Grefter Editorialythingstuffs, not all RPG related (I hate you)

[Grefter]

The reasons everyone should play Deus Ex.

Everyone should play Deus Ex.  Not just because it is one of the most widely positively viewed games you can find around and not just because it is one of the "classics" that missing is like being a Cinema buff and not having seen Schindler's List.  It should be played because it is the game that grabs half the crazy ideas you and your friends have ever had for a game and makes it work.

Do you remember when you just watched the Matrix and guys in long coats from the future that took on armies of dudes with assault rifles with pistols was cool?  This game does that.  Remember when you read about Nanotechnology and thought it was the coolest thing ever and how it would let you fix damaged organs in cancer patients?  Well it doesn't do that, instead it lets you lift giant crates, regenerate from any wound and detonate anti-armour small arms as soon as they are fired at you with your mind, which is almost as cool as the cancer thing.  This is the game that took your young impressionable ideas of super megacorporations led by hypercompetent villains that buy out the government branches while forming the Illuminati come to life in a fully realised world.  It is terribly melodramatic and plays it so straight that it is delightful.  Topping it all off?  The game is just damned fun to play.

Call me old fashioned but that is the main reason to play the game.  Ignore all the hype for it and ignore the plot.  You just have a game that is straight up fun to play.  You have choices from the very start on how you want to shape your journey picking skills that will determine your approaches to your objectives.  What is this swimming skill?  I am a super secret agent man I won't need that!  And you won't.  Unless you choose to go that route!  Then for a cheap investment you can effectively swim underwater for about 10 minutes.  Even splashing into a few different areas is rewarding, there is no need to hyperfocus on one or two skills when being passignly competent at lockpicking, bypassing electronic security and computer hacking all will provide you a wide array of ways to approach your objectives.  There is no need to be a perfect shot with a rifle if you can take that side door and have as long as you want to line up your shots.

Then of course there is simple choices that are not even effected by your choices of skills, do you roll out guns blazing or do you take a more tactically minded stealthy approach, both are just as viable as one another.  One obviously trends more towards your skill choices being combat based clearly, but there is distinct variations to both paths that can be taken even still.

Most importantly however is that not only does the game give you all these tools to play with, it gives you sandboxes to use them in.  Not a big vast open world to do as you will to your hearts content, but carefully crafted sequences of challenges for you to meet.  Some paths may be more difficult than others given your skillset, but enough searching or persistencecan even see you through paths that are counter to your chosen skillset if you insist on proceeding.  This isn't a case of sequence breaking, but rewarding self set goals, you are on the path you chose for yourself.  Of course that is assuming you just stick to one path.  For those slightly more obsessive players the world is so well populated that the more you search the more of the fully realised world you will experience.  You can run around a part of Paris and find a drug dealer asking you to break into a nearby bakery to steal some drugs hidden in the oven overnight.  You only run into encounters like this by exploration, both the dealer and the bakery are entirely optional areas of a larger section of a Paris city area.  Don't let my description of it not being an open world mislead you.  The game has its boundaries and limited areas, but these are big areas that you can easilly sink some time into.

It is a game of choice and consequences, not all of which are rewards, but never are an unexpected punishment.  There are at times even rewards for pushing the game in directions that are counter to what people are telling to you do in game.  It creates for a wholely unique gaming experience.  A world with a refined plot that will swerve if the player pushes it and keep running, a shooter that is refined to the point where gunfire is something that can be largely ignored and if you desire lethal approaches even completely bypassed, in some cases it even being the safe route to disabling a target.  There is boss fights and they can all be bypassed or completely ignored if desired.  The largest criticism for the choices you will find is likely that some of the choices are fairly shallow or are presented and immediately resolved, however the game comes ahead with the sheer number of choices that you have all creating their own little minor permutations on what is still a largely carefully constructed story that someone wants to say.  This is choice without "But thou must!" or same responses to alternate dialogues.  This is a game where choice is something you make and you deal with the consequences of it and the game keeps going.  Events are bigger than the player themself, but the player is still a central actor in the larger story.

So yes.  You should play this game whoever you are that is reading this.  Yes you Ralp.  Andrew. Or Gregory.  Whatever your name is.  You there with the eye and maybe another one to the left or right of it.  This is a fantastic game and one that you should have played already, but if you are still reading this then you are clearly not playing it or replaying it right now.  Get to it.  It costs a tenner.  At the time of typing this you can get it for a $20 with one of the greatest examples of how to not learn anything from your predecessor and the follies of restricting all versions of a game because of one platforms weaknesses.  There is even currently a Square Enix sale going on with this and a bunch of other stuff for $75 if you are so inclined (19/02/11 sale is about to end even). 

The game is amazing.  The game is available and it is old enough that it will run on almost anything you can get your hands on.  There is bug fixes that should fix almost any issues you can see.

Once you are done playing it you should also watch the mind blowing speed run of it to watch a man Air Surf grenades off buildings to stop from dying or using them to teleport through walls.

Edit - On the off chance that anyone ever listens to a word I say when I tell you that this game that is awesome that you will play and go "Oh my gods that was awesome why did no one ever tell me about this game!??!?!?", there is a modded executable you can get that will let you play a the game a bit more consistently on newer systems.  http://kentie.net/article/dxguide/ Of great note is also this work that he has done http://kentie.net/article/d3d10drv to enable DirectX 10 support to the game so you can do some fairly neat things to take some of the rough edges off the game graphically (specifically enable V-Sync which does just that).

[Luther Lansfeld]

We need more Grefter the Fashionista.

[superaielman]

I will second that Deus Ex rant. It's just delightfully put together from top to bottom and does a great job at letting either explore or charge straight ahead.

[Dark Holy Elf]

I'm not sure why I haven't played Deus Ex yet.

Rest assured that when I do I will rant and rave about how nobody recommended me this game, now go play this undiscovered jewel.

[Grefter]

It is a first person game and you play with a touch pad is probably why.  Or you could play the PS2 version.  Then I make fun of you.

I should probably grab my fashion rants and Golden Sun rants and throw them in here (Maybe edit together?).

[Dark Holy Elf]

I thought it could be played with a keyboard? That is how I always choose to play FPS games on computer. If it can't, that might be why I haven't played more of it. Man, fuck mouse FPS.

[Grefter]

You uh can, it does actually come from the era where the default controls had that as an option.  It controls infinitely more imprecisely though, but whatever floats your boat (you can tell you grew up on a Mac there Marathon boy).

[Grefter]

The Ten days of Soddom a log of Golden Sun: Dark Dawn

Here is a condesned version of my posts regarding Golden Sun: Dark Dawn.  A game that everyone should play as a way to know what not to do with RPGs.  Note that this takes place over a month or so as play takes place mostly on the bus to and from work or just prior to sleeping.  That and I just plain had better things to do, like eat lead paint chips and to defecate on Police officers in an attempt to get myself away from this game.

20/12/10  Day 1

I have started Golden Sun DD as well, why I have spent money on it I don't know.  I just needed something different to play.  I am loving it.  It is bad in all the ways I expect GS to be, it is easy, stupid and it sucks hard.

On the other hand I get to make Matthew make ANGRY FACE in response to every piece of dialogue and laugh at how inappropriately the game interprets that response to be.  Like Garret's retarded son being a retard ANGRY FACE and Garret snaps back at you telling you not to get pissy at him.

On the other hand though, the world did not need to know that Garret grows up to have a pornstache in his mid forties.

31/12/10  Day 2

I don't feel like actually saying all this again because yeah. A chunk of text from IRC are quoted here

<Grefter> Sooooooooooooo.
<Grefter> Golden Sun Dark Dawn just went to a really dark place.
<hinode> ff.net?
<Xeroma> as in can't see shit on the screen?
<Grefter> No as in it shocked me and I had to close my DS.
<Grefter> Go to get the Ice gem thing from a ruin so that I can make big blocks of ice.
<Xeroma> uh oh
<Grefter> You come across the Ice Queen.
<Grefter> "NO Don't take me back I don't want to be a slave ever again."
<Grefter> So boss fight ensues against this women against her will.
<Grefter> ACTUAL LINE FROM TYRELL AFTERWARDS.
<Grefter> "I guess she knows her place now."
<Grefter> Wow.
<Grefter> Just fucking wow.
<Namagomi> ...jegus wtf
<Xeroma> that's bad even for GS writing
<Grefter> Five across the eyes and go make me a sandwich.
* Soppy-ClearGenderRoles is now known as Soppy-CLEARGENDERROLES

Covers it.

What the fuck Camelot.

31/12/10  Addendum

Only posting it here so that they are together because I feel bad that people are going to be skipping Dark Dawn because of one line.

When I stopped going oh my god they actually had that line and opened up my DS there was a bit more context to it.  Karis says that she feels bad about forcing it on the spirit against her will and Tyrell does some embararssed sad face emoticon thing.  Someone wonders whether the spirits came first or if the stones that they are kept in came first.

Then the monk dude from the first games that had been tricked into freeing her says "It doesn't matter she is back where she belongs now".

Camelot:  What do you say to a woman with 2 black eyes?  Nothing, she has already been told twice.

Keep it classy.

31/12/10 Response to why are you playing this game?

To revel in mediocrity.  I think Golden Sun is a very important RPG series.  It shows what happens when you make an RPG and know exactly how it all goes together without actually putting any thought or effort into it thereby making an utterly shit game that gets all the essentials right.

Also managing to do this three times, each time getting critical acclaim and great reviews.

04/01/11 Day 3

So some people wanted more Golden Sun Dark Dawn nonsense.  I haven't been playing it much becase it is stupid.

But anyway, so after sending the women back to the kitchen you can now restart the Alchemy Forge in one town that you have gone back and forward to constantly so that you can fly to another mountain peak so that you can try to go back to your original fetch quest.  This game is matryoshka doll of fetch quests much like BoF 2 is.

NOTE: FROM THIS POINT ON THERE IS NO DIALOGUE IN GAME.   

Anyway, so you fly to the other mountain by going through a short floating platform sequence.  Then the only thing you can do over there is go into some ruins and start up a series of clockwork devices by solving horoscope themed puzzles.  Once you have all them started the Sagitarius puzzle (the last one) causes the mirror outside the temple entrance to have an arrow shoot out of it.  You exit out of the ruins again and use Grip synergy on the arror and it starts the mirror swinging as it was a pendulum on a giant horoscope clock.  Because you started this clock a path down from the mountain levitates up from no where and you exit to the world map.

I have no words to describe what the fuck here.  This is what I mean when I say the game has all the key things to make a decent RPG.  There is a long sequence to get to the next town, a series of puzzles and fairly short challenges.  There is just nothing connecting these things, no reason for them, no explanation for them at all and no way at all of knowing the effect these things will have.  Why do you solve these puzzles?  Because they are there and it will probably get you to the next place.  Somehow.

Who the hell made this ruin?  Why would you make it like this?  This was supposedly a special road that ancient civilisation used.  How did the path levitate?  How do you make that work on clockwork?  Why the hell is it on a horoscope clock?  lolanswers

Worst part of it?  There was actually a block puzzle Lufia styles where you have 3 blocks to put in spots without overlapping the paths of the blocks that I looked up the answer for online because I was lazy and didn't feel like thinking about puzzles at 8 in the morning on the bus to work while I am listening to a podcast.  Easy puzzle, just feeling lazy.   You want to know what the answer was? LOL CAST THIS SPELL THE GAME GIVES YOU IT WILL TELL YOU THE ANSWER.

This game has easy puzzles and then like 1/4 of the way through the game it gives you a solve the fucking puzzle spell. 
Note that this doesn't quite end up being as bad as it sounds, there isn't many other places the spell actually tell you where to move objects around, just tell you when you can certain Psynergy on objects.  So I guess instead of a solve puzzle spell it is a solve mildly thought invoking puzzles spell

05/01/11  Response again to why are you playing this game?

Similar reasons to why I played FF13.  I payed full price for entry on this ride, so I sure as shit am finishing it.

06/01/11 Day 4

So we finally stopped dicking around and made it to the town where we should meet Kraden that is right next to the mountain area where we can find the Mountain Roc and get to the outer layer of the Matroyshka Doll fetch quest.  FUCK YES SOMETHING MIGHT HAPPEN.  The new recruit left and asked us to get the band to play a specific and she would come back in town.

Can't find the dude in town.  The band doesn't have an option to pick the song to summon the chick.  So you leave town.  You get some dialogue of lol couldn't find that bitch or dude.  Then 2 of the band members that can play the song mention that they are going on journeys and that someone else is already on a journey and that there is only 6 people in the world that can play the song.

You are fucking kidding me.

07/01/11 Discussing why it is stupid to throw a stupidly easy fetch quest for you to talk to people that show up along the way during the main plot so that you can summon second Wind user recruit

They didn't have to do that though.  Svelta clearly wanted nothing at all to do with getting the Roc feather and that she was cool to wait until you had done that shit before coming to chill with the party.  That is all they needed to justify it.

07/01/11 Day 5

The game threw out some more fetch quests and then it crashed.  I lost back to before the band incident.  Not sure when I will pick it back up.

11/01/11 Day 6

So I forced myself to play through the parts I knew.  This game goes much faster when you know exactly where you are going and where to search in town for all the hidden stuff worth shit.  I am now falling asleep to uncurse a tree or something.  Again I am not exactly sure why this is happening.  I thought I was supposed to be saving some pirates kid from being boiled alive, but hey I ended up in this town, talked to a woman and she said to do it.  So it is happening.

Also a side plot that only really comes up in books and in one area of the game (has been expanded in books in like every town since that one area) is the exploits of Emperor Ko and his general failings as a human being.  I approve of this message.

13/01/11 Day 7

Fuck this game.  Fuck it in its stupid fucking everything.  It pushed beyond the point of mediocrity in how far it will stretch being mind numbingly dull.  The fetch quests have no end in sight as the fetch quest that started the game is resolution to another fetch quest that we only just recently got (that we still have other things spiral off to fetch to get answers from).  I lost my patience with a 10 minute text scroll of bad dialogue between a Djinn and 2 Trees that told us that the princess fetch quests were in another castle.  I hate everything.

13/01/11 Response to "So the game is Lufia 1?"

No.  Lufia 1 is a fucking masterpiece compared to this shit.  Lufia 1 has actual classical story telling techniques in it.  Lufia 1 is regardless of all the bullshit an overarching plot that is a love story.

This game is about getting a feather to fix a jetpack that some dick head broke.  I am about to get that feather and in doing so going to keep going with more sidequest bullshit that oh my god just make it fucking stop.

I am clearly not framing this properly.  There has been a single sequence with the main villains at this point it is a good few hours into the game and is long out of sight by now.  One scene with someone who is probably a lackey that was never properly defined and happened a couple of hours after the main villains.  Otherwise there has been absolutely zero interaction with your antagonists.  It has just been chains of fetch quests to do completely bat shit insane random bullshit.

That is right.  This is a game about a magic back pack and it is FUCKING BORING AS SHIT.  HOW THE FUCK DO YOU SCREW THIS UP.

I haven't been this pissed off about a game since FF13 god fucking dammit.

13/01/11 Transcript of IRC during the above posts.  Presented to you by DjinnAndTonic who felt the need to log my bursts of anger.

[00:19]   <Grefter>   ;'jklfdsff THIS GAME
[00:20]   <Grefter>   So go through a forest maze in Golden Sun. Jump on a Tree branch. Get lifted up and talk to a tree with a face on it. Half way through the conversation the party gets suprised by a talking cliff right behind them that they didn't see.
              <Grefter>   This entire fucking game is full of "ERrrr what do we do here? Oh I know talking cliff from original games"
[00:21]   I wish someone had been actually physically pregnant with the idea of this game.
   So I could build a time machine and punch them in the stomach.
   <Grefter>   So then the fact that this game is a complete and total miscarriage would at least be my fault.

   <Grefter>   Wait, sorry, it isn't a talking cliff.
   It is an arse ugly tree that just looks like it is made of rock.
[00:25]   <Grefter>   STOP TALKING OH MY GODS JUST STOP TALKING
   <Grefter>   For fucks sake.
   So much stupid shitty dialogue to get a fetch quest.
   And it still isn't over.
[00:28]   <superaielman>   You really make that game sound worse than GS1.
   <Grefter>   We have to have the next part of another fetch quest pushed along.
   <superaielman>   And that is pretty damn bad
[00:29]   <Grefter>   It should be played.
   FUCK YOUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU
   FUCK FUCKING FUCK YOU
   <Grefter>   The solution to the next fetch quest?
[00:30]   Involves resolving the fetch quest that starts the fucking game.
   MY GODS I WANT TO FUCKING PUNCH SOMETHING>
[00:31]   <SageAcrin>   So basically they decided that what people liked about Golden Sun was "Everything" and didn't bother examining anything and instead cloned GS1 in a haphazard way that accidentally made more fetchquests, then tossed in GS2's battle system.
   I see.
   <Grefter>   SO MANY FETCH QUESTS.
   I can't keep up with why we are going fucking anywhere anymore.
[00:32]   <Grefter>   AND THEY ARE STILL TALKING.
[00:33]   <Grefter>   Subtracting five minutes for me to bitch about it.
   <Grefter>   That is 10 minutes of raw text scroll.
   To be told to go away.
   I hate this game.
   This is the first time I actually ahve hated it.
   Not just it being bad.
   <Grefter>   I just straight up fucking hate it now.
[00:36]   <Grefter>   Nonononononon onononononon o don't make my read more tlaking after walking one screen.

[00:39]   <Grefter>   stoptalkingstoptalkingstoptalking

24/01/11 Day8

Played more.  I am just blindly following the walkthrough at this point.  I am honestly not sure how the fuck you are meant to know where to go between these towns.  They don't mention each other or give directions.  The walkthrough tells me to go there and the plot keeps flowing.

26/01/11 Day 9

Things happen more.  People keep talking.  Lots of people are dead because of the Eclipse thing!  Shame that like it is only people without names.  Couple of people you don't care about are dead. woooooooooooo

29/01/11  Day 10

Coincidentally just finished it also.

I don't really understand how you can say all that stuff above and say the game is decent, but we never really see eye to eye on games and look for different things in games, so eh what can you do.

The last ton of the game is more of the same.  Random shit in the plot coming out of nowhere.  No plot resolution for the very first things you do in the game.  It is just a pile of nonsense to string together some gameplay.  If you want my opinion on the game just check every other post I have made about it.  At least for those I had something new to complain about.  Here the only thing I could add is the slow boat, which yeah is just boat is slow like Twil noted.

The final boss at least finally had something put up a fight though!  Go it!  Going in directly after the fight with the villains was actually a bad idea!  I should have just mashed attack on the boss before it because PP was actually an issue on this fight.  I had to use a whole Psycrystal on Matthew because of all the Odysseys I had cast and there was revival required.    Also the boss has damage, so healing is useful, there was even points where I wanted both MT healers on the field.  To highlight it even more he has a move that can strip targets of all Djinn, so you have to swap people around as well (first fight in the game I ever did that on).  Actually equipping Eoleo and Amiti properly instead of just using cast offs when I remembered to change their gear would have helped a bit.  Muliple Djinn classes have better stat bonuses so might have made the fight more manageable.  He is also probably still vulnerable to Summon spam.  Generally taking the game more seriously would likely have made it fairly trivial, but hey playing fairly casually it certainly tried a little bit which is more than anything else in the game had.

So to lazy to do stat topic  even super lazy mode on it.  So someone else is going to have to play it (AHAHAHA take that bitches).

Short notes.  Game sucked, has basic concepts of an RPG there, plenty of dialogue, stats, a combat system.  It uses none of them for anything remotely any good.


For reference the "Stuff above" there is Twilkitri on it.  Here is his post, not to hate on him or anything, I just can't quite work out how to make the above make sense without it for reference and it brings up some good points itself.  It works as something of a counterpoint for my anger and bile.

Golden Sun: Dark Dawn - finished

Not going to bother to do any aftergame things. Ended up permamissing a world map Djinn so for all I know they may be blocked off for me anyway. The heck do they still use world map Djinn at all, let alone in a game where big swathes of the map become inaccessible.

Game was decent in general.

Too many puzzles which you solve just because they're there and end up being necessary to have solved to progress. Follow path up mountain, nothing there but vaguely astrology-based puzzles? Of course you should spend time solving them without even dialoguing about the path having apparently ended. It was completely obvious that this would cause flying rocks to come out of nowhere to provide a path down.

On a different tack, setting up the Lens. There is seemingly only one correct position for each of the controls to be in, which is automatically selected when you manipulate them. Why weren't they in this position in the first place then? It's not exactly a knowledge or skills roadblock, since you need to use all the skills necessary to get to the place in the first place, and the characters never researched what settings would be required or anything.

The ship is too slow.

The emotional response system is atrocious. I hit angryface at every opportunity for the humour value and a large proportion of the time the reaction to this indicated that Matthew had gotten angry at a completely different person than expected. When the reactions were making sense in the first place anyway.

I can only assume that the 'spell that solves puzzles' antihype is referring to Insight. Which just indicates what psynergy would have any effect on any active objects on-screen. And consequently only solves 'puzzles' which consist solely of 'use some psynergy on something'. Way to go. This does solve puzzles such as SLAP THE SUN TO REVERSE ITS ROTATION but puzzles like that are stupid anyway, and your other option there would be just checking all your different psynergy to see whether it was a valid target. Also the 'puzzle' where the guy wanted some sort of food, but that was designed to demonstrate what Insight could do in the first place and in the second place using it on people never comes up again as far as I remember, unless you want to see the seemingly random emotional state they're feeling and that they are valid targets for Spirit Sense.

I would say that the game is superior to GS2. Not sure whether it's superior to GS1 or not though. Regardless of the layers of roadblocks before you get the ship, at least everything is fairly nicely structured. After you get the ship things turn into faux-free-roaming chicanery similar to GS2 except that all the interesting places are locked off until you get a particular spell.

Ultimately I do stand by my statements early that people should play this game.  It is certainly one of those bad games that people with an interest in design should partake of, particularly if you are into design concepts of JRPGs, which anyone here presumably is at least tangentially.  I wouldn't spend money on it brand new or anything, but if you can then borrow a copy or get it cheap second hand (so that the money goes to someone more deserving than the publisher of this tripe, you know like a parasite that is trying to not give money to people that supply them with product).

What next?  Maybe I will compile some of my posts making fun of clothing design in games.  Maybe even do some more.

[Grefter]

Michael Caine

So in my endeavour to continue to write more I have started to write based on requests, why think of my own material when other people can do it for me?

Cmdr King requested a tribut to Michael Caine and so we begin.

I can't recall the first Michael Caine movie I saw.  I do remember the first Michael Caine movie I went and saw purely on the strength of Michael Caine however.  Children of Men, Caine has an important but overall minor role as he does these daysplaying an old hippy.  My love for Children of Men extends far beyond just Michael Caine, but he is absolutely brilliant in it.  You quite easilly develop a far greater attachment to him than the lead male (who is also very good), he is a caring husband and something of a Sociologist revolutionary.  His ultimate demise is emotional blackmail at its finest.  Everyone knows him from his roles in the new Batman reboot where he plays Alfred almost to perfection, his lines about his time in Burma relating to how destruction is all that drives some people is one of the most memorable lines in a film full of quotable quotes.  This is the kind of character he has been playing on and off for nearly 20 years now, but there is far more to Michael Caine than the friendly old experienced man of the world type.

A much younger Michael Caine is a very powerful thing.  From greats such as Zulu, Alfie and The Italian Job where he is well remembered and highly praised, there is other treasures like the Harry Palmer series starting with the Ipcress File (available on Bluray I just found out today, just finished watching it, thanks CK, you managed to make me sink a $20 into this) and continuing with 2 more films from back in 60s.  Here he isn't a pretty man as you will commonly see in the modern interpretations of some of these films, but he is amazingly attractive, very masculine and funny.  Very much like his friend Sean Connery was in his youth.  If you haven't dug deep into Cinema of the past and want to just check out some good movies then grabbing things with Michael Caine in them are not a bad place to go to.  Be sure to not miss Get Carter amongst all these treasures.  They aren't unknown gems by any stretch of the imagination, but they are old enough that our generation is quite likely to have missed them.

After his take off you get the period that in his biography he refers to as the period where he stopped being cast as leading male roles and started playing people's fathers.  I am probably mistiming this somewhat, but I am going to say it is the mid 70's to 80's.  The highlights here to not miss are The Man Who Would Be King, starring himself and Sean Connery, based on the short story by Rudyard Kipling (which is also based on some real life events in Borneo and Ghor).  I have to admit this is easilly the biggest gap I have in my watching of his career as the next big great movie of his that I have seen in this era is Educating Rita which I had only seen recently, this is a movie that I couldn't quite explain my love for it even after processing it for a while.  It was a touching film that really pulled on my desire to return to university.  Suffice to say it is of the Good Will Hunting or Finding Forrester school of movie.  It is about education and really is up the alley of people that love education.  There is others from this era also that people will have seen, Jaws 2 for example.  One in particular that is a gap in my library also is The Jigsaw Man which I don't know a great deal about, but it stars Lawrence Olivier alongside Caine, which is pretty much a wet dream waiting to be watched.  Lawrence Olivier is a tale for another time though, suffice to say he is among many actors heroes.

Then we reach the 90s and onwards.  After the Muppet Christmas Carrol (not going to touch on this, everyone knows this one), there is a much more relaxed period of telemovies and so on.  Then there is The Cider House Rules.  The Cider House Rules is probably not the start of the more modern Michael Caine era but it is certainly the one to leave an impact for myself with him playing the elderly father figure to a young Toby Macguire, young being 3 years before the first Spiderman movie, so a known entity, but still one to catch you off guard.    There is a lot of fun films in here as well, Miss Congeniality, Austin Powers, a cameo of sorts in the Get Carter remake.  All of which let me tell you if you have a thing for a more refined elderly gentleman let me tell you, this will keep you going for a while and it is only uphill from here.  You get Batman movies, Children of Men, The Prestige all of which he shines through with an amazing performance that leaves you wanting more.  You also get a few films with a return to form as a lead actor with Is Anybody There (one I need to see myself also) and Harry Brown, which if anyone has heard me recently talk about is an amazingly rough movie to watch, but brilliant.  Michael Caine is more than capable of still playing a very hard man.  It is delicious in its violence and the sharp brutal (over the top) message that it sends.  A nice touch is that it is filmed in the rough neighbourhood that Michael Caine grew up in.

Also I have referenced it a few times, but he also has a biography out, The Elephant to Hollywood which is quite a read or listen if you prefer Audiobook format (which is how I consumed it, narrated by the man himself), well worth a look even if you are not a budding cinema buff like myself it is just an interesting story of an actor's life and career and if you like a sappy nice life story it is a good one, he is a very lucky man even with all his hard work.  Well worth the time you put into it.

So we are done.  I have enough demands for FASHION that I believe something along those lines, over porting old work or writing something original is in demand.

[Grefter]

No article today because some guy went and suggested a really good topic which has blown my past the quota I had been aiming for each day.  So expect something substantial in a day or two.  Might port over FASHION tomorrow afternoon after work.

[Grefter]

So guys it is time for the cops to arrive.  We are going to be calling you out on your terrible taste in clothing in video games!  We will also be starting so many sentences with OH that you won't even begin to believe.  Not like I can even begin to believe that I found a picture of Fashion Police that featured a sign with an arrow pointing to a hot Fashion Policewoman proudly pronouncing her to be a Dick Girl Rodeo.

Where do we begin?  There is so many choices, but this one is the easiest because I am blatantly copying and posting another post!  Lets being with some basics for the gents.

 

Oh my this man knows how to dress with style, not necessarilly class and distinction but very nice.  Only real downside is the tie is to bright to go with the dark shirt under than coat.  Earth tones was a good choice, but something darker would work better really.  Work with what you have guys, if you are a ruggedly handsome dude then you don't need to add much more because you are ruggedly handsome and in shape.



Really you are going to do that?  You are seriously going to do Wolverine hair?  Okay.  You try that man.  That isn't really what I was talking about, but you go right ahead.  I suppose at least you do have the build to pull off a shirt open that far down, nice to see a totally manly dude like you shaves his chest though.  I am not even going to dignify the coat with a mention.  Cool popped collar bro.


Oh wow.  Oh my indeed.  You are going to wear those glasses in public and expect them to take you seriously?  Okay I uh guess you can do that then.  Why am I looking at dudes here so much?



Don't you point at me like that.  Your dress is entirely inappropriate for what you are doing, that bleach job is extreme and if it isn't a wig now it is going to be in a few months time because that kind of extreme peroxide treatment does terrible things to your hair lady.  Well done on your amazingly careful job on shaving those arm pits though.  That must take an astounding level of dilligence to pull off every day.  Ignoring how amazingly inappropriate that dress is for midday wear like when we first meet you in game, I have to respect your dedication to the getup, you prove quite formidable in your eveningwear.  The full-length formal gloves do go well with the evening gown and the red piping is actually quite tasteful with the pattern on the front and the heart on the top of the glove (that we can't see hear while you are glorying us with your aforementioned pristinely shaven arm pits).  A shame about the boa, you do need to accessorise with that getup, but that isn't really the first port of call I would go to when something as simple as pearls would do the job.  They certainly would not scream out HOOKER quite like the boa and that collar do.

Again with the glasses though.  You look like you are planning to do the worlds first piece of formal welding.  Why are we looking at police here though?  This was supposed to be a series about attorneys at law.



Oh I see, because French Cuffs flared that far out with cuff links that are clearly made of glass are absolutely dreadful darling.  They really didn't need to be on both side of the cuff and they need to be about a quarter of the size.  Also big shoulders are so 30 years ago.  You are lucky you have the figure to pull off that waistcoat and it is real shame you ruin such well fitted sleeves on those puffy shoulders.



There isn't much to say here.  The purple is of course ridiculous, but making fun of a pimp for wearing purple is like making fun of a policeman in blue.  It is part of the Uniform.  You may as well go make fun of Prince for his taste in clothing.  That covers the Cravatt also.  What we are looking at here is a pimp in a three piece suit.  The hair is a pretty wicked Widow's Peak paired with either some crazy hair gel or even crazier amazing natural cowlicks.  Whatever you have you may as well work with it though.



At ease.  Well not that you could really be more at ease given you appear to be wearing pajamas.  Lucky you can totally pull it off with that whole cute look.  The hat is also a good idea because my gods your forehead is huge, it is like half your face and your eyebrows are half way up it, not at the bottom.  Accessorising intelligently to conceal and accentuate your features.  Well done miss.  Also of course we must end this on Cool popped collar bro.



Oh my, it is like looking into a mirror.  That is the exact same experssion I am making right now as I look at that outfit.  First off, the medal is stupid, put it in a show case, unless you just won in which case you have no right to look nearly as horrified as you do.  Now do us all a favour and find the person that suggested you wear a pink shirt with pink piping and a pink headband and drown them in a bucket of your own urine.  Then you plan to complete the look with a white sports jacket?  I hope you are intending to go to some kind of blacklight disco where you will look absolutely amazing in that getup, you will stand out like no one else there.  For future reference, gelling up the ends of your long hair does not excuse you of getting a haircut when it is required.  Consult a stylist before trying such horrible ideas in the future, you look like you are trying to impress everyone with a crown of thorns, you suffer for our sins by not cutting your hair and dressing horribly.  We also have a case of accessorising beyond the jacket that must be addressed here.  Fingerless gloves do not go with your outfit at all.  They are black and you are wearing pink and black.  The most amazing part however is the fact that they seem to be rolled up so we can see the inner lining at your wrists.  Which means either two things, you have fingerless gloves that go up to your elbows which is amazingly retarded or you have just cut the fingers off of a pair of women's opera gloves.  I am not sure which is worse.  Again we must note Cool popped collar bro.



Sigh.  Emma.  You continue to be a complete and total delight.  Yes yes yes, there is excessive amounts of pink of course, but I can overlook this because personality makes up for colour here.  Also she is a Scientist, colour coordination is optional with what science makes up for in raw sexy department.  A three piece suit how marvelous.  The coat being a lab coat only adds to the allure.  Top it all off with a Cricket Cap and oh dear this is all working far better than it should.  How can anyone pull off a horizontal striped tie like that?  I can't even begin to put into words how fabulous you truely are.  Rounding the whole outfit out with a nice messenger bag (OF SCIENCE!) and that badge and you have the complete package here ladies and gentleman.


All images cribbed from either here http://www.doulifee.com/Storage/aceatt/ or directly from Court Records http://www.court-records.net/ where these are constructed from.

[Grefter]

World Building, How to do it where the Player doesn't have to see it

Alright, today's article is actually going to be RPG related for a change, specifically world building.  World building is something that is easilly placed at the wayside while writing a plot for a game, designing encounters or putting together a new IP.  It is something that you can easilly make quite successful games without paying much attention to at all, however when it is done well with some real thought it creates a highly memorable experience for the player and far more importantly business wise, it is one of the key ways to start a series.  Suffice to say games have been made and sold almost entirely on the premise of the world building.  

There is plenty of examples here but I primarilly want to examine three in particular and may give some examples of others that do similarly, we will be looking at Ar Tonelico, Mass Effect and Final Fantasy 13.  With these three primary examples I want to examine two kinds of ways that I think of world development taking place in games from the viewpoint of the player, Actively and Passively.  Exactly what I mean I will cover in relevant sections, but suffice to say that this is painting these concepts with a very broad brush.  The final section is of course for everyone that knows me is going to be about how to do it wrong, it is important to learn from failures as well as it is from success or mediocrity and it also can easilly highlight how little it matters to get the world building in perfectly for its presence to have a positive spin for fans.

Active world building

When I use the term Active world building I am talking of an experience of the world that the player has to seek out for themselves, this normally is a sign that there is a fleshed out setting that the story is taking place in, but for the core narrative it is not required.  It may be the window dressing or only necessarilly be required for the larger narrative arc that is to be addressed in future games.  This is the example I want to use Mass Effect for, straight up front this is a game I greatly enjoyed and have partaken of a great deal of the larger lore of the world, not as much as I could have, but I am relatively well versed in the setting itself.

The specific style that Mass Effect uses is an encyclopedia of all the terms, species and most importantly the technology of the setting.  For the player who has no real interest in the plot it sits are a large unapproachable mountain of text.  For the enthusiast it is a veritable font of information that is seemingly unending which progressively gets larger and larger as you get through the game.  This is a good way of seperating what your players need to know and what you want to show them with this universe that you have created.  It lets you trim some of the fat from your storytelling with establishing the world that your character lives in and can jump straight into establishing the character themselves or directly into the action if you are looking to jump directly into the second act of your three act plot (yes, there is other plot structures and when a game uses something else I will write about it).  It is a useful tool, especially if you have an overactive writing department like Bioware seems to.  This is far from a new idea in gaming of course, that is largely what your Civilopedia was for in Civilisation 1 back in the day or UFOPedia from the best game ever made.  Another way that Bioware have expanded on that is with the breadth and scope of optional content in the game, from sidequests on main worlds to planet landings and searching planets for emblems and minerals.  That kind of covers the nuts and bolts by what I mean by Active world building.  You have this world out there and the player is taking part in it, but it is clearly a very small part of it.  You aren't going to show them the rest of it as that isn't what your game is there to do, however you are going to give them the means to get out there and look at it on their own or to look it up for themselves if they so desire.

Now that is all well and good, but how something is done speaks nothing for how it is done well.  Mass Effect itself handles the reference document component with mixed degrees of success, the menus for finding details leave a bit to be desired, but that may just be the student of the library or closet database designer in me speaking, it certainly is quite servicable for what it does.  How it does it well though is helping to parcel out information in manageable bites, no article is excessively large, there is no treatise on how they solved the P=NP? or built a functional AI.  There is however information on almost any given topic you could want to know the cliff notes of on the universe, from man kinds first contact with aliens to the workings of the Space Shotguns and why the hell anyone bothers with a short range weapon in space combat situations.  Also is that there is a priority of importance in articles that is fairly prominently displayed to the player and is intuitive also.  All the important info that will expand your knowledge of the universe with things that will directly effect the plot are voice acted.  All the entries that are voice acted are stored in a different submenu to all the pieces about the different classes of Star Ship that the races have.  Simple and Clean but effective, people that are here for the violence never need to open the menu, for those that enjoy the larger narrative have a way that they can actively seek out further information that is neatly presented to them in the format consistent with the rest of the game and for the grognards that need to know the nitty gritty of the universe have it all there laid out in front of them, they just have to get to reading it.  They can even read the planetary descriptions while exploring which will give them a rundown of the weather and environmental features of every world in every star system you can visit.  That sums up to an absolutely amazing amount of text that is entirely optional and makes for a complete and fleshed out universe waiting to be explored.  Which you can do, because Mass Effect has an absolutely ridiculous chunk of optional content that can easilly skyrocket your characters into their mid 20s levelwise (with a cap of 40 first way through the game) without touching the main plot outside of the introduction.  You have 4 planets that you need to visit over the course of the main plot in Mass Effect, there is far more than just those four star systems available, you have 17 Star Clusters to visit, which have varying numbers of Star systems within them and under them a varying number of Planets.  Each Star System has at least one planet that you can land on and explore on foot.  This is where it falls through as most of the planets are desolate wastelands that you drive aroundf or 10 minutes in your balloon mobile to find some dudes to shoot.  Welcome to the galaxy, even though it is blooming with life, most of it is still a void of nothingness and gas giants.  It entices the player with rewards of cashmoney for finding little doodads, but that is mostly just a reward mechanism (certainly a profitable one) in play to get people out there looking around.  At the end of the day though it is entirely optional content so at its core, it only effects the game flow as much as the player wants it to.  This gives greater freedom in plot writing, it is something of a having your cake and eating it too.  It is fairly inelegant but effective.  Probably most importantly though is the way the library is built up.  This isn't your text book that is handed to you Ultima style of it is all right there in the manual off you go or everything is available from the start ala Civilopedia from ealier example.  Entries are unlocked fairly organically based on the conversations player has or the items they see or the parts of the world they interact with.  This is something you see fairly prominently in other games that have a similar system, however one advantage here is that Mass Effect doesn't have the amazingly gauche hotlinks with underlines leading from article to article.  This is a game, not fucking Wikipedia.

As for other games that do this and do it well.  X-Com: UFO Defense and its first two sequels do fairly admirable jobs (not RPGs, but the first one is aforementioned Best Game Ever Made tm), Dragon Age fits in its way (terrible menus though).  Plenty of others that do this horribly come to mind, more on the obvious later.

Passive world building

For Passive world building, we are talking about the counter to the above.  The players experience of the world is much more naturalistic, it happens with the natural flow of the gameplay rather than the player having to actively seek it out.  Regardless of how the player gets through the game, unless they are not paying attention to anything around them then they are going to get something of a feeling for the world at large.  The game I want to use here is not the best example of it that springs to mind, but is an RPG that was noted by some in the DL as being a good case for it or at least that was the main thing that they got from the game, Ar Tonelico.    Now for yet another disclaimer, I did not enjoy this game and have not taken it on board nearly as strongly as the example above.

The world of Ar Tonelico is fairly fully realised as a world that is constructed with a musically powered internet that is full of loli robots who peddle in pornography.  So it is close to the real world except all the fat pipe is run through one main tower.  The game also runs you through the history of the world somewhat, how it came to be constructed, why there is lolibot pornographers and why the Internet Viruses want to kill everything.  The way that the world parcels this information out to you is piece by piece as you make your way through the game, as you go to places it explains to you the significance of it and why it is all so important.  This works for world building because the game takes you everywhere.  You visit absolutely every area of the tower of Ar Tonelico, you start in the middle of the tower and are dumped down the bottom of it, the first story arc is pretty much making your way back up to the middle of the tower through the areas that are most densely populated, so you are shown how the society works in its dysfunctional way where pornographers are used as the primary weapons in the world.  You observe most of the different cultures in the world while you are down there because you get dumped as far away from the tower as you can be, make it to the majour city, some drama happens and you go to the satellite of corporate mercenary sin  and eventually on to the traditional native hold on to your cultural history types before making it back to the main characters home in the middle of the tower, where you really learn about the society there for the first time.  It is a pretty long journey that shows you half the tower and by far the most important part from a world building perspective as it is where all the population is and the rest is mostly just the Internet backbone.  The climax of the plot involves you needing to climb further up the tower to a point where you can teleport down to the bottom again, some more drama ensues with you covering the last unexplored areas down the base of the tower and you eventually end up building a rocket to get to the top part.  That part is mostly boring because as anyone involved in actual infrastructure backbone will tell you, if you aren't into it then looking at a DSLAM is pretty boring.  By the start of the final act you have explored the majority from top to bottom and have met all the key players and had the whole plot layed out for you.  Almost none of this is optional, it is all right there in the flow of the narrative.  From there it is just tying up loose ends and off you go.

So what the hell does that even mean?  Ar Tonelico is structured in such a way that just by the nature of playing the game and giving 2 shits about it the player will learn something about the world.  They will passively take it in.  It is just there.  There is varying degrees to how you can do this, Ar Tonelico specifically spoon feeds you the whole thing, it is all there and you kind of have to take it on board, it isn't really framed by the larger narrative in any way, it is presented in such a way that the world itself is something of the story (mileage varies here, I disagree with this personally and consider it a conceit of the storyteller that I give 2 fucks about this world and why Internet Virus wants to rape lolibots).  This isn't the only kind of world building that involves the player passively taking it on board however.  You can present games in such a way that the natural flow of the gameplay itself empowers the players in discovering the nature of the world through regular play.  This may seem very similar to Active above, both do involve the player finding the information, but in this case it is that through regular gameplay then the player will discover details about the world, rather than it being a secondary objective that they are succeeding in doing.  The latter is far more elegant and is really something of an idealistic design goal, the likes of which Valve is commonly praised for example.  Their games are notorious for not having the world spoon fed to you, but they also hide very little away.  It is all there, you have but to look and since most of the games are largely on rails you don't have to look far.  The approach of interactive cutscenes further embraces this as the player is given the opportunity to observe the world freely while the game proceeds along fairly organically (depending on how well put together the scripts are of course).  The biggest flaw to this is likely it relies on the player to play along with the designer which again can be something of a conceit, but the main thing to take away is that the game needs to be good as a game as well, the world building is just gravy.  Whereas with the first method where you are forcing it on the player, the world building had better damned well be good, because I don't think anyone really played Ar Tonelico strictly for the gameplay unless they are an even bigger fan of Press X to win than myself.

Again with the examples, let us proceed with me heaping praise and fanboying on things.  I sadly can't think of a world that force feeds the world building to someone that I can positively say it is well done, it is a common and effective way of world building in RPGs, but I can't think of anything specific that is elegant and well handled.  Halflife 2 is the quintessential posterchild for the show the player rather than tell kind of passive world building, but most of Valve's other plot oriented games are noteworthy for it, both the original Halflife and Portal.  Even Left 4 Dead has something of it in there as well with the writing on the walls in the safe houses.  Other studios do it, but it really is something of a signature with Valve.  This is also more along the lines of the world building in Mass Effect 2 with the people around you and the advertising commonly chatting quite freely about the state of the galaxy.

How to get totally wrong

By process of elmination you may have guess it that the one that got it totally wrong was Final Fantasy 13.  Big suprise for everyone, Grefter is hating on Final Fantasy 13.  Now before someone forms a lynch mob, remember that I am right and you are wrong like all the time.  Now that we have got my vainglorious jokes out of the way, I am being absolutely serious here.  All you have to do is examine the game with the two methods I described above and more importantly how to do them well.  Suffice to say Final Fantasy tries fairly hard at the passive world building, you cover a lot of ground in that game.  Even more obviously the game provides you with a vertiable whale of information, it is just a shame that much like a Japanese research vessel it ended up being released to market.  

So how did Final Fantasy 13 get it so wrong?  Well lets start with the Active experience because that one is very blatant.  Final Fantasy 13 doesn't just restrict itself to nice flavourful fluff to its encyclopedia, it stuff the plot in there as well.  Your experience with the core plot is disjointed and jarring because there seems to be an expectation that you are reading all the entries.  Terms, creatures, people and places are sort of bandied around and paraded through the game with next to no point of reference.  The game even as it proudly proclaims starts you off right in the action, much like they did in Final Fantasy 7.  A huge problem there is Final Fantasy 7 may have had a huge flashy showy intro, it was so much more than just for show.  Final Fantasy 7 shows you exactly where you are, you are in a freaking huge city and you are on a train, holy shit now you are fighting some dudes this game is intense.  Final Fantasy goes okay you are a prisoner on a train now you are killing some dudes then the train crashed and now you are on a highway.  There is no framework for it, but if you sat down for 20 minutes you know exactly where you are, what Cocoon is and have an idea who Lightning is.  You know what that defeats?  THE ENTIRE FUCKING POINT.  Here is a good experiment, find someone who hasn't played this thing yet and see how long it takes them to work out that Cocoon is the moon.  If you haven't read it and that was suprising, don't worry, there is nothing that will actually clue you into that for a damn good long time in game.  So spoilers I guess.  Cocoon is the fucking moon.  You cover a lot of ground in the game, but each of the areas is completely disconnected, this isn't a fault of the design of everything being a path that you can't revisit.  You can do this kind of design without that shit.  It is that the way you get from point A to point B tends to have no real sense of relationship.  You fly everywhere and get the cutscenes being dialogue scenes from in the cockpit and can only see clouds or epic space battles on ice monster motor cycles or some other dumb shit.  Towards the end of the game they just straight up go "Fuck it you got teleported into a magic training ground" then "Fuck it you got teleported out now fly away from the moon" and ultimately "Fuck it you got teleported back onto the moon"  The only area that really shows your progress between two points is the second last dungeon sequence where you run through a residential area on Cocoon.  But it is okay, you end up in an endless plain of moving platforms after that where you fight the final boss just so shit doesn't make sense.  What I am trying to say here is the game fails at world building because all it does is show you setpieces with no sense of context.  I am glad there is all this stuff in the world, but what the hell does it mean?  How does it work?  Why do we care?  Maybe someone does, but I don't, because haters got to hate and the game did nothing to make me care.  Even while I was playing it I couldn't have told you where any two given points were in relation to each other.  Sure there is more to world building than mapping it out, but it is a damned good place to start.

Now how does it get the Active world building so wrong?  The encyclopedia is huge, it covers everything, even the plot!  Well lets look at how I said Mass effect handles the sheer volume of its information well.  An intuitive system of prioritising important information and an easy way to access and be engaged by that information that gells with the rest of the game.  What does Final Fantasy 13 do?  Throws you a book and goes "Here you go bro, work it out for yourself lol".  One thing it does get right is that it builds the entries organically as you go along.  I hope you remembered what that term you never heard of before at the start of that 15 minute cutscene, because when it is over you can look it up if you remember what it was amongst the other ones.  Now I honestly can't tell you if the game highlights new entries, but that would have gone a long way (Another one Mass Effect does from memory).  There is next to no point to documenting the entire world if you are going to do nothing at all to make it presentable.  As bad as I found Final Fantasy 13 gameplay I can tell you that the last thing I wanted to do was reading instead.  If I wanted to read I would have grabbed an unread Vonnegut book off my shelf rather than read about the way Vanille's period has unsynched from the lunar cycle over the years or the flavour of condom Snow preferred to use when he was not knocking up Fang's mother and giving birth to Lightning.  So in their attempt to make Final Fantasy 13 as accessible as possible by dropping you right in the action all they succeeded in doing was failing to engage the player and providing them with an nigh unapproachable wall of text to catch up on just so they can try to make sense of a plot that doesn't even have the decency to have a consistent internal logic from cutscene to cutscene.

World building isn't an incredibly difficult prospect, most games have it to some degree even if just by accident.  It is far from necessary to make a good game as well and obviously for some it doesn't even detract from the game to do it poorly.  There is however ways to do it poorly and if you are going to do it you need to make it accessible to the player.  If it is optional you can certainly incentivise it, but that is not necessary because if it is actually good players will seek it out on their own.  My own self inflated opinion of it is that Final Fantasy 13 failed to do any of the above.  It is impenetrable and aloof, the game would have been better without it.  They could have saved money entirely by not paying for any writers at all and just let the two 5 year olds that they had directing the main plot and designing the summons and related cutscenes have full creative control.

The song we sang on that fateful night it didn't actually sound anything like this song.  This is just a tribute.

To finish it all off I want to continue on with what is likely to become something of a theme in this topic, there is a game that does both of the above and mixes them together in its own way.  Deus Ex is an absolutely stunning game.  It achieves a seemless melding of both of the above methods.  There is so much world building in Deus Ex that is tucked away in emails or data pads that are not required to beat the game at all that expand the world into complete details explaining how a megacorporation effectively bought out the UN's emergency response service and turned it into its own army, who the Illuminati were and how the usurper took power down to tiny details about why there is a pair of corpses in the hotel room down the hall from your brother's hotel/apartment.  The scope of the information is both local to the area you are in (the game takes place in various places across America, France and Hong Kong) and on a more global scale.  The real catch here is though that browsing and looking for these things is the natural way to progress through the game, you get key passwords or keycodes from these things.  You are always given ways around locked doors or bypassing security systems, but there isn't enough lockpicks or multitools to get around them all without heavy investment into these skills.  This is coupled with casual conversations with NPCs, overheard NPC conversations and locations that tell a story by themselves such as the sunken ferry off the dock at Libery Island or the Clinic in Hell's Kitchen.  So you have a game where you don't have to read everything, but if you want you can search the areas completely to find everything but regardless of how invested in it you will get some of the story because that is just the way that the game is played.  This is just one more facet of how great Deus Ex is, one more experiment that worked.

I think that covers everything I wanted to say on the topic, it is fairly high level overall, but we are clocking in at about the length of a second year Psychology assignment so this will suffice for now.  I might return to the topic in future discussion.

[Grefter]

So it is midnight on Friday and I want something to put something together that I can lean on in in the future for filler, because I figure it will happen.  So I figure I will return to the route cause of FASHION talk and that is Suikoden.  



So when I am in dire need to write something, I will be progressively going through the Suikosource character list alphabetically.  I will not hotlink their images, but will provide links to the character pages in question.  I might crib the images and host them somewhere else if I work something else out larger than my fairly limited hosting space I have with my ISP.

As a free bonus component Suikoden FASHION comes built in with a trivia game we like to call Boy or Girl.  Look at the character picture and guess the sex of the character in the picture.

All work here courtesy of http://www.suikosource.com a great place to go for Suikoden info and art and hilarity at said art.

Abizboah

He is naked.  Next.

Ace

Ace has a pretty good getup going with a jacket and cammo pants tucked into the tops of his army boots.  A chestlate and vambraces is kind of functional.  Not sure why he felt the need to have red all over the place, I guess it helps him blend in with all the bleeding he does in game with his crippling weakness to getting punched in the face by Golems.  We again have those strange fingerless gloves that go up to your elbows, at least in this case they presumably prevent the vambraces from chafing.  The brown and black on the coat clashes and doesn't make sense, why he is wearing a heavy jacket like that when it is warm in that part of the world I won't ever know, but I guess that is why he rolls up the sleeves.  Not much negative to say here other than those metal things tacked onto the boots much be an absolute pain in the arse on his cobbler, unless the Suikoverse has invented an equivalent to Dunlop welting those boots are likely hand made with big fuck off chunks of metal riveted into them.

Achilles No image
Addie No image
Adlai

A purple Kimono(?)with yellow piping, not bad, but there is a chance that he is just wearing a dress.  The purple and orange pockets on the labcoat are straight up freaky.  The green sandles with yellow and red straps on the toe clash horribly and what kind of scientist wears open toed shoes on site?

Adrienne

A blacksmith who has the bottom half of a cowboy and the top half of an exteme burn victim waiting to happen.  Awwww yeah bro lets go do some smithing with a belly shirt halter top with leather straps.  Gloves that I am goign to give the benefit of the doubt as being leather as I am feeling generous, but only go up to the wrist (what happened to the ones that go up to the elbow? Those might actually be relevant to someone who works with hot metals) and some vambraces again, this time with nothing to stop them rubbing.  Bonus points for being our first Boy or Girl contestant.  Fully sick mullet.

Adrienne is female.

Aegia No image
Agares
There isn't much to say, royalty dresses in purple and crazy extravagantly, we appear to have a classy white number underneath the whole getup with a wolf fur cloak and the purple robes of state over the top.  Agares is a man who accessorizes with style and decadence his place beholds.  Pristine white gloves and shoes with the cane to match leaves very little to say.  He bears himself well, does his hair fittingly and has a minimalistic crown that suits a man of his apparent elegance.

Age No image
Agnes
A pleated black dress with read highlights running underneath the pleats?  Well no it isn't even pleated.  It is a dress made up of what appears to be 8 lenghts of black cloth with the ends stitched together connected to some read strips.  I suppose it is kind of original?  I can't think of a fashion that uses it.  Might be a bit better without that stupid jackey top with the flared ot wrists or the hair that is some how behind her cheek, in front of her chest and yet somehow supposed to be straight.  Not to mention the thoroughly confusing lightsource, is it in front of her face where it is highlighted and reflects off her hair?  Or is it behind here where the sleeves sre shown to be in the shade?  No matter.  The jacked is stupid and the hair is confusing.  Now lets round it all out with what if they didn't appear to be platform shoes I would call Go-Go boots as they have a really tall boots that uh somehow appear to make it barely past her shin?  Wow those are some ridiculously long legs.  They don't even make it half way up her calf but buckle up three times above that.  Without seeing how that red line extends around the ankle I can't say how they exactly unbuckle, but unless they keep going those are horrible shoes to put your foot into, you must manipulate ankle in a pretty crazy way.

To round it all out I am not exactly sure what is going on in this picture, there appears to be a general motion to the right, yet she is standing pigeon toed in those boots.  The hands are splayed out like she is presenting something.  I guess that does support the Go-Go boot theory though, maybe she is dancing horribly.  We will never know.

Aila

This is going to be a bit of a running theme with Grassland people, they have a nice aesthetic.  I don't understand how some of their clothes work, but they can pull them off pretty well in general.  The shoes are confusing as ever, I guess they are a sandal that they slip into?  Whatever.  The really confusing thing is where the hell do a nomadic tribe get their hands on lycra to make leggings like that for their whole tribe to wear?  Let along giant 80s bangles like Aila has.  The collar on the tunic is a cute way to round out the whole thing.

Aaaand that is it for today.

[Grefter]

How RPGs have been abused into making money with bad shooters.

This article assumes you know something of how modern First Person shooters function and is much more oriented in that space than about RPGs, so I will try to explain some components as I go though what with this being an RPG site and not Shooting Dudes In Faces For Awesome Victory SHAZBOT.com or the like.

There has been a growing trend in many action games of late to inclued a levelling system taken straight from our favourite grindy little genre, level up, gain experience for killing guys or killing guys in special ways, get new gear, be more powerful and have more options.  Some have praised this as a way to improve the longevity of a game and that it empowers the player with a reward cycle.  I will be arguing something fairly different in here.

The core games that I am going to be criticizing here are the latest few iterations of the Call of Duty series, but it applies to many other games that have come out (to a much lesser extent).  First of all we have to examine some core decisions to this level up system.  As you level up you gain access to newer guns and perks that let you more effectively deal with your enemies, fairly standard RPG levelling up system.  For an example of the kinds of things it unlocks you can refer to this page for perksor this page for weapons You can see many things are unlocked by playing as well as just experience.  So the better you are the more you will unlock, seems fair enough, rewarding good play and so on.  The problem here however is that they are consistent positive feedback loops, the more you win the better stuff you get, the easier it makes to win, your victories aren't necessarilly because of a skill gap, but are in part artificially created gap based on unlocked equipment.  It is a cycle that feeds on itself sucking the player in.  A great little series on Escapist Magazine touches on this far more succintly and well than I feel I can here in an article from November 2010 on The Skinner Box and it is one I highly reccomend viewing.

That all seems fairly innocuous if a bit tedious and favours experienced players, but it gets worse the more you know about Call of Duty's main gameplay.  Call of Duty has a game method that rewards the victor disproportionately to the loser.  The more you win the easier it becomes to keep winning, this would be Kill Streaks for every kill beyond your third in a row through to the eleventh you will get progressively more powerful extra weapons to use, which will make the next kill even easier.  For 15 kills you get to turn off all the enemy electronic devices with an EMP (leaving yours still active) meaning anyone else performing as well loses their advantages, putting you at a complete and total advantage for 60 seconds.  From theren it is 10 more kills away from an instant win.  Plenty of games give the player winning and advantage in competetive FPS, the classical example being Counter Strike which avoids the normal benefit of not losing orientation on respawn by having distinct rounds, it gives the vitor more money than the loser to buy weapons next round and the winning team is less likely to have to invest in more weapons.  It is a clear advantage to the victor, early wins are a big advantage, but it is not one that is entirely insurmountable, after 3 or so rounds the victors will have enough bankroll to keep going through multiple losses on even footing, but the losers will also be on even footing.  There is a fixed threshold on how big the disadvantage can be because of the in game economy.  When we are looking at the advantages in Call of Duty however the scale of the advantages here are of a completely different magnititude.  Being able to buy a budget Assault rifle or a better assault rifle earlier in the game against instant win button, especially considering the person getting the instant win button is more likely to be starting the game with a better weapon.

To be fair to the games, they do give you benefits that you can get if you die a lot these would be Death Streaks, if you are going to click any link I provide I reccomend it be this one, because there you can note that you don't get access to these until you are level 4, 6, 27 and 39.  So well after you have sunk many hours into the game, then you can start to fight back a little better against experienced players.  Yet another barrier against entry as a new gamer, but like all the other components the more you play it the more likely you are to get it and even more frustratingly, the harder it makes for people beneath you to actually capitalise on a successful kill.

Now when you combine these two things together it starts to paint a portrait of what I find so deplorable in these games, they are innately stacked against the newer player.  This makes the game harder to play competetively, to be on even footing you need to sink an innordinate number of hours into the game with a shakey footing start and that is just in the online community.  To even play this game at LANs where the top tier of competetive gaming takes place they have to have specifically modified versions of the game to fix the balance.  All of this puts the kerfuffle about dedicated servers in the PC gaming community into a different light if you are not used to looking at the games from this angle.  The inability to have a dedicated server makes it harder to balance the game for competetive play, makes it harder to control the conditions of the server and leaves you at the whims of the matchmaking system.  Worst of all?  The host will have a massive advantage on ping if you are playing on the internet.  There is always some disparity there based on distance to server, but you are normally talking in a magnitude of 50ms of lag, for the host?  They are running with 0ms lag, you need to have everyone with very good connections and be playing locally to cut everyone's ping down to 50ms.  That or have better net code than I have ever seen in a game.

You could however disregard the game as a piece of competetive multiplayer entertainment and just treat it as just a game to play.  Ignore the stacking of advantages and disadvantages and fair play because hey, there is clearly a market for such games with people playing MMORPGs for PVP components with all the delightful farce that surrounds those outside of the top tier of play.  This still makes for an inherently flawed game with some serious downsides.  What might those be?  These imbalances natually poison the community.  You make it nearly impossible for new players to come into the game as everyone else has such a huge head start, I am sure you still get new players, but the incoming numbers after a few months plummet compared to what you can get with a game that has a flat entry level.  Without new players gaming communities just die out and move on to other games.

So we have a game that is unbalanced in favour of early starters and self defeating as a piece of community building.  How do concepts like this make it into a AAA title that is worth millions?  Easilly.  They are there by design.  We are looking at the same kind of design we are seeing in modern many kinds of modern technologies, built in obsolescence.  The game isn't meant to last any longer than the 12 or 18 months it takes to churn out the next component of the franchise to start the same whole vicious cycle again.  Tear it all down and rebuild it all over again reselling the same core product again at full price of entry all over again.  Engaging in the same self fulfilling cycle of reward and parasitic community creation all over again.  This is great for publishers but terrible for gamers themselves, instead of breeding inclusive communities it breeds short lived heirarchy based communities that thrive for short periods of time and then devour themselves as they run out of new easy kill fodder.  This is on top of the obvious negative side to gamers where previously a strong community based multiplayer game could be an absolutely amazing value for money investment, they instead become sucked into your regular purchase cycles like we see with mobile phones and other gadgetry.  This isn't to say it will kill the industry, far from it, people trapped in these cycles will keep buying and playing fairly obviously, but what it does curb is innovation.  You get by the numbers shooters that feed into these habits and as long as the market for this kind of gameplay is large it will continue to thrive.  There is always the threat that MMORPGs have though in that they will hit the threshhold for the marke and possibly even stifle all competition, but we aren't quite there yet.

Now I have hated on the one series enough, you can shrug it off as well it is just one company doing it, Activision and no one likes them anyway right with all their mass firings and raping Guitar Heros and whatnot?  Well no, last I looked Call of Duty was being hailed as one of the best selling games of all time (taking sales from 3 platforms added together) and the proof in the pudding?  The huge sales were at release.  A fairly fun page to look at is this http://store.steampowered.com/stats/ You can compare what people are playing.  I won't really do any statistics analysis here, but just want to highlight the fact that if you look, remember to compare peak playerships as well as current and not that Counter-Strike and Counter-Strike: Source are 12 and just over 6 years old respectively.  That is community longevity.  Consider the number of players you see there for the original game and remember that when Counter-Strike was taking off you could pick up a copy of Halflife for $15 and Counter-Strike was free.  Value for money at almost the best ratio you will find in gaming.  That is a strong win for a consumer.  Now with that horrible segue into talking about Steam I really want to note just how big this phenomenon is becoming, currently as of writing this, Crysis 2 just came up for Preorder, one of the benefits for the Preorder is a free 5 levels in Multiplayer at release.  So regardless of any setbacks on release date or quality of the game, before you have had any chance to find out anything at all about the game other than the marketting prerelease hype, they want you to pony up your money a month before release just so you don't get screwed over and caught in the tail end of this cycle.  You thought it was bad when Gamestop and EB were asking you to preorder or you might not be able to get a game?  How about when it was preorder or missing out on content?  Well, they successfully found a new spin on it that hurts gamers even more.  You have to preorder to not be at a statistical disadvantage in a competetive game.  Very nicely done from a marketting perspective, but horrible for gamers.  I hope all your friends are going to buy the game too and didn't choose to preorder Brink instead or are just going to stick with Bulletstorm or something else, because otherwise you are shit out of luck.

Now why do I take so much umbrage to it and note it here on an RPG site?  Well these get bandied around as RPG elements, but they aren't really the core components of what makes an RPG, they are a common execution of the genre, but far from the heart and soul of the genre and there have been other games out there that have successfully taken those same RPG elements without taking the grind with it (For people following on the forum, this is my obligatory Deus Ex hype here), you can integrate things like this wonderfully in Shooters and they are fairly easilly adapted to other genres as well, but is this really the elements we as gamers want taken from them?  Not really for myself personally, such things have their place and in competetive play they should be kept far away.  Leave this kind of thing to the singleplayer environment or to non-competetive gaming modes.  It sure is fairly fun in Co-operative gameplay modes that have such things.  Hell in Real Time Strategy this very thing has developped its own little genre, which is again a thing for another time.

Just as a closer here is a direct link to Extra Credits which is a fantastic series on Escapist Magazine that covers topics far more broadly than I do, more succintly, better researched and far more optimistically than I do.  Check them out.

[Grefter]

There has been a demand for more fillerFashion!  So here we go



We pick up where we left off still on A in Suikoden.

Ain Gide

Oh Suikoden 1 you are the gift that keeps giving.  Probably the first of many generic brown cloaks, that wonderful pallete choice of clashing purple and green mixed in with orange.  These are the signature of Suikoden 1 art even more than the crazy body proportions like the hands that reach from the shoulders to half way down the torso.  The knee high lace up healed boots that accentuate the calf that of course clash with the rest of the outfit.  To crown it off you have to love the Super Saijin haircut.  Apparently Suikoverse has invented Hairspray as well as Dunlop welting.

Aisha - No image

Akaghi

Again hairspray immediatly comes to the fore.  Well honestly it is probably just grease which is just as amazing honestly, where exactly does one find a sufficient supply of grease and the clean water supply needed to maintain that hairstyle on a ship?  Akaghi at least has clothing that doesn't clash.  If he was a bit more buff he could totally pull of the wife beater.  He would badly need to get a haircut losing the pinhead thing, but more importantly losing those carefully curled sideburns.  Do we need to add the curling iron to the list of things being made completely out of date here?  I suppose not.  If he dropped the haircut and worked out it is almost a workable look.  The purple is a bit much of course, but it almost works!  Now lets talk about that rape face.  That is one scary rape face.  The pose really isn't helping, it is like he was caught mid thrust given the way his hips are jutting forward.  He gets really into it as well, right up on his tiptoes.  Thats right kid, scary rapeface here is a NINJA.  He can break into your house while you sleep.

Alanis

AHHHHHHHHHHH WHAT HAPPENED TO HER LEGS.

Seriously, the perspective on this piece of art is positively disturbing.  As with most Suikoden 3 art though, the outfit is pretty decent, if a bit baffling for someone living in a presumably temperate area like grasslands, but an area that isn't suffering from a lack of water (everything in Suikoden 3 is quite green), meaning it is likely fairly humid.  Regardless though, it is a nice dress with matching jacket.  Very heavy jacket for the weather which is the part that really throws me.  The haircut is a bit much work, but works for a little girl (note that the fring is straight and the back is curly, either she straightens or she curls).

Albert

There isn't much to say about Albert other than Ciato would totally do him over a barstool.  The overcoat is wayyyyy to big for him, but whatever, he still pulls it off.  No wonder he teleports around with Luc though, a white leather coat like that would be a complete and total bitch to keep clean if you walked anywhere at all.  The coat would be warm as hell, which as far as a running theme of criticism for Suikoden 3 art is one I am prepared to take, at least they can look good.

Alberto

Unlike Albert above Alberto is not wearing clothing that is completely batshit insane for the weather he is in.  The glasses work pretty well for him and a dude rocking a ponytail with hair that curly has earned the right to have that chinstrap beard.  The patterned shirt actually is kind of cool if a bit strong (orange?) I would like to see if the cuffs are similarly patterned given that the hem of the shirt and the collar are, so I will give it the benefit of the doubt here and assume whichever looks best.  Burgundy pants are... well shit I guess they could work for some, I wouldn't do it with light brown hair though personally.  The booties are terrible though.  That shit is borderline ugg boot territory which instantly loses you a million points.  Gods something that loose would suck hard to walk more than a few metres in, would be comfy as a slipper though I guess.  Green shoes with burgundy pants is terrible.  The shirt is still pretty cool though, he should totally hook up with a chick in a peasant dress.

Aldo

Aldo looks like a generic elf but isn't even an elf.  I do laugh at the hair flowing in the breeze wile the rest of his clothing sits perfectly still.  Those purple tassles should be moving as well at least.  I don't really have much to say here, pants, functional boots and a vest is fine honestly.  I fear we have another thrust forward pelvis here though.  Is Aldo showing us that he is an archer or is he about to put his fingers up to his mouth and poke his tongue through as a proposition to all the ladies?  We will never know.

Alec Wisemail - No image

Alen

Suikoden 1 head shots are so very much better than the main art.  So of course I will be talking about the full body shots.  The head!  It is huge!  The whole torso which is to small for the head just happens to also be to small for the body.  This shit is creepy as fuck, it is like Frankenstein started with midgets and progressively ran out of midget parts as he worked his way upwards.  Generic armour and stuff.  Boring boring boring.  Nice clown shoes bro.

Alen Wisemail - No image

Alenia

Ahhh Queen's Knights outfit, you almost look good generally speaking.  Alenia of course fucks it up just like she does everything else.  Short skirt underneath that chest armour girl and either really tight leggings or some honestly pretty sexy pantyhose (?!??!?? Pantyhose has been invented?  Even if it hasn't apparently they have lycra!)  I have no idea what the go with the boots are, knee high and look like they are about to slide off at any moment, just kind of floppy looking.  Strange.  Purple with a dull bronze is kind of gross as well.  Don't pick blended colours from nearly opposite sides of the colour wheel.  At least they are both dull tones so it isn't overly offensive like Suikoden 1.

That is as good a point to stop as any.

[Grefter]

Well I was going to put out another Suikoden FASHION filler, but instead I am going to direct you to read this.

http://www.visionmachine.net/download/index.shtml

Vision Machine is a free comic that explores the concept of freedom of information, user agreements, open source, virtual economics and a ton of other amazingly delicious science fiction concepts that are on the forefront of IT discussions these days.  I would love to write a thousand word review of it or if I was more skilled to do a piece of work in that setting, however I lack the writing skill and am just completely blown away by it.

Actually honestly what I really wish I could do was code something really simple and release it as opensource that is Vision Machine related.

I can't say anything more than read this.  It is free in all the best ways possible.  I am in love with this book.

[Grefter]

Alex

Big brown boots with jeans tucked, an open button shirt and an orange vest.  Screams "Hello boys!" like some kind of mix of a Cowboy and the construction worker from the village people.  Comes with his own rop as well.  If the face wasn't ugly with that nose the hair might even contribute to the pretty gay cowboy look.  Wait this dude is married with a kid?

Alhazred

HELLO LITTLE BOY WOULD YOU LIKE TO TAKE A LOOK AT MY MAGNIFYING GLASS?  REACH INTO MY PANTS AND TAKE IT OUT.  Looks like a cross breed between a Garden Gnome and Heihachi Mishima.  Get rid of the cloak and you could almost take it serious if it wasn't for the pedomagnifier.  For bonus fun times, follow the chain connected to the Magnifying glass.  He tucks it into his pants and it is connected to his backpack.  This has to make putting down that backpack an adventure and a half with risks of the magnifying glass pulling the pants down, being dropped on the floor or having to take a bag full of books off his back with one hand while he grasps the magnifying glass.  The really confusing thing is all they had to do was put pockets on the jacket and connect it to that, which would have been perfect, except for the fact that it would have made the crotch mounted expansion device even creepier to keep stuff in his trunks.  Another character with pants tucked into the tops of their boots, this is an odd fashion convention that they have here.

Amada

Check out my junk.  I carry it around in a bandage.  With a pysique like this it is a crim to wear more than 8 pieces of clothing, so I chose a pair of sandals, an open tunic, some leg wraps, a wrist wrap and a bandage for my abs and junk because they are TOTALLY SICK bro.  Did you catch my good side?  My only regret is that the tunic does not have a collar to pop.

Ameria

Ermine coat, Go-Go boots, thigh high stockings (Again with the hosiery), crazy short shorts, see through shirt and a choker.  Well done Ameria, you are the first hooker we have.  I can't even work out exactly which market you are servicing, the coat says up market, but the see-through mesh top says low end.  I also thoroughly enjoy the suspscious bulge at the front of the shorts.  Is she packing or is she just prepared to service gentleman with a preference for strapons?  We will never know.  For a fun game try standing in that pose for an extended period.  Your neck and shoulders will hurt like a bitch.  Ensure that your left shoulder is held back at a different angle than the right.

Anabelle

Bright cyan bandana and shirt!  Fur lined vest and boots with a heel!  Otherwise functional outfit!  Hair to absofuckinglutely die for!  Nothing else to say!

Andarc Bergman

Nice earth tones, that standard Japanese Researcher Mage Dude outfit with mantle and tabard thing.  Lots of use of colour and it doesn't really clash.  The glasses work well.  Also boring, much like Andarc in general.  Silly weapon.  AXEWAND.

Anita

Custom made high heel plated boots and greaves.  Especially noting that Anita looks like something that just stepped out of the 80s.  Strong woman wearing pants and a weird skirted thing with crazy huge shoulder pads, like wow, just nutso big there.  Popped collar on the blouse.  Big earrings and short feathered hair.  Keep that 80s spirit alive guys, in another 30 years it might be in fashion again.

Anji

Again we have a headshot and a full body shot where the headshot is kind of silly, but the full body shot is completely ridiculous.  This guy is a pirate and he wears 2 layers of thick baggy clothing and crazy huge ugg boots.  I hope he knows how to swim in heavy clothing because if he ever goes overboard this dude is going to sink like a fucking stone.  Where does a pirate find hairspray during a civil war?  On any other character with less ridiculous shoes and haircut that might even be fairly passable for Suikoden 1 art.  There is no BRONZE GOD action or crazy proportions going on with the torso but most of all the colours aren't painfully clashing taken from a horrible pallette.  Go you Anji, you manage to make something almost passable completely ridiculous.

Anna Lightfellow - No Image

Annallee

Lady that imitates a fish and then joins your army, has 4 letters in an 8 letter long name dresses sensibly.  How dull.  Nice peasant dress.  Perfect match for Alberto maybe?

Anne

Standard Grasslander kind of functional but totally crazy outfit statement goes here.  Anne has a really weird one.  At first glance it looks alright, then you need to compartmentalise each component working upwards.  Those white bands really really do not want to be attached to those shoes, they make a pretty neat little flat foot shoe if they don't.  If they do they are like those amazingly terrible sandal boot abominations that seem to be in widely available at the momen (I REFUSE to call this terrible shit fashionable ugh, click that link if you want to get an insatiable urge to punch someone's face in).  ANYWAY, before I go off on a tangent about modern fashion disasters lets move up this woman's legs and criticise video games.  Those patterns in the bottom of those pants are kind of crazy, that shit would be terrible to wash, I guess you could pull it off as they have to hand wash everything, but the stitching on those pants is kind of crazy.  Moving up more, wow those are some figure hugging pants, does she use a lubricant to get them on?  Split tunic/dress thing is confusing, but whatever, this is fashion and just designed to look good.  I doubt Anne walks more than 3 metres in a day.  Further up, is that more patterns cut out of the pants to reveal more skin or is that a belt?  I think it is honestly skin.  This is why she can't walk more than 3 metres in a day.  If she goes outside long enough to get tan lines that has to look really weird.  Armbands with weird colours that work well.  Earth tones people, they will get you far.  Note the way that the tunic/dress thing lifts and seperates.  Either Anne has invented the strapless Wonderbra in the grasslands, she is AMAZINGLY gifted with breastacular bouyancy or that is an absolutely amazing dress/tunic thing.  It even hugs the top of her breasts.  Just wow.  What the hell are those sleeves attached to?  It looks like a really crazy jacket, because they farly clearly go over the top of part of the dress/tunic near her right armpit.  Again with the weird patterened gaps.  Is the jewlerry attached or does she wear a necklace underneath the whit cloth?  Hair even MORE to die for than Annabelle.  Such full body and an amazing perm.  How does a Grasslander do it?  Absolutely amazing.  Completely fantastic but you know what?  All the issues I have with the function and form of this outfit?  This is the first one I think we have that is entirely impossible that actually totally works.  Anne is just a dead sexy lady.  Hugo should totally have hit that.

Anos - No image

HAHA ANOS

Antonio

White guy with a Fu Manchu moustache.  Creepy as fuck.  Chef's outfits are ridiculous even in real life.  Nice shoes with no socks.  Also take note ladies, Antonio generally seems to be in proportion unlike most Suikoden 1 art and he has HUGE feet if you know what I mean.  One possibility is that he has heard some rumours and just wears shoes 8 sizes to big, but given his stance?  I say he is just inviting all the ladies.  All the single ladies.

Apple

Three pieces to discuss!  So we will have three paragraphs just for Apple.  I honestly wholeheartedly approve since she is the recurring character that I was most pleased to see each iteration.  Suikoden 1's Apple art is something special and I will have to link you to the theme song.  From days of long ago.  From uncharted regions of the universe comes a legend.  The legend of Voltron, Defender of the Universe.  A mighty robot, loved by good, feared by evil.  I have no idea why Apple is dressed like a generic 80s/90s/2000s/Japan is stuck in the 80s forever anime space female, but even it doesn't hide the crazy bad haircut, the stupidly huge boots and disturbingly large breasts for such a young teen.  Cream outfit with yellow leggings and red trim is stupid, especially with brown hair and green eyes.  This outfit would be absolutely horrible to keep clean.

Suikoden 2 art, now I need to find a completely different theme song. Suffice to say I totally dig the haircut.  Grow up a bit and generally be in proportion and the outfit looks less ridiculous, especially the boots.  Darker shades on the trim and leggings make this outfit great.  Seriously I thoroughly enjoy how functional and comfortable this outfit is.  Apple knows how to dress and how to be totally awesome.  It is a shame the series never let her grow into her own full character instead of being the Competence the character.  Still she is totally bitching.  The glasses totally work as well.

And when we hit older Apple (30s is it?), oh man she doesn't stop being amazing.  Again with the haircut.  Glasses totally still work.  The hair is great.  Functional clothing all around.  SENSIBLE SHOES.  Sigh, Apple is great.

Ashtat Falenas

Arshtat's outfit is extravagant and amazing, see the stuff I say about Agares?  Crank that shit up to 11 here.  Perfectly fitting for her position, expensive material used exessively, flowing draped garments that exentuate her figure and WHOA tight around the breasts, this is one seriously stacked lady and she works that shit like it is everybody's business.  Crazy impractical dress, but totally the kind of shit you could see being used as a portrait dress in an fairly exotic temperate climate like Falcena.  Nice use of colour, there is lots of it and fairly diverse ones, but subtle tones and theflow really well, they are all fairly closely connected with the only part of the clothing that is really busy is the shoulder and chest area where you have the white, purple, yellow/gold and blues all meeting and it honestly works pretty well.  Big thumbs up.  Bonus points for being an outfit you could actually make and wear if you had a stupid amount of money.

Arthur

You are shit Arthur, I hope Guillaume rapes gives you a sweet lollipop that stupid grin off your face.  Your boots are way to big, read striped socks?  Go away.  Functional pants that you roll up for no damned reason (they would fit you perfectly if be a bit baggy, which rolling them up does nothing for).  That vest is stupid.  Get rid of that shit.  Your glasses are like half the size of your head.  Get a haircut.

And that is done.  Making up for yesterday I guess?  I was hoping to finish off A, but hit 2k words already and there is still more to go.

[Grefter]

Going to finish off A tonight as I ran out of time and don't really have a topic to sink my teeth into.  Dragon Age 2 demo takes my time like nobodies business.

Assam - No Image

Augusine Nabor

Pants tucked into boots, actually fits this time as Augstine is a gentleman of breeding.  Tight pants, but not overly tight, they actually look like they are made of cloth!  Amazingly not anachronistic technology here.  There isn't much to say here, he is a beautiful man and dresses like it, blonde hair and blue eyes?  Yes he can get away with a blue vest and dress shirt with tails.  The flared out cuffs must make it a bitch to each chips and gravy, but such is life.  Marvelous hair and the hat is nice.  It could be worn at a far more rakish angle if he wanted to be even more debonaire.

Ax
NAKED.  Why does a lizard have fur on its ears.  Why does a Lizard have protruding ears actually?

Axel

Does not live up to the Axel name.  Disappointing and boring all around.  Totally styling there with your vest tucked into your pants and your pants tucked into your boots.  It is a sham you don't have your hair tucked into your tunic.  Boring boring boring, just like the character!

Aya - No Image

Ayame

I really kind of want to know where the hell you get socks that fade from white to turquoise to black.  I don't think I could pull them off, but damn they are seriously pimping.  Greaves and sandles is a weird look.  That robe/gi/thing starts weirdly high up.  It is like she dresses in a bath robe that is 4 sizes to big and belts it at her waist with half of it bunched up around her shoulders.  NINJA!  Nice breastplat that only covers your tits and not your awesomely vulnerable abdomen and shoulder armour that I assume restrictsaids your arm movement.  Bracers to protect your hands and fingerless gloves so you can risk losing all manua dexterity.  So awesome.  How the hell do you get lycra that clings that closely to your face to cling tightly just below the ear and maintain the contour of your nose.  That must take some crazy prep time.  Not as much as the ZANY NINJA HAIR, but still a lot of preperation time.  Regardless though, the socks are totally bitching.

Ayana

MAID.  SWORD MAID.  BORING.

Ayda

Okay so Suikoden 2 isn't the first game to pull off the totally white girl as a native Indian thing, but when Tekken did it they just made them look like white trash. Suikoden 2 pulls out all the stops making the girl white as fuck, wear a full native outfit and then give her red hair.  Classy.  Not much to say about the outfit, I kind of have no real frame of reference to it as a piece of fashion.  I do question how exactly she got the different colour stitching around the bottom of that shoe.  Is it alternated colour stitching on a traditional soled shoe?  Is it beeds tied into a leather mocassin type deal?  I guess I will never know.  Note that it looks like she is barely holding onto the bow with her finger tips, even more loosely than the arrow.


So that is A finished.  I am not sure what I plan to do with this.  The ideal is to get through all the letters.  Maybe do all 26 and then do a big extended thing to upload letter at a time onto the main site with images instead of just links.  Did people enjoy this?  I know having the images on the page makes it a much more fun endeavour like Feeling His Full Length Edgeworth was.  Is anyone even reading this anymore?  I don't know, but I do know I need to get some more serious articles written as well.

[Tonfa]

Did people enjoy this?  I know having the images on the page makes it a much more fun endeavour like Feeling His Full Length Edgeworth was.  Is anyone even reading this anymore?  I don't know, but I do know I need to get some more serious articles written as well.

It is definitely something I take the time to go through and compare with the pictures each day. Very entertaining. Serious articles are good reads as well, keep it up.

[Dark Holy Elf]

Totally seconding Tonfa here, but if I -didn't- enjoy analyses of Suikoden art I would have to be the most polite person ever.

[Jo'ou Ranbu]

I want to print these things and frame them on my wall.

[Sierra]

Did people enjoy this?  I know having the images on the page makes it a much more fun endeavour like Feeling His Full Length Edgeworth was.  Is anyone even reading this anymore?  I don't know, but I do know I need to get some more serious articles written as well.

It is definitely something I take the time to go through and compare with the pictures each day. Very entertaining. Serious articles are good reads as well, keep it up.

[DjinnAndTonic]

I don't agree with all of your fashion choices and some of your art critiques show some inexperience with figure-drawing (though your complaints on S1/S4 art are all spot-on, your S3 complaints on proportions and positioning just strike me as intentionally misinterpreting the artwork).

Despite that, I've been reading them all religiously and they make me chuckle.

I still kind of prefer your serious articles, though.

[Laggy]

Nuh-uh. Grefter fashion is superior.

That said I do kind of miss the vein of format and tone you did with the PW stuff, I seriously cracked up for ages on that one. Suiko stuff is great and you should continue, if you are making me click on the links to check out the art you are doing it right.

[Grefter]

I prefer humor to having nothing to say about a character, I stand by the Alanis thing though.  The distance between her knees and the tops of the boots is all wrong unless you are assuming a very specific steep angle shot, which makes the entire top half of her body completely at odds with her feet.  I can't think of to many things about S3 art that I really harp on the perspectives and proportions though. 

Also yeah it is hard to hold a dialogue with Suikoden characters compared to PW characters.  Just so much less to work with.  Alright glad people are reading it, I was cool with 2 responses this morning, that was all I needed.  Thanks guys.

Post incoming sometime.  Will edit it in.


So with Fenrir back I guess now is as good a time as any to celebrate games that none of us have heard of or played, myself included.  This is one I think we actually should get a bit of a following in the DL.  Bonus points for it being French.  Also not actually written for that reason, but serendipity and so on.

Winter Voices, an RPG in episodes

Winter Voices is an RPG that is from a little indie company that is trying to make an MMO.  Having dipped my toes into Winter Voices I honestly have no idea why they are even trying to make an MMO.  They are fairly clearly capable of something far more personally engaging and capable than that, but such is life.  This little treasure of a game is available on Steam for a reasonably cheap price.

The game is set in a remote village in a Tundra, the town seems much more about getting by day to day and surviving in the harsh climate.  It isn't like Teudogar where it is a historic story and setting, there is a fairly modern setting involved, it is just a very remote village.  You roll up your character from one of three classes that are essentiall a hunter, a village girl or what amounts to a village lorekeeper in training.  They are each adept at different things, the hunter is good at focus and physical challenges, the village girl has better social skills and some other things and the lorekeeper is more intelligent and has better memory skills.  So you have fairly diverse character choices.

Story is where this game shines through, the opening to this story is with the death of your father and the game largely seems to revolve around dealing with the grief or aftermath of this.  Your father was a quiet aloof man.  You have dialogue trees that show your reaction and different classes seem to react differently.  This is where the combat in the game comes into play.  The opening combat sequences aren't fighting monsters.  It is fighting representations of your grief.  You don't fight them so much as evade them and deal with them.  Topping it all off, it isn't actually that unique a combat system, it is a grid based affair where you have HP/Willpower (which is essentially mana) and a set of abilities that you can use, picking new ones as you level up.  It is a nice way of showing that a fairly stock RPG combat system can be used to interpret so much more than just mashing monsters into a pulpy mass.

The intro of the game really tries to highlight that the different characters will be different ways of playing, Huntress is physically formidable and is the most likely to survive and has Intuition as a primary stat.  Practical class that gets through life.  Of note is that they dominate the Physique stat, but the game makes note that Physique does not have an effect in combat at all, again playing to the strengths of the game.  The Weaver gives different dialouge options sarcasm and cynicism comes into play, but they assure you that this is the lighter path to take.  Weavers are supposedly generally more happy than the other two classes.  The final one is the Volva.  Picking this class warns you that it is the hardest one to play and that it is only reccomended if you are used to the kind of game.  More on them and their primary stat later that I quite like, but it does note that for all their difficulty they are the most rewarding to play.  Given that they are the lorekeepers and medicine women of the village, the story of one of those dealing with their own grief could make for quite the compelling tale indeed. 

You want strong female role models?  Well here is a start.  You always play a female and while it centres around the death of your father, it is not really to do with the loss of the father, he is distant at best and given some of the dialogue options almost uncaring possibly.  The game is how this girl deals with adversity and comes through the situation.

It is a game I have been meaning to keep go back to and play more than a short while, but as people may have noticed last year was a pretty damn good year for me with my more regular PC gaming.  That or I had dreadful shit to trawl through.  Suffice to say it has caught my eye and imagination and I really think it is something people should check out.  I am not sure exactly how it pans out but it is unique so far.

There is other things that set it apart though, it is episodic, which has worked pretty well for Telltale games with their point and click adventures, but it is interesting to see someone try this kind of charging model for RPGs that is releasing them at a somewhat consistent rate and haven't dried up (Penny Arcade game is the only one that springs to mind).

One specific mechanic that interests me that I kind of want to talk about in closing is the game's use of a stat Memory.  This is the primary stat of the Volva (the lorekeeper style class).  Memory as a stat boosts the experience you get, so Volvas will level up faster than other characters, however the stat has a downside, the better your memory the more damage you take.  This is absolutely delicious flavour given the focus of the game being a story of grief and dealing with it.  Other characters can choose to increase Memory as well if it suits your purpose.  It is an interesting trade off in a stat that has gameplay effects.  Most of the other stats are fairly straight forward standard affairs, but this one in particular is one I quite like and wanted to mention.

So yeah hopefully this brings an interesting little game to someone else' attention.