ANITLO Video Game

 I recently stumbled across a Kickstarter where you play a supernatural weirdo with an animal companion. You have to determine which of your peers wishes to open the gate for the Elders and who wants to keep it closed before the final ritual is held on the Halloween of the full moon. 

I speak, of course of October Night Games!

I'm enthusiastic about this. It looks like they're skirting the edge of the ANITLO IP, but assuming they don't get sued into Unknown Kadath, it should be pretty nifty.

I've played the demo as of yesterday. It's got a nice atmosphere, but a bit of a steep learning curve, particularly the fights. More on this as it develops!

Video Game Review: Tekken 7

I'm enjoying Tekken 7.

I played the first game in 1994, in the video arcade section of a bowling alley and it blew my young mind. I had it on console by the time I moved into my first apartment. There was a paralyzing snowstorm that year and as it was the only game we owned, my girlfriend (now wife) and I got very good at it. A friend kept trying to beat Heihachi and finally gave me the control pad in frustration. I beat him in ten seconds, with one hand, with a perfect. (It was with Michelle though, and in Tekken 1, it was obscenely easy to perform her 10-hit combo.) My wife has a similar story, and how my brother was strutting about his unbeatable Tekken prowess and she curbstomped him effortlessly. Her story is even better because he's so cocky and she's so mild-mannered.

The same friend managed a Gamestop (I think they might have still been called Babbages back then) and he brought over a copy of Tekken 2 before it was released and we played it all night and drank beer (and Zima, because it was the 90s) and sat on the roof and did all the things young people do.

I've got a lot of fond memories of the series is what I'm saying.

I took off the day of the release. so I'd be able to spend all day playing it :)

Tekken 7 continues the tradition of being needlessly complicated and kinda dopey ("Heihachi, you have reclaimed leadership of the Michima Zaibatsu. What are you going to do now?" "Throw a fighting tournament, doy."). So I love it, obviously. They added an exorcist to the roster, because of course they did. I love how they throw in whatever dumb thought comes into their heads, without any consideration for how it meshes with anything else. That's why it's the BEST!

Also, the character customization is a lot of fun.

Darkest Dungeon: Insult to Injury

I was playing Darkest Dungeons today, and my Leper contracted syphilis.

That poor bastard. He was probably thinking how his life couldn't get any worse and now this.

Also, if he was fighting a monster in such a way that he contracted syphilis from it, it's no wonder I keep losing so many fights.

Lily is officially a gamer

Me: I got an email from mommy saying that you were interested in continuing our RPG together tonight, but I don't know if she meant the Mutants & Masterminds campaign or I am Setsuna on the Playstation.
Lily: (Dismissively) Oh, I don't consider video games true RPGs.

It's like a rite of passage for our kind.

Masques & Murder: A Zelaznian Renaissance revenge simulator

Roger Zelazny passed away in 1995, before computer games had become truly mainstream. There were two adapations of his work for this format,  the Nine Princes in Amber computer game in 1985  and Chronomaster.

I'd like to nominate Masques and Murders as a spiritual successor to his works. Half RPG, half visual novel, you play a woman seeking revenge for her murdered family. It's the most Zelaznian work since the Revenger's Tragedy!

Wasteland 2: Damnation Alley or Bust

I played the hell out of the original Wasteland on my Apple clone back in the day. This probably deserves its own post. It was one of my favorites and I'm very sentimental about it. I picked up Wasteland 2 on Steam during a sale, and I'm still deciding if I like it, though so far I'm very favorably inclined. The brought back many of the original team, the atmosphere is very reminiscent of the first, and the early game is non-stop continuity porn.

Also, I came across this little Easter Egg:

Zooming in:

So that was pretty cool. Damnation Alley might not be my favorite Zelazny work, but at least people remember it.

Awake, Arise, or be Forever Fallen: Ni No Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch

This review will have spoilers! Big ones!

It ties into Monday's post about Lunar & Lunar: Eternal Blue, being another video RPG that I really enjoyed.

I wasn't sure about Ni No Kuni when I first read about it. On one hand, I was like "Hey, JRPG with designs and animation by Studio Ghibli!" and on the other hand, I was like "Oh, dead mom. Awkward."

And this isn't a mom who has been dead for a long time, the pain of whose loss has subsided to a dull ache. This is a mom who is alive and loving in the beginning of the game, and who dies saving her son, right there on screen.

Those were some itsy-bitsy spoilers. The next one is going to be really big.

Oliver's tears bring his doll to life. The doll was Drippy, Lord High Lord of the Fairies, who was trapped in this shape when he went up against the big bad, Shadar.

Shadar steals pieces of his victim's hearts, robbing them of courage, love, enthusiasm and other positive traits. In a broad sense, it seems like a childish threat that wouldn't be out of place in Care Bears, but it's handled in such a way that the little details about how the victims act when broken-hearted really lend it a kind of verisimilitude. We see how their pain hurts them, and the people who love them.

It's right up there Hyperbole and a half for a wrenching picture of depression.

Drippy explains that he comes from the counterpart to our world, where everyone has a soul mate. (I think this is one of the few instances where the localization was less than excellent, as soulmate already has a specific meaning in English.) The soul mate is their twin on the other world, and what happens to one, influences the other. Oliver thinks that saving his mother's soul mate will bring her back to life.

We see several cinematic cut scenes with the titular White Witch talking to her council and ordering Shadar around. We learn early on that the Great Sage Alicia, soul mate to Oliver's mom, went up against Shadar and was defeated. I thought the plot twist was going to be that Shadar had seized her heart and she had become the White Witch.

However, what happened was that Alicia fled to our world, an act that meant that she had no soul mate. Alicia wasn't the soul mate to Oliver's mom; she was actually his mother for real. Oliver's mom is really dead, for real, and she's not coming back. And, by the way, Shadar also mentions that he's Oliver's soul mate, and if Oliver manages to kill him, Oliver will die too.

And this little boy, when he should be bereft of all hope, steps up and vanquishes him anyway.

Oliver vanishes and we see Shadar drifting in the void. In his youth had been a soldier who was punished for protecting a little girl in the midst of a massacre. Reprisals were made against his family, and he believed that the girl died in spite of all he had done. He felt like nothing he did mattered and that a world in which this kind of thing could happen didn't deserve to go on. The White Witch heard his despair, and granted him the power to end the world. 

However, the little girl did survive, and she grew up to become Alicia. As Shadar was dying, she was there to comfort him. Shadar's final action was to release Oliver from his doom. It was really very moving, and it ties in with the theme of the whole game, that people make bad choices when they feel frightened and weak and alone.

It's a story about overcoming grief. We love people, and they die, and we have to learn how to go on living without them. There is a temptation to retreat from the world or lash out when we suffer a loss, but the peace of those paths is a lie.

The story and the presentation are top notch, the kind of brilliance we've come to expect from Ghibli. How's the gameplay? Pretty good. It starts out really generic, with a fight/cast/item/flee menu. But then, gradually, options are introduced over the course of the game, with alchemy and hundreds of little creatures to capture. The Wizard's Companion has a fantastic wealth of information about the world. I think the best stories always hint at more than they state outright, and that's certainly true with Ni No Kuni.

It's a great game, full of optimism and adventure and hope and friendship and good deeds. I talked about how games loom large in our childhood memories, until nostalgia distorts them beyond all recognition. Ni No Kuni is in good in truth as those childhood games are in my memory. It's very possible the best video RPG I've ever played.

Lunar: The Silver Star and Lunar 2: Eternal Blue

This was going to be the preamble to my post about how much I loved Ni No Kuni, but it got so big that I decided to spin it off into its own post.

I've been spending an awful lot of time complaining about things I don't like, so here's a post about something I loved.

For those of you who weren't around back in the early 80's, Dungeons & Dragons was once pretty mainstream. There was a confluence of circumstances which will never be repeated that made it so, but it really was part of mainstream culture once upon a time.

If I'm not mistaken, the first time I flipped through a D&D book was in a local craft store called Washington One-Stop. I started playing the game around 1984 or so, and I've been a tabletop gamer on and off ever since.

I've been playing video RPGs nearly as long. The only reason I didn't start sooner is that the technology was not yet in place. (And the fact that it does exist is one of the big reasons that tabletop RPGs aren't coming back.) I think my first computer RPG was the Eternal Dagger, and my first console RPG was probably Dragon Warrior. I played Final Fantasy I, II, and III, Phantasy Star I, II, III (ugh) and IV. Looking back, I think the thing that surprised me most is how many times I replayed so many of those games. I was a sucker for the melodrama. I rented a lot of games from the local video stores, back when that was a thing, and I would zero in on anything with RPG elements.

I've played a lot of them. Like anything, some of them were great, some of them were awful and some I remembered being great but were awful when I returned to them as an adult. I loved Phantasy Star II as a kid, but man, is it a slog to play through it again. (I still love the music and the story, though.)

I always enjoyed Working Designs' games. They provided quirky localizations of Japanese RPG, and they produced the bulk of their work for the Sega CD. (I still own a Sega CD, but I have no idea if it still works)

I'm going to plagiarize a ton of stuff one of my earlier posts that nobody read from 2010. This time I'll include pictures, though.

LUNAR: THE SILVER STAR

Lunar was awesome. I played it when I was working nights and before I met Jen, which was just a strange time in my life. I'm much happier now than I was then, but part of me misses being able to spend fifteen hours a day working through a video game. I remember renting Final Fantasy II for the SNES. Tim said "That needs at least 36 hours of play time and the rental only lasts for two days. You're never going to finish it in one try" and I said "That sounds like a challenge!" Lunar used actual speech in the cut scenes and I had the volume turned low because I was playing at 3 AM on my day off and then a cut scene begins and Ghaleon starts mumbling, "My apprentice Nash speaks well of you" and I had to run to the TV to hear what he was saying. Speak up, dude! You're the Premier of the Magic Academy! Do you mumble like that during graduations?!

I was looking through old posts to see if I had mentioned Lunar before, and I had forgotten this, and when she was really little, Lily was sitting in her little pink chair and I was singing to her. I was taking Fur Elise, the first movement of Beethoven's Fifth, and Ode to Joy, and singing "La" for each of the notes. She was smiling broadly at each of these, but what really made her laugh was when I "sang" her the song from an old video game. I think Tim is the only one who'll know the song I'm talking about, but it's the La La La song from Lunar: The Silver Star, which really does have "La" in the place of the notes. It's a catchy little tune and she laughed out loud at this. That was her first laugh.

I figured out two of the big revelations in Lunar pretty. I had just finished up another game called Lufia and the Fortress of Doom and it had the same plot twist, which is an element of Asian folklore that goes back to the Princess and the Cowherd, that of a goddess falling in love with a human and choosing to live out a mortal life with him. In each Lunar and Lufia, the amnesiac blue-haired girl is a fallen goddess who falls in love with the main character, recovers her memory but renounces her divinity to be with him.

The other plot twist in Lunar that Ghaleon, the Premier of the magic academy was a bad guy. If you watch the opening cinema, he's practically twirling his mustache and that gave it away.

"Damn, I'm evil. Also, my hand is gigantic."

 I'm not sure if knowing that diminished my enjoyment or not. It certainly provided a different experience than I would have had otherwise. It's a great game. The gist is that the world is in trouble, you have to save it, blah-blah, crying cakes, and that the people who saved the world the last time are the parents or the mentors to this generation.

Ghaleon is the one who drives the plot. He's probably my favorite video game villain of all time. He saved the world, but then ten years after that, he and his best friend had to save it again. He hates the goddess that empowered his friend for turning away from him. He hates himself for being unable to save the world.

This animation seemed a lot more impressive twenty years ago.

As part of his plan, he feebleminds one of the former heroes, turns another to stone, butchers the dragons he was sworn to defend, enslaves a goddess and uses her power to blast a floating continent from the sky. And yet, there's this bit at the end... As you're fighting your way through the final levels of his fortress, where the most powerful monsters in the game are hurling themselves against you, there is this level where peaceful music plays and gentle pixies flit around in an idyllic garden. The faeries will talk to you and it's clear they have no idea of the things Ghaleon has done. It's like he's trying to convince himself that he's not a monster. They believe him a kind, gentle man. And he was, once upon a time. One of the characters remembers how he used to take here on long walks when she was a little girl and wonders what must have broken inside him to make the monster he has become.

LUNAR: ETERNAL BLUE

As good as Lunar:TSS was, the sequel was even more incredible. It was the last game I did without easy access to a walkthrough and Jen bought it for my birthday when we were first dating, so it's special in that way too. It's set a thousand years later and the broad outline of the plot is pretty similar at first. You rescue a mysterious girl named Lucia, and run all over the place, assembling a ragtag band and eluding the White Knight Leo, who pursues you like Javert across the country. While fleeing him, your team arrives at an ancient temple where a recording shows you the events of the last game. As it's showing the defeat of Ghaleon it's suddenly interrupted by Ghaleon himself, somehow back from the dead.

It's worth noting that I was thinking it was great game and the only thing that could possibly make it better would be an appearance by Ghaleon.

Part of the game is to become the heroes out of legend, the Dragonmaster, the White Knight, etc, only to discover that...those roles are already filled. And Ghaleon, the traitor from the first game is their leader.

The game had so many scenes that I loved. You know how in these kind of games, you're always running against a clock before the the villain takes over/destroys the world, but nobody on the team has any problem stopping to get a kitten out of a tree. When you get to one village, Lucia, who was raised away from humans, says "Fuck this noise," and quits the party when you delay the main quest for yet another humanitarian mission.

When traveling through a Sherwood Forest type area, "We're close to Taben's Peak, everyone. Keep your eyes peeled and your hands on your valuables. Ronfar! Get your hands out of your pants!"

Lunar:EB has a lot of the tropes of that era of game, and one of them is that the main character has stats that are significantly better than those of the secondary characters. Leo is a special exception, as he has stats that match the main character's precisely. There's a bit where you've just finished a punishing boss battle and Leo catches up to you. One of the cultists shrugs and activates the runes that summon the boss again, and Leo and Hiro team up to smack it down.

Leo was pursuing you because he believed that Lucia was really the Destroyer, but he was starting to have doubts. When he asks you if you really think that Lucia is the destroyer, you have the option of answering "Only once a month". Heh.

The characters are awesome. I mentioned Ronfar, the lovable rogue who had been a priest, but who fell into despair and all manner of vices because he was unable to save Mauri, his beloved and Leo's sister.

There's Jean, who was raised as an assassin, but who found peace as a dancer, who is fleeing from her former mentor, Master Lunn. He is one of the four false heroes, and she has to defeat him in single combat. Everything about the game feels epic.

Leo was another great character. There's a scene where he realizes that he's been played and that he's been serving a false goddess all this time, and he faces up to the consequences.

It has the best scene ever in a video game. Zophar, the dark god that had been impersonating the goddess Althena, Lucia, the mysterious blue-haired girl whom you had rescued absorbs Althena's power into herself to destroy Zophar, thereby eliminating all magic in the world. Zophar then reveals that such power would destroy the world of Lunar as well. She hesitates, beat...beat...beat...each accompanied by a party member's face, and then she does it, "Althena's light shine forth!" unleashing the forces that will destroy a world.

She hesitated too long to actually do, and Zophar siphons her power, but she still has enough to teleport our heroes to safety. Cut to a town where Hiro is absolutely crushed by despair. Ghaleon shows up and threatens to kill everyone in the town unless you can stop him.

When you do, he reveals to Hiro that he allowed Zophar to revive him so that he could atone for his actions in the first game, but because Zophar could withdraw his power at any time, he could never overtly aid the heroes. And now that he has betrayed his master openly in order to rekindle Hiro's spirit, he will return to the grave once more.

At the very end, Lucia returns to her duties in a spire on the moon and the heroes go back to their lives. There's an ending song and a montage showing the fates of the main characters, and then it goes back to the title screen, where you have the option for a fully playable epilogue! It's not just a tacked on thing, but a full scale trek as Hiro gets the band back together and you get to see the outcome of all the good you've done as you search for a way to be with your beloved. At the end of it, you find Lucia, and the game ends while together they watch the Earth arm in arm.

I'm still going to write that Ni No Kuni post, so keep your eyes out for that. 

Lily and the Brain Chain

Lily wanted me to tell everyone about a game she had invented. But first, a story!

I was playing Ni No Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch, with Lily, and it's certainly a game that will warrant its own post. It started out being distinguished only by its design and the execution of its story, and then branched out to zillions of fun little subsystems. Like a number of video RPGs, it has a casino area where you can wager some form of currency that isn't available elsewhere, to exchange for items that aren't available elsewhere.

It features slot machines, blackjack, an arcade game and card game that I believe that was invented for the video game. It's called Platoon, and each player is dealt ten cards from a poker deck, which he or she must divide into five piles. Each card is worth its face value, except for kings, which automatically win against anything except for an ace, aces, which automatically lose (but beat kings), and jokers, which swap your hand with your opponents. The rules are pretty simple, but there's a decent amount of strategy.

In your face! (The computer gets unbelievably snotty when it wins)

Lily spent all afternoon trying to master that small and trivial subsection of a video game. I shudder at the knowledge that this displaced, but we had some interesting conversation about it. Lily wondered if we were really playing against another person somewhere on the internet, and if they saw us as the dealer. Later on she concluded that this must be the case, because if we were really playing against the computer, it would just deal itself a winning hand every time. I pointed out the flaw in her reasoning, (that sooner or later, the player would figure it out and stop playing with the computer), but I liked that she tried to reason things out with the facts available to her. I've often said that kids aren't that far behind adults when it comes to straight up problem solving; they simply have a smaller pool of experience to inform it.

I'll take a little bit of credit for this. I'll ask her open-ended questions, and follow up with "Why?" in order to get her articulate her reasoning, which is something I find useful myself, as part of the process of trying to determine how I came to a particular conclusion.

I see that she's internalized this, because she was the discussion leader at school recently, where she guides the discussion and asks the other little kids questions about the story they're reading. Lily's questions were open-ended, what-do-you-think-will-happen-next questions, but the teacher was looking for a line of inquiry more along the lines of what had happened previously in the book. "What did Jim have for lunch?" "Why was he late for school?"

I'm torn. On one hand, I think Lily's kind of questions are more illuminating, particularly if she follows up with "Why?", as you can't make a good prediction about what's going to happen without having a solid grasp about what has happened. On the other hand, most kids that age aren't ready for that level of reasoning, and perhaps more importantly, that's not what she was asked to do.

We were talking about detention, and I asked her what she knew about it, and she said it's when you're forced to stay after school and you can't do anything but sit there and do your homework. I told her that sometimes you can't even do your homework, because it's supposed to be a punishment and the idea is that you shouldn't be able to derive any benefit from it. She told me that she likes sitting alone at her desk, because she can play a game of her own devising, which she calls Brain Chain. She'll find something in the room, and chain associations with it. "Oh, that poster of a castle reminds me of Tangled which reminds me of Grammy Kathy because we saw the movie in Florida which reminds me of cooking, because Grammy Kathy is such a good cook, which reminds me of Wacky Wednesday because I make pancakes on the griddle, which reminds me of Valentine's Day, because I'll sometimes put chocolate chips in the pancakes and people give out candy on Valentine's Day, which reminds me off..."

I used to play similar games when I was bored, and I'm more interested in her thought processes in coming up with the game than I am in the specifics of it. Two things impressed me. The first was how cleanly she was able to articulate the rules to Jen after she had explained it to me. She didn't ramble, as people often do when explaining something, but rather she laid it out clearly, in logical order, providing specific examples to illustrate her points. The other thing was how enthusiastic she was. She had invented this thing completely on her own, and she was so excited and wanted to share it with people she loved. That's one of the things about Jen with which I first fell in love, and I'm glad it passed on to Lily. There's so much of me in her temperament that it's nice to see that she inherited some of Jen's good traits too.

I wish DC would stop paying people who hate Superman to write stories about Superman

Surprisingly, this post is not about Orson Scott Card.

(But he still sucks.)

It's about the video game Injustice: Gods Among Us and the comic tie-in.

Injustice is the upcoming fighting game starring a bunch of DC super-people. The plot of fighting games tend to be pretty superficial. Mostly they serve as a paper thin rationale to answer the questions posed by ex-drama students, who might suddenly ask "What's my motivation here?" when Zangief pulls Dhalsim into a spinning piledriver.

So the bar for fighting game storylines is generally pretty low. We just want something that will give us an excuse to believe that these people would be fighting each other. Prize money, pride in your nation, proving you're the best around and nothing's ever gonna keep you down, revenge, rivalry with another combatant, these are all fine.

I'm a guy who loves the cheesy backstories of video games and owns White Wolf's entire line of Street Fighter: The Story Telling Game. It doesn't have to be Hamlet; just give me a semi-plausible fig leaf of an explanation and I'm happy.

Hell, in Marvel comics it's almost de rigueur for superheroes to fight each other when first meeting. That's like how they shake hands.  In Justice League Task Force, the reason you're not really fighting your teammates, you're actually fighting their evil android duplicates created by Darkseid. Fine, great, whatever. I'll buy that. It's no more ridiculous than any number of canonical stories. Parallel universe counterparts, clones, training simulations, again, whatever. Excuses abound. If I believe a man can fly and shoot death rays out of his eyes, I'll believe that there's a reason where he might be fighting Batman.

Much like Fox Mulder, I want to believe.

Now, hold that thought.

Non-comic book writers, when they do write stories about superheroes, have two types of stories they like to tell.

The first is some kind of regulation/registration of super heroes, which I first encountered in the 1981 Days of Future's Past X-Men story arc, and then once every year or two right up until the present day.

And Wikipedia has helpfully compiled a list, so I don't have to look for examples: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Registration_acts_(comics)

As you can see, there are a ton of these.

For some reason, this is something that people outside of comics think that never occurs to comic book writers, while in reality, it's one of the hoariest of comic book cliches.

The other thing they think of is making Superman evil. An evil Superman in an Elseworlds is only slightly less common than a dead Spider-man in an issue of "What If?" There are literally hundreds of variations on this, but they're all mostly the same story.

It's not a good story, by itself, or a bad story. Much like anything, it depends on how its told.

However, I tend to be suspicious of people whose only idea for a story about Superman is one where Superman turns evil, because I think an even more essential element to the character even than his great power is his great goodness. The central premise of these evil Superman stories really seems to come down to the belief that Superman is only a hero because he doesn't know any better, because he's never faced any challenge or tragedy, and that his naive idealism is so brittle that it will crumble with one good shock.

A story with an evil Superman can sometimes work, if you contrast the man he has become against a character who has been defined by a lifetime of good deeds.  Take the Justice Lords two-parter in the JLA series. But if your story opens with Superman suffering some tragedy and going, "I guess I'm evil now," so you can write a story where you destroy the character twice, once when he betrays his values and again when he's beaten down by tougher stronger, better heroes who stood tough and didn't break when the going got rough, well, pardon me if I don't want to pay my money to read your story.

Greg Rucka said something once that really gets to the core of Superman: Pet peeve time: for the contingent out there who sneer at heroes like Superman and Wonder Woman and Captain America, those icons who still, at their core, represent selfless sacrifice for the greater good, and who justify their contempt by saying, oh, it’s so unrealistic, no one would ever be so noble… grow up. Seriously. Cynicism is not maturity, do not mistake the one for the other. If you truly cannot accept a story where someone does the right thing because it’s the right thing to do, that says far more about who you are than these characters.

And part of this is because it's not easy to write an entertaining Superman story without subverting some aspect of his nature. I don't personally like Joss Whedon's work, but I've heard from several people who usually like his stuff that they thought Captain America was boring in the Avengers, whereas I thought he was great in his own movie. I was talking about this with some friends, and I think the core of the problem is that Whedon, like a lot of other writers, just doesn't know what to do with a Honest-to-Goodness, Lawful Good, Twenty-Million-Die-By-Fire-If-Am-Weak, Super Hero. (And note that's not my usual dig against Whedon. It's a lot harder to play goodness straight than it is to deconstruct it.)

It's for those reasons that this story strikes me less as a reason to explain why these superheroes would be fighting each other and more of an excuse to shit all over Superman by someone who hates him.

I knew Ed Boon wasn't going to give us All Star Superman, but Jesus, this one is so bad that the comic makes me not want to play the game. It's so bad that when I read I read the original description of the plot I thought it was a joke, because it was such a collection of the worst of the 90s over-the-top grim n' gritty women in fridges bullshit that the only way it made any sense was as a parody.

The Joker steals a nuclear bomb, and then kidnaps Lois Lane and implants a trigger in her chest (a development of which Chris Sims wryly observed: "I mean really, you'd think that if the Joker enrolled himself in medical school, let alone made off with a nuclear warhead, Batman would try to be on top of that situation"), then gives Superman a dose of kryponite-spiked fear gas so he'll see his (pregnant, of course) wife as a supervillain and fly her out in to space to her death. Then her heart  stops and sets off the nuke in Metropolis.  Then Superman goes crazy and takes over the world because he had a sad.

That expression is begging to be made into a poster

The trope of murdering of a female character to spur a male character has a name, and is covered here.

Women in Refrigerators

I'm a big fan of Kingdom Come. Lois Lane had been murdered in that one too, well before the story began, when the Joker gassed the Daily Planet. Everyone Superman loved, everyone that anchored him, snuffed out, just like that. And he tracks down the Joker, to bring him to trial, and then, when the Joker is killed in the street before he can be tried, Superman arrests Magog, the Joker's killer and sees that he is tried. When Magog is acquitted, Superman hangs up his cape and retreats from the world.

Instead of, you know, taking it over. 

It reminds me of a line from the review of the last episode of the Legion of Super Heroes series on the Legion Abstract. "... I'd like the Legion's final villain to be someone other than my favourite superhero."

I'm kind of amazed that this series got made at all. Comics are on the decline, and this game is going to be the most exposure that most people get to Superman until the movie. Is DC really okay with its flagship character going crazy and murdering a bunch of people? DC Women Kicking Ass covers the comic  and, if possible, hates it more than I do.

On top of all this, it's got a bunch of my pet peeves. The Joker. Jesus. Clowns are terrifying

but that's all he's got going for him. It's been my experience from working with crazy people that they poop in the closet, masturbate at inappropriate times and occasionally try to stab me, but being crazy didn't give them the wherewithal to perform open heart surgery or mastermind the theft of a nuclear warhead, even considering that didn't have to work around the Joker's liabilities of looking like a grinning anorexic albino in a purple suit.

And also we get the lecture from Batman

Superman: I think an objective evaluation would show that killing the Joker would save more lives in the long term.

Batman: No! Once you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny!

Superman: ...

Batman: Murder is like kryptonite-laced crack. Once you kill one person, NO ONE CAN EVER STOP!!

Now, this argument has come up several times from Batman, and it's hard to refute it, because, as every child knows that police officers who kill someone in the line of duty instantly turn into serial killers. 

Christ, that's ridiculous. 

Though a close second is something that has to be the idea has insinuated itself into every message board on the Internets, the idea that "Batman can't kill the Joker! He'd just take over hell and come back with an undead army!" which apparently is something that happened at some time or other, and is now being treated as a inviolate and unassailable fact rather than the idiotic element from a single story that it is. Some days, it's hard to love you, internet.

It's a shame, because the game looks exceedingly well put together, and the promotional campaign has been absolutely top notch. I guess I'll do the right thing and not spend $60 on a game I won't have time to play anyway. I'll make a stand. For Justice! 

The Old Republic from a Certain Point of View: A CoH old-timer reviews SWTOR

City of Heroes was my first and only MMORPG prior to playing Star Wars: The Old Republic and it's still my gold standard for the genre. (Here's My CoH memorial post)

My friends Greg and Dave have been playing SWTOR for a while and I decided to give it a whirl when someone sent me an install disc in the mail as an early Christmas present.

I had to relearn a fair bit. Back when I played CoH, I had a bunch of bonuses because I'd been a paid subscriber forever. So I had travel powers early and enough bonus powers for a full attack chain at level one. Plus I knew the game inside and out. I could start a new character and have him at max level inside of a week. I was soloing Archvillains before it was cool. (Though it was never that hard with an ill/rad. It just took forever. Fucking Nightstar.) I was, in all modesty, really pretty good.

And my friends leveled slower than I did. I'd be closing in on 50 and they'd still be slogging through the teens. I'd shake my head sadly and would offer a silent prayer that they would someday just learn how to play the game.

Anyway, I was remembering this when I saw Dave's toons on SWTOR rocketing through the levels and I was thinking how much it sucks to be on the other end of the equation.

So, how does the Old Republic compare for a CoH grognard?

Grouping with your friends could be a little easier. CoH excelled in that area. I play mostly with Greg and Dave, and we have to go through a lot of contortions to find content that we can all play. By contrast, in City of Heroes, you could disable earning exp, you could artificially lower your level to the level of the mission, or raise your level to that of the mission owner. It was really well-designed in that respect.

The thing that struck me first at the Old Republic is how many time sinks it has. Little ones here and there, but the cumulative effect is enormous.

Four seconds to break down an item for components. Respawn timers when you die. Large Empty areas. (Fucking Tattooine) Waiting for the lift to rise. Traveling from your ship to an orbital platform and then finally to the spaceport on Balmorra, as if being on Balmorra weren't punishment enough. Running Alllllll the way back to the offices in the Senate when you complete a mission in order to get the next in the series.

Seriously, it's really annoying.

In City of Heroes, we used to bitch if it took more than three missions for a contact to give you his phone number so you could call him from the field. Also, our superspeed didn't shut down if we walked into a restaurant.


A trooper flies into a bar...

...and his speeder shuts off.

On top of that, it was trivially easy to teleport your teammates to your location, requiring only the selection of a single power available to every character at level 6, so only one person needed to go to the mission door and could just port the lot in.

Which brings me to my next point. Instances. City of Heroes used them ALL THE TIME. You would walk to the mission door, click on it, and enter your own little world. I recall the dev team lamenting at one point that they might have overdone it with instancing, but I never appreciated how much I liked instances until I started with SWTOR.

Coruscant is usually pretty crowded, because it's the second world for every Republic character. I was on a mission with Greg and Dave to kill 30 gangsters in a particular area, or some such thing. I forget the exact details, but it was something along those lines.

The problem was that there were two other groups on the exact same mission (either that or they were just a bunch of douches and they were killing our mobs just to be annoying. I wouldn't put anything past people on the Internets) The mobs respawned pretty quickly, and the thing that I remember about the whole thing is that they'd just pop into being, performing their milling-around idle animation. I imagined that they were talking about the game last night, or a recent date or their plans for the weekend or whatever. They just looked like they were standing around, shooting the shit, when, as they're turning to tap the ash off their cigarette, a Jedi would suddenly EXPLODE into their group from all the way across the room and FUCK THEIR SHIT UP!! with his laser death swords. The juxtaposition was just surreal.

Anyway, the moral of the story is that I would prefer more instanced areas and not have to compete with other players constantly for mobs and glowies. Why no, random guy, I don't mind if you loot that treasure chest while I'm killing the Elite that's guarding it. Just walk right up to the chest and open it while the robot is spraying me with rockets. You fuck.

From a graphical perspective, despite the Ultra Mode overhaul, City of Heroes was showing its age when it folded (having debuted in 2004) and SWTOR looks really slick next to it. However, the sheer variety of the CoH Costume Creator has never been matched. I made a dude with a pillar of fire for a head. Beat that, SWTOR!

The inability to add a player as a friend account wide is such a shocking omission that I have to conclude it's a deliberate decision and not something they merely overlooked.

If you'll excuse the digression for a moment, a character named Positron was one of the Signature Heroes in City of Heroes, a high level ally who would sometimes show up in missions, and who also served a trainer in one of the zones. He was the character of one of the devs, who had played him in a tabletop game and who occasionally took on the identity for in-game events and posted under that name in the forums.

One day a player wrote a tongue in cheek post titled "DO SOMETHING POSITRON!" where he complained that he had died to an ambush, literally at the feet of Positron the trainer, who didn't lift a finger to help.

Positron the Dev wrote back with the quip "All that crap is grey to me, no XP", which became famous on the boards.

I was thinking of that when I was walking through Coruscant. Mobs aggro on me long after they stopped being worth experience points. City of Heroes did this better. You only had to be three levels higher than a mob for it to ignore you. It's annoying being swarmed by a bunch of goons that don't give you any rewards, but which will slow you down and occasionally knock you off your speeder.

I'd probably never have given SWTOR a chance had CoH not gone under, and I think I do prefer it still. That's not to say I find it superior in every way.

The legacy system in particular is really neat. It's been my experience that a lot of gamers give their characters extensive backstories in video games, and it's pretty nifty to have mechanical support for that.

The spoken dialogue in SWTOR really adds an extra element, and is always solid and occasionally spectacular. They did get some of the best talents in the field, and it shows.

Plots are engaging, if occasionally nonsensical. I may have missed something or it may be revealed later, but one of the missions features a scientist who is secretly a Sith. He developed one of the super weapons that litter the Star Wars universe for the Republic, and he goes through all these machinations like faking his kidnapping to get the plans to the bad guys. That just seems needlessly complicated. Couldn't he just cut out the middleman and deal directly with the bad guys and say "Hey, let me build you a super weapon", rather than fucking around with the Republic in the first place?

Still, that's a picayune complaint. They're fun to play and a fair number of CoH's missions fell apart when viewed critically too.

I like that every class has some mez protection, as blasters were insanely squishy in CoH right up until the very end, and for a long time, mezzes dropped all your toggles and you were as good as dead. At the other end of the spectrum, tankers were almost unmezzable. I would have liked to perhaps have seen some greater differentiation between the classes in SWTOR, and maybe some extra oomph for the front line fighters/tanks, but I think this is probably preferable to CoH.

PvP was added to City of Heroes well after launch. It gained a small, but devoted following, but underwent heavy revision in the interest of game balance with one update and was abandoned by the hardcore PvPers. There was occasional talk of tweaking it again, but mostly it just languished on the back burner. I played a little, but mostly when I went into PvP zones it was for badges or the really solid temp powers that were available there. If I'd see one guy on the /whoall, I'd grumble "What does this asshole want?" before taking off for the nearest exit.

I LOVE PvP in the Old Republic. It's like playing a game of Battlefront! Sometimes you get a shitty team, but hey, then the match is over quickly and you get a new team for the next match.

Though, while we're on the subject of shitty teams, I do seem to be drawing more than my share lately. I'd be on a team with three or four other teammates in the center room on the Ancient Gate map. The other team would focus fire on me, four or five of them, and I'm pretty decent at staying alive on the sage, between breaking LoS, using heals and Force Armor, etc, and I'd last a good twenty or thirty seconds before they overwhelmed me. Thing is, nobody came to help in that time.

It's the slow ganking that gets me. Yeah, if a bunch of dudes jump me and I die before you can intervene, well, sucks to be me. If a bunch of dudes jump me and ping away at me for a half a minute and you're just standing there like Kitty Genovese's neighbors, well, then, dear, I fear, we're facing a problem.

On the other hand, I kept the other team tied up for a couple man-minutes when they could have been working towards objectives, so go me!

And it's fun being on the other side of this dynamic, if you're on a halfway functional team and the other guys are coming at five of you in your entrenched position one at a time, like goons in a kung fu movie.

Overall, I like it a lot. Slowly working my way up with my sage. Having friends to play with makes a lot of difference and I hope to be at level 50 by the time they raise the level cap so we can all do the new stuff together.

Playing Games with Lily: Lego Batman 2

We picked up Lego Batman 2 because we had so much fun with Lego Harry Potter. My friend Eric had mentioned that the game was very nearly the Lego Justice League, and, after playing it, I'm inclined to agree.

My friend Frederick had played previously. He mentioned that whenever you fly with Superman, the John Williams theme plays. (He also moves his arm to turn.)

I think, though, the memory that sticks with me is going to be my daughter, playing Wonder Woman, running around and beating up the other Justice Leaguers and saying things like "I'm a Princess! Treat me with respect! Treat me like you'd treat your boss!"

Like any Lego game, it has a zillion characters to unlock. This looks like a job for "J'onn J'onzz, Catwoman and...Captain Boomerang!"

"To the J'onzzmobile, old chum!"

The puzzles are a touch more difficult than in Harry Potter, occasionally made frustratingly so by the camera angles obscuring a neccesary component. The controls however, are top notch. Superman, in particular, is a lot of fun to play. I would go so far as to say that this is one of the best video game incarnations of Superman.

His heat vision is SO MUCH FUN to use and occasionally I get carried away and "accidentally" roast Batman. Nelson laugh! Ha ha!

Seriously though, if the control setup were ported to another game in toto, I would have no problem with that.

The cutscenes are consistently enjoyable and occasionally laugh out loud funny. After completing the game, you unlock free play in Gotham City, where you can run around in an open world, freely switching through any character you've unlocked. Unfortunately, this is the game's biggest failing in my opinion. You can collect up to 250 gold bricks, but most are accessed through jumping games, which I hated in the missions themselves. It's just not fun, and it's a shame that an otherwise really enjoyable game ends on such a sour note.

Nine Princes in Amber Computer Game

My first computer was a Commodore Vic-20. I guess we got it around 1983 or so. I loved that thing. It had a tape drive! I think I owned both pieces of software ever made for it.

A little later in the late 80s, we got an Apple Clone.  I loved the old text-based Infocom games, but they could be frustrating.

I read a review of the Nine Princes in Amber game in Dragon magazine at some point in the 80s,  but I never actually played it until I got to college, when I searched for it on a whim and saw that someone had uploaded an emulated version. I played it a little bit in the computer lab, but it made a ton of noise. The computer didn't have any speakers hooked up, but however the sound was made bypassed the speakers. It was embarrassing, even for someone who would play a ten year old game in a college computer lab, so I turned it off.

Flora's cultured tastes: "Carmella, I think that neon purple chair looks much more elegant on top of that fluorescent orange carpet. "

Seeing the game made me remember what I loved about those old games. Playing it made me remember what I hated about it. It was like a BAD text adventure game, where you randomly pair verbs with nouns until you find the completely arbitrary solution that advances the plot.

You know what, though? I see an emulated version is still up, so I'll give it a go for this post and see if it's any better than I remember!

Let's see.

All right. Hit orderly.

Break casts.

Escape.

Goddammit!

I forgot to read the chart before I left anyway, and if you escape without doing that (and learning your name is "John Corey"), it just results in you wandering the streets aimlessly. 

That's just an artifact of the time though. Modern gamers don't enjoy that kind of thing. I'm reluctant to say that gamers in 2012 tend to want their games easier, but there is a less of a tolerance for the kind of artificially inflated difficulty found in this game. I think that had things been different, and the game had been released for smartphones in installments in modern times, I think it could have really caught on. Though that's not to say that I'd want to see such a thing, as I think it would be too close for Zelazny's prohibition against other authors writing Amber stories for me to be comfortable.

 Zelazny contributed a blurb for the game, "I'm thrilled to see my Amber books become a challenging computer adventure. For anyone interested in exploring contingent paths through my tale, the possibilities here are almost endless", but he would have been foolish not to, so it's unclear if he liked the game or if he was just promoting it.

And of course, the actual writing would present any number of challenges. Such an author would have to understand the characters inside and out in order to understand how they would react in situations they didn't encounter in the books, and I doubt that anyone but Zelazny would be capable of that anyway.

Playing Games with Lily: Lego Harry Potter

 I was hanging out with Lily a couple weekends ago and we spent a couple hours looking at the Lego versions of Harry Potter characters in the Brickipedia. If you have a daughter, you've probably done the same thing.

(Brickipedia is a Wiki about Legos. I never even imaged such a thing existed, but I am thrilled that it does. The Internet does occasionally produce something worthwhile.)  

I thought, "Hey, this Lego Harry Potter game looks fun!" so we drove out to the mall and traded in some stuff for a used copy.

It's just about the perfect game for Lily. The only thing I could think to make it better for her would be to add something where she can practice her reading.  But it has cooperative gameplay, puzzles to solve, tons of stuff to unlock and it's impossible to fail (you just explode into bricks if you lose all your health and then immediately respawn minus a little bit of money), which is great when you're playing with a six-year-old.  The cutscenes are cute. It's got a little fighting, but it's not too violent. Just like you, the bad guys just explode into bricks.

The puzzles are mostly pretty easy. When in doubt, zap everything on the screen, and as my friend Frederick observed, if the bricks don't disappear, then you're probably supposed to build something out of them. Occasionally, the trick to a boss fight is not immediately obvious. The basilisk in particular is a pain. The fight involved luring the thing into smashing three sets of walls, brewing a potion that includes components that are obscured by the geometry due to the fixed camera angle, pulling a chain after you drink the strength potion, summoning Fawkes, using the same spell at the same time as your partner on the same item, jumping down into the pipe, using a spell on the Sorting Hat to get the Godric Gryffindor's sword and then finally levitating the sword to stab the basilisk who for some reason was positioned somewhere off screen where I couldn't see him.  I used a walkthrough at Gamefaqs for that one. It was just astoundingly tedious. Unfortunately, Lily reads well enough now to realize what I was reading and she doesn't want to do the puzzles anymore, but would rather consult the walkthrough for a solution.

Lily has come to hate Ron and Dobby for some reason. I can understand the Dobby hate, but Ron? Ron's a cool cat.

No, Crookshanks is a cool cat.

Lily's solution to whenever the game makes her play Ron is to run to a cauldron and brew up some polyjuice potion, which lets you select another character. She usually changes him into Hermione in a ballgown, which suggests to me that Ron has some really particular fetishes.

(I usually turn my character into Lucius Malfoy and run around Avada Kedavraing random Lego people. Whee!)

But yeah, Dobby sucks. A friend asked how I could hate Dobby and I said that the only sock I wanted to give him has a bar of soap inside.

When she's not playing video games, Lily likes to play "Would you rather?" where one person poses a choice between two good things or two bad things and the other person has to choose.

We had this exchange earlier today.

Me: Would you rather...get a bunch of candy, or....push Dobby into a wood chipper?
Lily: Wood chipper.

Ha, ha, ha. Fuck Dobby.

I'm so proud of her.

I'm Gonna Wreck It!: Wreck-It-Ralph Review

We saw Wreck-It-Ralph on Sunday and everyone in our party enjoyed it. It's the story of the titular Ralph, a video game villain who, on the 30th anniversary of his game, is tired of being hated for doing his job, which is destroying a building, so the hero of the game, Fix-It-Felix, Jr, can repair it. The Nicelanders, whose building Felix repairs, throw him a party, to which Ralph is not invited. Ralph crashes it, things go badly, and the Nicelanders tell Ralph they'll throw him a party if he can earn a medal. And Ralph abandons his game and goes looking for one.

In the movie, all the games in the arcade are linked by "Game Central Station", which was a cornucopia of cameos. We saw Chun Li chatting with princesses from the Mario series. Ralph gives a cherry from Pac-Man to a homeless Q-Bert. Ryu buys Ken a beer at Tapper's. I really like the shared universe of the movie. I've seen it likened to Tron, but I think a better comparison is Who Framed Roger Rabbit (with dashes of Scott Pilgrim and Toy Story to flavor) a movie that unifies number of disparate properties under a single multiversal umbrella.

Ralph learns that completing the game in Hero's Duty will earn the winner a medal, so he sets off to do that, encountering Jane Lynch's Sergeant Calhoun, the tough as nails commander of the force in the game. I don't care for Glee, the property for which she's best known, but I don't think I've ever been anything but tremendously entertained by any role I've ever seen her perform. She doesn't disappoint here either.

After an abortive attempt to play the game as intended, Ralph climbs the tower where the medal is housed and thereby triggers the victory sequence. (He declares "Shiny!" on seeing it, and I'm inclined to take it as a nod to Firefly, particularly in light of Alan Tudyk's presence.) Unfortunately, he awakens a Cy-Bug (the ravenous adversaries of Hero's Duty) and it gets stuck in an escape pod with him as they rocket out of the game. He lands in Sugar Rush, a candy themed go-kart racing game that I would absolutely play.

The Cy-Bug sinks into a candy bog, Ralph goes to retrieve his medal from a peppermint tree, but Vanellope von Schweetz beats him to it in order to buy her way into a race. Meanwhile, Felix and Calhoun do the buddy movie odd couple thing as they too enter Sugar Rush in pursuit of Ralph.

The malevolent King Candy (Alan Tudyk) doesn't want Vanellope to race, but through Ralph's intervention, she bakes a car and enters the race. Unfortunately, the Cy-Bug has laid thousands of eggs by this time and its offspring swarm the game.

And by this point we're getting into spoiler territory, so click on the button if you've seen the movie or don't mind being spoiled. Or you could stop here and look at this cute picture of Lily with the cast.

SPOILERS!

The plot has a lot going on, but ties together better than the vast majority of movies made for adults. In particular, I like the idea of "Going Turbo". The concept is first introduced by M. Bison in the Vill-Anon support group as something that horrifies even these hardened bad guys. The phrase pops up a couple more times until Felix explains i to Calhoun. Turbo was a character in a racing game that fell into disuse when the more popular Road Blasters was put next to it. (And rightly so. Road Blasters rules! Cruise Missile for the win!) So Turbo journeys to Road Blasters and attempts to take it over, resulting in both machines being shut down. We get a brief little flashback of the events and that seems the end of it until the end of the movie where King Candy is revealed as Turbo. Had I been watching more critically, I might have caught on, but I wasn't expecting something that sophisticated for a kid's movie and I wound up being surprised. I liked the design on Turbo. When his old-timey graphics are updated for Sugar Rush, he's got a bit of a skull motif in his face, and that's a nice touch. I also like how they foreshadowed his return, but at least I saw that one coming. (When they mention at several points that the Cy-Bugs become what they consume. I thought that was nicely illustrated when one ate Ralph's gun.)

END SPOILERS!

Random thoughts on the movie

The animated short at the beginning of the movie, Paperman, was really extremely well done. The music reminded me of the music from Flower.

The coming attractions:

Croods: You could not pay me to see this movie. By the numbers stinker, but I'm sure we'll get the Dreamworks face!

Dinotime: Impossibly generic. Oh! And Rob Schneider! The Poor Man's Adam Sandler. Chew on that for a minute.

Smurfs II: Our local library had one of those shelf-clearing sales that libraries occasionally hold, and I picked up anthology of short stories about different takes on Hell. It was pretty good. I remember that one of the stories was about this director and his movie star wife who were killed in a car accident, only they didn't realize it until the end of the story. Things got more and more miserable and frustrating and the movie they were making got more and more terrible. One of the details that sticks with me is that they were filming a movie at their home, but they had to drive to the studio and then be shuttled back to their home because of the studio's deal with the Teamsters. The movie they wind up creating was an absolute abomination that never would have been created in a world with a just and loving God, and I think something like this is the only explanation for the existence of the Smurfs sequel.

Oz: The Great and Powerful: This actually looks pretty good. James Franco and Sam Raimi! Yes, please! Also, the promotional art looks very nice.

I usually hate John C. Reilly. He is the kind of actor whose presence will keep me away from a movie (q.v. Adam Sandler), but this is the role that justifies his existence. I would go so far as to say that his performance has caused me to reassess him.

On the other hand Sarah Silverman, whom I usually like, was lackluster. She wasn't bad. She was fine, but she was the weakest of the main cast by a considerable margin, and there are just so many voice actors out there who could have done a better job.

As I said above, Lynch was characteristically great. I jotted down her one aphorism, but I'm not sure that I got it right, "A selfish man is a mangy dog who chases a cautionary tale." She's never overused, and never has a moment on screen where she's anything but perfect.

Jack McBrayer as Felix was Kenneth the page as a video game character, but it worked. He was mostly the straight man, but hey, comedy needs a straight man, and he does the job extremely well. The mannerisms for all the characters were very good, but his in particular were outstanding.

Also, I'm loathe to say anything nice about a Firefly alum, but Alan Tudyk is pretty good as King Candy.

Though I like both her acting and her writing, I was kind of disappointed to see Mindy Kaling's name in the credits. I'm not a big fan of stunt casting in voice acting, and while she was fine, she didn't add anything,  I'd have preferred to have the role go to a less established voice actor.

The pacing was great and it was very tightly plotted. There was actually a lot going on, but it all tied together very neatly. And something I really appreciated was a number of transitional scenes. The one I'm thinking of is where Q-Bert sees Ralph in the suit of power armor in Game Central Station. That eliminates the moments of fridge logic where the audience stops and says, "Wait, how did Felix know to look for him there?" I love that kind of thing. It was barely more than a few seconds long but it really works to sell the movie as something that actually happened.

There were a lot of neat details. King Candy's combination is the Konami Code! That's awesome. The baking of the car mini-game was a lot of fun to watch too. I liked the Rampage gameplay from Fix It Felix. One of my favorite movies is Scott Pilgrim versus the World and this had the same wealth of details that will be missed by nearly everyone in the audience but are there for the careful viewer. (And too other things reminded me of Scott Pilgrim. The first was the logo in the beginning, and the second was that Calhourn says "Bullroar!" at one point and the only other time I've ever heard that phrase was from Todd in Scott Pilgrim.)

I remember Vonnegut's rules on writing where he said "Everyone should want something, even if it's only a sandwich." Every one of the has his or her own goals, and they overlap and conflict and make for a richer movie than they would be otherwise. Vanellope and Ralph each want the medal, and I'm pleased that the filmmakers gave her a reason other than peevishness for having her go after it. Likewise, Felix and Calhoun each have their reasons for entering Sugar Rush, and the fact that these reasons are not the same provides a little friction to their relationship.

It looks like the movie is on track to be a real commercial success, but I hope that they refrain from making it into a series, because it gets so much right the first time and part of the charm is it's uniqueness and I think capitalizing on that would only diminish it.

Playing games with Lily: Costume Quest

I really enjoyed Costume Quest.

First, a plug! I enjoy Phil's work over at Adventurous Endeavors, so I decided to see which other blogs he was following. One of them looked especially appealing. It was Life in 16-Bit. I like video games, particularly of that era, so I signed up to follow.

Part of his series for October was scary games and one of them was Costume Quest. It was on the strength of that review that I decided to check out the  game. My thoughts about the game were almost exactly the same as his, which turns out to be rather unfortunate, because it means that someone already wrote this review before I even started the game. Rather than retreading the same territory, I think I'll focus on my experience playing the game with a little kid.

My daughter Lily is in kindergarten. She reads extremely well for her age, but as that age is barely six years old, so I wasn't sure if she'd be capable of following it. Still, the full game (Costume Quest plus Grubbins on Ice) was available for $7.50 and I thought it would be nice to spend some of the money in my Playstation wallet on stuff other than more Little Big Planet Costumes. It combines two of Lily's favorite things, dressing up and scary things.  Also, it doesn't hurt that we're really into Gravity Falls, and the main characters in costume Quest, Wren and Reynold are also twins in a new town.

The game starts with the twins bickering until Mom puts one of them in charge, which is how you pick which character you're going to play. We think "Girls Rule!" around this house, so we played Wren, and I'll be referring the main character as Wren in this review, though of course, you can pick either.

Wren has her awesome robot costume and Reynold has his stupid candy corn costume. They knock on the first door, but instead of getting a massive haul, the guy gives them some LOSER CANDY. At the next house Reynold knocks on the door, but Wren hides behind a mailbox, too embarrassed to be seen with him. When the door opens, a monster emerges, and, thinking Reynold is a giant piece of candy, makes off with him!

And then the adventure proper begins. Wren discovers that she transforms into whatever costume she's wearing whenever she gets in a fight with the monsters, which is such a little kid wish fulfillment fantasy. This is the core mechanism of the game, and it was extremely well done.

A giant robot, a ninja and the Statue of Liberty walk into a bar...

Different costumes have different abilities. The ninja can sneak around (and it's weird hearing a six-year-old telling me that she's going to "enter stealth mode"), the robot moves around on roller skates (and wound up being my default, because movement is kind of slow without it), the knight shields you, etc.

Every review I've read about the game mentions Tasha Harris, the team's lead animator and a former Pixar artist, and for good reason. The graphics have an extremely distinctive style and they mesh very well with mood and the gameplay.

The dialogue is both funny and natural. The best of it has to be between Wren and Reynold, who have that mix of affection and animosity that all real siblings share. You recruit a gamer named Everett and a science geek named Lucy and they each have their own fun personality quirks too.

Since it was produced on a somewhat lower budget than most modern games, it harkens back to an earlier time, where the player actually had to read the dialogue. This is a plus for me, because whenever Lily asked me what it said, I would always reply "You tell me," and with a very few exceptions, she was able to read everything. (We had previously used Little Big Planet to practice reading until we got into the the user generated levels which are all like: "If u like teh lvl, plz heart it. kthxbai!" and are thus suboptimal for our purposes. As the other review mentioned, the only problem is that dialogue flows by without prompting in the cut scenes and I wound up having to read it for her there because it went by just a little too quickly.

I think she was a little young for the game, because the battles were tough for her too, and I wound up taking the controller for a lot of those. They have a quick time element to them and she's just not fast enough to do it, and they're surprisingly unforgiving for a game aimed at a younger demographic. I think battles were my least favorite part of the game, anyway. They were certainly Lily's. She enjoyed running around, exploring and collecting new costumes. She was a little disappointed that we never got the princess costumes we saw on NPCs, but the magical rainbow unicorn made up for that. She was also partial the vampire and the flaming pumpkin head.

In the third act, we ran into the dreaded French Fry bug. (Not to be confused with the horrifying crab-spider nightmare monster you become when you wear the French Fry costume into a fight).

 If you'll excuse me, I need to go clean off my chair, seeing as I have shit myself in terror.

Apparently if you apply the update after you've started the game, the mandatory quest where you have to lure customers to a french fry stand becomes uncompletable. We couldn't figure out what we were doing wrong and I finally resorted to going online to figure it out and that's where I learned about the bug.

And I was prompted for the update as soon as we finished downloading the game, but we wanted to get playing right away. Lily was understandably distraught. She's a drama queen anyway, but I think I would have been pretty upset too. I believe her exact quote was "All of our hard work for NOTHING!" I promised her that I would get her back to where we were, and I did, but I'll admit, I was a little nervous approaching that part, in case the bug did trigger again. It didn't though, and we progressed through the game.

We beat it last night.  With some games, the ending seems tacked on or unnecessary, but this one ended exactly as it should have.  Indeed, I'll go so far as to say that it ended the only way it could. We're looking forward to the sequel, Grubbins on Ice, and you can count on reading the review here.

Though we may not get to it right away. Lily was so excited about the game that as soon as we finished it, she exclaimed, "Let's play it again, but with Reynold this time!!!"