Category: Writer’s Blog

A friend recently linked me to this blog post as possibly “relevant to my interests.” She was, of course, correct.

What a Western Isn’t

It’s not the easiest read and perhaps also not the clearest in terms of what the author is trying to say, which is perhaps unsurprising if you’re trying to define something by a negative. What does a black hole look like? Well, by definition we don’t really know, do we? We’re just making our best guesses based on its effects on what we can observe.

But I think I would find agreement with him on what I believe is his basic thesis, which is that the classic Western is far more convoluted (and even subversive) than many might assume, even before the controversial “deconstruction” that was High Noon. Or, in our more modern era, we might see Unforgiven in the same way. I believe his main point is that a true Western is not a simple matter of sound and fury but of hard choices and complicated people. He doesn’t like the remake of 3:10 to Yuma and I agree with him, especially since I have seen the original and found it far superior in terms of having something to say, so to hear that the remake’s director was comparing cowboys to “Greek Gods in chaps” in his commentary is at the same time a WTF and also an insight into what went wrong. That comparison is far more apt to superheroes than cowboys.

Now sure, we’ve got our Zorros and our Lone Rangers and our Man with No Name, but they’re all still a far cry from Superman and Wonder Woman. Get down to the “street level” of characters like Hawkeye and Daredevil and that’s a lot closer, but still, the classic Western at least is populated with heroes who may have extraordinary skills and/or determination but are very, very mortal. William Munny may slaughter an entire saloon full of enemies at the climax of Unforgiven and emerge unscathed but not long before almost died from a fever. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance may exhort “print the legend” but the classic Western depicts the more muddled circumstances behind the legend, the real story rather than the dime novel exaggerations and fabrications. The latter can be entertaining in its own right, but is it a Western?

Well, I suppose I’m not going to die on the hill of saying what does and doesn’t count, but it seems to me that the ability to transplant a “Western” into other settings like feudal Japan or outer space means there are certain conventions of the genre that transcend the American Old West. The titular character of The Mandalorian is a badass but also a man dealing with a rickety ship and a recalcitrant toddler and who sometimes gets the crap kicked out of him despite his skills. Plus he’s trying to live by a code in a largely lawless frontier, which doesn’t always hold up when faced with the murky realities and relationships of his profession, and all of that just screams “Western” to me far more than six-guns and stagecoaches ever will.

So I ended up binge playing the RE2 and RE3 remkes all the way through and then went back to RE7. And just recently I finished RE7, and…

Holy crap, that was good. That was an experience. I went in basically totally blind as to what to expect (beyond being captured by a crazy backwoods family and then chased by a big guy with an axe), and I think I highly recommend doing the same if possible because the protagonist Ethan Winters is similarly clueless and there are a lot of layers to peel back on a very horrific metaphorical onion.

So yeah, because of that I feel like I shouldn’t actually get into any details except that the game gets my highest stamp of approval. This was well put together by a team that wanted to excel at their goal, and their goal was to scare the crap out of us while also telling a very compelling story. The visuals are realistic, the character modeling excellent and the acting is good enough to keep you well immersed in the unfolding insanity. And oh, the gore! Not a game for the faint of heart, this one. It is downright brutal, but held back just enough that it’s also hard to desensitize yourself. And although the first-person mode is a departure from the rest of the series, you definitely can’t beat it for horror purposes, especially if you pair it with some surround sound headphones so you can spin in paranoid fear at the slightest weird sound behind you. Sometimes that paranoia might save your life.

The creepies are crawly and the boss battles are excellently done, particularly in the beginning where brute force won’t get you far compared to awareness of your surroundings. Sometimes the particular subgenre will switch up on you as well and you’ll have to adapt to and survive a new kind of crazy.

RE7 fits neatly into the lore while being its own thing, and what a moody, scary, fantastic thing it is. If you like horror games and you haven’t done so yet you need to play it, period.

Or perhaps I should say: JOIN US. ACCEPT HER GIFT.

The Resident Evil franchise from Capcom is one of the granddaddys of the survival horror genre in video games, not to mention zombies.  Full disclosure that I never played the original 1996 game beyond a short demo, which was enough to turn me off because no amount of novelty was going to get me past the absolutely atrocious writing and voice acting. In particular I will never forget this early exchange between two members of an elite Special Forces team:

Dude (cheesy voice): “Jill, can you use a gun?”

Jill (girly voice): “I think so…”

I guess no offense to those of you who soldiered on, but I was out and I’ve never gone back, even when they eventually rebooted it. Same reason I have the unpopular opinion that Silent Hill 2 is not the greatest thing ever — it was a cool concept and setting but that dialogue just felt like I was getting my teeth pulled. I’m one of those weirdos who doesn’t skip cutscenes or even questgiver text when playing a game so I find it rough if that’s not clicking for me.

Luckily for my relationship with RE, Resident Evil 2 debuted in 1998 and felt much improved and immersive, even if running from zombies was interspersed with trying to find heart-shaped keys. I also liked the innovation of the disc it came on being 2-sided — on one side you played through the game as rookie cop Leon Kennedy, and on the other you played college gal Claire Redfield, and their stories intertwined and diverged in intriguing ways after a shared beginning. On top of that, once you completed the game you unlocked a second run-thru which wasn’t just the usual “same-game-but-you-keep-your-upgrades” but provided new scenes and even an extended ending that represented the truly complete story.

You basically got 4 complete games for the price of 1, which is a heck of a thing to consider in this modern era where you’re lucky to get a no-frills experience that works without day 1 patches, microtransactions and DLCs. The dialogue was still sometimes funky but not teeth-grinding and really, it’s a deserved classic. Resident Evil 3 followed up the next year and was a major upgrade for the character of Jill Valentine (yes, that Jill quoted above) while also remaining one of the more intensely terrifying experiences I’ve had playing any game.

After 3 the series took a different tack and even though I played RE 4 and RE 5 I completely took a pass on RE 6 or any of the other seemingly innumerable spin-offs like Code: Veronica. They might have been good or at least enjoyable, but it wasn’t until this year when I finally fired up Resident Evil 7 that I got hooked back in.

Because holy shit is RE 7 impressive. And immersive. I may have to do a whole blog about it when I finish but so far the controls, the acting, everything is just amazing, particularly while wearing the new headphones Dawn bought me so I can hear the measured tread of the thing chasing my protagonist. It’s a completely different play style than the old games but the scares are there and the puzzles are worked in enough I can suspend my disbelief.

Now perhaps ironically, it’s so good that I started paying attention to the recent RE output again. I watched the demo for RE 8 and it was jaw-droppingly gorgeous (even when horrific), and noted there was a free demo for the Resident Evil 3 remake. I was vaguely aware they had done remakes of 2 and 3 but hadn’t been all that interested since they basically just looked like 4 with their over-the-shoulder viewpoints and such. Lo and behold though, after a few minutes of playing that demo I broke down and bought RE 2 and 3 both because there was a special sale of a “Raccoon City bundle.” I hate bad dialogue and pacing, but I’m an absolute sucker for the opposite and the remake was hitting my buttons. It was this lore and these stories revisited with the more mature pass (not just mature in terms of adding F-bombs) I always dreamed of.

So two things: one, RE 2 was hard for me to pull myself away from because I found it just that immersive. RE 3 I have to take breaks from because I’m once again finding it just that terrifying. You know it’s a good boss fight when it ends and you let out a breath you didn’t realize you were holding, and if there’s any regret it’s that sometimes I can’t stop to appreciate the apocalyptic scenery fully while running for my life.

I’ve heard people were unimpressed or even disappointed with these new iterations but I don’t get it. I suppose maybe if you paid $60 but then again that’s why I am the patient spider with my game purchases. There are no microtransactions and all the content and unlockables are included with the exception that you can buy some extra outfit options as DLCs. And there’s a try-before-you-buy demo, which is something that at some point fell out of style and I dearly wish every major game still had. The cynical side of me says that’s because the current AAA game industry model seems to be getting as many people as possible to buy or pre-buy a new game based on hype alone, which seems more often than not to lead to either buyer’s remorse or a sunk-cost denial of day 1 problems. There’s no guarantee that a playable demo couldn’t just represent some finished bit that works while the rest doesn’t but it’s at least something. A good one shows the company has some pride in their work and gives you your taste of what to expect, and it feels better than going in completely blind. That used to be how games were marketed, by presenting the public with the opportunity for informed decisions. I turned away from the original RE because of a demo, and then RE 2 got me back on board. Now, in a lot of cases it seems like companies market them by hiding as much as possible, and sometimes in intentionally malicious ways, to the point where Cyberpunk 2020 is getting CD Projekt Red sued not by angry consumers (or not just by angry consumers) but by their own investors.

But I digress. These remakes float my proverbial boat in a way I completely did not expect, evoking the nostalgia of the originals but being new experiences in their own right.

Oh, and like in Shadow of the Tomb Raider, you can choose whether to rapidly tap buttons during events or just hold them down. You didn’t get that choice in the old days, and my old bod again appreciates the option.

“Get back on topic!” said the handful of readers of this blog. Maybe.

So to assuage this no doubt nonexistent controversy, I’m going to mention a few zombie video games in development. One I’ve played a demo of, the others are just pure conjecture from trailers, etc.

I guess let’s start with the one I actually played, courtesy of a free demo period on Steam which at the time you read this will have ended the previous day. We are timely as ever! I did post about it on our ZR Facebook page over the weekend, so maybe some of you saw that. Anyhow:

The Last Stand: Aftermath

This one’s an interesting concept. Instead of guiding a single character or group of recruits through a zombie apocalypse scenario, you have “volunteers” that you control through the game world one at a time, sneaking through zed-infested neighborhoods seeking gas for your car and supplies for your compound. Oh also doses of anti-viral, since you’ve been infected by a new strain of virus and don’t have long to live. The anti-viral only temporarily slows the progress of the disease, so you’re basically doomed no matter what.

“You” is a temporary concept by design, though. The car you travel in, gas up, and (most importantly?) load supplies into has a beacon in it and will get recovered by the compound when you meet your untimely end, one way or another. Then the next day you pick from one of three new volunteers who have shown up back at home base and start off again. Same car, different fodder. Life is cheap I suppose, while working cars are not. The supplies your last run picked up can be used to help out the new guy (or gal) and hopefully they’ll get further along. It’s sort of similar to Hades except instead of being an immortal who keeps reincarnating when defeated, you’re guiding a never-ending(?) stream of different folks who know they’re going out but basically want to do some good for the tribe before they die.

I was a little muddled on the objective but I believe it’s to get beyond “The Wall” and then…? But it’s not like I got very far, only a few neighborhoods before I stirred up one too many zeds… when they get riled enough to start running after you it seems to be game over for that particular survivor, or at least I couldn’t find any way to get out of that. In fact I couldn’t even seem to traverse obstacles that I’d jumped over or through just a minute before and which I would have dearly loved to put between me and them. That and an unfortunate problem of not being able to see your character or zombies at times because of an imperfect isometric viewpoint is a frustrating bit because some of the other activities like sneaking and distraction and such are fairly intuitive and, dare I say, cool.

But since the game is still in pre-release there might be time to smooth out the kinks, so worth keeping an eye on, especially if you’re a fan of rogue-like (or “rogue-lite”) games. It definitely preserves the high body count a zombie movie often involves!

Posting about Control feels a bit like being one of those reviewers who had to give their thoughts on Wandavision based on the first three episodes they were provided by Marvel. It’s not presented in the trappings of a sitcom but I feel like there’s a similar thought that maybe the rug of my perceptions will be yanked out from under me as I continue playing, and that’s acknowledging that things have already gotten really effing weird.

On its surface Control is a third-person shooter experience with superpowers tossed in. You play as Jesse Faden, a drifter who as the game starts seems to have drifted her way into the lobby of the Federal Bureau of Control (name drop!) at your behest.

No, really. Jesse narrates to herself as she goes along but also has internalized discussions with someone and as far as I can tell, that someone is you the player. If it turns out not to be the player, well, that’s one of the possible rug pulls that has me intrigued (and possibly unsettled). The lobby of this government agency is deserted and Jesse has next to no idea why she’s there, but as you explore a bit you pass portraits of directors and such and… uh, why is there a portrait of a janitor on the wall next to those, his back turned from your gaze?

You’ll meet that very janitor shortly and he is as enigmatic as he is Scandinavian, and says you must be here for the job as his assistant. Perhaps surprisingly, Jesse agrees with this even though she makes clear it wasn’t why she came. She’s no stranger to grunt work.

But then Jesse meets the Director of the FBC. And then Jesse is the Director, and the portraits you passed a few minutes ago now have you in them complete with nice suit and nameplate.

Of course the building turns out to be in lockdown due to an invasive and hostile presence and you have to stop it, often by shooting things or blowing them up, and in fact the environment turns out to be delightfully responsive to destruction even before you get your first psychic superpower. Afterwards, holy crap does shit get torn up in satisfying manner and that is (forgive the phrasing) a blast.

But nested on top of that is a huge labyrinth of mindfuckery where reality warps unexpectedly and break rooms become portals to other planes of existence. Jesse navigates all this with a degree of aplomb, even hinting to you that all the weirdness is a relief to her after years of stressing out at the mundane world and what she always felt was a veneer of normalcy laid over… something. That said, she’s both Director and Janitor’s Assistant now and has cleaning up to do.

The most fascinating bit which I only realized after I’d purchased the game and started playing it is that not only is it developed by the same team that did Alan Wake and Max Payne but Control goes a step further and is actually set in the same shared universe as the former. The events of Alan Wake are not the only anomaly in the world and the FBC was founded to keep tabs on and address such things so that the general public could go about their lives with a minimum of possessed former people trying to murder them. There’s all sorts of missives and dossiers to find detailing these activities, although a lot of it is redacted (even to the Director?! hmph). Well maybe that’s because the former Director is still talking to you from beyond the grave. Not to mention there’s The Board, which doesn’t seem to be made up of people at all.

Anyhow, much like in Alan Wake there’s a lot to think about and be creeped out by in between the blasting and I very much appreciate that. And there’s Ahti the Janitor and yes I’ll spell that with a capital J because hoo boy is he ever something more than he seems — but he’s also a foulmouthed Finnish(?) custodian who keeps muttering idioms that I suppose might make more sense if you were Finnish as well. If you’re a conspiracy buff you’ll probably also be pleased by a lot of easter eggs regarding various lore along those lines like MK Ultra.

And then you blast more baddies with your mentally reconfiguring gun (which might have been Mjolnir or Excalibur in a previous life?) and use your telekinesis to slam an explosive cannister into some fool’s head and send him ragdolling across the room. It’s this strangely satisfying dichotomy of Ego and Id and I have been totally there for it.

The Ultimate Edition debuted this year and I got it on sale, natch. Been well worth the pricetag for me even if the bottom drops out before the end, but when all was said and done they stuck the landing with Alan Wake so I have similar hopes here that when the answers to the questions start coming, they will at very least be tantalizing rather than disappointing.

In the meantime, pew pew. Boom.

I’ve been a fan of the Tomb Raider franchise since all the way back to Lara Croft’s first debut in 1996. And not just because of the tiddies. I mean honestly, the way things started it’s kind of amazing to think there was ever a controversy over what was basically a triangular wedge. Mind you the marketing did skew heavily towards sex appeal and there were rumors of a “nude code” but…

I digress. After several sequels the series rebooted itself in 2013 as a prequel, featuring a younger and far less confident Lara as she took her first steps towards becoming the badass adventurer originally presented. Lara Begins, if you will. The sexuality was also dialed back quite a bit unless you have a thing for torture porn — which hopefully neither you nor the developers do, but I can’t deny there was a lot of wading through gore and dealing with graphic injuries. Someone watched The Descent.

Fortunately by the end of the 2013 game Lara seemed to have found her footing and become the badass. Unfortunately, the follow up seemed to reset all that and put her back in mopey, bumbling noob mode, which was also weird because now you’re doing all the badass things and stealth-or-not-so-stealth killing dudes by the dozens like a pint-sized (Frank Miller) Batman.

Now at some point it was clarified(?) that these reboot prequels would be a trilogy and at the end of the trilogy Lara would at last be her classic self again. So okay, 2018 comes along and the last in the series debuts with Shadow of the Tomb Raider.

And, alas, the scuttlebutt comes down the pipe that we’re still dealing with noobLara, wracked with guilt and parental issues — again in between murdering a lot of folks and animals — and that by the end that arc still isn’t really resolved. So I wasn’t especially motivated to want it at the time, but two years later the Definitive Edition was on sale and no matter how much I’m bitching about certain things the series does draw me back because I’m an exploration junkie and the games still do preserve the core of Tomb Raider that I liked in terms of exotic vistas and spelunking Lara’s way through ancient temples, puzzles and traps. SotTR absolutely delivers on that score and I find it immensely satisfying even if Lara’s introspection and dialogues still occasionally feel frustratingly lacking in confidence compared to her actions.

One other thing that stood out to me was how petite this version of Lara is, and I’m not sure I got that from even the previous installments of the prequels. Lara is very smol, as the kiddies would say — standing amongst a group of mercenaries that capture her near the start she looks almost like a child. As you play though I suppose I’d say this is considered more feature than bug, as there are a lot of small cracks Lara squeezes through that would have trapped or stymied someone of larger stature. If you are at all claustrophobic, this game may be very anxiety-inducing, especially the parts where you’re underwater. And even if this Lara probably isn’t any more than 5’2″ or so, she’s still a rabid little wolverine in combat that can wrestle jaguars and take down grown men twice her weight class.

I haven’t finished the game yet so maybe there’s still time to see her get back to that confident, quippy globetrotter introduced in 1996, but I’m keeping my expectations low and just enjoying the ride. Like I said, it’s definitely scratching my exploration itch especially in this time of pandemic where I rarely even get out of the house.

I should also give some special mention that even if the character’s evolution might be lagging, the controls are as good as they’ve ever been even with some new moves added. It’s all very intuitive, and I am extremely appreciative to whichever dev recognized that 1996 was 25(!) years ago and some of us aren’t as spry as we used to be. There are skill upgrades allowing for more reaction time and even some comfort settings in the game menus now allowing for options like just holding a button/key down rather than having to tap it rapidly, and my fingers and wrists are thankful for this and hope to see more games following suit in the future. Another feature I hadn’t seen before is that when you’re playing around with your graphics settings you can run a “benchmark” which basically goes through three separate rendered scenes to show you a preview of your detail vs. your framerate — and as someone who likes things as pretty as possible (but not so much that the game gets unplayable) it was wonderful to be able to tweak the dials to my liking before even starting the show.

Sometimes a good trailer is all it takes to make me buy a game.

No, that’s not true. But it helps. If a game floats across my Steam feed (whose algorithms might be getting scarily accurate at showing me things I might like) and the trailer intrigues, I’ll stick it on my wishlist which basically bookmarks it for later consideration. Greedfall was one of those and I can’t remember if it was this trailer specifically which caught my attention but it’s close enough:

Like many trailers this one has the fault of not bothering to show any actual gameplay but the concept alone got points. It looked like a fantasy RPG set not in the usual faux-Medieval or Early Renaissance period but instead the Colonial era of the 17th and 18th Centuries, complete with a “New World” being encroached upon by the Old.

Focus Interactive is the publisher and while I can’t say all their stuff has been hits with me they’re an indie studio that at least doesn’t leave the bad corporate taste in my mouth that a soulless megalith like EA does. Anyhow when Black Friday rolled around a sale came up and I decided to take the plunge, though foregoing my usual hours-long character customization process for RPGs so I could get in and make sure nothing was a deal breaker before my two hours of active play were up and I couldn’t refund the purchase.

So anyhow, the EA comparison is relevant for more than my disgruntlement with the modern AAA gaming industry. Or I should say, more relevant than I expected.

Greedfall is a Bioware RPG in the classic sense. Meaning before EA bought out Bioware and gutted it into a corpse wearing a label it no longer deserves to brandish. Yes, I have opinions. I will not go into them right now. Just suffice it to say that Greedfall’s gameplay reminded me so much of the first Mass Effect that I was shocked to discover it doesn’t appear anyone on the dev team is a Bioware expat. In fact, the game was made in France, by spiders.

No, really.

But seriously, it feels so much like Mass Effect and other Bioware offerings of their golden age, right down to the way your character reverses direction while running. Companions, dialogue choices, reputations, interactions, combat… and while I haven’t played through enough yet to find out if it’s got one of those big twists Bioware was famous for back in the day, the story is maturely presented and interesting in its complexity. Meanwhile the world is delivered pretty much as promised, and thankfully isn’t just a matter of “greedy invaders versus virtuous natives” (or vice-versa as it might have been in an earlier era). Bioware always liked having some grey areas even in a morally bipolar setting like Star Wars, and the Spiders revel in the moral murkiness of their original setting. There is a New World and there are natives and there are three main nations of the Old World each laying claim to a part, and you happen to be a highly important diplomat of the most neutral of them, a merchant kingdom who is trying to negotiate a place for your interests between the natives, the religious nation, and the science nation. Also there’s a terrible plague devastating your homeland and you’re hoping to find a cure.

You can choose to be male or female and customize your looks to an extent, including being non-white if you so wish (your name will always be De Sardet however, much like a former protagonist was always Shepherd). There are debates to be had on how white and male history truly was but the world of Greedfall establishes early on that it is most definitely not Earth, neatly sidestepping any such conversations. That said, the religious nation definitely has Catholic trappings and a Spanish flair to its style while the science nation is very Ottoman. The natives near as I can tell are somewhere between Amerindian and Pictish/Celtic in their inspirations, with a rather unplaceable accent that sounds like someone who isn’t Irish trying to sound like what they think an Irish person sounds like. As you might expect the natives have a druidic nature magic going, but the church folks have their own divine magic and the scientists have guns and alchemical mixtures for days. The New World (which is more of a large island, really) is definitely going for a temperate feel rather than Caribbean and you’ll be journeying through some lovely Autumnal forests and other tableaus of primeval North America on your quests, though no one seems to want to talk much about the active volcano at its heart.

It’s not on sale at the moment so the price tag on Steam is back up to $49.99 and I wouldn’t necessarily gush and say to pay it, unless you really pine for the good old days of Bioware past and want to support an indie title which really does have a surprising amount of polish to it. And even if the Spiders aren’t actually Bioware, they sure do seem like Bioware’s biggest fans in a way that so far I can only praise.

Given the current subject of the comic it would be timely to discuss the underlying assumptions of human currency, but I’m going to save that for another time. I said last week I wanted to just talk games for awhile and I’m sticking to my guns, dad gummit. So skip on through if vidja games bore ya.

The Outer Worlds is the one I talked about a bit last week so we’ll start there. TOW is basically “What if Fallout and Borderlands had a baby?”

I should specify here I do mean the 3D Fallout games, not the isometric originals. However, there is one feature the TOW developers brought back from the very first two Fallout games that Bethesda chucked when they got hold of the franchise. Allow me to post the meme I stopped in the middle of character creation to make, because I was just that giddy…

Yes, in the Ur-Fallout games if you created a character below a certain threshold of smarts you were treated to custom dialog choices and reactions befitting someone a few knives short of a drawer. It’s very possible Bethesda decided not to continue that out of fear of causing offense. It’s also very possible my friends and I are terrible people because we found them hilarious and missed the option in its absence. I suppose now I feel equal parts guilty and giddy. Guiliddy?

Anyhow, it’s not an accident the folks behind TOW included Fallout alumni who perhaps were more than ready to do a very Fallout style game out from under Bethesda’s thumb, even if they had to create a whole new setting to do so. What we end up with is basically a colonial space Western crossed with a nightmarish depiction of late-stage capitalism where mega-corporations control (nearly) everything and everyone. If that sounds a bit like Borderlands, now you’re getting why I said what I did at the beginning. The art style as well feels somewhere between the two franchises, and (surprisingly) TOW is an RPG which goes the Borderlands route of having no third-person view while playing. This is one disappointment for me because the character creator has a heck of a lot of facial customization options and the models look great, but in-game the only time you get to see your character are during a 360 degree idle pan that you can’t adjust or on your inventory screen, which you can’t angle or zoom.

It’s possible they did this because your character doesn’t talk out loud so there’s no reason to have the camera on them during dialogue. That does let the dialogue be a lot freer and more expansive on the player’s end because there’s no audio needed, and I’ll tell you it’s another bit that reminded me of earlier Fallout games where the camera would just center on the person you were talking to. Borderlands again for the first-person only view and a lot of the aesthetic, though you don’t always have to shoot your way through. In fact this time around your dialog skills can even have an effect on combat should talking not be an option, causing enemies to cower before your impressive presence, for example.

Anyhow, if you’re a fan of old-school Fallout pick up TOW when you get a chance. I’ve heard some complaints that it’s short and also no companion romance options, and so far no real modding support. That last is possibly the biggest reason to wait for it to be on sale like I did, just in case you feel like more bang was needed for your buck. But from what I’ve heard this first installment was extremely successful, so here’s hoping the next will be bigger and better, while remaining micro-transaction free.

So here I am back at the ol’ tiller, figuratively speaking. It feels like we got a headstart on the mess that was 2020 since at least half of our 2019 was a mess, but at this point I’m going to be very cautious about hoping 2021 will be better.

Computer gaming has been big for me in terms of weathering these storms with sanity intact. I mean that’s been the case nearly all my life ever since I was but a wee tyke playing Combat on my Atari 2600, but now with the conventions on shutdown and restaurants closed, etc. etc., it’s been nice to have a library of virtual escapism at my fingertips. Admittedly, I’ve been working my day job remotely since last March and mostly now tell the difference between a day on duty and a day off duty by how many windows I have open, and sometimes the workday ends and I’m in a haze for awhile or needing to take a nap while my brain sorts itself into leisure mode.

Toys are still good, though. New toys especially. For instance I was finally able to pick up The Outer Worlds as part of the Winter Steam Sale. I’ve waited awhile for TOW because it first debuted exclusively through the Epic game store and regardless of any business shenanigans going on there I just don’t need another launcher on my computer. Also it’s fine because it’s been a long time since I felt any need to buy games at launch, much less pre-order. The industry model of “release first, fix later” is rampant (the recent Cyberpunk 2020 blow-ups being an example) and if I have to wait a year or so for the kinks to be worked out, so be it. Beyond that I get three more benefits:

1. The price tends to have come down
2. There are often DLCs that have now been bundled into some Ultimate or Game of the Year edition.
3. If it sucks, remains unfixed, or isn’t what I expected, the reviews and Let’s Plays will have long been in the wind.

Out of all these the price is still the big one, I suppose, since in addition to any natural price decreases I tend to hold out for sales — although the more independent the studio and the better the effort seems to be, the more likely I am to pay closer to full price or even full price for a game. It doesn’t hurt that most indie games have a lower price tag to begin with.

But anyhow, all this is besides the point I suppose, and the point is that I now have TOW and some other new toys to play with, and I think at least for the start of 2021 I’d like to talk about my toys, even if their subjects aren’t really related to Zombie Ranch. It’s soothing. It also will prevent me from stressing about what to write. So we’ll do that starting next week, probably. Or you can skip. Whichever stresses you least. Heaven knows we all could use a little relief.

You know what’s wonderful about the Internet? You can type a word and “pronunciation” into Google and come up with an audio file of people speaking it. That’s not something I had as a kid, and oh how my reading and writing vocabulary often outpaced my ability to express verbally. It doesn’t help to be dealing with English, which even as a native speaker is a confusing mess where we pretend there are rules, but it seems like the only real rules are that there are no rules. Take for example the word “subterfuge,” which comes from the same root as “subtle” — the Latin “subter-” which as you might also guess is the root of “subterranean.” It’s all about being sneaky or unseen or underground (the last one literally in the case of subterranean). Alas, I first ran across “subterfuge” reading the Vampire: The Masquerade RPG in the 1990s and associated it more with subtle, thus for years pronouncing it with a silent ‘b’. It turns out that subterfuge and subterranean both quite vocally pronounce “sub” unlike subtle which sounds more like “suttle” when said out loud. You can kind of blame the French for this (as well as a lot of other weirdness in English pronunciation) since they took the Latinate word “subtilis” but somewhere in Old French -> Middle English it became the word “sotil,” discarding the ‘b’ sound and ensuring a very confused Clint hundreds of years hence. Unlucky King Harold took an arrow to the eye in the Battle of Hastings and the rest, as they say, is history.

Anyhow, this phenomenon can present some unique challenges when you’re writing books or comics or such where the words are not spoken aloud. Hell, it’s even cropped up during get-together parties back in the day where I met people I knew from an MMO and discovered I’d been pronouncing their character name all wrong all this time, and vice-versa. Sometimes you’re dealing with foreign languages and your reader may be totally unaware that “Siobhan” is a gaelic name pronounced to sound sort of like “Shuh-VON,” not “SEE-oh-bon” like I sometimes hear in my head to this day. Sometimes you’re making up entirely new words or languages and hoo boy, that’s something a reader can’t even look up unless you yourself put out a pronunciation guide. Tolkien did, but how many of us read it? Well, Peter Jackson I suppose, and bless his heart for it.

So Rosa first mentioned “specie” in passing back in Issue/Episode 3, and while that’s not a word I made up, it’s hardly in common use anymore. How did it sound it your head when you read it? Well, if you pronounced it as if it were the singular of “species” — SPEE-shee — you are correct! But species is always plural and refers to animals, while specie always refers to coinage. Same Latin root, “form or kind,” no French interpolation, and yet English breaks the rules yet again by having the meaning change completely depending on whether or not you stick an ‘s’ on the end.

But at least the pronunciation is consistent. On the other hand, in the comic before the current one I had the cops shout out “freeze, speecer!” at the would-be thief of said coins. But it would be pronounced “speesher” wouldn’t it? Here’s where I’m in trouble making up a word and would have to be generous if someone heard it in their heads with a straight “s” rather than “sh” sound in the middle. Specier or specer or spesher all lost out in my composition raffle. Perhaps I will regret this decision in the future, but onwards we go.

It is perhaps appropriate “specie” was first uttered in the comic by Rosa, whose own last name I am rather convinced a good portion of the readership hear in their heads as “am-uh-RILL-uh” when she uses the Spanish pronunciation of “ahm-uh-REE-yuh” and it does not help at all that Texas has an actual town called Amarillo which is pronounced the first way (with the “l” sound), because Texas. So if you hear it that way you’re absolutely forgiven, though I still reserve the right to joke about it in the comic at some point in the FYOO-churr.

There are very few sources I trust for entertainment news, especially given today’s emphasis on scoop over substance, but The Hollywood Reporter is one of them. If it’s a headline from them, it tends to be vetted and accurate and I pay attention. If I saw one of the more iffy media sites out there declaring that Alfred Molina was going to be reprising his role as Doctor Octopus for the next Spider-Man film, I would shrug. The one and only time he suited up for that was nearly two decades ago and it seems like just the sort of vaguely rumored nostalgia clickbait best not rewarded with a… well, click.

But there it is from THR: Molina will be welcomed back to the Spider-franchise with ah, open arms. Jamie Foxx as Electro as well, which means we’re now potentially mixing-and-matching three iterations of Sony’s Spider-films. Benedict Cumberbatch will be appearing as Doctor Strange. Are we going multi-versal? Spider-versal? I mean, that already happened, but not in live action.

Mining the past seems to be in fashion, if the above news and also recent episodes of The Mandalorian are any indication. Who am I to buck the trend? We first mentioned Wall Wardens waaay back at the beginning of Episode/Issue 2, and here we are a decade later in real time finally getting to some actual “footage” of the show.

It’s not quite the fanfare return some of these other franchises are having, but hey, proud to be on the bandwagon nonetheless.

I used to have a t-shirt that said, “I feel much better now that I’ve lost all hope.”

Pretty nihilistic, eh? But sometimes, it’s a mood. Possibly for 2020, it’s even a roadmap for clinging to sanity. For example, I’ve written off Long Beach Comic Expo and WonderCon for 2021, so no pressure prepping for those. This is also around the time we would get our acceptance or wait list notice for San Diego. We haven’t heard a peep from that team by mail or email since October, and I’m definitely not inclined to put down a non-refundable hotel deposit while a vaccine is still in question. As the prophet Max Rockatansky said, “…hope is a mistake.”

Of course he goes on to state that “if you can’t fix what’s broken, you’ll go insane.”

Which begs the question: am I broken? Have I gone insane? Max certainly had, but his situation was far more stressful than mine. Also trying to fix things implies the necessity of hope, does it not?

Perhaps it’s just recognizing that a lot of things are out of my hands and it’s best to concentrate on the immediate. Our cat has pulled through her emergency and is now recuperating nicely at home. As I type, she is sitting watchfully next to Dawn hoping for a bite of pastrami. She will not get it as we are under strict parental instructions from the vet to keep her diet controlled, but fortunately she is quite happy with the kidney-fortifying stuff that is now her breakfast, lunch and dinner. This is a time where we even welcomed the big hairball she horked up recently because it means she’s been grooming herself again. The vet cautions that there is no “cure” for kidney disease and kitty will never be the same as we knew her, but so far little miss Balrog has been uninterested in such declarations and is climbing up her cat tree as if nothing ever happened.

Meanwhile my dad also came home from his visit to the emergency room, and although he might not be clambering up obstacles five times his height the doctors have managed to track down some nasty bacteria in his system and ordered up the necessary drugs to stamp them out.

So, you know, peaks and valleys, valleys and peaks. It may be that it’s impossible for the human psyche to lose all hope. Are we more hopeful when good things happen? Or more hopeful in the depths of despair? Would losing all hope be tantamount to death?

Perhaps. So perhaps at this time, under these circumstances, I permit myself a bit of optimism. Cautiously.

I feel a bit like an oracle. Remember how we decided to take this week off for, among other reasons, just “general stress relief“?

Well, 2020 was not having any of that! I’m an oracle insofar as that if we didn’t plan to take this week off, we probably would have had to anyhow. I’m also an Oracle, capital O, insofar as the Ancient Greek tradition of those nutty ladies at Delphi prophesying the future, usually with a side helping of doom.

Our cat is currently laid up at the animal hospital suffering from kidney failure and a persistent bacterial infection. She’s been there for a few days now while they get fluids and antibiotics into her and wait for culture results. Meanwhile I got the news this morning that my dad is laid up at the human ER, also with kidney issues. In both cases, Dawn and I would like to send this message to 2020: thanks but no thanks, could you not?

Anyhow, positive thoughts in both cases are certainly welcome. So much for the stress relief, but at least we were able to focus entirely on the emergencies at hand.

I’ve gushed about The Mandalorian already, and I’m pleased that it has continued to reward my faith. Turns out Dave Filoni is a really good storyteller. He not only has an encyclopedic knowledge and appreciation for Star Wars canon that he didn’t create, but also the stuff he did. Star Wars: Rebels is well worth your time and I just finally got around to watching how he more-or-less seamlessly developed the final season of The Clone Wars so it intertwines with prequel canon and at least tries to make some parts of Revenge of the Sith better by proxy.

Without getting into spoilers, it’s all coming around full circle now. People have been excitedly speculating on some of Filoni’s characters, heretofore confined to cartoon form, making the jump to live-action, and The Mandalorian just recently delivered in a big way and is promising even bigger reveals to come.

But Filoni by all I’ve seen is a humble dude, and one of the things I most appreciate about the episode I just watched on Friday is how he doesn’t hinge the story on you having ever heard of Character X even if the person next to you might be squealing in recognition. You get the gist of things by watching and can connect important dots internally within the confines of the current show (and its previous Season). The important questions are covered and any subsequent Googling or watching/reading of external material is supplemental; enjoyable enhancement but not required.

And that’s great. Some of us met an old friend and some of us met a new one but all of us got a thrill. That’s not an easy balance to pull off, and kudos are in order. And I continue to look forwards to Fridays for the time being in a way which threatens to anchor my quarantine haze.

Writers are kind of like the gods of their creations. We speak sometimes of characters going “off script” and writing themselves against our expectations, but let’s face it, if we really wanted to we could smite that free will right out of them. We are the omniscient beings, looking into all the heads, knowing (mostly) where the paths will lead.

Jeez, that’s a lot of pressure.

No but seriously, I had to pause in the midst of writing this week’s installment of the comic in order to go back through the archives and make sure if Lacey was present or not when Frank gave Chuck and Rosa his dictate that Rosa was never to leave Chuck’s side. Turns out that yes, Lacey was, and that makes a big difference in the subtext of the current scene even if she doesn’t end up bringing it up to Suzie out loud.

If Lacey wasn’t there, then even though I know it and the audience knows it, Lacey would not. She’s not an omniscient being. She and the other characters still have to operate within the bounds of their own limited experience, and the writer has to continually be aware of and manage that.

Omniscience, man. It’s a hell of a job.

So Among Us has been a bit of a fad lately. It’s basically a computer version of the classic Werewolf-style games where one (or sometimes two) people are secretly working to kill the rest of the group while the villagers (everyone else) try to figure out who the werewolves are before they all die. Among Us doesn’t have people covering their eyes or putting their heads down but instead has the crew having to roam through their ship or base fixing various broken systems. Eventually though, a dead body will be found and the finger pointing will begin. The Impostor(s) can only win by successfully throwing the rest of the crew off the scent until its deadly work is done and there’s not enough crewmates left to vote it out of the airlock.

Among Us has become popular enough that the term “sus” started dispersing through memes and chatrooms. As you might guess it’s just really a shortening of “suspicious” but easier to type out in a time-limited body discussion session.

sus red = “The red player was acting shifty and I suspect them of foul play”

Anyhow I pondered about that since I was starting to see “sus” bleed out into general usage. How long before this gets added to the Oxford dictionary the way “frenemy” was?

According to Google, my answer is apparently “over 200 years ago.”

Yes, “sus” was a thing long before Among Us, which just goes to remind me that some things we think are newfangled concoctions of the youths are in fact something grandma might have said or done. Or maybe even we ourselves did but forgot, until we’re alone in Electrical and Red comes strolling around the corner…

Hoo boy… I’ll admit I haven’t been keeping up on the comics industry as well as I could have these past several months, but that didn’t stop my social media feed from lighting up with a great deal of gnashing of teeth from several fellow travelers. The culprit? An early presentation by Adobe of a new product to be included with their upcoming AdobeMAX suite, called ComicBlast.

Okay, so basically I bookmarked this in my head since it was about a week ago and of course everything happens the day after I write this blog. Now that Dawn and I have watched what was making everyone so upset, I’m… well, I can see it. The framing is clearly “this will be great for professionals!” rather than something meant for beginners and/or children as Adobe CEO Eric Snowden (no relation to Edward)  later tweeted in an attempt at damage control.

I’m going to include some videos and y’all can judge for yourselves if you want, though it’s telling that both the “jaded pro” video and the “interested beginner” video both have questions on what exactly ComicBlast is supposed to provide for them. There are neat features but even with the idea of being able to edit and resize things afterwards, there’s a certain point where you’d be editing and rearranging so much you might as well have just started from scratch.

Also yeah, I didn’t notice the first time since the video was going (probably intentionally fast) but why does she have the algorithm-generated balloons and captions and then she imports her art which… contains hand-drawn balloons and captions in the same positions? Another bizarre thing to include was the demonstration of the lineart function which makes a serious boo boo in panel 1 by shading things such that a character who was standing in front of the giant man is now standing behind him (check frames 1:58 and 2:03 in the presentation video). An artist trying to use the feature would have to redraw that arm and leg.

But, yeah, you can handwave all of this as alpha development stuff. I think what really got folks in a tizzy was what one commenter brings up: Adobe consults professional photographers for Photoshop, etc., but what comics professional was consulted on this? It’s like the company didn’t take it seriously, and oh boy if there’s one thing comics industry professionals love, it’s to not be taken seriously.*

(*sarcasm alert)

There are certain things Dawn and I can think of that we would love to see in a helper program, and maybe there’s still time for ComicBlast to implement those. Or maybe as the last video says, Adobe will quietly take it behind the woodshed and it will never happen. We shall see.

Original presentation:

Professional response:

Beginner response:

Aftermath response:

This comic (ideally) publishes once a week, but it’s not like you have to be here for it right on Wednesday. You can come by on Thursday, you can wait for the weekend, or your Monday mid-afternoon doldrums. For that matter, you can just skip out entirely and then catch up later at your leisure, even if that happens to be months down the road.

Nowadays it feels like with the rise of streaming television, more and more pop culture is falling into this model. Netflix of course is still famous for dumping the entire season of their shows all at once. Amazon Prime and HBO Max and such still stick to weekly premieres of episodes but keep an archive as they come out, accumulating until you once again could just binge the whole thing at your own pace.

I’ve been pondering if all this is contributing to my feelings of coming unglued, time-wise. The Covid situation has exacerbated it for a lot of folks, but I still have a day job, which still has a schedule to stick to even if I’m working remotely for the time being. I still have a comic to produce. And yet… and yet… there’s still a nebulous sense that the days have been blurring together, and to look at my friends’ posts on social media I’m not alone in that.

Conventions are virtual and being recorded on YouTube, many movies are on indefinite hold and some like Mulan have just gone ahead and debuted themselves on the television (albeit at a pretty ridiculous premium but that’s a whole other story). When does Season 2 of The Mandalorian happen? October 30th? I’m guessing on that, hold on while I look it up.

Ooh, okay I was right. There’s a lot of other stuff that’s dropped while I wasn’t paying attention, though. The “water cooler talk” I get into with friends is disjointed because Friend X has watched the whole Season, Friend Y has only watched the pilot and I’m somewhere around the middle. Even without bringing spoiler considerations into the mix, that doesn’t exactly lend itself to the kind of shared experience that anchors a discussion.

So it feels like my pop culture watch is broken, and because of that I’m sort of floating through the weeks. Don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t want to go back to the old days where if I missed an episode I was just out of luck unless I’d happened to set my VCR, but I guess it’s just interesting to me to admit how much of my “clock” might have revolved around these little bits and pieces of fiction, and having them jumbled around or even just all happening “at once” has left me a bit adrift.

There’s this game called Fiasco where you and your friends come up with interrelated characters and proceed to tell a communal story together, guided by some dice rolls and other mechanics. While the story itself is important (and, as you might guess, is designed to end in disaster for most if not all involved), the lion’s share of the game is arguably coming up with characters in the first place and making sure they have things in common, such as a location, item, etc. Ties that bind. Things to live, laugh, and love over — and also bicker and even kill over.

This web woven before a Fiasco game even begins is similar to how some writers will tackle keeping track of the characters in their stories, whether that’s on post-its or a whiteboard or a computer spreadsheet. Who knows whom? Which characters are friends? How good of friends are they? Or the same question but applied to antagonistic tendencies? How did they meet? How long has it been since they last saw each other? Is there something else that connects them, and if so is it simple as a convenient MacGuffin? Or something deeper?

Not every writer does this much prep and not every character needs it: the horde of ninjas wants to kill the hero because Their Master Wills It. ‘Nuff said there, especially if that’s the kind of story you’re telling. But you certainly want to have some kind of handle on how your major characters will interact, even if their meeting remains hypothetical. With rare exceptions, people don’t show the same “face” to their boss at work that they do to their kid at home. We put on all sorts of masks just to get through the day, and though we may have been taught by G.I. Joe after-episode PSAs that lying was bad, we grow up understanding that sometimes being entirely truthful and open just starts fights.

So remember that your characters have their masks, as well, even someone like Brett who might assume subterfuge was some kind of sandwich. And have your “relational database,” but remember that when you tweak even a few parameters the output can change a lot.

The blog title this week comes to me courtesy of the BBC television program (or as they spell it in the former Motherland across the pond of the Atlantic, “programme”) called Blackadder. The premise was basically an excuse to insert a hitherto unknown and unrecorded total bastard known as Edmund Blackadder into satirical recreations of historical events and let hilarity ensue. Aside from showcasing a pre-House Hugh Laurie using his native English accent, the series is perhaps best remembered for its elaborately overblown put-downs, threats, and other choice bits of dialog. To whit:

“Must it end this way, Baldrick? Am I to cut you into thin strips and tell the Prince that you walked on an extremely sharp grid wearing a heavy hat?”

Our blog title is another quote where our bastard in question brags about his plotting; his cunning plan. A plan “so cunning you could put a tail on it and call it a weasel.”

It’s a great line, but pursuant to recent discussions in this very column I can’t really see any of my characters expressing themselves like that. Out of everyone Chuck might be most likely to wax (pseudo)eloquent but let’s face it, he’s not a BBC kind of guy. Half-remembered Monty Python movies, at best.

Anyhow, if it’s a choice between clever dialog and consistent character I’ll try to err on the side of character every time. And sometimes the dialog will end up clever anyhow, but on their own terms.