Tag: Reviews

So I Guess I'm an Evercade Guy Now

2024-07-03, 6:00 pm
Categories: Games, Stream of Consciousness, Tech

When I first read about the Evercade, I didn't see much to get excited about — another retro gaming device with old Atari and Namco games you can already get in plenty of other places, and despite "-rcade" in the name it didn't actually have any arcade games, only console ports of them. Like, it might be something fun to get my nephew if it didn't cost quite so much, but I didn't think it was for me.

Times have changed. Those early Namco and Atari collections aren't really representative of where the Evercade is today — in fact, they've not even in production anymore.

Stuart Gipp's done a good job of covering the Evercade over at Retronauts; he's called attention to it as a system that often highlights weird or obscure retro titles, not just the obvious stuff. And when he interviewed a couple of the folks at Blaze Entertainment in an episode of the podcast, I decided I should probably get me one.

So I got three.

But I'll get to that in a future post. For now, let's talk about the Evercade.

Why (or why not) Evercade?

The Evercade is a gaming device primarily focused on emulation and retro-gaming.

Thing is, there are plenty of those. I have an Analogue Pocket. Hell, I've got a Steam Deck, which isn't emulation-focused but is pretty damn great as a handheld emulation device. Those both cost a lot more than the Evercade, but you can get an Abernic handheld around the same price point and load it up with ROMs.

So what sets the Evercade apart?

Does going legit matter to you?

I'm going to leave aside the indie games and native ports for now (we'll get to them down at the bottom) and just talk about the retro ROMs you can buy for Evercade.

You can find all these ROMs on the Internet. You want a complete dump of every NES game or whatever, they're not hard to find.

But a lot of the retro games on Evercade aren't available anywhere else legally.

Now, let's be real: in the vast majority of cases, buying 30-year-old games isn't going to support any of the people who actually worked on them. But you are showing the publishers there's a demand for games like these, and giving them an incentive to release more.

Does curation matter to you?

So these ain't exactly Digital Eclipse releases here. They are, for the most part (but not always!) pretty barebones collections of ROMs that, as I understand it, run in Retroarch. There's a description and box art for each game, you can use savestates and a few simple screen filters, and depending on which version of the Evercade you have, you may or may not be able to remap the buttons. (Which you will usually want to do, because the default mappings are mostly terrible.)

But nonetheless, people put thought into what to include in each collection. Most Evercade carts make for a pretty fascinating and diverse lineup of games from different times and different genres and, often, different systems. And, given the choice between multiple releases of the same game, the one they pick usually shows a certain amount of care — for example, as Gipp notes, Interplay Collection 1 has the Genesis version of Earthworm Jim, but Interplay Collection 2 has the SNES version of Earthworm Jim 2. They chose the better version of each game. Similarly, Sunsoft Collection 2 includes the Genesis version of Aero the Acro-Bat 2 and the SNES version of Zero the Kamikaze Squirrel.

It's easy to find a dump of every SNES game ever released. But what are the odds you'll fire it up, look through the list, and say "Hey, Zero the Kamikaze Squirrel sounds like fun; I'll play that one"? I've scrolled through those lists of Every Game, man, and it's like indecisively paging through Netflix for half an hour: too many options can make it hard to choose one. There's a value to a limited set of suggestions. Particularly if all the options are good, or at least interesting.

B-listers and deep cuts

Most dedicated retro-gaming devices focus on the hits. And the Evercade's got some of those — one of its upcoming devices is Street Fighter 2-branded — but it's also got collections where the most recognizable games are Earthworm Jim, Glover, and Dizzy.

And don't get me wrong, I love me some Mario, Sonic, and Castlevania, and the first thing I did when I got my Evercade EXP was fire up Mega Man X. There's nothing wrong with playing the hits. But the Evercade collections have that thrill of discovery. I've never played Claymates before, and it turns out I've been missing out. I haven't spent enough time with Joe and Mac 2 yet to realize if it's any good, but it sure looks great. Even something like The Fidgetts, which I wouldn't describe as good, has some lovely sprite work and is so close to being good, if only it weren't for oldschool artificial-difficulty mechanics like lives and a way-too-short timer. Even the games that aren't great are worth the time to check out, and I doubt I ever would have if they hadn't come in collections like these.

How do you feel about physical media?

Well, they've got their benefits and drawbacks, don't they? On the one hand, they'll probably still work in 30 years if you still have the hardware. On the other, they sure do take up space, and obviously it's less convenient to swap cartridges than to just pick a game from a menu.

Evercade games come on cartridges, in plastic clamshell cases, with full-color manuals. That's pretty cool! But maybe not the most convenient. But it brings us to:

The collector thing

It doesn't take long to figure out that the Evercade is a system for collectors.

I wouldn't say I'm a collector on purpose, but I definitely collect things — if for no other reason than I'm terrible at getting rid of the shit I have.

I've got a comic collection, a game collection, a movie collection; I'm a collector. But I buy comics to read them, games to play them, movies to watch them — sure, I've got a backlog, but I mostly don't buy stuff just for the sake of having it. I don't worry about gaps in my collection — sure, occasionally I'll think "Hey, I'm only one issue shy of a complete run of Simpsons Comics," but then I forget about it; I don't go on eBay and start looking for it because I just have to complete my collection.

But yeah, the Evercade encourages collectors; it's got numbered releases, a menu screen that keeps track of which games you have and which ones you're missing, the whole deal. The good thing about this is, if you buy a used Evercade game, it's probably going to be complete and well-cared-for. The bad thing is, once games go out of production they start to get expensive. You want a copy of the Oliver Twins Collection? It ain't gonna be cheap.

Since getting an Evercade, there have definitely been a couple of times I've seen an announcement that a cartridge has been discontinued and then thought "Oh shit, I'd better get that while I still can." And sometimes that's a good idea! I got the Codemasters Collection while it was still available for $20 new, and there are some great games on that thing. But it can be easy to get caught up in that mentality and spend too much money on stuff you don't need if you're not careful.

If you like to collect things, the Evercade will scratch your itch. Just don't go overboard, okay?

The unique stuff

Now, I've said that most of the retro collections are just simple ROM dumps, and that's true, but it's starting to change.

First there were modest modifications, like removing Charles Barkley from Barkley Hoops: Shut Up and Jam.

More recently, there have been ground-up remakes: this year's Piko Collection 4 includes Glover, which the Evercade site describes as "rebuilt from scratch" to run smoothly on a device that isn't exactly optimized for N64 emulation. And the collection that convinced me to buy an Evercade in the first place, Duke Nukem Collection 1, includes remakes of the first two games.

You can buy Glover on Steam. You can find Duke Nukem 2 on abandonware sites. But these specific versions of those games aren't available for any other platform but Evercade. A lot of work went into them, and they're pretty fucking cool.

And the indies

So now let's get to the indies.

They're fucking great.

If you have an Evercade EXP or VS, there's a featured indie game every month; you download it and you can play it for free until they replace it with the next one. And periodically they'll release compilations of indie titles, including those previously-featured downloads as well as others. And they're some of the best games on the system.

Some of them are modern ROMs for retro systems that run in emulators; some are retro-style games designed for modern systems and ported to run natively on the Evercade. In both cases what we've got are some games that look, sound, and feel like old 8- or 16-bit classics, but with another thirty to forty years of design iteration.

And once again, you've got other options for devices to play these games on — legally, even. Most of them are on Steam or itch.io or direct from the publisher's site. They're not necessarily a reason to get an Evercade in themselves.

But if you do buy an Evercade, you'd be remiss in not checking out at least some of them. It's a device whose primary purpose is playing old games, but the best games on it may very well be the new ones.

My current favorites are Alwa's Awakening, Full Void, and Tapeworm Disco Puzzle.

So that's a quick introduction to the Evercade. Next time I'll talk about the different models I've tried (and some I haven't) and where to buy (I like videogamesplus.ca). Join us, won't you?

TMNT: The IDW Collection, vol 1

2024-06-27, 6:16 pm
Categories: Comics, Stream of Consciousness

When IDW launched its Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles series by Kevin Eastman, Tom Waltz, and Dan Duncan in 2011, I picked up the first couple of issues and stopped there. I'm sick to death of reboots, I'm not interested in reading the umpteenth iteration of the origin story, and the pacing felt glacial.

But I've picked up a few issues and trades here and there over the years, and liked them a lot, so I've occasionally thought about getting into the main series.

As of this posting there's a Humble Bundle featuring the first fifteen volumes of TMNT: The IDW Collection, plus The Last Ronin, a TMNT riff on Dark Knight Returns which I've heard a lot of good things about. So I went ahead and snagged it.

I read TMNT: The IDW Collection vol 1, which collects the first twelve issues of the series plus an 8-page story from the 30th Anniversary Special and five "micro-series" issues (one for each Turtle, plus Splinter). And I liked it, but it also reinforced my initial impressions from 2011.

It is decompressed as fuck, but it feels pretty brisk in this format, where you can breeze through a 22-page chapter a couple of times a day instead of waiting a month in-between. So I like the main series better this time, but the done-in-ones are still the best part. Particularly Donatello, which has the best writing (by Brian Lynch and Tom Waltz, with artist Valerio Schiti), and Leonardo, which has the best art (by Sophie Campbell, with writer Brian Lynch).

As for the main arc, well, it sure does hit a lot of the expected plot beats. Turtles and rat get mutated by glowing green ooze of alien origin, Raph meets Casey and they beat up some street thugs together, Michelangelo has a holiday-themed adventure, Donatello makes a human friend, Leonardo gets the shit kicked out of him by a whole lot of Foot ninja, the lair is attacked by Baxter Stockman's Mousers, Splinter is captured, the Turtles meet April (who faints), they infiltrate the lab where the ooze came from, Splinter is captured by the Foot, the Turtles hunker down in April's secondhand store then find out where Splinter is and go to save him, big fight with Shredder, end of the book. It's fine, even good-to-great, but most of it's a little familiar (and the stuff that isn't, like the new origin where Splinter and the Turtles are a reincarnated family from feudal Japan, doesn't necessarily work for me), and I'd rather see new stories than just riffs on old ones.

That said, the characters are there, and that's the most important thing. Raphael and Casey aren't as angry in this depiction as in most; they feel a bit more like the older versions from Mirage's TMNT vol 4, who'd grown up a little and gotten some perspective. Donatello, by contrast, is kind of a dick; he knows he's the smart one and he never lets anyone forget it. It's Don, not Raph, who's constantly butting heads with Leo and questioning his leadership. It's an interesting twist on the formula; it makes Donny a lot less likable than usual, but it sure makes him queasily relatable.

And some of the plot changes are good, and serve the characters better than in the original series, when Eastman and Laird were just making it up as they went along.

Like, the original 1984 TMNT #1 is kind of weird. Splinter sends his four 15-year-old sons out to settle a decades-old blood feud for him. That's pretty fucked-up! And nobody addresses that it's pretty fucked-up until about 50 issues later, in City at War, when (IIRC) Leo observes that they are caught in the middle of a gang-war because Splinter dragged them into this. And that's following all the other shit that's happened as a direct result of their killing the Shredder back in issue #1: Leonardo and Raphael both got beaten nearly to death, and April got her apartment burned down. None of those things would have happened if Splinter hadn't roped his boys into a revenge killing.

Which, in hindsight, really doesn't sound much like Splinter at all, does it? Eastman and Laird weren't thinking of long-term character development when they put together that first issue, they were just thinking of chop-socky tropes. (Oh God. Is that why the villain's name is Saki?) And most subsequent versions have, rightly, rewritten the story so that Splinter isn't the aggressor. Usually the Foot is up to some nefarious deeds and the Turtles run afoul of them without even knowing of their connection to the Shredder. This is one of those stories, with some mysticism thrown on about fate and karma and destiny.

Most significantly, at least for Splinter's character, is that he only faces Shredder because he's forced to. He literally has to be dragged before the Shredder before he fights him, and even then he agonizes about whether he's willing to use lethal force — and only decides he's willing to kill because he thinks that's the only way to protect his family.

(He doesn't kill the Shredder, of course; this isn't the original series and they're not going to take him out that soon.)

I also like Leonardo calling out the Shredder for acting like he's a badass even though he's never won a fair fight. Like, what have we seen him do up to this point? Kill a woman and children, and then win one-on-one fights with Leo and Splinter but only after ambushing or kidnapping them and then making them fight like a hundred other ninjas first. The Shredder's only ever projected weakness, never strength, and Leo sees right through him.

All in all? I thought it was pretty good. I've got my gripes but I liked it, the potential is definitely there, and I'm interested to keep reading and see how it develops as they start to tell new stories and as Sophie Campbell becomes a bigger creative presence.

But maybe I'll get back to that Hellboy bundle first.

My Favorite Episodes of The Lone Gunmen

2023-06-16, 6:25 pm
Categories: Stream of Consciousness, TV

Following my previous posts on my favorite episodes of The X-Files and my favorite episodes of Millennium, I will now complete the trifecta with my favorite episodes of X-Files spinoff The Lone Gunmen. This won't take long.

(This post reuses some stuff I wrote on Brontoforumus, 2022-08-26.)

Episode 6: Madam, I'm Adam

The always-great Stephen Tobolowsky plays the eponymous Adam, a man who comes home one night to find there are other people in his house and there's no evidence he ever existed. He tells Jimmy and Byers that he's from another universe and in this one he doesn't exist.

That's right: it's a riff on Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said.

Or is it? In an amusingly specific third-act twist, it turns out it's actually a riff on a different Philip K Dick story.

It's got its problems, including some ableist language: several of the characters in this one are little people and they're repeatedly referred to by the M-word, and look, there was a time that word wasn't considered a slur, but 2001 was not it. There's also a moment where Langly loses his temper with Adam and calls him a "re-" before stopping himself. I guess they at least knew that one was too far, but jeez, you guys.

And there are some problems on the plot side. I'd really like to know more about Lois and why she is doing the things she is doing! Like, is she just a sex pervert? I kinda feel like she might just be a sex pervert.

But still! Flaws aside, I really liked this one.

Episode 8: Maximum Byers

You know those TV episodes where the good guys go undercover in a prison to try to exonerate an innocent man? This is one of those, with Byers and Jimmy going to prison.

It's got a couple of uncomfortable racial stereotypes, including the violent Latino and the wise Black man. And it's got some tonal shifts that maybe work to the detriment of its overall consistency but, to my mind, make it more interesting.

Episode 11: The Lying Game

Guest-starring Mitch Pileggi as Skinner, who just can't stop getting accused of murdering people. Also guest-starring Mitch Pileggi as Jimmy pretending to be Skinner.

Content warning: like the film it takes its name from, this episode treats a character being trans as a plot twist, and, while it's a sensitive portrayal for 2001, the other characters describe her using some phrases that wouldn't be considered appropriate today.

Fell Seal

2019-03-25, 6:31 am
Categories: Games, Status Updates, Stream of Consciousness

You know what game I've been enjoying lately? Fell Seal: Arbiter's Mark.

It's from developer 6 Eyes Studio and publisher 1C Entertainment, and it's an unabashed homage to Final Fantasy Tactics.

I think that's an underserved niche. There are plenty of tactical RPGs (like Fire Emblem) and their close cousins, turn-based strategy games (like XCOM). But most of them don't feel quite like Final Fantasy Tactics or its predecessor, Tactics Ogre.

Fell Seal does. Its storyline isn't quite as complex or as epic as those games', and its soundtrack is fine but doesn't feel as inspired as theirs. (After a round of Fell Seal, I tend to find myself humming tunes from FFT -- though FS's tunes are beginning to stick in my head themselves now.) But its mechanics? Those are damned impressive. Especially from such a small team (per their The Team page, two leads and nineteen contractors).

As of this writing, I'm eight hours or so in. I haven't seen every map; I haven't unlocked every class. But what I've seen so far has kept me excited and engaged in that FFT "just one more fight" way. Every class so far has been useful; every skill tree seems well-considered. And look, FFT is one of my favorite games of all time, but it's not perfect; there are a whole lot of useless skills in there, such as most of the Archer class's "Charge +n" abilities, and Cloud's Limit Breaks for the same reason. Fell Seal doesn't have a charge mechanic; abilities all execute right away. And I haven't found a class yet with abilities that weren't useful (though I admit I'm not quite sure about Gadgeteer just yet). Beyond your basic classes (Merceneries are a well-rounded base class, Menders heal, Wizards damage from a distance, Knights damage from up close, Scoundrels are quick and maneuverable), you get some more interesting choices, like the Plague Doctor, who has debuff-focused attacks but also a base AoE ability that removes debuffs and heals a small amount of HP. There are useful passive skills, too: Wizards can learn an ability that prevents offensive magic from harming allies or healing magic from healing enemies; it's a major boon for any spellcaster.

I haven't even tried the crafting system yet.

It's not a perfect game -- I don't love the character graphics, and while I do love the environment graphics, the decision to go with hand-drawn environments means you can't rotate the camera, which is inconvenient on some stages (for example, when a character is standing under a tree branch and you can't see them). But it's a damned impressive game, that I've already derived hours of enjoyment from and expect many more. The game has some excellent granular difficulty settings, and while I'm enjoying it on the defaults, I'm also looking forward to playing it again on a harder difficulty sometime.

As of this writing, the game is in Steam Early Access. However, it's scheduled for a release sometime next month, and the version currently on Steam is nearly final; according to the release notes, the only things missing are the ending and a secret bonus dungeon. The price has recently gone up from $20 to $30; I believe that will be the final price on release but I'm not 100% certain. I'd still recommend it if the price went up to $40.

But whether you get it now in Early Access or wait a few weeks for its full release, I heartily recommend this game. If you like tactical RPGs in general, and especially if you like Tactics Ogre and Final Fantasy Tactics in particular, you should buy Fell Seal: Arbiter's Mark. I don't think you'll be disappointed.

Fell Seal is available for Windows, Mac, and GNU/Linux, with Xbox One and PS4 versions on the way; I'm playing the Linux version. There's a free demo at itch.io, though I had some trouble with it (I couldn't get shops or guild halls to work, which left me short one party member on the second battle and made it much harder; I haven't had any issues with the full version of the game).

Buster Makes Me Feel Good

2019-03-11, 6:48 am
Categories: Movies, Stream of Consciousness

Last week I watched The Ballad of Buster Scruggs.

I thought it was delightful -- albeit that uniquely Coen Brothers type of "delightful" that involves some truly horrifying and disquieting stuff happening at various points over a two-hour period.

One of the things I really loved about it was its format: it's an anthology movie, made up of six stories, each running around 15-30 minutes.

I wrote a blog post years ago titled Form and Function where I discussed how the Internet could, hopefully, eliminate some of the rigid page-count and running-time requirements we're used to in print media and on TV. Buster Scruggs doesn't do that itself -- it's a two-hour movie -- but it's a roadmap for how a TV series could do that.

I saw reports, on the film's release, that it was originally planned as an episodic series. That's not actually the case; Josh Rottenberg asked the Coens about that story in an LA Times interview and Joel said it was always intended as a movie. But the rumor about it being a TV series is believable. You could certainly watch the movie that way, switch it off at the end of each story and come back and watch the next one some other time -- the only thing stopping you is that boy, some of those segments are grim, and the Coens have wisely arranged them so that the nastiest stories are followed by something with a little more levity.

There's no reason you couldn't make a TV series where each episode resembled one of Buster Scruggs's stories -- do a fifteen-minute episode, do a thirty-minute episode, do whatever length the story calls for. Traditional TV requires that your story be told in a half-hour or an hour, minus commercials, but there's no such restriction to online streaming (and even basic cable has been tooling around with episodes that have some variation in their lengths, like Noah Hawley's Legion or Fargo -- say, there's another one that comes right back to Ethan and Joel).

Mostly I see this resulting in longer episodes -- maybe a show goes a full hour instead of forty-five minutes, or a full half-hour instead of twenty-two. But why not shorter? Why not fifteen minutes? Why not fifteen minutes one episode and thirty the next?

The new Twilight Zone series would be perfect for a format like that, but I suspect they'll be keeping it around the half-hour mark. Still, it feels like somebody is bound to start playing with the scripted TV format with episodes of wildly varying lengths, and the recent resurgence of anthology-style shows seems like a good place to do it.

Glaivin'

2019-03-07, 6:06 am
Categories: Games, Movies, Stream of Consciousness

I don't play many new games anymore. I played Spider-Man because it came with my PS4, but since I finished it I've switched to something a couple years older: Final Fantasy 15.

I haven't been playing it long, just...*looks at save file*...Jesus, twelve hours? Anyway, I'm on Chapter 3. And so far I'm really enjoying it.

I dig the setting. Final Fantasy has been doing this "let's juxtapose fantasy with a quasi-modern world" routine since 7, and it's a lot more fully-realized here than it was then. Still not perfect -- city planning does not work that way, guys; you don't pass the limits of a major city and immediately find yourself off in a big empty desert with only an occasional gas station; the transition tends to be more gradual than that -- but still, the dissonance is a lot less glaring than FF7's transition from Midgar to a big empty overworld.

Actually, to a large extent, the dissonance is what I like about it. Taking things that shouldn't go together and then mooshing them together. This is a game that starts off with...well, I can't seem to get the intro to embed (I suspect a music rights thing), but if you haven't seen it, check it out on YouTube.

As I was saying: This is a game that starts out with a barrage of fantasy tropes -- the king in his castle saying farewell to his son, who's leaving to marry a princess to secure peace with the Empire -- and then cuts to the party pushing a broken-down car while Stand By Me plays. It is instantly one of my favorite video game openings ever.

The game doesn't retain quite that level of quality throughout. But even where it falls short, I like it, at least so far. I like ambitious failures. Here's how Brent described it:

As long as you keep the "FF15 has been in development for 10 years" fact firmly in mind the whole exercise is interesting from a how-do-you-make-something-mostly-complete-out-of-this aspect.

Did you notice the one part of the game where there was supposed to be a rad as fuck boss but they only got as far as modeling and not rigging the rad as fuck boss so they had you go and take a look at how rad as fuck the boss's model is and everybody comments on how rad as fuck the model looks and then you get a cutscene explaining why you don't need to actually fight the rad as fuck boss and then you just fuck off?

Not gonna lie, I love stuff like that. It's like the best kind of soup, the "if you've got it, just toss it in the pot" kind.

I love stuff like that too.

And you know what else is overambitious about this game? Kingsglaive: Final Fantasy 15.

Kingsglaive is a movie that occurs before and during the first chapter of FF15. It fleshes out some major plot points -- in a way that's, frankly, kind of ill-conceived, because there's at least one major scene in FF15 that lacks some pretty important context if you haven't seen the movie.

Spoilers for Kingsglaive and the ending of the first chapter of Final Fantasy 15 follow.

At the end of the first chapter of FF15, the kingdom of Lucis falls. And in the game, you don't really have a lot of context about just what the hell is going on. You've never seen the Emperor or General Glauca before, and you're given little context for who they are. Clearly the big spiky guy stabbing the king is a bad guy, but...you're given no other information on who he is or what his deal is, except that the peace agreement was a ruse and Niflheim has sacked Insomnia.

Do you even see the general again? I don't know. He kinda gets incinerated at the end of Kingsglaive, but maybe he gets better. I don't know for sure, but...it kinda looks like the game shows a scary-looking dude murdering the protagonist's father, never explains who he is, and then maybe he never appears again? That's...not great storytelling. That makes Kingsglaive less an ancillary cross-media spinoff and more an essential part of the story that is neither included with the game nor explained by it.

But I'm underselling just how baffling the entire endeavor is.

Because shunting a major, game-changing event off into a spinoff movie isn't the weirdest thing about it. It isn't even the weirdest thing about that scene.

Because the climax of Kingsglaive -- the betrayal at the signing ceremony, the fall of Lucis -- is intercut with Nyx and Lunafreya fighting a giant monster. And not just any giant monster.

Giant Purple Octopus
Kingsglaive: Final Fantasy 15
© 2016 Square Enix

That's Ultros. From Final Fantasy 6. This guy.

ULTROS: Mwa ha ha! Let's see if Maria can shrug THIS off!
Final Fantasy 3
© 1993 Square Enix
Screencap courtesy of Blastinus at Let's Play Archive

The movie cuts back and forth between the fall of Lucis -- guards being stabbed, bombs dropping on the city, the Emperor pulling a gun on the King -- and the octopus who tried to drop a 4-ton weight on an opera.

It is insanely, spectacularly wrong, and it is absolutely hands-down my favorite scene in the movie.

How did this happen? What was the thought process here? "Newcomers to Final Fantasy will just see a generic monster. But longtime fans will be wracked with the giggles!"

Obviously Final Fantasy is self-referential as all hell, and some of that was to be expected. But there's a pretty big difference between, say, playing the main Final Fantasy theme as background music early in the movie, and introducing Ultros during the climax.

But there's also something quintessentially Final Fantasy about it. This series is chock-full of sudden and inexplicable tonal shifts. I've talked about this before, back in my Final Fantasy 7 and Iconic Images post in 2011: FF7 goes from Barret's somber battle to the death with Dyne straight to chocobo racing. Bombs dropping while the heroes fight a tonally-inappropriate Easter egg? Just like the games!

And something that weird and singular saves the movie from being boring.

Because Kingsglaive is boring. It's very pretty; as a two-hour tech demo, it definitely demos the tech. But the characters are thinly-sketched, the villains' motivations and the plot twists don't make a whole lot of sense, and the climax feels like a Godzilla movie without the fun or the charm. It feels like the movie is focused entirely on showing really cool locations, monsters, and fights. It does that. But not much else.

In its own way, the Ultros fight is one more of those striking juxtapositions I like so much. Final Fantasy 15 starts out with high fantasy tropes and then immediately swerves into being a road trip movie. And Kingsglaive intercuts the serious and the silly. It doesn't really work, exactly, but I still love it.

There's an old Simpsons line where Marge tells Homer she doesn't hate him for failing, she loves him for trying. Whatever FF15's faults -- and I'm sure I'll find more of them as I get farther in the game -- they seem to be the result of overambition. And you know what? That's a good kind of failure. An interesting kind. Square Enix tried some things nobody else had ever done here. In some cases, at least, it turns out that there's a good reason nobody else has done those things. But if you're going to mess up, at least find a new and interesting and, perhaps, spectacular way to do it.

Hey, This Stephen King Guy is Pretty Good

2019-03-04, 6:08 am
Categories: Books, Status Updates, Stream of Consciousness

I made it to my mid-thirties without ever reading a Stephen King book.

It wasn't some kind of hipster thing; I wasn't consciously avoiding him because he's popular. And it wasn't that I don't generally read horror novels, either, because of course he's got plenty of output in other genres. No, I just never got around to it, even though I've enjoyed movie adaptations of his work for years.

I read On Writing a year or two back, and a few months back I picked up the first three Dark Tower books at Bookmans and I've been working through those. And you know what? I think this guy's pretty good.

He's certainly got a gift for storytelling. And for words. And symbolism, and character, and he's got a real sense for how to juxtapose images in interesting ways. I've never read Ready Player One, or seen the movie, but from what I've read about it I have the impression that Ernest Cline was trying to mix together familiar iconography in the kind of evocative way that King does in Dark Tower, but simply doesn't have King's chops.

But more than anything, I think the reason King's so damn appealing and resonates with so many people is that it's so obvious he's having fun.

Mark Evanier told a story about Harlan Ellison shouting, "I have just written the greatest fuckin' sentence I have ever written!" before running out his front door and dancing naked on his front porch. Evanier mused that this was why Ellison's writing was so good: because he was the sort of person who was so enthusiastic about what he was writing that he'd dance naked on his front porch, and because that enthusiasm was clear in the final product.

I'm not aware of Stephen King ever dancing naked on his front porch. But he's got the same kind of enthusiasm for his work that Ellison did, and it's infectious.

The first three Dark Tower books are all I've got. I finished those and I'm going to take a break from the series before I pick up the rest. I've got plenty else to read -- I just started Good Omens, and I'm also chest-deep into a Valiant Comics bundle, which I'll probably have a lot to say about when I get to the end of it. But I'm glad I finally took the time to read some King. The guy's good, and his popularity is well-earned.

Does Whatever a Spider-Pig Does

2019-02-25, 6:06 am
Categories: Cartoons, Comics, Movies

I finally got around to seeing Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse.

...actually, I saw it like a month ago, and that's when I wrote this post. But then I got some kind of flu or something and I'm only now just getting around to posting it. But hey, now it's timely, because it is now Academy Award winner for Best Animated Feature Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. Anyway:

I finally got around to seeing Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. And it blew me away.

Mothra on Brontoforumus described it as the best comic-book movie he'd ever seen. When I read that comment, I assumed he meant the best movie based on a comic. Now that I've seen it, I'm thinking he must have meant the movie that best translated the medium of comics onto the screen.

I'm inclined to agree. It does some really cool shit with comic-style layouts (like the new DuckTales opening titles, if they were two hours long). Where movies like Persepolis and Sin City are straight off the page, Spider-Verse adapts the page itself. In a funny way, I think the movie makes a good defense of Ang Lee's Hulk -- because you can watch Spider-Verse and see that this is what Lee was trying to do with those splitscreen tricks. He couldn't quite stick the landing, but I've always thought it was a fascinating approach -- and Spider-Verse takes those ideas and makes them work.

Plus, after 35 years of "Biff! Pow! Comics aren't just for kids anymore!" headlines, it's nice to see a movie that's finally unselfconscious enough to put sound effects up on the screen.

And the plot -- somehow, a movie that's packed with heroes, villains, and parallel dimensions manages to feel lean and tight. I think part of that is that the script (by Phil Lord and Rodney Rothman) knows who to focus on (Miles > Peter > Gwen > the rest; Kingpin > Prowler > Doc Ock > the rest). It also trusts the audience: not only do Lord and Rothman trust that they don't need to explain who Doc Ock is; they trust that the very idea of a bunch of different versions of Spider-Man from parallel universes is a fit premise for a kids' movie.

They're right.

I took my seven-year-old nephew to see it. He didn't have any problem understanding the many-worlds premise. Granted, it's not the first time he's seen a superhero multiverse; both the 2003 and 2012 versions of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles teamed up with the 1987 versions at one time or another. But the point is, this is a kids' movie that treats kids like they're smart.

School of Wizardry

2018-08-06, 7:50 am
Categories: Games, Stream of Consciousness, Tech

I've been listening to Jeremy Parish's interview with Robert Woodhead, the co-creator of Wizardry. It's a great interview and recommended.

I think about Wizardry sometimes. I first played it on the Mac.

If you pull up the original Wizardry on archive.org, or if you go looking for screenshots, here's the kind of thing you can expect to see:

Wizardry for Mac with lineart dungeon graphics
Via Hardcore Gaming 101, which has a great comparison of the various editions of the game.

You can get more detailed maze graphics by maximizing the window, but at 512x342 that comes at the cost of having to move other windows on top of each other to fit:

Wizardry for Mac with detailed dungeon graphics
I took this screenshot myself.

Of course, if you want to get fancy, you can try emulating a later version of MacOS with a higher resolution, and then you'll have plenty of room. Like these madmen here:

At any rate, I've gone back and tried some of the other versions of Wizardry, but I still think the Mac version is the best, with its GUI and its more detailed graphics. It's not perfect -- look how small the maze window is, even at its larger size; and why does the Castle window need to be visible when you're in the maze? -- but the game is well-suited for a point-and-click, drag-and-drop interface.

The first five Wizardry games aren't currently sold for modern systems, but GOG and Steam both sell Wizardry 6 bundled with DOSbox. So why not sell the Mac versions of the earlier games and bundle them with Mini vMac? I guess I'm not sure what the legality is of distributing old versions of the MacOS; they might need a license from Apple in addition to getting one from whatever company owns Wizardry these days.

I've also often wondered why nobody's ever remade the original Wizardry for modern computers, taking the Mac version as a base and adding quality-of-life improvements. The closest thing I've ever seen is a Japanese remake of the first three games called Wizardry: Llylgamyn Saga that was released for Windows (as well as PlayStation and Saturn) in 1998.

Wizardry: Llylgamyn Saga for Windows
Via Hardcore Gaming 101

Llylgamyn Saga is not quite what I'm talking about; I tried it a few years back and my impression was that it was a Windows port of a console game and its interface felt like it. It simply didn't handle as smoothly with a mouse as the Mac version.

What I'd like to see? Remake the original game. Use touchscreen devices as the primary platform. Copy Etrian Odyssey's mechanic of using the touchscreen to map the dungeon as you go, the way we had to use graph paper in the old days.

Etrian Odyssey Untold 2
Etrian Odyssey Untold 2
Via Jeremy Parish -- him again! -- at USgamer

Using half a phone screen wouldn't be so different from EO using the DS/3DS touchscreen. The biggest immediate hurdle I can think of is fat fingers: Etrian Odyssey is designed for a stylus; drawing with a finger would mean the grid squares would have to be larger. Pinch-to-zoom would be a good idea, or just a toggle to zoom the map in or out. Build to accommodate different resolutions; there's no reason a tablet user should be stuck with a map that's sized for a phone. Of course you could hide the map during combat, menu navigation, in town -- anywhere where it's not necessary. Use a point-and-click, drag-and-drop interface similar to the Mac version; when you go into town, you can drag-and-drop characters between the active party and the reserves.

Add some modern quality-of-life improvements, too. Obviously the weapons shop should behave like it would in a modern RPG: compare a highlighted weapon to the weapon a character currently has equipped. (If it'll fit onscreen, show how it compares to the weapons every character has equipped.)

And allow users to toggle the oldschool rules. Let them play with original inscrutable spell names, or with simple, plain-English ones. Allow them to disable characters aging on a class change, or the possibility of a teleport spell going wrong and permakilling the entire party. Hell, allow a mode where players can navigate through the maps they've made and point to the square they want to teleport to, or even set waypoints so they don't have to do that every time. Maybe even allow them the option of seeing monsters, treasure chests, and other points of interest before walking into them.

Once you've rebuilt the first game in this new engine, it wouldn't be hard to do the second and third. 4-7 would require more work but would be possible. Probably not 8, as it abandons the grid format in favor of free movement.

Hell, open it up. Since I'm dreaming anyway, I might as well say open-source the whole thing -- but failing that, at least release a level editor.

Maybe the best way to go about this would be for a fan group to start by creating a game that's Wizardry-like but noninfringing -- similar D&D-style rules, similar generic fantasy races, classes, and monsters, but different maps, spells, enemy behaviors, etc. -- and then, once they've released a finished game, make an offer to whoever it is who owns the Wizardry copyrights these days to port the original games to the new engine.

A man can dream.

Creator-Owned Ditko

2018-07-20, 7:28 am
Categories: Comics, Stream of Consciousness

I've been meaning to write a post about Steve Ditko's creator-owned comics for quite some time. Ditko's recent death has me thinking about that, and so, here's something. I'd still like to write something a little more detailed later on down the line, but this should serve for now.

Steve Ditko stopped working for mainstream comics publishers in the 1990s, but he never stopped making comics. For the past 20 years, Ditko's comics have been published by his friend, editor, and collaborator Robin Snyder. Ditko has also written essays, some of which appear alongside his comics, others of which appear in Snyder's zine The Comics, and others in 9 small pamphlets called The Four-Page Series. Since 2013, Snyder has funded twenty Ditko comics on Kickstarter, with more to come; Snyder noted in a Kickstarter update last month that he and Ditko were working on two new titles, and a prior Kickstarter update discussed out-of-print books that Snyder intends to send back to press.

Snyder does not have a website, but Bob Heer's ditko.blogspot.com is an invaluable resource, and its Ditko Books in Print page serves as a catalog of what Snyder has available and how to order it.

Of course, merely seeing a list of titles can be daunting. Where to start?

The most in-depth article I've seen on this subject is Steve Ditko Doesn’t Stop: A Guide To 18 Secret Comics By Spider-Man’s Co-Creator, written by Joe McCulloch for ComicsAlliance in 2013. You should read that.

But if you want my opinion? You should start with The Mocker.

Of the Ditko books Snyder has on offer as of this writing, it's the most accessible, the one that feels the most like Ditko's work for Marvel, DC, and Charlton. It's a straightforward, tightly-told story of a costumed crusader fighting organized crime and corrupt police.

I only have one complaint about The Mocker: it was clearly intended to be printed at a much larger size. Ditko fits a lot of panels on each page, starting with 16-panel grids and eventually settling on 20. The comic was originally printed at magazine size; reduced to standard comic size, it's often difficult to tell what's happening and to tell characters apart, especially in action scenes. (Ditko sure draws a lot of men in suits and fedoras punching each other.)

After The Mocker, there are a few different directions you can go. The most obvious is Mr. A, Ditko's best-known creator-owned series -- if you're interested enough in Ditko that you've read this far, you probably already know who Mr. A is, at least in passing. My favorite Mr. A stories are When is a Man Judged Evil? and Right to Kill; both appear in a 32-page comic that's just called Mr. A -- which, sadly, is currently out of print. I'm quite fond of the whole series, though; there's good stuff in every issue. I believe #4 contains the earliest Mr. A material that's in print, while #24 and #7 are the two latest issues (in that order, and no, I don't understand the numbering) and include the two-part story The Knifer.

Alternately, I'm partial to Miss Eerie, one of Ditko's later creations and another masked vigilante in a 1930s setting. She appears in Ditko Presents and The 32-Page Series #3, #6, #14, #20, #23, and #26. The 32-Page Series itself is an anthology comic and something of a grab bag; it's a great, eclectic collection of Ditko's late work.

From there? Well, I was all set to recommend Avenging World, a collection of comics and essays that I consider to be Ditko at his purest -- but, sadly, it's out of print. Here's hoping that changes.

For my part, I have varying degrees of affection for everything Ditko did. His comics are often eccentric and didactic; his essays are often impenetrable puzzle boxes. But he always had something interesting to say. He was one-of-a-kind. I'm going to miss him -- but for now, at least, I can expect a few more new Ditko comics still to come, and older Ditko comics like Static to become available again.