his universe before playing this game, and even if I do, there are way too many characters, and no documented point of reference for a player to look at for a reminder.  The main characters seem to be Constance Pickering and Hermione Granger, with a splash of Harry Potter and a pinch of Ron Weasley thrown in.  Their commentary doesn’t add much to my engagement because it’s the same mildly curious “I wonder what’s causing this” speculation we’ve had since the beginning.

Good stuff appears to be coming soon.  The strongest aspect of the game is the ability to customize one’s character with an ability tree, which lends more variety to the way players can interact with the fortress challenges.  An upcoming update is set to add this customization to the map screen, which may give this game the new life it so sorely needs.

All in all, judging Wizards Unite by its gameplay and content alone, and divorcing it from the source material, I’d rate it a C+.  The game isn’t sure what it wants to be.  It advertises itself as an exploration game, but punishes walking and rewards standing still.  Adventure Sync once again rewards walking, this time when the game is closed, but the player is again punished, this time by severe battery drain.  The game leans heavily on its story, but the story falls short due to poor updates and over-reliance on events to tease rather than deliver new story elements.

And of course, if we are to judge the game based primarily on its being an entry into the Harry Potter franchise, then we must begin to judge it on the merits and flaws of the franchise as a whole, which is a discussion for another day.  If we don’t measure it against the franchise, there is much in the game that will be confusing to a player unfamiliar with the series.  Who are these people, and why are we rescuing them?  Why are we rescuing this one man some of the time, and attacking him other times?  Four of the six pages of stamps feature characters from the franchise heavily.  Players who aren’t invested in the franchise won’t care too much about them.

To someone who isn’t interested in the Harry Potter franchise, or to someone who was previously interested but has become disillusioned with the author of the series, I recommend you pass on this game.  However, longtime fans who can still derive pleasure from the series, who separate the creator from the creation, or who view this and other derivative works as their own entries, created by teams rather than by the one who started it all, may enjoy this game.

[jobrosupdates]

‘We needed to speak our truth – and forgive’: Jonas Brothers on music, marriage and making up | The Guardian

Six years ago, on the back of 17m album sales, the Disney stars split, devastating their fans. Now they’re back with a No 1 single. They talk about family rifts – and why it took so long to patch things up

“Good to see you,” smiles Kevin Jonas, the first of three Jonas brothers to arrive in the back room of an upmarket hotel in Fitzrovia, London. Kevin and I have indeed met before, many years ago, for an interview he has no reason to remember. Between then and today, the Jonas Brothers have split and now re-formed, and for anyone querying just how in sync the newly reunited band are, Joe is the next to join us. “Good to see you,” he says. A few seconds later, here comes Nick: “Good to see you.”

It is three months since they announced their reunion, more than half a decade since a split that was blamed on a “deep rift within the band”. The pandemonium surrounding their getting back together, which has seen Sucker become the band’s first US No 1 single, feels like a mirror image of how fans reacted to the brutality and abruptness of the split in 2013, when, having sold 17m albums and achieved widespread international fame, the brothers ditched a half-made fifth album and cancelled a world tour they were in the middle of. Nick instigated the split, it emerged; there were musical differences, along with the deep rift.

I ask them how being back and once again hurling themselves into full days of press, fan meets-and-greets and invite-only concerts is going. Kevin is the first to respond: “Well, we haven’t wanted to break up yet.”

The Jonas Brothers began life as a standard teen band. Columbia Records had already released solo music by Nick, who had been performing on Broadway since he was seven. (Today, he describes his seven-year-old self as “incredibly driven and focused and not very fun to be around”, which prompts a knowing laugh from older brother Kevin.) The preposterously wholesome New Jersey brothers’ cover of Busted’s Year 3000, in which their vision of the future referenced girls with “round hair like Star Wars” rather than Busted’s “triple-breasted women”, brought modest success. But when their debut album flopped, Columbia dropped the band and around the same time, their father, a pastor whose involvement in the church had a big impact on the family, lost his job. Joe was 17, Kevin was 19; Nick was just 14. “Lost in the shuffle of major label ‘stuff’,” is how Nick puts it now. At the time, emotions ran higher. “We felt like our journey had come to an end.”

But in the words of another sibling pop band, it had only just begun. In 2007, just weeks after leaving Columbia, the band signed with Disney’s record label Hollywood. Disney’s pitch to the Jonas Brothers was simple, according to Nick. “They called and said: ‘You’ve been working with someone who doesn’t know how to market to this audience. This is literally what we do. We see an opportunity and we want to help you grow.’” Disney’s power had already become obvious to the band when the Year 3000 video was played on one of its TV channels. “I saw our Myspace followers go from 100 to 10,000 in just one day,” Joe says.

Only with hindsight is it clear just how effectively the Disney machine made good on its promise. They inserted the Jonas Brothers, albeit not as the Jonas Brothers, into the TV show Hannah Montana, as Miley Cyrus’s favourite band, in an episode that aired directly after the premiere of High School Musical 2. They gave the siblings their own sitcom, Jonas, in which they played a band (again, not the Jonas Brothers). Then came the movie Camp Rock, in which the Jonas Brothers starred alongside Demi Lovato as the band Connect 3. Once again, not the Jonas Brothers, a strategy Joe now recognises as both “genius and confusing”, but the audience joined the dots, thanks in part to another series, Living The Dream – a fly-on-the-wall show in which the band finally starred as themselves.

Those years involved so many of what Nick describes as “pinch-me-I’m-a-Jonas-Brother moments”, such as performing at the White House as favourites of the Obama administration. Joe recalls playing with Stevie Wonder at the Grammys. “The curtains open and there’s Paul McCartney and Chris Martin, and they’re the first ones out of their seats.” They were applauding, not leaving. “Obviously it was for Stevie Wonder, but that felt rewarding.”

Inconveniently, the brothers, being living organisms, got older, and while the Jonas Brothers owe their success to Disney it was inevitable that they would outgrow the channel’s values. Joe wrote a frank assessment of that time for New York magazine in 2013, saying the band were like “frightened little kids” when faced with Disney’s demands for a clean-cut band. Today, he says simply that Disney was “very helpful when we needed it the most”.

Internally, things were also complex. There is a throwaway comment in one episode of Living the Dream in which the brothers discuss their father, who by that point had taken on the role of the band’s co-manager: “The problem is, we’re never sure when he’s just being dad.” Equally, the band realised the line between brother and bandmate was frequently, inevitably, ill-defined. “Sometimes you just want a dad, sometimes you just want a brother,” Joe says today. “There was confusion when it came to family versus band, and what comes first.”

“When the band broke up, he balanced both really well,” Nick says of their father. “Because I had initiated the conversation for the group to break up, he was comforting to me while I spoke my truth. Then when Joe and Kevin’s reaction was complicated, he was a father to them, and managerial to me.”

I ask Joe and Kevin if they can expand on “complicated”. “Sure,” Joe says. “I was mad as hell.”

The split, Joe says, wasn’t something he was expecting, even if the signs were all there: “The music wasn’t as strong as it had been, we weren’t selling as many tickets. And our relationship was unhealthy. We weren’t communicating as we should have been.” Still, Joe remembers thinking that things would work themselves out. “I kind of just assumed we’d get through this bad phase and something great would happen again.”

By 2009, the Jonas Brothers had been releasing an album every summer since 2006 but their fourth album, Lines, Vines and Trying Times, sold less than half its predecessor, and less than a third of the band’s breakthrough album. After that, Nick and Joe released solo albums, which were poorly received. I ask if the failure of those initial solo outings, followed by the ill-fated retreat to the safety of the band, could have fostered resentment that led to the eventual split. Joe nods. “I wanted to at least get that personal win of being able to do something on my own, which I carried for many years, just thinking: ‘I can’t do anything without these guys.’”

After the band’s split in 2013, Kevin spent time with his wife, Danielle, raising their two daughters, starting a construction company and investing in a handful of ventures including a food app called Yood and a service for social influencers called The Blu Market. Nick released two albums, resulting in some decent airplay and chart hits such as the 2014 single Jealous. Joe formed a band, DNCE, whose 2015 billion-stream behemoth Cake By the Ocean was No 1 from Ecuador to Israel. Despite movie roles for both (Nick in Goat and Jumanji, Joe as a voice actor in Hotel Transylvania 3), and a slot judging on Australia’s The Voice for Joe, their projects hit a wall – one of the tracks from DNCE’s latest EP has broken 7m Spotify streams, while Cake By the Ocean stands at 806m.

Although the brothers were hardly estranged during this period, there was a multi-platinum elephant in the room at family events. In 2017 came the idea of a Jonas Brothers documentary, Chasing Happiness, which is out this week on Amazon. The main aim was closure. “We definitely didn’t think we were going to get back together,” Joe says. During one pivotal moment the band took part in a drinking game (the documentary was not being made by Disney), in which residual issues were pulled out of a hat, and each member rated the other on the honesty of their responses. “We all needed to speak our truth, and be able to forgive,” Nick says. “It’s easy. Say the truth, then it’s behind you. Just say it out loud.”

The brothers insist the plan was simply to draw a line under the band, but a full reunion happened anyway. They contacted the songwriter and producer Ryan Tedder, who has worked with everyone from Adele to U2. They knew they needed to update to reflect pop’s new sound, and what Nick describes as “the ever-changing landscape of the way music is released and how people consume it. We were conscious that there would always be a new wave of entertainers you can feel you’re in competition with but rather than be frustrated with how quickly things change, we’ve chosen to lean into it.” Tedder’s early enthusiasm for the project gave the band the confidence to approach other pop overlords such as Greg Kurstin and Max Martin. “Before,” Joe says, “when it was slowing down, we were nervous to reach out to big producers and writers, thinking they would say no to working with us.”

The result is an album, Happiness Begins, that is arguably better than anything the band made in their earlier years. Free from the late-00s shackles of over-enthusiastic hair straightening, the Jonas Brothers rather suit being older. They seem happy that their audiences in 2019 will generally have drinks in their hands and much like the fans who have grown up with them, these brothers seem more like individuals, too, from Nick in his designer bomber jacket to Kevin in an unassuming lumberjack shirt.

The march of age – Nick is 27, Joe, 29, and Kevin, 31 – also means the brothers are no longer synonymous with the purity rings they once wore as a display of abstinence, which quickly became the target of a rather odd media obsession. Nick has since said that the purity rings ended up shaping his view of sex. “They did,” he restates today. How? “The values behind the idea of understanding what sex is, and what it means, are incredibly important. When I have children, I’ll make sure they understand the importance of sex, and consent, and all the things that are important. What’s discouraging about that chapter of our life is that at 13 or 14 my sex life was being discussed. It was very tough to digest it in real time, trying to understand what it was going to mean to me, and what I wanted my choices to be, while having the media speaking about a 13-year-old’s sex life. I don’t know if it would fly in this day and age. Very strange.”

In any case, the band are all now married. Kevin got hitched to Danielle a decade ago while Nick’s wife is the actor Priyanka Chopra, and Joe married Sophie Turner, Game of Thrones’ Sansa Stark, in a Las Vegas ceremony last month. All three significant others feature in the video for Sucker. “Sophie was pretty adamant that she play the love interest in every music video we do from now on,” Joe notes. “I told her I didn’t think that was possible, but we’d give her the first one.” I ask him if there’s been a strange atmosphere, with one major chapter ending for Turner just as a new one begins for Joe. “We’ve definitely spoken about that. It’s difficult to say goodbye to one … But it’s amazing timing that we could be starting our life together right now.”

The couple’s refreshing approach to dealing with paparazzi in New York, where they live – staring them out, giving them the finger – often sees them go viral. “Early on, we were trying to be secretive about our relationship,” Joe explains. The problem? “We like to sit outside. Pulling faces at the paparazzi is sometimes the best way to handle the situation – and then I see myself on the top of Reddit.” He suddenly becomes rather animated. “I love Reddit! I got so excited when I saw that. I went: ‘We made it!’ She wasn’t as excited.” (He adds that he mainly visits Reddit for Gifs, memes and pictures of “any cute animal”.)

I ask Nick how he and Priyanka, who has experienced a similar level of a different type of fame, manage their public lives. “She’s coming up on 20 years in the business, and weirdly, so am I,” he begins. “But she wasn’t really familiar with us, or me, when we first started dating.” One of their first steps, within their first few weeks together, was a show-and-tell session. “We actually sat down and educated each other, playing videos we were both embarrassed and proud of. It was a helpful way to get to know each other.” (Nick adds, ominously, that Chopra “did a little digging of her own and found out some things about my past”.)

The band’s not exactly hermit-like private lives have undoubtedly boosted their comeback, but, along with Sucker being a nailed-on hit, they have also benefited from a curious type of nostalgia. Their return does transport the mind to a time when their music seemed to soundtrack things slowly getting better, rather than rapidly descending into what Nick describes today as “an incredibly negative time across the whole globe”, and what the rest of us might term an international dumpster fire.

“That should be our album title,” Joe decides. “Before The Dumpster Fire. Six years ago was a lot different everywhere, but we like the idea that we can take people out of it and smile and bring some joy to 2019.”

This feels like as appropriate a time as any to bring up the internet theory that Kevin’s appearance on the US version of Celebrity Apprentice was directly responsible for Trump’s presidency. The Jonas Brothers aren’t known for their political views but the theory goes like this: Kevin’s presence gave the ailing show an early ratings boost, but after Kevin attempted to outfox Trump in the boardroom and got himself fired, the rest of the season’s ratings were poor, and now here we are. “You can do the math on it, and it lines up,” Kevin accepts. “It’s plausible, I guess, that the need for attention could have led from bad ratings to the presidency. I hope that’s not the case.” Would he like to apologise to the world? “No. I do not take credit for it.”

I ask Nick if, as he has previously stated, he would still like to run for president himself one day. “Politics is a very tricky thing,” he diplomatically responds. “It’s a very different time to when I first mentioned my desire to be president.”

“He’s practising,” Kevin laughs.

“We’ll take what we can get,” Joe mutters.

With that, it’s time for the band to clear off and perform for fans in Kingston, London. Before they go I ask what Connect 3, the band they portrayed in Camp Rock, are doing now. “I think,” Nick says, “they’re just really jealous that the Jonas Brothers are back.”

Jonas Brothers’ new album, Happiness Begins, is out on 7 June on Polydor/Republic Records

Source: The Guardian

[rkheunji]

[ EUNJI - FREE SOMEBODY - HEARTZ MARCH EVAL ]

there had been a lot of second guessing when it came to her choice for her solo song.

she liked it, she knew she could perform it but was it what they wanted? they had already been told the concept for the group and she wasn’t sure if her choice really fell in line with what showed her color the best. in the end, free somebody was still a safe middle ground. from the dance to the vocals, it was a good choice to showcase her skills, the skills she developed since coming into the company.

now, she was -all of them were- on the road to debut and she needed to make sure she did it right. so she went through everything, creating the perfect plan to take care of her voice. that was a main concern, the high note in i don’t know was already something, but she’d also have to do the high notes in free somebody, she wouldn’t ruin her voice.

she couldn’t.

that meant, almost whispering most of the time. setting when she could speak in her regular voice, how often she would sing and at what volume. it was a tedious process but it would help her today. even for this, she prepared everything the best she could. the group performance would go well and this would go even better. even the set up had been practiced, quickly setting up the instrumental that would have the backing vocals in certain parts and making sure her mic was on a low enough volume.

even her outfit had been a recreation of one of the singer’s stages.

when her back turned to the coaches, the music started and eunji closed her eyes for a moment.

We are dyed with different colors and are full of different scents The tips of the five senses are soaked in fantasy where all of these senses happen

she didn’t have back up dancers so she cut out the intro part until it was time for her to walk forward, strutting slightly. the song wasn’t very cute, it leaned towards sexy but she put that tweak into there. just to show she could still give them what they wanted but this was her. the way she felt powerful, that feeling of it was one of the reason’s why she had chosen this song. it was  strong and soft and something she could groove too. in the end, she wanted to have fun on stage, no matter the outcome.

cause I just wanna free somebody Say what you feel Tonight you and I are in this moment on this free night, ey yeah I wanna free somebody

the dance was also another aspect, for female choreograph it was everything she wanted. moves that had to be sharp or it’d look off, elegant in some aspects but still having a lot of power. a reason she went for tennis shoes instead of heels, so she could do all aspects of the dance without a problem. the stage looked cool with back up dancers but since she didn’t have any, it she had to go a little harder in her dancing. in a way she wouldn’t be able to in heel’s. and the more she went on, the more she realized just how much she was enjoying herself. 

I know, I know, I know, I know Deep inside your heart It’s there, it’s there, it’s there, it’s there A dream that you’ve always had I know, I know, I know, I know Throw yourself Now let’s go crazy about the world for once

there was a little extra smile on her face when she sang the ‘i know’ parts, the extra harmonies in the instrumental helped it come to life. and it allowed her to save her voice for the more important parts. this was a hard enough song to stay stable with, especially if you were giving your all during the dance. so far, eunji felt pretty good about her vocal performance. it wasn’t her goal to fully copy the original singer, she knew her strengths and were to play them. if that was one thing she was sure about, she knew her voice and she trusted it. 

and she wanted to give her all when it came to both.

her voice was her most important skill, the thing she was proud of the most. what she treasured most as an artist because it was what she used to express herself. like now, some of her words had a more sultry feel while her notes were pushed out with desire. like she believed her own words.

Ooh~ Ah~ I hope that you find your true self I wanna free somebody

and this was were she really wanted to impress, the one line would repeat a few times and she had to reach the note each time. the small dance break allowed her time to prepare herself but she didn’t show it on her face. even if it was a little awkward just looking at her coaches an not a crowd. this was performance none the less and it had to be known that she was having fun, enjoying herself. natural winks, a smirk or a playful smile. by the end it was easy to see she was truly into it. 

I just wanna free somebody Say what you feel Tonight you and I are in this moment on this free night, ey yeah I wanna free somebody

she poured focus on the high notes when it came time. even if it was a one right after the other, eunji managed to do it with a smile. it was hard but it wouldn’t be worth it if it was easy. and they came out just how she wanted, and she couldn’t have been more proud. now that the vocals were done, eunji went all out with the dance at the end. ( not that she wasn’t before. ) but her goal was to end it with the little extra humph she was looking for.

when it was over, she had to focus on evening her breathing. slowly calming herself down until it was time to release herself from her pose. a few more seconds and she bowed her head and packed up to leave. she was in it to play the long game, even if she was the last girl, as long as she got to debut, then it was fine. 

[coreytravelogue]

Whitehorse, Yukon Territory - May 19, 2018

While I was Yukon I had full intention to post my journal entry before leaving but like me bringing my Jayne hat on this trip, it just didn’t happen. So this will be a mix me last week talking and me a week after reflecting. So lets begin.

(May 11)

Today is the first half of my first day of the city and I think I have already got most of the city now, maybe I am wrong but it is not a big fit. It is not a knock I expected it o be this way and wanted it to. I needed the quiet and the forest atmosphere. Could have done with less of the wind.

I forgot my Jayne hat which angers me to no end but it is a first world problem. I found I forgot it mid way to the airport. Got on the plane at 7 but it wasn’t until 8 when we got off the ground due to a broken toilet. We made it it to Kelowna 45 minutes later in what was supposed to be a in and out and instead it was another hour waiting for something else. I am assuming it was the same broken toilet.

We got off the ground again and it was a 150 min trip or so. One good thing was they fed us well, well better than westjet or air canada would on a trip less than 6 hours or so. We got a fruit and meat plate which was unexpected, a snack which was small but oh well followed by a warm cookie so I could not complain especially since I barely ate that day.

I finally got into Whitehorse at midnight to find the smallest airport I have been to in years that felt like it came out of the 80s w it hits warm colours but I liked that of course. It was just different coming from big or bigger airports elsewhere. Even St. John’s airport is twice the size of this one. I knew I needed a taxi. I normally don’t not trust or don’t like using taxis but given is as in a unknown place, it was midnight and I was tired it was required.  I checked that it would be a 13 dollar fare and the route didn’t seem to of air of a drive but it still wound up being a 20 dollar fare. Thankfully I was prepared for that.

I arrived in my room and found it to be excellent, very nice and clean. That being said I didn’t wind UFO falling asleep till 2 am. I woke up at 6 am and dragged another hour of myself before I showered and met the owner of the house. The house itself is very new in a new neighbourhood. Apparently it was once full of kids but they are all but one gone and that one hopes to be d one soon. In a great form of irony he is trying to apply to work for the department I am working for. I couldn’t and wouldn’t tell much since I have no power to sway but the mother told me he really wants to work for us and I told her if her. Son really wants to work for my department and has the education then he has a good shot. She is a nice woman and house is very nice, would probably be a awesome place. To stay in the summer but it is not quite summer yet as I would soon find out.

I walked out into the 9am to a never ending gust of wind but I quickly got what Whitehorse was about.  It truly is frontier city, that has always been its aesthetic and this city owns it as best it can while it does modernize. It felt like a fusion of the small towns patchiness of Bay Roberts with the industrial appeal of Edmonton.

I walked to the airport in 30 min from the house looking to go to the museums next door but they were both closed. I assume that this city is visited in the summer commonly and winter as well but not in fall or spring and it is still spring here. I then decided to walk tot he city centre because on the map it didn’t seem like that long of a walk. Well not long compared to other cities I have been to. 90 min later I finally reached the city Center after walking through sandy hills and beautiful made for hiking trails. I hoped to have a good breakfast but it was too late for that.

I went to the Main Street which it was literally, the city has one records tore in the area and it is a small one with records going for 50 bucks a shot, CDs for 20 bucks. Reminded me of the old days of Fort McMurray where all CDs cost 25 dollars while everywhere else south was at 20. That is the price of living north of regular civilization. The further away you are from civilization the more expensive things get.

I spent 30 dollars on fudge.......fudge! Not because it was expensive, I don’t know about fudge prices but I went into this Midnight Sun shop which seemed to have a makeshift amount of home madeish stuff, tourist stuff and.......fudge. They had a tray full of tasters and I had one, loved it.....tried another loved it and I think I tried all the different stuff. I am normally not a fudge guy, I cane at it but I guess it has only been until recently I have gotten into how creative many places are with it....so I bought 30 bucks in fudge.....so what....treat yo self!

A coworker recommended a cafe for me to go to but it is too late for breakfast food. As I am writing this I am on my 3rd beer at the Dirty Northern Bastard Public House. I had butter chicken fries and two Yukon made beers from a brewery that is good far from me to check out called Winterlong Brewery. The other I want to go to will have to wait till tomorrow. I could g o today but I want to go on the tour. I always wanted to go on a brewery tour but they were always expensive or not available. This seems doable but the tour starts in 20 min and it Isao 40 min walk from here, I know because I already walked it.

So Saturday the plan is to wake up and hit the two museums at the airport early then be in the brewery by 2pm for it’s tour then buy some beer and find somewhere to get writing. I knew I would be done exploring this city quick. The point was to find solitude or a portion of it to work on stuff.

Whitehorse has something that the others don’t and that is wilderness that surrounds and you are away from everything, something I can’t get in Vancouver or anywhere close. I don’t know if I will get that in Fort Mac 2 weeks from now but I know I won’t have time for writing in Fort Mac while I run a solo Corey This Is Your Life episode just for myself because I know only I am interested in my own past and preserving it because my greatest fear is forgetting things.

The day is still a child here but it is too early to get drunk so I want to hit the only  museum open today then find another place to watch the hockey game. The traditional Canadian accent is very strong here, I feel like the Canada culture is stronger here than it is in places like Toronto, Edmonton and Vancouver. That is if you think in terms of the stereotypes; large wilderness, the accent, the sweet tooth, the hockey obsessed lifestyle and the beer.

May 12

Another day is done and in between those two days there was lots of walking that was done.

After I wrote the above I sent out to explore some more. I set out to find the paddlewheel boat and found I could not get it on it.

Walked back to the city center to go to the go to the city’s historical museum. Sadly it was under renovation but they still were open and changing 8 bucks.

After spending a hour there I went back to the bar to watch the Caps versus Bolts while I continued to dine on over priced bar food and beer but hey.....treat yo self! It was still good food.

By the time the game was over I felt it was time to head back to my room and figured hey it took 90 min to get here I should be able to get back no problem in the same time. I walked up the hill to where the airport was and figured well I already went one way, the other way don’t look too long....

3 hours later I finally got home with my legs completely shot, serves me right I think but thankfully a chat with a friend on my phone made the trek shorter plus I needed the alone time to talk to myself about the typical things.

I got off the bed today and immediately felt the effects of Friday’s walk around the airfield. Those effects I have felt all day. The plan was to go to the museum next to the airport then take a bus to the city center and do the brewery tour then head back to the house to watch the game. That didn’t happen.

The museum was awesome, it was the Beringia Interpretive Center and I think I was their only patron that day, they gave me the full tour and I got my full 6 bucks worth which was beyond worth it. I got to shoot a prehistoric arrow befor bows and arrows which make me want to try and build and shoot my own of it.

After that I had about 90 min to get to the brewery, so I went to the bus stop assuming that it should be around only to find it only runs once and hour. So I decided to do another stupid thing and that was to walk the way down there on basically one good foot. It did wind up being fun despite the fear of bears being around.

I finally got the brewery and drank my fill on a empty stomach, I think everyone knew my plight that day was to just get toasted. I went to wall mart to get my parents the rest of their Christmas presents because I like to get it early. I finally did take the bus which lead me back to at least ten min from the place I stayed but I needed food and was too lazy to cook so I wound up paying 50 dollars worth in fries and chicken finger just for nourishment and nearly passing. Out on their couch. I don’t think it was so much being drunk as it was exhaustion.

So here I am in bed and really to sleep at the early hour of 8 pm.

Tomorrow the plan is to check out and hit the last museum then sit in the airport and work on my writing till the plane gets in. 

May 13 (written on May 19)

The original plan for May 13 was simple; have a decent breakfast for the first time since I had been there, go to the transportation museum then wait it out in the airport till I left at 4:30 and got home just in time to have a decent night’s sleep............that did not happen and no one ever really gave a good reason. It was just that kind of a day. The first big issue I had that day was that i had bought two bottles of beer that I hoped I could bring with me on the plane. I found out that I couldn’t so I went into the bush to drink it. Not only was it warm but it wasn’t that great so I only really drank half of one bottle and two shots of the other and poured them out.

I went to the transportation museum which found up being a bit of a waste of money to me. It had a few nice things in it but nothing that I really cared for. I did get a pin out of it. Even though I did try to stretch my time at the museum I still had 3 hours before i had to check in. I went into the airport assuming like every other airport I have been it to it would have wifi but it didn’t I was also hoping that the concession stand would be open as it normally is to the hilt in every other place to get a fridge magnet (one of the few tourist things I collect at places because its cheap and it makes my fridge look cooler). Concession stand was closed, apparently it is only open for maybe a few hours between whenever flights come because not very many flights come in and out of Whitehorse. So I had 3 hours to kill and decided to walk across the street to the motel/resteraunt/bar that looked like it came straight out of the Klondike which struck my interest and it did not disappoint. Once inside it did have the look of a log cabin with 1970s decor. I ordered chicken fingers and fries with some Yukon Brewing beer. Realized they didn’t have wifi either so there you go but the food was good and I was able to relax. After an hour and a half of relaxing I felt i may as well just check in and wait it out and went across the highway again to check in.

I went to the check in place to find out that the plane did not arrive and that the flight has been moved to 9:30.............fuck. So much for having a good nights sleep.

By this time the concession stand was open because I think even they assumed my flight would in and maybe buy shit like I did, the fridge magnet. So I figured well I guess I will just take the bus back downtown and have a few beer then bus back since it takes only about 20 min to do it. I walked to the bus station to find out the bus was closed on Sundays. That is a new one for me and suffice to say I wasn’t that happy about it but how I seen it as long as I could get home I didn’t care. So I went back to the truck stop motel/restaurant/bar to the surprise of the waitress wondering why I am back. I told her my flight was pushed back 6 hours so I am basically going to be here for 6 hours. She had no problem, I ordered and drank more beer and had some of the best roast beef I have had in a long time.

Yes I ate a lot of meat while I was here, the reason is that I couldn’t find any real vegetarian options in this city, it is a small city. I got to watch yet another hockey game and get sufficiently buzzed and got back to the airport ready to take the plane out and so was everyone else who looked like they got kicked in the balls by Air North.

The flight from Whitehorse to Kelowna was fine; got a sandwich, snack and a cookie, I wish Air Canada/WestJet would do this but then I also do wish all air lines would stop trying to fuck you to but that is wishful thinking. I was originally supposed to sit beside this woman whom looked a little bit older than me and seemed to have a serious thorn up her ass. One look at me I think and she wanted no part sitting with me. I know I am not a good looking or a well groomed person but I did wash that day, my hands were clean and I knew I didn’t smell. She did look like a bit of a snob having a bad day but since the plane to Kelowna was half full she was able to sit by herself. When we arrived in Kelowna the flight itself was gonna be full, full of young kids coming from a hockey game. One kid could not stop saying “that’s insane” for someone realizing they would only get 2 hours sleep that night it was getting beyond annoying. The most annoying part though is the same thing that happened crossing Kelowna happened again but for no reason. We were basically on the fucking plane for at least 90 min even though they said it was just going to be a in and out thing. It wasn’t

Even more annoying was the snobby lady had to sit beside me and she did not look happy about it. At the time I really didn’t care but I was also antsy because we were not allowed to have our tablets or phones out for some ungodly stupid reason. Anyone who knows me knows I don’t do well with sitting still doing nothing for long so my leg was bopping and the lady for some reason didn’t like it even though it was not making noise and as far as I knew it was not making anything else move but she told me to stop. So with the push back of the flight, the needless wait in Kelowna, the “that’s insane” kid, nothing do and the snobby girl telling me to stop moving my leg really made me irritated. Part of me wanted to say no deal with it, we all got to deal with what is going on tonight but I said nothing. We finally got off the ground and we arrived in Vancouver at 1am with no way to get home but to pay a 30 dollar cab ride home and get home at 2am with only a chance at 3 hours of sleep.

That was my Whitehorse trip.

The days prior to my trip I decided on trying to do a grading system for the cities I have been to because I like to grade things, I am weird like that but I couldn’t entirely nail down the grading scale in a way that would be fair to all places because not all places are built to serve the same person but I felt that as I grade them I would take into account certain things. Maybe at some point I will back grade previous cities but I felt why not grade Whitehorse first, Fort McMurray would be more appropriate but oh well it has to start somewhere.

I decided make this similar to my 1-5 C rating system that I use with movies, music and books but while I want to keep those fluid its with cities where every C means something if that makes sense. With music, movies or books I am only really spending at most a day (with books maybe more but accumulating time is a day or so) with what I was rating so the grade is very simple. With a city and so many moving parts plus I am spending more than a day there in most cases I want to be more in depth in my ratings. Hopefully you will get it once I start, again this is just a test anyways.

There are five categories (5 Cs) I grade a city or place on.

C - Transportation/Transit - How easy is it for someone who don’t live there to get around without having to get a taxi. Is there transit, is it easy to use? Can one bike there and is it easy to obtain a bike? Can one get around well enough just by walking?

The best example of a city that would get a full C on this would be Köln or Berlin. Both cities are very walkable if you want, both cities have a very robust transit system to where you can bus or train anywhere you want. Both cities are pretty bikeable to if you want to do that. Unless you are going around in the middle of the night you can get around without a car.

Worst example would be Toronto even though they would sit get a half C because it is still a very bikeable city, transit can take you anywhere you want to go and get you there fairly quickly it is just very confusing to use and expensive.

C - Vibe - What is the attitude like of the city. When you are a stranger of the city its pretty easy to look like a tourist or a stranger. First impressions still are everything and they are to me when I am in a new place. Whenever I meet a tourist in Vancouver I always try to treat it like I am representing my country and my city because in many ways you are. How you treat a new person is telling how others are and if you ruin it for them their opinion often ruins the city for them.

I could use examples but I think this one is pretty self explanatory.

 C - Food - Originally it was going to be bread because normally every city at least in Europe does their own bread but North America basically just borrows from Europe so I decided to just make it food. This one is fairly fluid in one way its a grade of the distinct to local cuisine and in another way it is a grade on the food selection. I could still give a city a high grade if they only serve one kind of food as long as it is unique to their culture while I can give a high grade to another city not because they have a unique food style but because they have so many food options.

C - Things to do - Could be architecture, could be exploitability of the city. Basically how fun is it to get lost in the place. For a new comer would it be fun to just get lots and not have to worry about anything like boredom or getting mugged. How much fun can you have here is basically the grading here.

Best example of a god grade is Toronto, there is no way you can be bored there. There is just so much one can do and go and I spent almost 5 days there and I only scratched the surface. Example of a bad grading would be Cork, Ireland. Though to be fair I didn’t both really doing anything there because I was recovering from travel fatigue but looking into what the city had to offer there wasn’t very much.

C - Beer - Every city has their own beer in this day in any, either the city has their own or their country has their own unless we are in a 3rd world country or a very strict anti liquor country every city has their take on beer. One can have no brewery but if they have a great selection they helps, one could have a ton of excellent breweries but if none had great beer it may not mean anything. You want to win this grade have a great selection of good and affordable beer either by your own creation or by importing of other places. No beer, very little beer or expensive beer means bad grade.

So lets start with Whitehorse.

I give transportation a half C; while I was not a fan of how infrequent the transit was there coming around only once and hour and closed on Sundays but it does get you around if you know where you need to go and it gets you there no problem. This city is bikeable too as well as there are bike trails that get you to and from the city centre. Plus the city is small, you can walk from one end of the city to the other in around an hour, i am talking the main area not the separated areas but even then you could get from one end to the other walking. Transit is bare bones but you can get around if you need to.

Vibe I would give a full C; everyone I met here was nice and gracious to me. I did not meet one bad apple here (outside of that snob woman but I dont count here as a local). Given with how much of a mining city this place was and how being secluded from everyone else can often make you made or crazy Whitehorse people carry it extremely well, they carry it far better than Fort Mac people do/did that is for fucking sure. This is a easy grade to get from me, you would really have to have miserable people in your city to make me grade you low on this one.

For things to do I could give Whitehorse 2/3 of a C, I thought a half but it is not really fair. You can’t compare Whitehorse to Toronto, Paris, Berlin or so many other cities like that because those places are huge compared to Whitehorse. If I was to grade Whitehorse just on it as a city a half C would be me going soft on them because quite honestly you could do everything in Whitehorse in a day if you were just coming down for the museums, the city itself and the beer. A day would be enough to get the whole gist of it. I can see people getting bored out of their minds here if they had a city mentality. However Whitehorse brings something that those cities I mentioned don’t have; nature. Look at the landscape pictures I posted this city is surrounded by forest and hiking galore. Whitehorse was and I think will forever be a outpost type city where people come to get the stuff they need then head out to the wilderness to either unwinds or do whatever they wish. You can’t get that with many or any metropolitan cities. In Whitehorse it’s less than an hour away.

Food is where I would have to give it it’s lowest grade at 1/3. That does not mean there is bad food in Whitehorse, that is far from the truth because I had lots of good bar food in Whitehorse and the fudge was excellent. However there was not very many distinct choices for someone to eat. If I was a vegan eating here I would be hard pressed to find dishes I liked here, vegetarian it would be possible but still tricky to find places. There is some variety but compared to other places there is very little variety. But have fudge at Midnight Sun, it is fucking divine. Next I do come down I am definitely having the bison burger too.

Lastly is beer, I didn’t have high expectations because this city has 2 breweries and it is a small city again I thought of when I lived in Fort Mac which even then is probably not fair for them now since the beer industry has changed so drastically in Canada as a whole since I moved to BC (even Vancouver was nearly a Canadian or Kokanee place when i got here) but I was expecting not very much felt that the grading of this would depend on the beers of these two breweries. I would up being surprised; the liquor stores and bars for the most part (at least the Dirty Northerner Bar) had a great selection of beers. They had Toronto be dead to rights that for sure. I couldn’t go to the Winterlong brewery because that was too out of my way but I had most of their beers at the Dirty Northerner Bar and I liked them again better than Toronto. Yukon Brewery was no better, none of their beers really stood out to me though but their tour was great, service was great and for the most part all their beers were very drinkable. If they served that beer here I would feel more than comfortable suggesting a Yukon Gold or what not to a fellow beer fan to try. That is why I give it 3/4. A perfect grade would mean I would have to fall in love with their beer and while I had no problem flirting and having one night stands with their beer, that is as far as I go with them.

So in the end Whitehorse get 31/4 Cs on the Corey Scale which when compared to how I grade movies, music or books makes the city seem like it was ok but I don’t need to go there but in terms of how i grade cities I dunno I guess I think it makes it more harder for one to really have a perfect grade. To be honest I thought Whitehorse was a great city to visit to be honest. I would be more likely to go to Whitehorse than to Toronto or even Seattle and I didn’t mind Seattle. However there is not much for one like me to do there past two days unless I wanted to camp there but honesty I live in Vancouver which also has vibrant wilderness just an hour away so I would not need to go to Whitehorse for it. I would return for the beer, atmosphere, fudge and for what I feel the city brings best and that is an escape.

Its not your average tourist destination; if you come here a day or two is enough for the city, to get the most of the place it would be out in the forest. That is what operates this city and what it brings that other places don’t have. I would recommend this city, don’t let the weather scare you. Sure if you came in the winter time of course you are going to get the very cold weather but if that is your thing you will have just as much fun as you would coming in the summer like I sort of did. Whitehorse is cool and if you are looking for a place with a mix of city and wilderness with a whole lot of nice people and decent drink to be had then Whitehorse is worth checking out.

Next week will be my hometown which I haven’t seen in at least 10 years maybe more. It will be interesting to explore this city now as a man and not a boy or a teen. Shazbot nano nano

[tracklist-fic]

Tracklist Fic | 0 / Prelude

Title: Tracklist | An original, mature, Ed Sheeran fanfic CO-AUTHORED BY: @tea-and-toblerones and @sippin-on-red-wine Rating: Mature (SMUTS my dahhhling, SMUTS)

Note: ARE YOU GUYS FREAKING OUT????!!! CAUSE WE ARE! This will be a full-fledged Chapter fic. We are DYING to know what you think so please comment/reblog/inbox/anon and spill the beans!

"You nervous Jac? Today's the big day. The first client you'll handle yourself. Now this is a big step but I have faith you'll do just fine."

I took a deep breath in an attempt to hide my nerves. This was the first day I was at the controls. I had been looking forward to this day for weeks. As soon a Mark had brought up that he'd be comfortable letting me handle stuff solo or as he described it guidance from afar, I felt the butterflies hit. It's what I've been working so hard towards. Now that it was finally happening I couldn't believe it. He paused outside the recording room, his hand on the door knob.

"Now, I've put you with our easiest client. They're laid back, not harsh, not overly critical. They're patient and are completely understanding." They must be the closest thing to training wheels I get. "They're also very hands on with the whole process so you'll be working pretty long days elbow to elbow with them." His voice grew a little sterner, "Now I will be checking over your work to make sure it's up to snuff and will sit in on a few sessions just to make sure you're doing everything correctly."  His face broke into a smile, all previous sternness gone. "Now, are you ready to see who you're going to be working with?"

I nod, taking another deep breath, my excitement levels creeping up to near maximum. This is it. My dream is finally coming true. This is my first big step in the music world.

Mark opens the door, shaking hands and exchanging pleasantries with who's ever on the other side of the door. He turns back to me, motioning for me to come in. My eyes grow wide in shock when I'm staring Ed Sheeran in the face. I thought I had caught a glimpse of surprise flash behind his eyes but whatever I saw was quickly replaced with a warm and friendly smile.

Oh no.

"Jac, I'd like you to meet Ed." Mark smiles, practically bouncing with excitement. Oh no, no... "Ed, this is my intern and apprentice Jaclyn."

Ed offered out his hand, which I took, the shock still evident on my face. Ed smiled as he grasped my hand "It's a pleasure to meet you. Jaclyn. I have a feeling we're going to get along just fine."

This can't be happening.

Mark laughed, clapping his hands together, the sudden loud noise making me flinch. "I knew you'd be surprised that it's such a huge powerhouse in the music world. It was worth keeping it all a surprise from you just to see your reaction!  Not only is he huge, this is his big album after coming back from a year's hiatus!" He was still beaming, "We won't start anything serious until tomorrow so I'll leave you two to figure out scheduling and whatever else might need ironed out." He shook Ed's hand one more time before walking out the door.

As soon as Mark left I sank down into the couch, grinding the heels of my hands into my eyes. I hear Ed’s footsteps growing closer to me. I expected to feel the couch sag beside me but the soft shuffle told me he had decided to perch himself on the table instead. I raised my head to see him staring at me with a smug look on his face, his arms coming up, crossing his chest.

"Fancy meeting you here, Jac."

This is a nightmare.

THE NIGHT BEFORE…..

It was just a typical Wednesday night at Copperstill, the bourbon bar I worked at part-time to help pad my lowly intern-salary. It had that 'modern rustic’ vibe that’s so on-trend, which basically means it's filled with expensive new pieces that are made to look old and scuffed up. Whatever. It was more than supplemental to my income, and that's what mattered. It wasn't uncommon to see well-known or well-off patrons in the bar, which meant Big Tips. That's what I'm about.

Unfortunately one of the regular customers is my skeezy ex-boyfriend, Dylan, and his little posse of frat-boy idiot friends. They drink cheap beer, shoot pool, call each other by their last names only.. and oh, they don't tip well.

When Dylan (Newman, to his 'bros’) and I broke up, he actually tried to 'claim’ this bar as his, saying it's the main hangout for his 'crew’. Even though I’ve worked here for years. Asshat. Obviously I'm not quitting the job that pays most of my bills, so here we are, unwillingly spending a lot of time sharing the same oxygen.

I wasn't proud to admit that it hadn't exactly been a clean break, if you know what I mean. There's a fair bit of alcohol DRINKING involved with being the person doing the alcohol SERVING, what a novel idea. Anyway, that usually meant that by the end of the night, I was buzzed and a little horny. Dylan was an asshat, sure, but he still had a six pack. What can I say, your girl's got needs. And he can be really great, sometimes. I hadn't really gotten closure from our messy break-up.

But Dylan was in rare form tonight, hitting on a particularly fake-looking blonde in the bar. Fun times.

At least it was pretty steady, plenty of patrons coming in and out. I was slinging drinks left and right and time had been flying. Until I noticed a certain ginger-haired celebrity quietly slip in and take a seat at the bar.

His signature tattoos were covered by the long sleeves of a plaid flannel shirt, buttons agape, hanging open, a plain white tee peeking out underneath. He was semi-incognito in a black baseball cap, but his coppery-red hair was untidy and stuck out in tufts under his hat. I took his order and hearing the British accent made it official: Ed Sheeran was in my bar… alone.

We often had lesser-known or less recognizable celebrities here, not quite anyone of his caliber. I mean, there's only one #1 streamed artist in the world and… yup, he’s it. But between my experience at the bar, and the handful of popular musicians I had worked with so far in my internship, I wasn't too badly starstruck. In the beginning it had surprised me how these people were just… people. They talked about the weather or news and ate the same things I did and overall, just wanted to be treated normally. And so I got Ed Sheeran a cold pint and went about my job.

“Yo! Jac! Round of Snakebites for the boys?” Dylan just shouted clear across the bar, instead of coming up and ordering something like a decent human being. I pretended not to hear him. I'm a bartender, not a medieval beer wench.

I was at the end of the bar refilling the beer cooler when I noticed Ed trying to flag me down, so I wiped my hands on my jean shorts and made my way over to where he was perched up on his barstool.

“Hi again. Do you have food here?” He asked, rather politely. I reached back next to the till and grabbed a menu.

“Not a huge selection, but everything we have is great. Here, have a look,” and I casually handed him the one-sheet menu. He glances at it quickly.

“Alright, I'll have the loaded fries, please. But could you do salsa on the side? And maybe skip the bacon, oh and and I don’t like the onions. Actually, no jalapenos either, please, I got wicked heartburn last time I had them.”

“So… you want cheese fries?”

“Well, we call it ‘chips & cheese’ in England but.. erm, yeah, I guess I do.”

“No problem, I'll put that in for you. Shouldn't take too long… cause, y’know.. No toppings.”

He snorted, apparently able to laugh at his own expense. I appreciated that about him.

“Say, is this satellite TV?” He asked, pointing up to the neat row of flatscreens mounted above the bar. I nodded. “Could you turn the football game on?”

“Uh, yeah, it’s Wednesday, there’s no football on tonight.” I grimaced internally, realizing that I actually knew the days of the week that NFL games were played. Another awesome thing I gained from my relationship with Douchey Dylan.

“No, love, football. Footie? Soccer?” First of all, who ya calling ‘love’, buddy? Second, he was flailing his hands all around as he talked. Kinda weird.

“Oh, yeah, I gotcha. You’ve been away from America too long, evidently.”

“It’s my first week back, actually, I’ve been--”

“Away. Out of the spotlight for a while.” I finished for him, matter-of-factly. I caught a glimpse of the macho men behind Ed’s shoulder doing some kind of secret bro handshake.

“How’d you…?”

“Who doesn’t know? Wasn’t born yesterday, man. Shit, do people ever really pretend not to know who you are? You don’t exactly blend into a crowd, no offense.”

“Cheers to that,” He held up his pint glass to toast me.

“Oh, I’m not drinking tonight.”

Just then, one of Dylan’s friends moseyed up onto the bar. He was wearing a light-wash denim jeans, the kind that are distressed before you buy them, and a super tight black tee shirt. It looked like it came from Baby Gap.

“Where are the Snakebites?” he asked.

“Uh, no one ordered any?” I retorted.

“Didn’t you hear Newman before?”

I rolled my eyes and went to work making a tray of the disgusting shots. The sour, gold liquid sloshed out of the shot glasses on the tray when I slid it back in front of one of the gorilla guys. “Thirty eight dollars.” The guy threw down two crumpled twenty dollar bills, took the tray and left.

“You’re right, I have been away from America a long time. Do people talk to you like that all time?” Ed asked.

“No, they’re just a special kind of stupid.” I shrugged, tilting my head over to the group of guys.

I cashed out the shots order at the register and then decided to pour myself a cocktail after all. The bar had cleared out a little bit, and to be honest, I needed a little something to take the edge off. Especially if I was going to have to watch Dylan subtly flexing his muscles in front of the blonde bimbo he was trying to impress.

I mixed myself a double and stuck a straw in, taking a long sip.

“Changed your mind about that drink?” Ed Sheeran piped in again. Probably shouldn’t have come to the bar alone if you’re in a chatty mood, pal.

“Turns out I’m gonna need it.”

“What’s that you’re drinking?”

“I call it a Painkiller. Vodka, tequila and grapefruit juice.”

“I’ll take one of those next, please.”

Ed ……..

She seemed like a really cool girl. Something feisty about her, too. ‘Spose you need that to be a bartender, especially since douche-bag fuckboys tended to travel in packs. Watching her work had won my attention over the footie match. She was polite to other patrons, but not overly peppy or talkative. All about business. I cracked up when one of the Ed Hardy jean-wearing guys put on some kind of EDM song on the TouchTunes, and she promptly switched it off and replaced it with a Jimi Hendrix tune, Watchtower.

I couldn’t help but admire her long, toned legs, her skin tanned from the California sun. She was wearing these high-waisted denim shorts that fit her body like a glove, and this pretty white tanktop that was all made up of rope and straps in the back, her tan skin peeking through the whole way down. But the shirt was modest in the front and she had finished off the outfit with a pair of teal blue chucks. Her sandy-blonde hair was pulled up into a ponytail high on her head, the long waves spilling out and running down her neck. Her eyes were green, I think. I wanted to get a closer look.

She was gorgeous, no argument there.

I watched her pull out a tube of chapstick and apply some to her lips, which looked full and soft and were a pale raspberry color. I found myself first wondering what they would taste like…. And as she tucked the little tube back down into the denim of her shorts, fitted so snugly on her tight hips, I couldn't help but wonder what she would taste like in other places, too...

Jac……..

A couple hours had passed. Dylan was open-mouthed kissing the blonde in front of the dart board while several of his ‘bros’ cheered him on. I’d had enough Painkillers that I knew I would most definitely have a headache at work in the morning. And Ed Sheeran just seemed to get chattier and chattier the more he drank. Which is great, unless you’re a miserable, sarcastic bitch, like myself. Blonde Bimbo was all giggles and lip bites and pouty faces. All that stuff was so not me. No wonder you’re going home alone, J.

“... so yeah, it’s at this really cool old theatre, ‘The Time’, have you heard of it?” Oh, was Ed still talking?

“Sorry, what?” You asked, not bothering to hide the fact that you totally weren’t paying attention.

He laughed. “You seem distracted.”

“Sorry,” I wasn't sure what to say. Sorry, my ex-boyfriend-still-lover has practically unlatched his jaw to suck face with a Barbie-doll lookalike right in front of me? Sorry, you're a Grammy-award winning singer/songwriter and even *that* can't snap me out of the downward spiral I'm in?

“Do you want to hang out sometime? Maybe get a proper drink when you're off work, catch a movie or something?”

Wait, what?

“Are you seriously asking me out?” I asked, incredulously. “Uh, you don't even know my name.”

“Well, yeah, I guess I am innit?” He flashed a dopey grin my way.

“Hey, I’m flattered, I’m just not really… looking...”

“Have you got a boyfriend?” He asked.

“Nope.”

“Girlfriend?”

I could feel my face getting flushed. Was Ed Sheeran seriously asking me on a date? He shifted his posture and ran a hand through his hair, fluffing it up again. I couldn't help but wonder how it would feel to do that to him...

I snapped back to reality.

“Nope. Just not really looking to, ah, date, right now.”

“Does that mean you're open to other… activities?” Ed shrugged off the flannel shirt, exposing the rainbow designs splashed all up and down his arms. Was he suddenly warm, or trying to illustrate a point?

Either way, it got my attention.

“I hadn't pegged you as a hit-it-and-quit-it kinda guy,” I replied, straightening my posture a bit. I was suddenly a little more aware of my physical presence, clad in short denim cutoffs that bordered on the line of distasteful, but kept the tip jar flowing.

“No -- I’m, that's not what I meant --” he stammered.

I glanced up at the clock. “Well, my shift is ending in about twenty minutes.” I said, matter-of-factly.

His jaw hung open a bit. “Okay. I'm do--, okay, yeah.”

“My place.”

“Okay. Are you going to tell me your name, now?”

“I don't really think you need my name, just for… activities.”

I had told Ed to meet outside by my car while I punched out. I slipped out the backdoor of the bar and sure enough, there he was, leaning up against my car with a sly grin painted across his face.

Okay, Jac, here's your last chance. Is this really a good idea? No? But he looks so… fucking sexy.

I crossed the small parking lot to where he was standing. I reached out to touch him, apprehensive at first, but then he pulled my face into his and his lips were on mine and they were pillow soft, but still rough and pressing on mine. All apprehension flew out the window at that moment.

The kiss breathed life into me, and I grasped his shoulders and pressed his back flat up against the side of my little SUV, letting my tongue implore his mouth, finally breaking that barrier. He was a really, really great kisser. His hands explored my body while our tongues explored each other's mouths. I really wanted to touch his silky mop of ginger hair, so I reached out and removed his ball cap, placing it backwards on my own head instead. He took advantage of my slight distraction and flipped me up against the car, his palms rubbing down my sides and onto my hips as I dug into that wild mess of red curls, threading my fingers through it, it's even better than I expected... He pressed the full length of his body against mine, and I was surprised to feel his cock already hardening through his jeans. Fucking hot.

I broke our connection, both of us coming up for air from that long and heady kiss. He pulled away from my body and I pouted instantly, I wanted him back, the pressure of his body felt so good, so right…

“How far is your place?” He breathed.

“Twenty minutes or so?” I was already panting.

“...Fuck.” Yeah, man, me too. Me. Too. Twenty minutes suddenly seemed like an eternity.

I grabbed the handle to the rear passenger door and swung it open. “In.” It wasn't a question.

He slipped into the warm, black leather backseat and I climbed up in after him, straddling his lap.

I could finally reach his mouth again and ravaged it with enthusiasm, the kiss turning more and more frenzied as my hips bucked around over the top of his pelvis.

He was the one to break away this time.“Damn… you are so beautiful… let me see you?” And he tugged up at the hem of my top, yanking it up and over my head.

My tank was sort of backless, so I hadn't worn a bra.

But Ed was all over me, his flattened hands running over my belly, my ribcage, my lower back, his mouth on my neck, and decolletage, then shoulder...

He stopped just short of my breasts, his hands pulling away from my body. “Please, just tell me your name?”

I deflected, burying my face into his neck and sucking on his sweet skin, relishing the feel of my nipples dragging across the soft fabric of his teeth shirt, the way my legs settled on either side of his lap.

His hands ran down my back now, instead, tracing my spine, his fingertips dancing over my skin. I took a little nip at the spot just below and behind his earlobe, and he moaned out into the backseat of my Jeep.

Even through both of our jeans I could feel the outline of his dick, straining at his zipper, wanting to break free.

“God damnit,” I cursed under my breath.

“What's wrong?” His voice was so sweet. You can drop the good-guy act, dude, we're about to fuck and never see each other again.

“I need to drive. Us. To my apartment. Right now.”

“You're going to need a shirt, then.”

He followed directly behind me on the stairs up to my apartment, I can only imagine he was staring at my ass as I climbed each step. I stopped in front of my door and pulled my keys out, Ed wrapped up my body from behind, his mouth on my neck, his hands sliding down my stomach, his erection pressed up against me. I finally found the right key and inserted it in the deadbolt.

As soon as the door swung open, it was game over. He slammed it shut behind us, locking the deadbolt again. His eyes were hungry, his lips painted a pretty kiss-stung shade of pink. He came at me, pulling my face up into his, those pretty lips crashing into my own as he walked me backwards until we were pressed up against the refrigerator in my tiny kitchen. Thankfully I had left the light on above the sink.

He quickly pulled off my tanktop again, this time going straight for my breasts. He took a nipple into his mouth, swirling his tongue over the little pink bud, sucking in. “Fuck,” I spat out, the sensation taking me by surprise. He replaced his mouth with two fingers, rolling my left nipple between them while his mouth moved to my other breast, repeating the same swirling and sucking while I gasped for air.

The door handle of the fridge was digging into my back, but I didn't even care, everywhere he was touching me was just buzzing. I wanted more.

“Bedroom,” I gasped out.

He removed his mouth, taking a step back. He looked 100% fuckable in that moment, the dim glow from the kitchen sink light illuminating all of his edges; the wiry scruff of his facial hair, his biceps clearly visible beneath the short sleeve of his white t-shirt.

I grabbed him by the hand and led him through my small apartment, into my small, cozy bedroom. The curtains were open, starlight pouring in through the window pane.

Ed closed my bedroom door behind us, and it was my turn to de-clothe him. I pulled his t-shirt up and over his head in one swift motion. The belt buckle was next, but my hands were trembling with urgency and I couldn't quite get it unclasped. He reached forward and did it for me, unbuttoning his jeans as soon as the belt buckle was freed. I took over from there, crouching down to yank his jeans and boxers down, watching in awe as his cute, fuzzy thighs appeared right before me. He picked up each foot in turn, letting me clear away the pile of fabric at each ankle.

I straightened back up and turned him around, walking him backwards toward my bed, then pushed him down onto it. He adjusted himself, dragging his body up the bed a bit until his head hit the pillows.

I shucked off my denim shorts, and the thong I wore underneath that was now soaked through with my arousal.

I crawled onto the bed, toward the headboard, and reached down to my nightstand to pull the little drawer open. I rummaged through it, reaching toward the back and found the little foil packet I was after.

I straddled Ed, clutching the little condom wrapper like it was my own personal Golden Ticket. His hands settled on my hips instantly, and I leaned into his neck again to suck and kiss and tease him, a strong little vein popping forward as he tilted his head back to release a soft groan.

Holy shit, his whole chest is tatted, I realized, as I shimmied down his body. The starlight was bright enough only to show me the mix of colors running over every inch of his chest, I couldn't make out what any of the designs were. Oh well.

Just a short trip down his belly and I found a soft trail of little coppery hairs leading to my prize: his cock, thick and rock-hard, curving up slightly toward his stomach. I tentatively wrapped my fingers around it and wow, was he ready to go. His cock literally pulsed in my hand as I tightened my grip. I had just intended to slip the condom on him but in that moment, fuck it, I just had to have a taste.

I let my lips fall open, tongue flattening as I lowered my mouth on his shaft. I flicked my tongue over his slit, then took his plump head in my mouth, lubricating it with my saliva. I let my tongue trace the outline of his ridge while my hand still grasped the base of his cock, pumping it softly. He was moaning again, his hips pushing up into my mouth.

I took his whole length into my mouth, and his hands crept up to my head, his hand gently grasping my ponytail. I bobbed up and down on his length a few times, taking his length deeper into my mouth on each pass.

I left a sloppy kiss over his head and eased off, sitting back on my heels. I ripped open the little foil packet and pulled the condom out, grasping the base of his cock as I rolled the little latex barrier down over his erection. “God, you look so sexy doing that…” his voice trailed off.

Once the condom was snugly covering his cock, I crawled forward, suspending my body over his. I leaned in for a quick kiss, biting his bottom lip as I pulled away.

I raised up my hips, gripping his shaft as I lined up my opening with his tip. I sank down slowly onto his cock, easing myself onto him inch by inch. His sex was so wide, so thick - he filled me up to the max, it was crazy hot. Ed apparently thought so too, as he took on a sharp breath and sputtered “...so tight, damn it…”

Once I had taken his full length into me, I took a deep breath and started to rock up and down on his cock, pressing my hands to his chest for leverage. The tip of his penis stroked my very back wall, dragging across it over and over again as I rode him in my bed, our bodies illuminated by the night sky outside.

I leaned over his chest, grabbing fistfuls of his hair as his tongue explored my mouth, his strong hands gripping my hips as I bounced up and down on his thick cock.

This kiss was sloppy, swapping saliva as we took turns groaning into each other's mouths. The new angle had my clit grinding against his pubic bone and it felt so fucking good. It had been a long, LONG time since I had climaxed during sex.

I broke away from his mouth, burying my face in his neck again as I grabbed at his hair, probably pulling enough for it to hurt. If it did, he didn't say anything.

“That's right, baby, grind your pretty little clit on me…” He muttered in my ear, his hands rocking me over and over him.

I was whimpering, I couldn't help it, the mix of sensations overwhelming me as he thrust into me over and over, my clit delighting in the pressure of our bodies coming together.

“I'm -- I’m --” I gasped out.

“Yeah? You gonna come all over my cock? Let me have it,” his voice shifted, low and growly in his throat and I was putty in his hands, I had no option but to obey and I cried out as my orgasm took over, my walls tightening around him as I held my breath and clenched my thighs around him and held my grip on his damp curls.

He flipped us both over, his erection fit snugly inside me the whole way. He adjusted the pillow beneath my head and left a kiss on my jaw. “You okay to keep going, love? Do you want me to stop?”

“No, no, more -- I want more,” I muttered, still trying to catch my breath.

He took my words to heart as he leaned forward, resting all of his bodyweight on his forearms, and withdrew his cock from me super slowly, then thrust into me again, hard, the sound of skin hitting skin reverberating around the room.

“Yes, just like that,” I cried out.

He sped up, sinking his rigid shaft into me in perfect rhythm, his eyes trained on our connection. I watched him as he watched his own cock sink into my pink flesh.

“D’you like what you see?” I asked, calling him out for his intentful stare.

He glanced up at me, a smirk plastered across his face. “Caught me..” he said, tucking his bottom lip into his mouth as he went back to watching as he fucked me slowly. His beautiful blue eyes shifted back up to mine. “You’re just so gorgeous, every inch of you… I want to taste you…” and before I knew it, he pulled out of me and was flat on his tummy, pushing my knees up, burying his head between my legs.

His mouth was on me in an instant, his tongue dipping into my folds. He licked and sucked on every inch of my slit before finally zeroing in on my clit. He hummed, the vibrations spilling over my sensitive little bud and I couldn't help but buck my hips up into his face, grabbing fistfuls of sheets on either side of me.

“Fuck -- do that again,” All manners were out the window at this point.

He obliged, humming again over my clit as he tongue stroked and flicked and then he one-upped himself, slipping a finger in my wet entrance, adding another layer of pleasure.

I groaned, wriggling my hips under his face, admiring his golden-copper hair fluffed up between my legs. “Don't stop,” I breathed, which apparently only served to egg him on more. He sank a second finger into me, stroking forward on my front wall as he went to town on my clit.

He hummed one last time and it was like he struck a match in just the exactly perfect way to make it light up in flames. White hot fire spread through my veins, branching out in all directions from my core as I tried to stifle my shouts. My heart thudded in my chest as I released my grip on the sheets and, once again, threaded my fingers through his hair, wanting to pull his beautiful mouth away from my sensitive clit.

He moved up my body and I pulled his mouth into mine, tasting myself on his tongue, kissing him open-mouthed so I could try to catch my breath again. That orgasm had absolutely wrecked me. I never had expected him to be such a skilled lover

“Want you.. to come.. for me now,” I said, breathlessly, inhaling on each pause.

He brushed the stray flyaway hairs off my face, staring up into my eyes. “Can I take you from behind? Is that okay?”

I leaned forward, pushing him up off of me, and flipped onto my hands and knees in front of him, which I imagine was a better visual than just saying, “Yes.”

He lined up with my entrance again and pushed in, filling me back up with his girthy shaft. I moaned, everything was so sensitive down there and the angle from behind was so different than before. Once he was buried in me, his hands found my waist and pulled me back into him, my hips meeting each thrust as he fucked me.

There's no way I could come a third time but holy shit did that feel good, so satisfying, just feeling his hips thrust into me as he pulled my body back onto him and I knew, I knew without looking that his stare was fixed down on my ass, watching as he buried his cock in me, probably admiring the way my ass swayed with each thrust, increasingly harder on each pass.

“Yes, fuck me, fill me up,” I choked out, pausing each time he entered me.

“Gonna -- come -” he warned, his breath hitched, his grip on my waist tightening.

Five or six strokes later and he pulled me into him one last time, holding me there, groans tumbling from his mouth as he emptied himself into the little latex barrier. I found myself wishing he hadn't worn the condom, the thought was just there in my head before I could make sense of it. Don't be stupid, Jac.

He held us still for a moment, probably collecting himself, before pulling out of me. I was so exhausted from my orgasms that I collapsed down onto the bed, rolling to lie on my side as he crawled out of my bed.

“There's tissues there, on my desk, wastebasket below it,” I panted. I watched as he crossed over to my little writing desk, cleaning up and disposing then used condom.

I expected him to slide back into his boxers and jeans but he came back to the bed, instead, sidling in next to me.

“That was really nice,” he said, a kind of daydream-like quality to his voice.

“Yeah, it was,” I agreed, wondering when he was going to leave.

“Do you mind if I stay the night?”

Oh.

“I've actually got work pretty early in the morning…” It was a lame excuse, sure. But we had been clear about this being a one-night thing.

“Please? I can leave early in the morning. I just.. I don't want to sleep alone tonight…”

“Okay, fine. That's fine.”

He slipped under the covers and I flipped around to my other side, my back facing him. Before long, we were both asleep.

My head was throbbing as my alarm rang out (“Uptown Girl” by Billy Joel).

Ed was closer to my nightstand, so he grabbed my cell and handed it over to me to turn the alarm off. He slipped out of bed, finding his underwear in the pile of clothes on the floor and swiftly pulled them on. He dressed himself in last night's clothes as I rubbed the sleep out of my eyes, sitting up in bed with the sheets pulled over my naked breasts. Can't believe I let him sleep here.. NAKED. Fuck. Such a big day at work. Why did I have to go *there* last night? I'm supposed to be an adult. Ugh.

“I want to ask for your name, again, but I have a feeling you'll turn me down. Can I at least leave you my number?”

What does this guy not understand about a one night stand?

“Look, that's really sweet and all. But please don't. You're nice, and you're good in bed. But this was a one-time thing. I’m sure you won't be in town for long anyway. Sorry. I've got to jump in the shower so I can get to work on time…” I had avoided eye contact with him throughout my little speech.

“I understand. I'll head out then. It was nice meeting you, mystery girl.” He leaned down and left a peck on my forehead, then let himself out of my room. I breathed a sigh of relief and tried to give myself a pep talk. I really needed to get up and moving so I could make it to the studio before Mark got in.

A moment later I heard the deadbolt open and my front door open and shut. I had forgotten to listen for that when he left my bedroom. I got up to re-lock the door and saw a note on the my coffee table as I walked naked through my living room.

It was his phone number, etched out in slanty chicken scratch, his name signed below it.

Thanks for reading!

[sutekiyomitsu]

Sato Ryuji First Time in Taiwan: Dream EZLA Report

[TRANSLATION] Sato Ryuji First Time in Taiwan

Please do not repost any of my translations.

Popular 2.5D stage actor Sato Ryuji, a member of Himawari Theatre Troupe, has acted in many stage and musical adaptations of anime, including the cornerstone of 2.5D, Musical Prince of Tennis, the globally popular Live Spectacle Naruto and various other stage performances. Of particular prominence is the musical adaptation of Japan’s most popular game, Musical Touken Ranbu, in which he played Kashuu Kiyomitsu. His incredible acting skills and his handsome appearance have attracted many fans who have never come into contact with the 2.5D genre, and he has gradually broken into this circle to explore his style.

On 3 September, Sunday, at Sanchuang’s CLAPPER STUDIO, Sato Ryuji held his first overseas fan meeting, with a screening of the movie in which he plays a lead role, “Please Please Please”, and shared happy times with his fans.

Sato Ryuji entered the stage wearing a combination of black and red, and as he was entering he muttered some English greetings, and expressed that before he went up the stage he had asked the staff about how the audience was like. “It seemed that there’s a more handsome Kashuu Kiyomitsu here, and they seem to be really popular, so please go easy on me! (laughs)” [1] It was hard to hide his happy but bashful side.

After the screening of the movie, he sang the full versions of song that was in the movie, “Please”, live, and the ending song for the weekly drama “FIVE”, “Gakuen Tengoku”. Sato said that this was his first time performing these two songs, and that they were available for download on iTunes. When he was talking about some other goals he’d like to fulfil on this trip to Taiwan, he expressed that he had seen Studio Ghibli’s Spirited Away, and heard that the scenery shown in the movie is inspired from Taiwan’s Jiufen. Since he thinks that it is very beautiful, he would like to go there to visit the real location. He would also like to try out the Taiwanese staple dessert, pineapple cake.

Coincidentally, at the start of September, his co-star Kuroba Mario had also come to Taiwan to hold his second fan meeting, and at that time Sato Ryuji recorded a video to give to him. Sato Ryuji half-jokingly complained, “Why didn’t he send me a video? And we have such a huge screen in this venue!”, which showed fans the good friendship between these two boys even in private.

After that, it was time for the fans question and answer segment. Fans were concerned if he was injured during the final performance of Live Spectacle Naruto, and Sato quickly explained, “It was just that I tried to say a line that was too long with one breath and wasn’t breathing properly, straining my muscle. Thank you for your concern.”

Sato Ryuji is also raising a kitten, and there were fans also asking about him. Sato expressed that he initially wanted to bring him to Taiwan, but since the kitten was not used to travelling long distances, he was left at the pet hotel. He also said that the kitten has been snuggling into his armpit and falling asleep with him, and his tender expression showed that he loved his pet dearly.

At the same time, Sato Ryuji shared that his favourite songs in Musical Touken Ranbu were “Tokenai Mahou” and “Show Me The World”.

Musical Touken Ranbu Kashuu Kiyomitsu Tanki Shutsujin 2017

From 5 October to 10 October, these 11 days at the Galaxy Theatre, Sato Ryuji will be playing the leading role and bearing the heavy responsibility of performing the Solo Live by himself.

He then discussed the upcoming Tanki Shutsujin performance in October. Firstly, because Kashuu Kiyomitsu is associated with the colour red, the chosen theme for the main visual was red, and with the whole visual giving the appearance of  “a whole piece of red”, it helped to highlight the character of Kashuu Kiyomitsu.

Sato further disclosed that this Tanki Shutsujin was his idea, and for it to be able to come true was very good, and that he was extremely happy. Also, this performance was different from the others as only one person was performing. At that time, the actor who plays Iwatooshi, Saeki Daichi smiled and said to him, “You usually have a stage presence that is equal to that of three people, you would certainly have no problems!” As he said this, the audience became very quiet, but Sato quickly corrected himself, saying, “Ah, but if the audience’s response is cold it isn’t my problem! It’s his fault!”, passing the blame to Saeki [2], making the fans laugh.

Musical Touken Ranbu is also very popular even overseas. To people now, these historical swords are a romantic story and the Touken Danshi are very handsome, so the popularity of this work is understandable.

Speaking of being on stage, [Sato Ryuji] would change his voice to fit the personality of his character. For example, when acting as Sasuke in Live Spectacle Naruto, his voice would get deeper. Sato performed a line in Sasuke’s voice on the spot, and said that even though in the original anime it should be more levelled, when performing on stage, it requires a bit of originality, so he added his own style, demonstrating his professionalism.

At this event, he not only allowed fans time to take pictures, Sato Ryuji also personally gifted fans with his own personal photobook, “Gekkan Sato Ryuji” and the perfume that he uses. At the end of the event, in order to let fans get the chance to get up close with him, Sato Ryuji high-fived everyone to send them off at the exits, ending this great fan meeting. He also reportedly had a special little chat with a Kashuu Kiyomitsu cosplayer!

According to the host, Sato Ryuji was very happy to be able to hold a fan meeting in Taiwan, and after the event was over, and celebrated with the rest of the staff. The host also said that while he was backstage he was excitedly taking selfies to post on his personal twitter, and said that he would like to come back to hold another event in Taiwan.

Notes:

[1] This phrase can mean “Don’t judge me too harshly” or “Look favourably on my humble efforts!”

[2] This inside joke started during the last 2.5D Cafe SHOWROOM with Kuroba Mario, Saeki Daichi, Oohira Shunya and Kitazono Ryo. Saeki Daichi told Kuroba Mario, the last Touken Danshi to sign on the cafe’s wall (Kitazono Ryo signed after him, but his signature was technically already on the wall), to use up all of the remaining space on the wall, which led to him signing a huge signature on the wall. Kuroba Mario then remarked, “It’s all Saeki Daichi’s fault”, which fans picked up and made into a meme. When the four of them tweeted after the end of the SHOWROOM, they all tagged their tweets: “It’s all Saeki Daichi’s fault”, and the hashtag trended on Twitter for a while.

More translations of articles about the event:

Gamebase

Translations of interviews by the Taiwanese media before the event:

HiNet Games Animen GNN News ETNews Taiwan Yahoo! News

This article was translated from Traditional Chinese. (Source: Dream EZLA)

[thephantomprojectionist]

Long Review: Death Fighter (2017)

"What's the matter, never humped a rock before?"

While every other martial arts fan was watching the long-awaited Boyka: Undisputed IV a couple weeks ago, I was getting my hands on a more low-profile release called Death Fighter. I regret that decision, now. While looking up lower-profile movies has served me well in the past, it led to a disappointment this time. After having its release pushed back repeatedly for several years, this film finally reveals that it has little more going for it than a supergroup of karate stars and a few surprises. While there are some things that I like and admire about this one, I have to admit that it’s just too plain to hang with its more substantial competition.

The story: A renegade FBI agent (Matt Mullins) teams up with an ex-military mercenary (Don Wilson) to take down a dangerous kingpin (Gigi Velicitat) in the Thai jungle.

Ensemble casting is so common now that it’d almost be a bigger surprise to feature less than four prominent names in an action movie, but Death Fighter certainly secured an iconic draw. In addition to XMA champ Mullins and kickboxing hall-of-famer Wilson, the cast packs two more legends in Cynthia Rothrock as one of the evil lieutenants and the late Joe Lewis as Mullins’ doomed partner. Throw in rising genre staple Jawed El Berni and you can see why I had such high hopes for this. However, the utilization of its stars is the main reason I’m unhappy with the film. Only the acrobatic El Berni delivers approximate to his reputation; everyone else is in trouble.

Matt Mullins: I’ve been waiting for this guy to step up and become the next Scott Adkins ever since I first saw him in Adventures of Johnny Tao. With Death Fighter being technically his first vehicle in 12 years, I thought it’d be the stepping stone he needed to get people at large to notice him…but now, I have doubts about his potential. Matt shows off his martial skills just fine, but jeez, are both he and his character ever bland! Mullins comes off as a Ken doll, and is absolutely unremarkable beyond his fight scenes. Adkins is no master thespian but at least he can create a memorable character, whereas Mullins barely creates an impression. Were it not for Matt’s physicality, anybody could’ve played this role.

Don Wilson: The opposite of his younger costar, Wilson is charismatic but totally unprepared for the movie’s style of action. Choreographer Patrick Tang favors a flashy, acrobatic style of fight scene, but Wilson isn’t about to change up his usual grounded game for anybody. Though Don’s brawls feature significantly less slow motion than his regular fare, they’re noticeably slower and less creative than anybody else’s – giving the impression that everyone had to go at half-speed with the old man.

Joe Lewis: Speaking of old men, the late karate god is in decisively poor shape. I know Joe was in failing health at this time in his life and thus excuse much about his utilization, but he still seems poorly-placed in an action-packed film like this. He briefly beats up a henchman and engages in a shootout before being killed off only a few minutes into the movie. Whereas his previous role in Kill ‘Em All seemed like an appropriate sendoff to the grandmaster’s film career, this almost seems like an unwanted obligation.

Cynthia Rothrock: Having previously stated that she’d like to do at least one more Hong Kong film in her life, I’d hoped that the similar style of this picture might be the opening Cynthia needed to remind the world that she’s an action legend. Not so. Rothrock seems awkwardly cast in her supporting role, playing second fiddle to a performer less charismatic than she (Velicitat), and like Wilson, her two fights leave a lot to be desired. Her dream match against Don is particularly disappointing, featuring some cruddy camerawork.

Nevertheless, the picture has some noteworthy redeeming traits. Despite my complaints about some of the fighters’ individual performances, I’m still generally pleased by the action content. Though he doesn’t properly distinguish himself from other performers who utilize the tricking style, Matt Mullins is well-matched against Jawed El Berni and the various Thai stuntmen, making for occasionally nice showdowns. However, the film’s trump cards aren’t any of its advertised performers, but rather two hitherto-unknown costars who just about blow their cohorts out of the water. Chiranan Manochaem is introduced as a dramatic performer and potential love interest to Matt Mullins, but explodes onto the adrenaline scenes with some impressive fights, making her arguably the best-utilized performer of the bunch. Less of a character but definitely the best onscreen fighter is Prasit Suanphaka, playing Don Wilson’s near-stoic sidekick. I’ll be really disappointed if this guy gets lost among the masses of stunt guys in Thailand, because he’s one of the most versatile and unhinged performers I’ve lately seen leading a fight scene. With a brawling style that’s a fair mix of Tony Jaa and Jackie Chan, he’s one guy who should definitely been in more movies.

Other positive things I noticed include the refreshingly layered participation of women in the action scenes. I recently wrote an essay on the depiction of women in martial arts films, and it seems as though the filmmakers were thinking along similar lines regarding exceptionalism. Chiranan Manochaem soundly dismantles any demure expectations you develop about her character leading up to her first fight (demonstrating that women can be action participants and supporting stars at the same time), and Cynthia Rothrock’s otherwise disappointing casting as an enforcer helps level the field between the sexes and makes the sight of women fighting men less extraordinary than filmmakers often perpetuate. A subplot involving human trafficking isn’t handled with as much gravitas as I’d hoped (it takes a backseat to the personal revenge angle), but it isn’t played for titillation. Not only that, but – for the first time I’ve ever seen in a U.S. production – the kidnapped women are rescued by another woman. These are small touches, but the effect they have on the presentation is noteworthy.

If there were only such aspects to consider and the handful of weird B-grade moments (e.g. a kid thinks it’s funny when a murder victim’s blood pours onto his head), the film might yet manage to shine a little. Disappointingly, the technical presentation keeps viewers from properly engaging with the story. While the movie can get its plot from A to B, choppy editing frequently gives a strained feel to conversations, fight scenes, and montages. The presence of some naturally pretty scenery merely draws attention to the lack of standout cinematography. Also, the movie’s tone can shift so drastically at times that it can be like watching two different films: it favors a refreshingly optimistic outlook wherein characters develop genuine bonds and manage overcome personal problems, but it can quickly turn around and become quite grim, like the rather gratuitous throat-slitting scene. This film wasn’t rated by the MPAA, but I can see it getting one of those ironic R ratings based on just a couple of scenes. (For the record, it’s gotten a 14^ rating in Canada.)

Outright lack of quality isn’t Death Fighter’s failing point so much as mediocrity. While a movie like this would be a decent watch in most circumstances, the amount of talent involved makes it all the more disappointing when you see how little the filmmakers did with their resources. It makes me fear for the career of Matt Mullins: Rothrock and Wilson subsequently showed themselves prepared to shape up in The Martial Arts Kid (produced after this one but released earlier), and the sheer amount of movies coming out of Thailand assures me that I’ll probably see Manochaem and Suanphaka again, but Mullins probably had a lot riding on this for his prospective solo career. He’ll always be able to find stuntwork and supporting roles, but if this is all he can do when the spotlight’s on him, I have a feeling that it won’t grace him many times more. However, responsibility for the picture’s quality ultimately falls on the filmmakers: to the extent that director Toby Russell wasn’t hampered by producers, he’s demonstrated that he needs more practice in producing a standout karate film and, for the time being, should stick to documentaries.

Death Fighter (AKA White Tiger) (2017) Directed by Toby Russell (Cinema of Vengeance) Written by Lawrence Riggins (Replicant) Starring Matt Mullins, Don Wilson, Chiranan Manochaem, Gigi Velicitat (The Mark) Cool costars: Prasit Suanphaka, Cynthia Rothrock, Jawed El Berni (Ninja II: Shadow of a Tear), Joe Lewis Title refers to: The official title could refer to virtually any of the above-mentioned performers, whereas the working title refers to Matt Mullins. (Don Wilson: “Sometimes, it takes a stubborn tiger like you to get a reluctant lion like me to fight. And you’re white.”) Content warning: Kidnapping, implied torture, violence against women, extreme violence Copyright Vision Films, Inc.

[aion-rsa]

Marvel’s Avengers Beta Doesn’t Deliver Superhero Spectacle, But There’s Hope

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There was a moment while playing the Marvel’s Avengers early access beta on the PlayStation 4 when I had to ask myself whether this slice of the game was the best way to showcase what was supposed to be a major spectacle for Earth’s Mightiest Heroes. Following two of the biggest movies of all time, Marvel’s Avengers should feel like a victory lap for Square Enix and a grand return to video games for the superhero team. Instead, the beta showcases a low-key affair that never quite feels all that fresh or unique.

While the combat, traversal, and all of the game’s other mechanics generally work just fine, the title’s dependence on long-established trends and design concepts, as well as a very dull group of baddies, render Marvel’s Avengers sort of ordinary. The game’s arcade-y co-op gameplay feels like an over-the-shoulder upgrade of the Marvel Ultimate Alliance series, which is undoubtedly a major inspiration here, while the loot shooter elements don’t really add anything new to that particular genre, either.

It’s important to note that these are my impressions after only playing the game’s beta build, a small portion of a much larger whole. This is in no way a final verdict on Marvel’s Avengers.

Before we jump in, you can check out some gameplay footage from the beta below:

I spent three days with the beta, playing through the “A-Day” intro mission that Square Enix has previewed plenty of times before as well as several main story missions (called Hero Missions in the game), a handful of short Drop Zone and War Zone missions, an Iconic mission focusing on the Hulk, and three HARM Room Challenges best described as the game’s take on a horde mode. While the beta was a varied sampling of the activities that Marvel’s Avengers has to offer, it was also a brief one that I wouldn’t consider a full view of the final product, and I definitely left the beta with the sense that there was way more to see.

The beta opens with the heavily-directed A-Day tutorial mission that familiarizes you with the different heroes at your disposal. You wreck terrorists on San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge with Thor and his mighty hammer while zipping through the skies to lend air support as Iron Man. The Hulk joins the fight on the bridge, too, smashing and stomping his way through gun-toting enemies and tanks. The tutorial gives players only the briefest of moments with Captain America and his trusty shield before switching to Black Widow for a QTE-heavy boss fight with Taskmaster.

The A-Day sequence is fast-paced and exciting, full of Marvel’s signature funny quips and heroic moments to be sure. But while this opening story mission shows how Earth’s Mightiest Heroes can work perfectly in tandem during an emergency, it isn’t really indicative of the rest of the missions in the beta, which feature combat more akin to a brawler or beat em up than the choreographed, more linear fights of the intro.

A time jump after the intro sequence sees the Avengers disband after failing to save San Francisco from the terrorist attack. We reunite with Bruce Banner and Kamala sometime later on a mission to reassemble the superhero team. The beta keeps things largely out of spoiler territory, so I didn’t get to see how the duo first met or what set them on their new mission. But from what I did see, it’s clear that the young Kamala, who is destined to become the superhero Ms. Marvel, is the heart of this story.

It’s her desire to learn more about her powers as well as the heroes she grew up admiring that drive the main plot forward. She brings an energy to the team that’s a very nice contrast to the much more defeated Banner, who is living in exile on the Chimera years after A-Day. We get hints that he’s not really interested in being the Hulk or an Avenger anymore, but Kamala convinces him that reuniting the team is the only way to save the world from the game’s main enemy faction, Advanced Idea Mechanics (aka AIM).

The Hero Missions that follow hit familiar story beats, as Bruce and Kamala first go on a mission to recover an old piece of Stark tech vital to finding Iron Man and then make contact with what remains of SHIELD, now led by Maria Hill. The beta stops short of actually reassembling the team, but along the way, we watch as Kamala interacts with pieces of Avengers history, from finding Cap’s original shield in a silo to walking around the team’s old HQ on the Chimera. It’s nice to be able to experience this story from the point-of-view of a fan who feels as much wonder for these characters as we did when we read our first Avengers comic book or watched the first movie, even if the beta’s somewhat unsurprising and safe missions don’t quite inspire wonder themselves.

The big issue with the Hero Missions and War Zone/Drop Zone side quests is that AIM’s massive army of jet pack-wearing soldiers, evil scientists, and robots aren’t all that much fun to fight or learn about. While some of the robots boast cool, bug-like designs (one class even looks like a smaller version of an X-Men Sentinel), they’re basically just punching bags and bullet sponges that don’t require much strategy to take down.

Running from room to room taking out AIM agents and machines starts to feel repetitive really quickly, and it doesn’t help that the environments sometimes feel really drab — big steel buildings with plenty of glass and high-tech lab equipment to destroy. There were even times when I felt like War Zone missions were recycling the same environment, simply remixing the order of rooms and hallways you traverse. Fortunately, these environments are almost fully destructible, which is a nice touch, especially when you’re playing as someone as chaotic as the raging Hulk. But overall, the level design showcased in the beta felt a little uninspired.

Once you unlock the War Table, you’re pretty much free to embark on missions in any order you choose and with whichever character you want, except when it comes to Iconic missions, which require you to play as a specific hero. The beta featured a Hulk-centric Iconic mission that saw the Jade Giant smash into an AIM facility to destroy the group’s gamma ray research. There’s a bit more storytelling involved with Iconic missions as well as opposed to other War Zone and short Drop Zone activities, which feel a bit less remarkable.

While there are a variety of different War Zone and Drop Zone missions to choose from, the ones in the beta mostly come down to fast sprints from point A to B that require you to destroy AIM research, defeat a robotic mini-boss, gather intel, or hold down a specific position. They rarely feel like unique experiences that could only belong in a Marvel game and are generally unexciting. And although some War Zone missions tend to offer up multiple stages and objectives, usually broken up by an elevator ride into an AIM facility or underground bunker, Drop Zone missions are bewilderingly short. You can finish them within 10 minutes, which makes them feel like filler content most of the time, although it should be noted that the shorter length of these missions is by design.

The nice thing about Marvel’s Avengers is that it won’t force multiplayer on you. All of the missions mentioned above can be played solo with three AI characters at your side or with up to three other players. While I only spent a very limited time playing with others, matchmaking worked well, but the real test will come when Crystal Dynamics opens up the beta to a much bigger group of players throughout August. But if you want to play the game solo, you can do so no problem. I even found the companion AI to be nice substitutes for real players during big fights with AIM. It’s evident that the studio has put in a lot of time into making all of these heroes feel genuine regardless of whether they’re being controlled by a player or AI.

A high point of the beta was the HARM Room, a holographic training area where the Avengers can square off against hordes of AIM enemies. In this mode, which is set on the Chimera itself, the team must survive 10 waves of increasingly difficult baddies. Only three difficulty levels were available in the beta, but it was a nice taste of what the mode has to offer. Whereas fighting AIM grunts in War Zones and Drop Zones starts to feel a little redundant, taking them on in bigger numbers in an enclosed area can get pretty exhilarating, especially when you’re against a wall in later rounds with fewer chances to heal.

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As far as the combat itself goes, there’s a nice flow to the action, which feels pretty polished at this point, as you chain a mix of attacks with Black Widow, Kamala Khan, Iron Man, and Hulk. I particularly enjoyed playing as Black Widow, who uses a mix of batons, gravity-defying flips, kicks, and dual pistols to take down the game’s robotic enemies. She also has a cool grapple that she uses to swing to hard-to-reach platforms or hurl herself at enemies. Switching between her melee moves and third-person shooter gunplay is pretty smooth, too. Black Widow ultimately feels like the hero who benefits the most from Crystal Dynamics’ own experience with the action-adventure genre. At times, I even wished the studio had embarked on a Black Widow solo adventure instead of such a big superhero endeavor.

Unsurprisingly, learning how to play as each hero is the best part of the beta. While Captain America and Thor are notably absent beyond the tutorial, you get plenty of time with the other Avengers. For the most part, each character feels distinct. Black Widow performs as a close- to mid-range hero while Ms. Marvel is all about melee. Hulk not only brings devastating tank-like power to the battlefield and destruction to the game’s environments but also does quite a bit of platforming along the way (a strange choice to give Hulk so much of the platformer gameplay but it mostly works). With Iron Man, you unlock the ability to fly around and wreak havoc from above, although his melee attacks also feel satisfying and weighty.

Special abilities that work on a cooldown timer add a nice superheroic layer to each character. Iron Man can summon his Hulkbuster suit for when he needs to take on bigger enemies and Hulk can clap his hands together to create a soundwave that does incredible damage and staggers targets. Black Widow can activate a camo that effectively turns the entire team invisible for a short time while Ms. Marvel can embiggen. Each hero has three unique abilities that really complement them and their move set. It was a blast learning how to best implement each ability.

A skill tree and a gear upgrade system allow you to unlock new attacks for each hero as well as upgrade gear stats to make your character stronger. As you level up in the game, you get skill points to redeem in the skill tree while the game’s myriad resources can be used to upgrade different pieces of gear. There are quite a few resources to keep track of, mostly found inside giant crates during missions, but I found that you could mostly ignore which resources upgraded each piece of gear. Compared to loot shooters, collecting resources never feels as grind-y or frustrating as it does in, say, the Destiny games.

You can also find different pieces of gear on the field, such as better gauntlets for Black Widow or better armor for Ms. Marvel, that offer perks (buffs) such as a damage boost, health boost, or elemental effects. Some pieces of gear even have two perks that you can unlock by upgrading them. As far as I could tell from the beta, gear serves to boost your character’s stats further but doesn’t offer any cool cosmetic effects, making loot feel a little less satisfying as a whole than in other loot-based games. Instead, cosmetic changes to your character will come from unlocking skins through gameplay or buying them with real money.

While microtransactions weren’t turned on during the beta, Crystal Dynamics did provide in-game currency so that I could shop for some skins, emotes, and themed nameplates for when you want to rep your favorite hero while in the matchmaking lobby. Skins include a Joe Fixit costume for Hulk, a casual winter-themed outfit for Kamala, a very cool black and red suit for Black Widow, and MCU-inspired suits for each hero. There were only a few skins to try for each character but trailers and gameplay videos have already promised way more costumes to choose from.

Some Marvel fans might perk up at the thought of being able to play Marvel’s Avengers as Joe Fixit and I guarantee there’s plenty more deep-cut comic book goodness where that came from. Credit must be given to Crystal Dynamics for just how much Marvel history it managed to pack into just this short beta. From breaking news from Marvel’s number one reporter, Phil Sheldon, to references to Dum Dum Dugan, easter eggs to be found on the Golden Gate Bridge, and classic real-life comics that make up the game’s collectibles, it’s clear Crystal Dynamics has done its research and has a real love for this universe. There are Avengers memorabilia scattered pretty much everywhere in the Hero Missions and there are even one or two villainous cameos I won’t spoil here.

While AIM facilities feel a bit dull as you run around their familiar hallways, the world as a whole feels lived in. The level design in the beta might falter but the world-building in Marvel’s Avengers is on point. It’s just a shame that the gameplay itself never comes together like the world and lore Crystal Dynamics is building around it.

I return back to my earlier question about whether the content specifically chosen for this beta was the best way to showcase a game as big as Marvel’s Avengers. Did Crystal Dynamics play it too safe for the sake of preserving story elements and other surprises? Will War Zone missions have more to offer than the repetitive gameplay shown here? Crystal Dynamics has stressed that these missions could last anywhere from 10 minutes to two hours. It would’ve been nice to see a mission that’s somewhere in the middle, just to get a better look at the scope of the game. For now, missions and levels feel too minuscule for a team as big as the Avengers.

Will AIM be the only bad guys in the full game? Hopefully not. There are hints in the beta that other supervillains may be on the move and there’s even a brief boss fight with a villain that’s appeared in an MCU movie. With all of Marvel history at the team’s disposal, it’s hard to believe AIM was the best choice here over the countless other evil organizations, factions, and races created by the House of Ideas. Hopefully, the full game will offer a bit more variety on the bad guy front.

Ultimately, it’s important to remember that this is only a beta and what does work in Marvel’s Avengers works well. There’s hope in the game’s world-building, character design, and the combat system. And don’t forget that Marvel’s Avengers is a live service title designed to change and improve over time. It’s positioned as a platform that will receive content updates for years to come. Like many online games before it, it’s possible Marvel’s Avengers will face a rocky launch this fall, but if the history of this particular game format is any indication, Crystal Dynamics and Square Enix will have plenty of time to right the Chimera.

Marvel’s Avengers is out on Sept. 4 for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, PC, and Google Stadia. It’s coming to PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X later this year.

If you’re interested in participating in the beta, here is the schedule of when you can do so:

August 7-9 – PS4 pre-order customers can join the closed beta

August 14-16 – All PS4 owners can join the open beta, and PC and Xbox One pre-order customers can play the closed beta

August 21-23 – Open beta across all platforms

The post Marvel’s Avengers Beta Doesn’t Deliver Superhero Spectacle, But There’s Hope appeared first on Den of Geek.

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[operationrainfall]

First released for PC in Japan in 2012, Phantasy Star Online 2 has hit the Vita, the PlayStation 4, and the Nintendo Switch since then. When it was announced at E3 2019 that Phantasy Star Online 2 was coming to North America exclusively for the Xbox One/Xbox One X and (later announced) Windows platforms, I was more than a little skeptical- especially after it was announced to be a free-to-play title with optional microtransactions. When the free closed beta weekend for Phantasy Star Online 2 was announced, I immediately signed up for it with a burning desire to answer a pair of simple questions: 1) will a game from almost a decade ago still be relevant and have an audience in today’s gaming world, 2) will there be plenty of content to explore, and 3) what are the gameplay mechanics like- will I want to spend hours in this universe?

After playing all through the Phantasy Star Online 2 closed beta both on Saturday and Sunday (I couldn’t log in on Friday thanks to the server issues), I found that all my worries and fears are, with some reservations that I will talk about later, meaningless. Phantasy Star Online 2 is, simply put, an amazing title to play. And if the final full game is anything like this closed beta, then we are in for an absolute blast of a game. Before I talk about my beta experience, there is a bit of lore background that needs to be explained first. In Phantasy Star Online 2, you are part of ARKS, a task force that evaluates and surveys planets while fighting the Falspawn, a corrupted force that wants to engulf the universe in darkness. As you play through Phantasy Star Online 2, the ‘hub’ takes place on various ships (online servers) that are part of the Oracle fleet. At the beginning of the closed beta, you play ARKS’s newest recruit who is dropped onto Naverius, a planet described as “uncivilized, with aggressive wildlife”, to complete his or her training.

“…I loved the party system in the Phantasy Star Online 2 beta test. It was a lot of fun, and it felt like everyone in the party had something to contribute.”

When you’re creating a character, there are four races to pick from (Humans, Newmans, CAST, and Deuman) and two genders options (male or female) for each race. As soon as you make those basic selections, the entire character creation panel opens up in a way that belongs more to a triple-AAA sixty-dollar title like Skyrim than a free-to-play title. There are so many options to select from. If you want to put on two hats and sunglasses, while changing all of these items colors around, you can. If you want to change your hair color, skin color, eye color, even how thick/skinny your arms and thighs, you can do that too. There is even a cornucopia of voices that you can choose from for your character. The character selection process is insane with just how unique in appearance you can make your character. And you can, if you want, just randomize everything instead to come up with something truly ‘unique’. You can then select your class. There were six classes available, which ranged from the Distant ‘pet’ class Summoner to the up-in-your-face Brawler and everything in between. I tried out a handful of classes when I started, and I was more than pleased to see that not only do they all play differently but they all also are rather fun to play. Just for the record, I played almost exclusively as Summoner.

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Want to shape muscle mass, waist size, or virtually anything else? You can in Phantasy Star Online 2, as seen above.

Or you can just randomize at your own risk, as seen below. (Images taken by me).

When you dive into the tutorial mission, you are introduced to Alfin -also a new recruit- and you go through the basic movement controls and combat attacks on dummy targets set into the ground as an NPC on the ship, Echo, guides you from task to task. Predictably, things quickly go awry as the Falspawn appear and you’re saved by a cool and well-experienced red-headed dude who sees something in you as the new recruit who can keep calm under pressure. After the mission is completed, you return to your ship and you get a brief tour around. While the closed beta storyline (keep in mind- things can change before final release) was fairly standard JRPG-plot ‘comfort food’, I found it quite enjoyable nonetheless and a perfect introduction into the Phantasy Star Online 2 world that I now inhabit.

The NPC characters, at least in this early beta portion of the game, are fairly JRPG trope-incarnate. (Images taken by Leah McDonald).

Phantasy Star Online 2 is, first and foremost, a real-time ARPG game. What that means is that you will kill enemies on the map in real time (no turn based combat here!) and level as you go through each quest. I got to level 15 within a couple hours, and I did almost no grinding to get there. I will say that after that point, I got from 15 to 19 over a period of three or so hours. As you level, you can equip different weapons and armor as well. And unlike in FINAL FANTASY XIV: A Realm Reborn, you can upgrade your weapons and armor during a raid. Leveling and expanding my pet’s abilities, which is done via an independent combination system of consuming eggs and inserting ‘sweets’ into a chart that is reminiscent of the abilities system KINGDOM HEARTS: 358/2 Days, is rather unique and a bit more complex than I would have liked. Even after I figured it out, I was still not happy with it and more than a little annoyed that my pet’s stats weren’t tied completely to my own leveling.

Place the sweets on the chart to boost your Summoner pet’s stats. (Image taken by me).

Combat itself is a lot of fun and is incredibly fluid. You are given three different weapon palletes that you can equip weapons and abilities onto and flip between with only a couple button presses- even during combat. This is important since different enemies are weak to different elements, and you will be able to equip said elements in weapons/abilities to take advantage of this. I will say though, as Summoner, my Gunblade weapons were borderline useless as I would be quickly torn apart if I actually tried to engage in any real up-close combat without my pet. I was thus pretty much limited only to using my pet to attack from a distance and then using my pet’s abilities, which are tied to the ‘PP’ bar below my ‘HP’ bar. Even attacking from afar did not detract from my gameplay experienced whatsoever. Phantasy Star Online 2 closed beta was simply a fun game to play with a group of randomized people. We tore through enemies, died some, and then destroyed even more enemies as we traversed different biomes on Naverius as groups of four, and I found myself continually diving back in fight more enemies on a regular basis.

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There are four races and six jobs available in the Phantasy Star Online 2 beta. (Images taken by Leah McDonald).

You can have up to three (3) different weapon palletes per job for maximum fighting customization. (Image taken by Leah McDonald).

These quests fell into two types: 1) find the final map zone area and kill the final area boss there and 2) get ‘x’ number of points from enemy kills, with each enemy being worth 2-3 points. The first one was where I spent most of my gameplay time and I loved going through the maps and killing enemies until the final boss. There was not a whole lot of strategy beyond “spam attacks and special attacks” needed, and there wasn’t any communication in party- which turned out to be a problem that I’ll get into shortly. Regardless, the fighting went very smoothly and I found myself enjoying it quite a lot. The second type of quests, where I needed ‘x’ points, was extremely tedious to play. With each enemy only being worth two or three points, and I needing 250 points to complete one mission, I found myself going back and forth in the area in order to make sure that I didn’t miss any enemy. It was a long slog of a mission, and it didn’t help that I was doing it solo for whatever reason. I sincerely hope that SEGA either increases the point value of each mob or decreases the total points needed to clear that type of quest, since it was an absolutely ridiculous experience.

You select your quests from an NPC aboard the ship. (Images taken by Author).

As I mentioned earlier, I loved the party system in the Phantasy Star Online 2 beta test. It was a lot of fun, and it felt like everyone in the party had something to contribute. The only issue with it, however, was actually finding where your party was on the quest map. If you were dropped into a quest midway through (not an uncommon occurrence), you often would end up having to hunt through the map for the other party members. The in-game map only revealed itself as you visit that part of the quest map (even if you have done this quest before) and so I would often be at a complete less of where in Naverius the rest of my party was. Along those lines, there was often no ‘direction’ in the quests of where exactly to go next to complete the area. The party and I would frequently wander around just visiting all of the areas in the map in order to determine where to go next. And due to a lack of communication between players in quests (seriously, there were no messages exchanged at all during my beta quest experience), this really did hurt the overall experience. Exploring the world is fine and dandy, but I wanted to keep the quest moving forward constantly instead of trying to not keep someone from backtracking yet again to a previously visited area due to the possibility that we overlooked a path forward.

There are different biomes to explore, including an ice themed one as seen here. (Images taken by me).

The highlight of the beta was easily the Urgent Quests that would temporarily appear on a fixed schedule. When an Urgent Quest was imminent, the main ship area would light up with red alert lights, a message would appear, and a limited-time event Urgent Quest would soon be available. These fell into two categories: 1) Explore the area and kill the boss at the end and 2) Just kill the big boss enemy that appears. The Urgent Missions were a ton of fun and showcase the absolute best of what Phantasy Star Online 2 can do. The explore-area-and-kill-final-boss was just like the individual quests, but with a larger number of people. The second type of quest turned into a massive boss-kill fest that was frequently over in a minute or two, especially when people were hitting levels 18-plus towards the end of the beta. It in fact culminated with the final boss Urgent Quest, Elder of the Unfathomable Abyss, being able to be spammed by parties in just two to three minutes apiece. The only real issue I had with these Urgent Quests was the queuing up process. When you decide to jump into the quest and you enter the group loading area, you have to activate a teleporter to start. When that teleporter is started, whoever is inside within thirty seconds will be entered into the Urgent Quest. It doesn’t matter if there are twelve people or only two present- those people are the ones that get dumped inside. It is a baffling decision by SEGA to not, at least for the beta, require a full alliance of people in order to start the Urgent Quest and not start the actual mission until there is that number of people present.

When an Urgent Quest is about to begin, the entire ship lights up in alert, as seen above.. (Image taken by Author).

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The final two Urgent Events, seen above, was a massive combat zone that quickly became a farm-fest for the second-to-last event. (Images taken by Author).

The teleporter you have to use before entering an Urgent Quest. (Image taken by Author).

There is one major, absolutely annoying issue that was present regardless of the type of quest I was doing though, and that was inventory management. Your character is limited to carrying fifty items at a time. That includes all your gear, your weapons, and any items that you want to use. You can also manually move items into a storage space that has around three-thousand slots in it. All good, right? Well, the problem is that enemies frequently dropped, at least in this beta, a lot of items and gear. To the point where I quickly capped my item inventory out after my third mission. What this meant was that I would frequently stop fighting and perform inventory shuffling multiple times while questing. And since you will be able to share gear across characters and you can’t tell exactly what item is what before when you pick it up, it means that you are forced to do this if you want to collect your fight drops.

In addition to playing Phantasy Star Online 2, you could watch the trailer for the upcoming live-action Sonic the Hedgehog movie that was on all the screens in the ship. (Image taken by Author).

What this means is that, more than once, I saw people hanging around after the final fight in a quest in order to presumably inventory shuffle items alongside me in order to actually pick up drops. It was annoying, it was cumbersome, and it quickly made me stop picking up items entirely after a few hours into the beta so I could just actually keep playing the game. This is a completely baffling gameplay mechanic by SEGA and one that I hope is revisited and revised completely before Phantasy Star Online 2 is released in its entirety.

Check out my thoughts on the casino games and Quna’s idol performance on Page 2 —->

While taking a break from running missions, I strolled my way to the casino to gamble some. After purchasing some coins with my in-game currency, I tried out a game called Mesetan Shooter that cost me 100 casino coins to play. The rules were fairly simple: you shoot targets on the far side of the screen, and then collect the coins as they roll down the screen pachinko-style by moving your cannon around. Unfortunately, this gambling game was marred by the most complicated control scheme this side of Kid Icarus Uprising: You use the left stick to move left and right (needed to collect the coins and to move the shooting cursor side-to-side), the right stick up and down (to aim at the upper-tier and lower-tier of targets), and you have to press the ‘X’ button to shoot. This resulted in a confusing mess that was awful to play and that I wound up giving up on after a single full round of multiple waves. I know that SEGA will absolutely have to revisit this control scheme before Phantasy Star Online 2 launches, as it is darn near unplayable as it currently stands.

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I only tried Mesatan Shooter once, but that was more than enough for me. (Images taken by author).

In addition to the gameplay and gambling sections, there was also a shopping area and a café on the ship. These areas were fairly bare and were both clearly meant to instead be implemented in full when the final game is launched. It was also worth noting that while the terminal to sell items on the marketplace was present and you could register your five-digit PIN with the console, you couldn’t actually sell anything. I am sure that this is a feature that will also be available when Phantasy Star Online 2 launches. The one thing that did take place in the shopping district was near the end of the Saturday night beta: the live concert. SEGA, clearly taking a page from Japan’s idol culture and virtual idols such as Hatsune Miku, has created an idol of their own to bring to Phantasy Star Online 2. When I showed up for Quna’s performance, I quickly found myself surrounded by a flood of people pressed up as close as possible to the stage and jumping around. The music and dancing itself was typical J-Pop idol fare and was absolutely enjoyable in-and-of itself. At least, what I could hear of it was enjoyable.

“I stuck out both of Quna’s performances, but the vulgarity and jumping sounds really put a damper on what I was hoping would be a perfect penultimate moment before the final two ‘Urgent Quests’ of the Phantasy Star Online 2 beta.”

Whether I was in normal viewing mode (meaning I was seeing the performance from a third person perspective in the audience) or in the enhanced mode (where it was a special live cutscene version of the performance), Quna’s singing and dancing was frequently drowned out by the noise of people jumping and the live ‘commentary’ of an audience who has finally discovered how to use a keyboard in game, complete with the sound effect of a new message popping up. And these messages, while some did include the necessary word-trigger for Quna’s encore performance, also had players asking for her nudes, wanting to buy her bathwater, and talking about their two-inch penis. I sincerely wish I was exaggerating, but you can check out the photos that I took in both views below to see what I mean:

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You could barely hear Quna over the jumping sounds and the frequently vulgar concert comments. (Images taken by author).

I stuck out both of Quna’s performances, but the vulgarity and jumping sounds really put a damper on what I was hoping would be a perfect penultimate moment before the final two ‘Urgent Quests’ of the Phantasy Star Online 2 beta. I would love for there to be an option to turn off all surrounding sounds and text other than the concert during the show, and I am hopeful that SEGA will implement something like that in the next beta build or before the full game’s release.

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Certain areas were more or less inaccessible during the beta window. (Images taken by Author and Leah McDonald).

If you can’t tell, I really liked the Phantasy Star Online 2 beta. There is absolutely a lot to love about this game and the world that my character inhabits. There are still a lot of unanswered questions such as when the game will launch, how microtransactions will factor into the final game, what the content update schedule will be like, and what the full storyline will be like. This beta was not perfect. But that’s the point of a beta: to stress test the servers and to see what content works and doesn’t work. And I have faith that SEGA will listen to the player feedback and will make something absolutely spectacular when the final game launches.

A Congratulations scene popped up after I cleared the final Urgent Event of the beta. (Image taken by Author).

You can find out more about Phantasy Star Online 2, including future beta events, at their official website, on Twitch, on Twitter, on Instagram, on Facebook, and on YouTube.

Did you jump into the Phantasy Star Online 2 beta? What did you think of it?

Are you excited for the full game to launch?

Let us know in the comments below!

Phantasy Star Online 2 Beta IMPRESSIONS: Amazing & Rough First released for PC in Japan in 2012, Phantasy Star Online 2 has hit the Vita, the PlayStation 4, and the Nintendo Switch since then.

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Zombie Army 4: Dead War Review — Sharknado: Zombie Edition

February 3, 2020 11:00 AM EST

Zombie Army 4: Dead War is the most refined entry in the series so far and offers hours upon hours of zombie-killing content for your enjoyment.

From Resident Evil to the upcoming The Last of Us Part II, zombies have been featured in video games for as long as I can remember. It’s a tried-and-true formula that just works. I think the zombies and video games relationship can be best summed up by paraphrasing Forrest Gump; they belong together like peas and carrots. However, it was Treyarch’s hidden mode from Call of Duty: World at War that made Nazi zombies all the rage. The merging of the two evils inspired the creators of Sniper Elite to feature Nazi zombies in the game’s expansions which ended up being so popular with fans, it went on to spawn its own franchise. Now, the fourth entry in the series, Rebellion’s Zombie Army 4: Dead War, will be releasing shortly on PS4, Xbox One, and PC.

At the end of the Zombie Army Trilogy, Hitler was defeated and sent to Hell. It’s now one year later and Hitler’s dead army still roams the earth leaving a path of death and destruction in their wake. In Zombie Army 4: Dead War your task is to defeat this leaderless army of zombies before they can revive their supreme evil leader Adolf Hitler and wipe out humanity in the ultimate zombie apocalypse. The all-new campaign starts in Italy and ends in Hell as you encounter the most grotesque enemies ever seen in the series such as zombie tanks and sharks.

“Rebellion, who both developed and published Zombie Army 4: Dead War, has improved upon the gunplay quite a bit.”

There are four characters to play as and as you level up, you can customize and upgrade them to match your gameplay style. This includes up to five perk slots that boost your offensive and defensive tactics along with a special category that provides things like the ability to carry more ammo for weapon types. You need to level up to unlock these slots with the fifth and final one unlocking at level 35. Your character can also get a special melee attack that ranges from giving you a small amount of health to an incendiary axe throw.

Rebellion, who both developed and published Zombie Army 4: Dead War, has improved upon the gunplay quite a bit. The game also still includes the oh-so-satisfying X-Ray Kill Cam made famous in the Sniper Elite series. If you are unfamiliar with the X-Ray Kill Cam, it slows up time so you can watch the bullets shatter brains, organs, and bones. If you have played any third or first-person shooters before, controls and gameplay will feel familiar and easy to master.

Zombie Army 4’s arsenal includes a handful of rifles, assault rifles, shotguns, and pistols that are typical and standard in most WWII shooters such as the MP44 and the Gewehr 43. Making them unique is the fact that they are upgradeable with a variety of cool perks that will enhance your bullets with lightning or Vampir scopes that return a small amount of health on successful critical hits.

Zombie Army 4: Dead War’s campaign can be played solo or with up to three others in co-op. Unfortunately, I couldn’t test out co-op too extensively in this pre-release form. Since I prefer playing campaigns first on my own before joining others anyway, this didn’t really concern me, although it’s easy to see that the game is designed with cooperative play in mind.

I also tested out the new and improved Horde mode and while it’s not impossible to play on your own, it’s definitely not easy taking on progressively more difficult and numerous waves of zombies. Even in my failure, I still had fun with Horde mode but I’m looking forward to being able to play with more friends once the game releases.

There’s a whole lot more to Zombie Army 4 than just killing zombies. There are objectives and obstacles to conquer which provide a little more depth and polish to the overall experience. Traveling down the canals of Venice in a boat, you will have to stop and refuel with the fuel being scattered throughout the level. Once you find the tanks of fuel, you must make your way back to the boat amidst zombie chaos and only the use of your pistol. For those of you treasure hunters, each chapter includes several collectibles to be had including weapon upgrade kits which you don’t want to miss. Of course, the real reason we are here is to kill zombies, and the game does a good job of not getting repetitive by offering several varieties of zombies to blow away. Half of the battle becomes learning the weaknesses of each type so you can quickly eliminate them.

The graphics and art direction of Zombie Army 4 bring lifelike realism to the various zombie forms as well as depict some of Italy’s notable landmarks in a ruined but still lovely state. The sound crew at Rebellion have added to the intensity of the zombie attacks with a perfect mix of sound effects and zombie cries. The scream of a Suicider will become all too familiar as you frantically seek the direction it’s coming from before it’s too late and self destructs in front of you. I was reminded of the Clickers from The Last of Us and how the sound of them haunted my dreams long after I finished the game.

Zombie Army 4: Dead War poses a challenge in its punishing gameplay that feels mostly balanced, with the exception of the lack of health. I’m currently at level 43 in the game and only a very small portion of my health bar regenerates. In order to regenerate to full health, you need a medkit. You can carry one extra medkit with you, but given the length and difficulty of some chapters, sometimes one alone is not enough. Ammunition is scattered around the levels very generously, so you rarely run out of bullets, but I almost never found medkits. After each level, you are sent to a safe house where you can re-supply and often that was the only time I would see them. I’m not saying I didn’t come across the random medkit here and there, but it was an extremely rare occurrence. I even tested all three difficulties to see if they spawned more frequently on Easy, Medium, or Hard and the result was always the same.

“Zombie Army 4 offers a cohesive and fun experience that doesn’t take itself too seriously.”

Another pitfall of playing games prior to release is that often I’m playing it before it has been fully optimized with the day one patch. That was, unfortunately, the case with Zombie Army 4: Dead War at times. The worst error which took place for me was during the Death Canal mission where I was prompted to pull a lever to lower a bridge but the ability to actually interact with the lever never manifested. For a while, I was stuck here and couldn’t progress. Since it was fairly early in the game, I started over from the beginning and was able to finally move along. There were other similar incidents throughout the game, but nothing as severe as this. Typically, restarting the most recent checkpoint fixed most of my other problems.

Another odd issue I experienced had to do with beating the final boss. Upon defeating this baddie, the game immediately went straight to the main menu, with no story wrap up, cutscenes, or anything. The only way I knew the game was over, was because the achievement for finishing the game popped. Replaying the last chapter properly ended the game for me and I was able to see how things actually wrapped up. Fortunately, these problems I had shouldn’t be an issue for you as Rebellion has sent out the contents of a day one patch that should fix these and a few other minor bugs that are currently plaguing Zombie Army 4.

Unlike the direction the Zombies mode from Call of Duty has taken in the past few iterations, Zombie Army 4 offers a cohesive and fun experience that doesn’t take itself too seriously. It’s engaging from start to finish and with its weekly challenges, the arcade-like setup of the chapters and leaderboards, and with Horde Mode, there’s a bunch of replay value here. Zombie Army 4: Dead War has finally broken free of its Sniper Elite shackles and will hopefully give rise to a lasting franchise of smiting out Nazi zombies.

February 3, 2020 11:00 AM EST

from EnterGamingXP https://entergamingxp.com/2020/02/zombie-army-4-dead-war-review-sharknado-zombie-edition/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=zombie-army-4-dead-war-review-sharknado-zombie-edition

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Wolfenstein: Youngblood Review

New Post has been published on https://gamerszone.tn/wolfenstein-youngblood-review/

Wolfenstein: Youngblood Review

Most parents hope that their kids will one day surpass them, but failing that we’ll settle for staying out of prison and not asking for money too often. So if I were in the shoes of legendary run-and-gun shooter protagonist William “BJ” Blazkowicz, I wouldn’t be mad about my twin daughters’ debut performance in Wolfenstein: Youngblood

, but I would be disappointed. The young Blazkowiczs’ approach to co-op is, on the whole, serviceable but does cramp the style of its inherited trust fund of combat and stealth gameplay. Without a similarly outlandish cast of characters to liven up the alternate-history setting in which Nazis won WWII with the help of fire-breathing robot dogs, it’s perfunctory compared to the extremely high standard set by Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus.Nearly everything about Youngblood feels like a step down from Wolfenstein 2’s distinctively zany plot and satisfyingly energetic Nazi-slaughter action. Outside of a single reveal, this story – the daughters’ search for an MIA BJ in Paris, which is still lousy with Nazis about 20 years later – has nothing surprising up its sleeve to add to the Machinegames Wolfenstein reboot series’ collection of WTF moments. That’s partially due to the minimal number of story cutscenes within the main missions, but really it’s because of a stark lack of interesting characters to fill the shoes of batshit insane companions like Super Spesh or Set, to name a few. Abby, the daughter of Wolfenstein 2’s Grace Walker, is about as bland a hacker helper character as you’ll ever find, and the monotonously cackling villain isn’t fit to shine Irene Engle’s jackboots. Admittedly, Wolfenstein 2 is a tough act to follow in those departments, but Youngblood barely seems to try.

BJ himself is among the weaker characters in the previous two games (aside from those flashbacks to his childhood), and in that respect his apples haven’t fallen far from the tree. Soph and Jess’ defining character trait is being snort-laughing dorks together, who would be at least a little adorable except for their constant use of fist-bumping and horrible ‘80s slang (read: “tubular!”) like gender-swapped frat bros. They’re not unlikeable when they’re chatting about memories of hunting with their dad or novelist aspirations in heavy Texan accents, but they’re not exactly breakout stars I want to see more of, either. They’re… fine.

The sisters, who have identical abilities thanks to their power armor suits, start with at least a few of the key moves BJ has to work for in Wolfenstein 2 – most notably the double-jump – and earn plenty of upgrades from there. To Youngblood’s credit, there are too many upgrades to get them all without playing exhaustively, so specialization does matter, though not to the extent where I see opportunities for a lot of synergy between abilities. You can focus on buffing up your health and armor maximums, intensify your melee damage, gain the ability to pick up and upgrade heavy weapons, and more. We also get pretty much all the same arsenal of pistols, shotguns, SMGs, rifles, etc. that the twins’ father wielded two decades earlier (though annoyingly, only pistols can be dual-wielded), and they can all be upgraded with modifiers like muzzles, sights, and stocks that increase their power as you go. It’s the most visible representation of progression because those changes are reflected on the gun models you’re holding. Seeing the stock SMG become a tricked-out version is a satisfying transformation.

The Blazkowicz twins aren’t exactly breakout stars I want to see more of. They’re… fine.

“

But the addition of a leveling system for both the girls and the Nazis they fight doesn’t do the combat any favors. For one thing, as a veteran of the first two games in this series it was jarring to see a name and number pop up over the head of an enemy when I aimed at them to indicate how their power level compared to mine. More importantly, it messed up the balance of about two thirds of the fights: when you’re going up against techno-fascists who are right at your level, combat feels just about how it should, but enemies that are beneath your level are mere fodder and those above are annoying bullet sponges that reward you with only a little more XP. When you’re dealing with heavily armored super-soldiers, that’s not much fun.

This leveling system clashes with Wolfenstein’s design: unlike in Fallout or Borderlands, there’s no loot to make the potential reward worth the risk of taking on a bad guy several levels out of your league. Seeing one just means you should turn around and come back later, and defeats the purpose of the non-linear structure of Youngblood’s missions. Sure, I can travel to zones in any order I want, but if they have a big burly bouncer at the door they can’t exactly be done in whatever order I choose anyway.

Wolfenstein: Youngblood

Those zones are adequate but similarly pale shadows of what’s come before. The best example is seeing vestiges of a parade that immediately reminded me of Wolfenstein 2’s Nazi parade scene in New Mexico – which has to be a deliberate callback – but without any of the liveliness. Beyond that it’s largely a collection of high-tech Nazi facilities and war-torn city blocks, distinguished mostly by good use of multi-story structures to double-jump around on and the lightest of Metroidvania design touches, asking you to use one of the three heavy weapons – a laser, an electric zapper, and a sticky grenade launcher – to blast open new areas.

No Quiet on the Western Front

Of course, shooting Nazis until their faces fall off is only two thirds of the magic of Wolfenstein’s previous success. The other is stabbing them repeatedly, occasionally while cupping a hand over their mouth and whispering “Ssssh, it’ll be over soon, you goose-stepping douche” into their ear – then doing the same to about a dozen of their friends before you get around to the shooting part. Naturally, Youngblood messes this up, too. Its level and enemy layouts simply aren’t designed with stealth in mind, and attempting to play it in the way I’d had success with previously almost always went poorly. Either you’re spotted by a flying drone or there’s no way to separate and pick off a group of enemies, forcing you into noisy combat.

Instead, you’re supposed to use the blatant design Band-Aid of the cloaking device, an ability so essential it’s one of two you choose from when initially creating a character (and quickly unlockable if you choose the Crash ramming ability instead). Even before you upgrade it to last longer and let you move faster, it lets you walk right up to an economically anxious German, step around him, and stealthily ventilate his spleen. It feels like a cheat, probably because it absolutely is a cheat. The designers cheated not only the game, but themselves. They didn’t grow. They didn’t improve. They took a shortcut and gained nothing. They experienced a hollow victory. Nothing was risked and nothing was gained.

The cloaking device feels like a cheat, probably because it absolutely is a cheat.

“

Co-op does get a fair amount right. From the start, it’s conveniently and seamlessly drop-in and drop-out because your sister is always with you, controlled by either a friend, an internet rando via quickmatch, or a mostly competent (because it cheats and warps around bigtime) AI when you’re playing solo. Youngblood also does a good job of letting you play with anybody you want regardless of your respective levels – when I was level 25 someone joined me with a brand-new character and was able to hold his own, just with fewer abilities unlocked. His character even got to carry their progress back to single-player, which is always appreciated. That said, I had more than once incident where my co-op partner would experience an annoying lag between when they pulled the trigger and when the enemy they shot would actually take damage – and this even happened on a LAN, so it’s unlikely to be connection-related.

The co-op-first nature of Youngblood’s design does take its toll on the single-player experience, as you’d expect. The first problem I noticed was that you can’t pause, even while playing by yourself. You can go to the menu screen, yes, but then you just get to listen as the Nazis and their suicide-bomber dogs (yes, those are a thing) murder you. Also, every level has annoyingly common doors that require both players to heave them open, no doubt intended to keep you from wandering too far from your partner.

But whether you play with a buddy or solo, death is a lot harder to come by in Youngblood than in previous Wolfensteins because, as is standard in the co-op shooter world, it has a down-but-not-out system where you can revive each other endlessly, as long as you get to the injured person within about a minute. This one is actually unusually generous, because even if you’re both downed you have a pool of up to three “shared lives” that let one of you self-revive to get back on your feet before it’s game over.

Once that generous system runs out, however, the consequences of death can be, as they say in Germany, uber stupid. For example, the final battle in the Brother 2 Tower mission (there are three of these that make up the bulk of the 15-ish hours of story) killed me several times – thanks for nothing, AI-controlled Jess. Each time, it booted me so far back that it took me about 15 minutes just to get back to the boss fight, including battling through or sprinting past several miniboss mechs and running through the longest jumping puzzle section in the entire campaign. Just as bad, Youngblood restarts you at the nearest checkpoint with the amount of ammo you died with, not what you had when you first reached it. And if you didn’t go down without a fight, that usually means your good stuff is depleted. That makes you spend a bunch of extra time scrounging for ammo, and it’s actually worse when the checkpoint starts you right in the thick of the action effectively unarmed – as it does in the tedious final boss battle.

There’s plenty to do in Youngblood beyond the story missions, including dynamic “actions” that pop up and invite you to plant bombs or listening devices or straight-up murder some dudes “when you have a moment” en route to your larger objective, and tons of side missions you can take on by talking to a handful of completely forgettable characters idoly standing around the hub area. That’s arguably the meat of Youngblood and could carry you forward for another dozen or so hours of cathartic, justifiable homicide, but frankly I’d rather spend that time replaying The New Order and The New Colossus.

Source : IGN