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James Gunn’s thesis statement for his Superman is simple and effective: "Be good. Do good. Be human despite the bad things. That is the most punk rock thing in a world so stoic and cynical."

And that’s how it should be. That’s beautiful, the new Superman movie is beautiful.

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[tarakaybee]

not to shit on zack snyder again but it's really funny that he tried to make a big, grand, complex moral quandary on where superman should stand when he saves people around the world and then james gunn is like "he wants to do it because he thinks it's the right thing to do". sometimes going simpler means you get to the crux of what the character is all about much more efficiently. like wow it's really that easy

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Cloudwad, Ho! Stray Thoughts (Episode 06)

Typing this about a third into episode six, some stray thoughts.

Strongly feel like the Zood Switcheroo is setting us up for a twist that that very thing has happened to Comfrey McCloud.

I feel a little annoyed on Murph's behalf that everybody is naysaying him constantly. It's unclear to me why everybody mistrusts Maxwell at this time but everybody's so persistent with the RP of dismissing Maxwell that Murph is basically getting shot down whenever he speaks up about anything, whether or not he's in-character.

I really like the gimmick of the new creatures being drawn by the offscreen artist in real time, it gives a fun visual component to the RP that isn't always there in the room for the players.

This episode is two and a bit hours so my concentration is starting to flag. I'm pretty sure there is a battle map in this episode and I'm trying to resist the temptation to skip to it.

The story of this campaign is so creative, really love the idea of the Legio Rex being part of the lore, which from my limited historical knowledge sounds like a take on the myth of the missing ninth roman legion. Which is something I know about from the very underrated Doctor Who episode about it. An immediate wikipedia search where it's called Legio IX immediately makes me wonder if "Legio Rex" is based on the pun of pronouncing Legio IX as "icks" instead of reading it as numbers.

[tarakaybee]

Thunderbolts was actually pretty good! I used to be die hard for MCU films before they fell off by doing too much of it, but I feel like the Thunderbolts got back to the MCU's roots. It's not the comic accuracy, it's not the action, it's not really the story, the thing that made early MCU just work is that it was fundamentally putting a load of characters in a blender and allowing them to have really good chemistry, and you could imagine what it would be like if characters from different stories also had chemistry, and then they would realise that vision. A lot of new MCU has forgotten this and the focus started to become setting up future stories, and yet despite that, the Thunderbolts are the characters I'm actually looking forward to seeing again. I love Yelena, she's a a spiky asshole but also she's accidentally become the closest thing the current MCU has to an everyman, and she's great. My dream pairing is for Yelena to meet fellow Malevolent Spiky Asshole Jessica Jones, I absolutely believe that their chemistry would be utterly immaculate.

[tarakaybee]

can’t believe it’s actually out finally

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Dissecting Transistor's Plot (Spoilers)

So as I mentioned recently, I finished my tenth playthrough of Pyre recently, my favourite Supergiant Game and one of my favourite games in general. I decided to also replay Bastion and Transistor to remind myself what goes on in them. Bastion is an extremely good story, I think the gameplay is extremely mid, the combat doesn't flow very well and while the art style is beautiful, it's also very cluttered in a way that makes it hard to parse things when you're playing a video game and have to quickly make decisions about things. I basically just play it for the story, which I happen to think still holds up even as Supergiant themselves have surpassed it, a narrator voice that reacts to everything is a fun concept but the game quickly moves beyond it as the narrator tells an involved story about an extremely interesting world and a great set of characters. Yeah it's pretty good, will replay again in some years probably.

Transistor is the game I've replayed the least, I admit when I first played it I did not follow even the barest shred of story and only knew the plot in abstract because of the Zero Puncutation review explaining it directly. This is about the third time I've played it, and this time I actually played it properly, and I enjoyed it a ton more. The way I played it in my previous runs was that I basically just stuck to the default attack functions and didn't change my setup at any point, the actual way you're supposed to play it is you're supposed to change your setup at every checkpoint, because using each of your programs three abilities unlocks story documents, without which the story is basically impossible to follow. Oh, to explain if you've not played it, it's a hack and slash game, but instead of having standard weapons attacks, you have different program functions that is either an active ability, a passive ability or support ability. For example, one of the functions is jaunt(), in the active ability it gives you a short range teleport, in the support ability it lets you use the program it's supporting during your cooldown phase, and passive makes your cooldown phase faster.

Canonically, each program is derived from an aspect of a character in the story, and using each of a program's three functions unlocks a third of a character's story document. I didn't do that the first two times I played, and if you don't do this then as I said, the story is basically impossible to follow, it's told in a way that is basically whatever the opposite of spoon-feeding you exposition is. I came to appreciate the story and the way it was told this time, I love Fromsoftware games, which tell stories in a similar way, but I have never successfully pieced together the plot of any of those games on my own, this time I was able to understand the story with minimal looking it up online.

I was thinking about the game's story on my walk back from the shops today, just to see if I understood it. From my understanding, the setting is Cloudbank, a city that exists in a digital world, like The Matrix, or the digital world from Digimon, and basically Cloudbank is an absolute democracy, everything is voted on by the populace down to things like the colour of the sky, whether they have bridges or railways, the general existence of specific buildings and landmarks and etc. The story starts and we meet protagonist Red, the only things we know about her are that she is a singer, she's lost her voice, and she's being targeted by a criminal conspiracy called the Camerata. She's also next to a corpse that has a big sword impaled in him, and that sword is the Transistor, which is something that allows you to program things into existence in Cloudbank. The Transistor has a very human voice speaking from it, and this voice seems to be of the man it was just impaled in, whose name we never learn because the only person who would have a reason to address him by name is Red, who currently cannot speak.

The game starts and we're moving through the city, the Transistor's voice makes references to the Camerata in extremely oblique terms, implying only that they did something terrible to Red and her companion. You also find the corpses of some other people that you absorb some of your programs from, unlocking their story documents reveals two things if you read all of them and put the jigsaw together, they are either a celebrity or a specialist in a certain field, and that the Camerata disappeared them. Among the programs are documents on Red and "Mr Nobody" (the man in the Transistor). I realised only in hindsight that program derived from Red is specifically derived from her voice, the game doesn't spell out that this is why her voice is gone but it's established in the documents that the Camerata were interested in her voice (not her specific voice, but specifically her charisma and general ability to influence people, she's basically a Rockerboy if we're going full Cyberpunk).

Eventually you learn about the Camerata, when you start cross referencing the dialogue with the names attached to your programs, something that I did not do in previous playthroughs. Basically the Camerata want to establish an Technocracy, as in, a society governed by experts in various fields, which is the reason they were using the Transistor to capture the essence of various Cloudbank figures. Really though it's more an Autocracy because the Camerata seem to want to be in charge of who is important. This is probably why they wanted Red, her field is expertise is established to be music and linguistics, it seems like they wanted to use Red and her voice to influence people's opinions, she apparently has a track record of causing people to start riots, which again is very Rockerboy of her.

Cut to the start of the story, there's something happening in the city called The Process, which seem to be basically factory resetting parts of Cloudbank. This is the main bit of the story I understood through reading bits of the story online, basically the Camerata dug into Cloudbank's source code, apparently Cloudbank is so old that nobody living in it understands how it works anymore, and they found the city's digital building blocks and basically turned it on. Then then lost control of it and it started eating the city, and they couldn't stop it because they need the Transistor to do that. I think that they made the mistake of using the Transistor to kill Mr Nobody, who must have been trying to protect Red from the Camerata, and allowing the Transistor to fall into Red's hands.

So the game ends, you've killed two of the Camerata and the other two died before you could reach them, probably at their own hands. Red now is able to stop the Process, but only after basically everybody in Cloudbank is dead except herself and Mr Nobody, she basically has the power of a god now. Then, the strongest moment of the game happens, a moment that I interpret as happy and romantic, though bittersweet in a way. After a whole story instigated by the Camerata trying to control Red and her will, once you've guided her to the end of the game, Red basically decide that she won't let anybody try to control her anymore, and this includes the player, in contrast to the player-controlled ending of Bastian. She takes the Transistor and impales herself in it. Some sources I've read interpreted this scene to mean that Red is overcome with despair at being the sole survivor and kills herself, but I think of all the inscrutable things to happen in the game, what actually happens is pretty clear, she's choosing to give up being basically a god and goes to live inside the Transistor with Mr Nobody, that's why she does this next to where his corpse is and curls up next to him while she does it. Remember also that Cloudbank is a digital city, so this is not anything approaching death, this is just her soul being moved from one place to another. The ending song doesn't spell this out, but it's pretty clearly a love song, by Red and addressed to Mr Nobody.

This story hits different than the other SG games. I still maintain that Pyre is my favourite story of the bunch, Transistor's story is told in a unique way, which is to say it takes place in your head rather than on the screen. The story is a puzzle that's only assembled in your mind, it's like when I played Case of the Golden Idol and one of the game's major plot twists happened entirely in my head because the game doesn't spell it out until after the final level. There aren't a lot of good love stories in video games that I personally like, or could even really name, but Red / Mr Nobody is a very good one. I want to say because I love the story of the Shovel Knight games that that has my other favourite, but it's not Shovel Knight / Shield Knight, it's the father and son relationship of Donovan and Reize. I like the Shovel Knight plot but it loses points by having Shield Knight be offscreen for most of it. By my standards, I also did enjoy Plague Knight / Mona a lot too, especially their extremely cute dance animation after the end credits.

Anyway, that's it for Transistor. I played Hades but I never got to the story end, I think that I was about four completed runs into the endgame plot before I gave up. I've also not played Hades II yet, I only played the first when it was out of early access and I'm doing basically the same for Hades II I think. Story-wise, Hades has the simplest plot, but also has very strong characters and developing relationships and a genuinely insane amount of contingent dialogue. Zagreus is a nice chap and I like his relationships with all the characters in the Hades House, I like the relationship mechanics and I liked his relationship with his various mothers. Will maybe do another of these big posts when I've finished it, or possibly when I eventually play Hades II and get to story end.

[tarakaybee]

Cloudward, Ho is been really fun so far! I feel like I wrote a post recently where I said that in Dimension 20, the runtime has gotten wildly out of hand in the past few years and there wasn't enough gameplay to engage me, and then they released this campaign where each episode's runtime is mostly south of two hours, and there's more gameplay. My hot take with TTRPG shows is that no matter how good the players are, I cannot watch three straight hours of people doing nothing but Acting™ at one another in extended improv, I need scenes to have an ending, I need the story to be furthered by gameplay, I need peaks and troughs in the pacing. I really enjoyed watching the substitution cypher puzzle be solved by Siobhan and I liked the little investigation gimmick where the IH were given magnifying glasses and told to investigate whichever visuals looked interesting in the background art.

I still want to watch that Critical Role series Age of Umbra, the idea of them moving on from the Exandria setting is exciting for me and I really like CR's main cast but three and a half hours per episode is an extremely tall ask. Critical Role are also currently doing Critical Role Abridged, where they're basically re-releasing Campaign 3 but with about two thirds of its content removed, which feels like a tacit admission that Campaign 3 has a lot of dead air, or that it's completely unreasonable to expect people to absorb four hours of plot every week for three years straight.

[tarakaybee]

started playing pyre and im immediately obsessed with how beautiful this game looks

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just finished pyre, a game about people in hell playing basketball for freedom. It made me cry plz play this game

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I've been doing a True Nightwing playthrough of Pyre for about the tenth time. I cannot believe that this game did not get as much praise as Hades did. I liked Hades and it had a great story, but the thing about basically all of Supergiant's games is that the combat is a little repetitive. Pyre's equivalent of combat is basketball, and it's less relentless and constant because the matches are not that long, there are a lot less of them and they're spaced out by the nice visual novel segments. The stories of every Supergiant game easily clear about 80% of every other game story, but I honestly like Pyre's story the best. I like that the gameplay influences the story rather than the story just being concurrent to it, the ritual basketball combat is more emotionally tense than the life or death struggle of SG's other games because if you lose, the story continues with you having lost. Every time I do a playthrough, Rukey is on my list of party members to liberate, but because he's the best orb-runner you can get I kind of have to liberate him last so that the others are a little easier, and I feel like in the majority of my playthroughs, whenever I lose Rukey's liberation rite, my stomach drops with the dread that I've potentially crushed his hopes and dreams for the rest of the playthrough.

Also, I think unironically that more video games should replace their combat with something else. I can't imagine how much more dull Pyre would be if if the system of choosing party members was part of a turn based combat system. My big grip with the Ichiban saga in the Like a Dragon series is that the combat is a huge chore unless it's a boss fight with a named character. I didn't hate the combat but I hate random encounters because I'm not going to think tactically in all one thousand combat encounters across the game, I am going to just gravitate to the thing that requires the least thinking time if I'm in no danger. I play tabletop RPGs, but I like that turn-based battle because you don't breeze through about twenty turn-based battles in one hour, they're slower and less frequent so they engage my brain a bit more. Thinking about it, I also really liked the combat in Cryptmaster because it wasn't a turn-based combat system, it was basically having a spell duel with monsters and it was fun because it was impossible to brute force. Also possibly why I like party based RPGs like the Mass Effect saga and the earlier Mario RPGs before the original studios went bankrupt, I think I just prefer gameplay that's more active, if it's tactical I prefer if the game incentivises me to be smart.

I wanted to think of examples of weird game mechanics that could replace the turn-based combat in the Yakuza games, I'm gonna say that Ichiban should retire from being an action hero in a crime drama and all subsequent Ichiban games should become basically a sports anime, but the sandbox map filled with minigames and the weird substories remain intact.

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Subsequent Buffy Thoughts (Season Seven) and Angel (Season Four)

I've been doing this thing where I alternate episode by episode between the concurrent Buffy and Angel seasons, I just recently finished the span of episodes where Faith breaks out of prison in Angel, helps the hang with the Angelus / Beast crisis, then Willow takes her back to Sunnydale to deal with the The First crisis. I really like the Angel side of this arc where it's clear that, by this point in time, Wesley is significantly more compromised than she is, morally speaking. Faith's actions in S3 of Buffy and S1 of Angel were shocking at the time but since then, Angel locked fifty lawyers in a room to get eaten by vampires, Wesley kidnapped a baby and made a woman into a slave, Fred tries to kill a guy, Gunn actually does kill a guy, and Cordelia did nothing wrong because she's the only person on the team with a moral backbone until she gets possessed by Jasmine.

It's weird watching those moments back to back with Faith's return on Buffy. This is a sentence that only watching a TV show could possibly call for her to say, but everybody keeps jumping up Faith's ass for killing two people, the Angel gang knew that none of them were in a position to judge her for her actions and didn't need to lecture her, but Buffy is constantly moralising to her. Rarely for most stories, Buffy is actually my favourite character in Buffy, but she does have a tendency to base her judgements of people on basically arbitrary criteria, it's really frustrating that she continues being really bitchy with Faith for her mistakes despite the fact that she shares her home with five murderers. Sometimes this flaw of hers makes for extremely juicy storytelling like the Buffy/Spike arc of season five and six, other times the moralising just gets irritating.

On the whole, an interesting thing about Buffy (the series) is that the characters become more complex over the seven seasons by means of their individual flaws gaining more of a foothold. Giles has a ruthless streak that causes him to occasionally push for the amoral options if given too much sway in the Scooby Gang, Willow is kind of impulsive and weak-willed and tends to only hold herself morally accountable if she thinks she'll be judged by others, and Xander is stubborn and has extremely skewed judgement. Buffy's main flaws as positioned by the show are all pretty justified, she thinks she's the highest moral authority and her decisions are always correct, which is sort of supported by the fact that across all seven seasons of the show she does the right thing more consistently than anybody else and correctly intuits all the surrounding context with an extremely high rate of accuracy.

I think I've decided I'm one of the people that doesn't like the mutiny storyline in season seven. Part of it is the degree to which this mutiny is influenced by the Potentials, most of the potentials are not good characters, and also are not fleshed out characters in general considering there's like thirty of them. I grudgingly admit that it's consistent to Buffy's character that she doesn't get on with other slayers, but Buffy actively demoralising the Potentials by constantly lecturing them and telling them they're going to die feels like a severe exaggeration of this flaw. The whole Potentials storyline is just an endless cycle of multiple characters naysaying Buffy > Buffy being really harsh with the potentials> people naysaying her for being harsh and making calls they don't like > repeat. It's not a fun conflict born of characters having flaws that clash against one-another, it's just frustrating.

I do believe Season Seven of Buffy and Season Four of Angel are the controversial ones, and on the Angel side of things, there's the "Cordelia is evil/possessed storyline". The conflict between the Angel gang in seasons three and four is an interpersonal conflict that I like, Wesley's judgement becoming comprised is some extremely juicy drama. In season three, Gunn and Wesley are competing for Fred's affections, Wesley withdraws into himself during the Billy Blim storyline when he gets magically compelled to harm Fred, and starts avoiding her out of shame. Gunn, who was able to circumvent this incident through circumstance since it happened to Wesley first, doesn't feel this shame and pursues Fred, and she then reciprocates. Cut to the "The father will kill the son" prophecy, where Wesley withholds information from the team because he has started withdrawing emotionally from everybody else, which results in a serious of massive cock ups that ends in a baby going to hell.

The possessed Cordelia storyline felt off to me when I first watched it, but it's even more off to me with the surrounding context of what Joss Whedon was doing behind the scenes that involved Charisma Carpenter during the production of season four. Firstly there's the "Cordy has amnesia" plotline, in which she is behaving in ways that she wouldn't normally behave in that situation, then there's the "Cordy doesn't trust angel" storyline where she's behaving in ways she wouldn't normally behave in that situation, and then at some point they decided that Cordelia had been possessed by the real villain of the season. This feels like a retcon because there are several massive discrepancies with this plotline in the episodes before this reveal, namely when "Evil Cordy" does things that undermine her own plan, is scared of the season's villain during scenes when she's alone, and generally acts like Cordelia when she's alone, up until the point where the audience learns what she is, at which point she suddenly stops acting like Cordelia in private. On the one hand, I'm glad that this is a retcon, Cordelia is the greatest character in Angel, and in season five when she briefly returns, her character is un-assassinated and she gets to have a good ending. On the other hand, this is a retcon so it's hard to watch the earlier episodes before this retcon was in effect, because this storyline was basically character assassination for Cordelia.

Like apparently everybody else on the internet seems to be, I'm doing my rewatch of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (and Angel once I'm up to series four). A reaction that I've had a couple of times is "really, this is the episode this character first appears in?". Really, Spike's first appearance is the Die Hard parody episode about parent-teacher night? Really? Anya's first appearance is an episode where she has about three minutes of screentime? In the first shot that Wesley appears in, he isn't introduced, a scene starts and he's just there in frame. Later in the episode he meets Angel for the first time and there is absolutely no pomp and circumstance to it, they just sort of meet in the Bronze and share about two words. Also in season three, Oz is in the opening credits but I would swear I've watched a load of episodes where he just has no dialogue.

My opinions of some things have shifted over the years, I've come to appreciate Buffy herself as being a really solid character admit a consistently shifting main cast, most of her controversial episode are in seasons four to seven so I will post about that when I get to it maybe. On return, I mainly find that I'm really not enamoured with the Buffy/Angel thing, I honestly feel they're each slightly better when they're in separate TV series on different channels. I also have a special hatred for "character keeps a secret" storylines after having put up with ten years of watching Smallville do the same plot on repeat. I get that characters should have flaws but this specific kind of character flaw is a pet peeve of mine because it's just an endless loop of every character being extremely irrational without anything developing. Buffy has a habit of keeping secrets throughout all seven seasons, she gets found out and everybody dogpiles on her for not being completely perfect and Buffy has to apologise even when she's the one who's right.

Also @productof-mytime, they ARE the swim team.

[tarakaybee]

just because someone is your favorite character doesnt mean theyd have the same moral alignment as you. wheatley from portal wouldnt say "my pronouns are he/him, thank you for asking!" hed say "what uhh. what does that mean. um. you mean the nouns im most "pro" at is that what youre saying? i like to think im pretty pro,, at all nouns really. umm lets see... apple, kazoo, bubble, happy, door, umm... cake. not too fond of cake really i think its alright but. not my Favorite. if it were up to me though id eat a whole cake in one sitting. if i were a human. not a human, clearly. also not sure if id, know what cake even tastes like. if i tried it. no tastebuds. no Mouth... no. hole. anywhere on my body. haha um,, well anyways id. id say im pretty Pro Nouns. dont see why anyone wouldnt be... what? you mean what i Go By? what do you. ohhhh. ummm. the male ones. the male pronouns. if i can remember what they are... definitely the ones for guys. manly men. like me. pretty sure im a man,,," and you need to accept this

[tarakaybee]

This latest Game Changer was so Baba Is You coded, the trick is not to win but to alter reality until the win condition is in front of you. Swapping the Host The Show rule with Sam is like when you "complete" the level select and it turns out there was a greater meta-menu of additional levels.

[tarakaybee]

reasons why i relate to tav, the main character from baldurs gate 3:

shouldn’t have wished to live in more interesting times.

[tarakaybee]

What if instead of "duelist" they said "gamer" instead