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monkey-network · 4 years

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An Unfortunate Critique of Spiderverse Part 2 (of 3)

Want Part 1? Here you go. Otherwise, enjoy the show.

Spider-Man: Into the Spiderverse was a fun award-winning 2018 animated film with a basically unanimously positive fandom, regarded generally as both a masterpiece Spider-Man film and a remarkable animated film overall. And while I do not disagree with that, it definitely earned its spoils, it pains me a bit to bring up the reason(s) why I can’t call it the masterpiece that many claim. I like this film, but I don’t love it as much as others and I wanted to express why. And I will see to be critical, not cynical. Fair enough?

Part 2 ~ The Spiderversal Stakes

To get a little personal real quick, I’ve been at this whole reviewing/analyzing for plenty of years now and I say the hardest part of doing these type of critiques, aside from not coming off as a cynical bitchlet, is conveying yourself properly. You don’t want to give people the wrong idea about what you want to get across.. Which is why this part is hard to express because there’s a lot to mull over and I don’t wanna bore ya. So with that said, I got a problem with the plot, but first lemme talk about my favorite Spidey film, Spider-Man Thre-

Sorry but we gotta talk about this

When you think about how the storyline of 3 plays, you’ll feel exhausted by of how much was thrown in (Venom, Sandman, the New Goblin, Emo Peter, etc.), the movie had to seriously juggle a lot in a little over a couple hours. Then again with all that, it never felt like the movie was inconsistent with the focus. It’s campy as hell but I felt it still had that good modicum of serious that Raimi’s 1 and 2 pulled off just as well, a quality balance. You grasped everything it threw at you by the end. Now Spiderverse, minus the credits, is an hour 45 minutes and it felt like the two points of the story, setting up the multiverse and Miles’ uprising as a heroes, were at rubberbanding odds with each other.

When I see Spiderverse, Miles’ story mostly overshadows the tension that came in the multiverse getting fucked up, and that the final fight of Miles and Kingpin is the only time where I felt shit got serious. Otherwise, the whole aspect of the Spidermun slowly dying because they weren’t in their realities and the multiverse colliding felt much of an afterthought for most of the film. Narratively, it has a good pace of doing what it needs to do, but on the look back the journey didn’t stick with me as well as I thought.

If I can bring in some previous examples, the likes of Kung Fu Panda and The Lego Movie had better stakes because it felt like the two storylines (the protagonist’s upbringing and the villain’s scheme) were prominent throughout the films once they got going. Po wasn’t just training because he wanted to be better and found the ways to do it, he was training hard because the villain was on his way and the defeat of the Furious Five showed he meant business. The Lego Movie takes a step further by having Emmett and the gang be on the run, we see the villain’s increasing impact as we go along, giving us on the fly experiences that provides Emmett’s “leap of faith” type breakthrough while the villain finally goes all out with his scheme. It helps make the stakes and optimistic breakthrough of overcoming them both escalate and converge naturally.

You know, not doing what Kingdom Hearts 3 did

Not saying Spiderverse doesn’t naturally converge its two storylines well, everything about it was clear, but the effects of the Super Collider come off as very infrequent and thus made the escalation disjointed. The whole “cellular decay” bit with the Spidermun could’ve been a great way to add some tension, like “Oh shit, this could be disadvantageous in the fight at Aunt May’s house. Put our heroes on the ropes.” It doesn’t happen, in fact the fight felt like it disappeared the moment Aaron and Miles were on the roof. It felt like a slight inconvenience than a matter of winning or losing everything, even in the climax. Same with the whole “reality warping” idea, it would’ve been very cool to see reality start to deteriorate or change around our characters, make the news media go “Oh shit, what’s happening?” or put the Spidermun on a little edge instead of them just solemnly waiting for a little anime girl to heely her way in with the flash drive to save the world. As great as the scene was, the “leap of faith” felt disconnected where I say a scene of Miles noticing the glitches from the hotel after he was living in the moment for once would’ve been a great transition to the climax. Show that he’s ready and amped to be the new Spider-Man, but knows there’s no time to lose. Have the life-threatening factor be more of a looming presence. If not that, might as well not add it in, especially at the last minute. I mean it’s possible.

Like what happened to Liv? We don- we don’t see her after everything is over. Is best villain just gone now forever?!

I talked previously of how Peni, Spider-Noir, and Spider-Ham were wasted in the film, but they were but a fraction to the whole idea of the quantum warping and how it felt like an afterthought until near the end. And as I mention Doc Ock, it mostly felt like the villains just come and go. Prowler is the exception, but I completely forgot Kingpin fucked with reality to get his family back. Shit, I forgot Scorpion and Goblin were in the movie. I’m not saying we needed the know how of everything, but I figure better time to conveying their stance in the film would make them more memorable. Spider-Man has great villains, and most of the films knew how to mix their presence in with our hero’s life fluently. If the major world ending threat wasn’t much, it didn’t help that most of the villains here supporting that threat were flash in the pan at best.

like a majority of blockbuster villains

Now off the bat, as I mentioned before, I am not a fan of movies that notably wink and nudge that a sequel is around the corner. I’m okay with things being open-ended but I draw a line at a film being forced to feel lacking because it’s relying on a sequel to pick up the slack. There are exceptions to this of course, but great films should be able to stand on their own and not be codependent on sequels to make them better. With my talk of the B-team and the whole reality warping aspect of the film, the Spiderverse part of the title feels like setup for the sequel and while there’s nothing inherently wrong with that, it doesn’t help when half the 1st film feels minor and somewhat forgettable in my case. Miles’ story was great but it’s like we had to flip flop between his story and the setting up for more. And it’s that story rubberbanding that leaves a less satisfying note to me compared to not only other films in general, but other Spider-Man films where even when a lot is thrown at me, each of the Raimi trilogy felt conclusively satisfactory as both a whole and individually.

It honestly makes this ending pretty mixed in my eye

But on this note, I don’t wanna end on a sour grape, not when the 3rd part is gonna end this whole critique off more optimistically. So as much as I harped the whole setup Spiderverse aspect, the silver lining is that this felt like the first few hours of Kingdom Hearts 2 with Roxas. This is a weird comparison but it does feel like Miles is at the twilight of his life in this film. We get some great action but his involvement in the film is kept at arms length while the other Spidermun are stepping well. It’s only after Aaron’s death, the dejection, and Jefferson’s uplifting words and this shot in particular where we can finally say...

Spider-Man has Awaken Again

I can step on anything in this movie but it’s where Miles gets his groove and is there for the other spidermun in the climax when I say that it’s a give and take. This movie isn’t perfect, and I can’t say it is my favorite Spider-Man film ever, but it definitely knows what it wanted to do and I can’t give them enough credit. I said before, but this film certainly has its ambitions and while not everything lands well with me, what they get right is what they handle in spades. The best about it all is where part 3 is gonna pick up. Stay tuned...

Otherwise, thanks for reading and I hope you enjoy your day.

#spider-man into the spider-verse #into the spider verse #spiderverse #itsv #spider-man #spiderman #marvel #critique #analysis #long post #Good Stuff

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a-ratt · 5 years

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Into the Mari-verse (for real this time)

Alright. Alright. Alright.

I’m back. That’s not a good thing. Maybe it is. I don’t know.

Okay, so, like, a week ago, I made a post about a WIP fanfic I was writing, but, uh, that may or may not happen idk. Anyways, I thought I might as well throw out all the notes I took and ideas and concepts I came up with, so, here goes:

The Goal:

So, when I first brainstormed this I wanted to think about how this would have to differ from Spider-Man: Into the Spider-verse. First things first, the main character, Marinette, is an established superhero who’s confident about herself, both in her personal and superhero life. Meanwhile, Miles Morales is a normal teenager who suddenly gets superpowers and has to learn how to be Spider-Man to save New York City.

Taking that into consideration, I had to write out a completely different arc for Marinette. From reading multiple fanfics and posts critiquing the show (credits to @zoe-oneesama @miraculouscontent and others.) I decided the best course of action would be for Marinette to work on her self-confidence. Now, here’s the thing, she’s already self-confident. At least, that’s how she’s portrayed. (Unless she’s in the same room as Adrien.) But, through reviewing the show’s canon and plotting out how characters should be growing, I decided that she’s probably got a lot of pent up emotions. Chief among them is probably anger at always being walked on and taken for granted, especially after Chameleon.

With the goal being more introspective, I was also able to validate the idea of the Mari-verse. (i.e. bringing multiple Marinettes into the same reality.) Each one has their own issue that they’re dealing with and each one helps the others with dealing with those issues.

The Marinettes:

Okay, so this is the real meat of the story. This is what everyone’s probably coming for. The base concept of Into the Mari-verse, is that multiple, alternate Marinettes converge on the same reality due to some phenomenon (I’ll explain that later.)

Anyways, the final total of Marinettes to show up in the story was five:

Ladybug!Marinette: The canon Marinette who received the Ladybug Earrings and became the Miraculous Ladybug. She has lived a rather successful life, saving Paris and getting A’s at school. Recently, she’s hit some rough terrain thanks to the return of Lila and her plot to turn her class against her. Thanks to her, Marinette has become tired and detached from her personal life; depressed, but not to an extreme.

This has led to a crisis of identity. Unlike most stories, however, she beholds her superhero alter ego, to the point that she questions her role as Marinette. Though Tikki argues that she shouldn’t neglect her personal life, Marinette cannot help but notice that people take her for granted, but they worship Ladybug.

Butterfly!Marinette: An alternate Marinette that succeeded in giving away the Ladybug Earrings to Alya in the Origins episodes. While Ladybird and Chat Noir continued to protect Paris, Marinette remained a side character. She stayed true to her values, standing up to bullies and helping others, but her she often feels guilt and experiences moments of self-loathing for pushing such a heavy burden as the duties of a superhero onto someone else; i.e. the new girl in class and her best-friend at that. Her closeness with Alya, however, has also translated into favoritism by Ladybird and Chat Noir, something Hawkmoth noticed.

During the events of Hero’s Day, Marinette was captured and used as bait, but after being freed, she helped distract Hawkmoth long enough for Team Miraculous to regroup and defeat the super villain themselves. She was taken to safety before the final fight and in the aftermath, crossed paths with an exhausted Gabriel Agreste who claimed to have been transformed into the Collector. Unbeknownst to either of them, Nuuru stole the Butterfly Brooch from Gabriel and stowed away inside of Marinette’s purse. Later that day, she discovered him. He convinced her to take up the superhero mantle once again and she became Le Monarque. Her inexperience has resulted in self-doubt and a fear of failure.

Bee!Marinette: (credited to @zoe-oneesama) An alternate Marinette that had the Ladybug Earrings stolen from her by Chloé without her ever realizing she had them. While Scarlet Lady and Chat Noir defended Paris (mostly Chat Noir), Marinette remained a resolute figure of confidence and courage among her peers. After receiving the Bee Comb, she became the Miraculous Marigold and clashed with Scarlet Lady over the role of team leader during akuma attacks. Her constant taking command of situations and pushing Scarlet Lady to the side has developed into a kind of controlling behavior, resulting in a minor issue of pride. Usually seen as the obvious leader among her peers, she rarely butts heads with anyone.

However, in Ladybug!Marinette’s reality, she butts heads with the other Marinettes over what course of actions should be taken.

Dragon!Marinette: An alternate Marinette who received the Dragon Miraculous. In a Paris that has long been protected by Ladybug and Chat Noir (in actuality, the married couple, Gabriel and Emilie Agreste), Marinette Dupain-Cheng was born with brown eyes. She adhered to her mother’s Chinese heritage, but was bullied for this. Due to this, she has developed an isolationist demeanor, veering away from social contact.

Later, in collège, Paris came under attack by the former Guardian of the Miraculous, Master Fu, who abused the powers of the Butterfly Miraculous in order to reclaim the Miraculous protected by the Agrestes. To fight him, both Ladybug and Chat Noir required aid, so they gifted Marinette, a notably resolute and resilient classmate of their son, the Dragon Miraculous, turning her into Chu Long.

Cat!Marinette: An alternate Marinette who received the Cat Ring instead of the Ladybug Earrings. Plagg’s influence developed her into a more mischievous and conniving character, often playing pranks, making jokes, and playing around. Though she retains her serious demeanor when it comes to situations demanding it, she is usually playful. (She’s basically a Meme!Marinette) However, she has an issue with self-sacrifice, believing that she must give up herself if it means she is helping others. While it is a tense issue in akuma fights, it is even worse in her personal life, with her classmates usually walking over her and bullies, such as Chloè and Lila taking advantage of her kindness.

Peacock!Marinette: An alternate Marinette that lost faith in herself. (Yeah, this is gonna take a dark turn.) Marinette has always proven to be a strong and confident character, incorruptible and resolute in her beliefs. However, she has had moments of doubt.

She holds Ladybug to an impossible standard. She must be the flawless symbol of heroism and nobility in order to be a superhero. However, is she truly worthy to be Ladybug is she’s been nearly akumatized twice? These seeds of doubt have haunted her for some time, and after the akumatization of her father because of her own emotional, irrational actions, she chooses to give up the Ladybug Earrings.

Her life took a downspiral from then on out. Her classmates abandoned her. Alya and Nino turned their backs on her. She was slowly breaking. Lila’s lies were destroying her life.

In the end, she managed to find comfort in Adrien, but when she managed to build up the courage to confess her feelings, he rebuffed them and told her about his devotion to Ladybug.

That was the last straw.

She once beheld Ladybug, but now she loathed her. While Paris praised their beloved hero, they forsook her.

Her festering negativity drew Hawkmoth’s attention, but instead of akumatizing her, he invited her to the Agreste Mansion under the guise of an internship. She was overjoyed at the prospect, but was quickly horrified to find the super villain in Gabriel Agreste’s place.

Hawkmoth manipulated her emotions, making her believe that the world had turned its back on her. He offered the damaged Peacock Miraculous to her, hoping she would claim it and work as his minion. Marinette, at the lowest point in her life, accepted.

Thus, Le Paon was born and began her reign of terror on Paris, hunting down her former friends and forcing Master Fu into hiding.

The Catalyst:

So, this is the event that actually causes the Marinettes to crossover into Ladybug!Marinette’s reality. It’s not so much of an event as it is an akuma, though.

Her name is Metadrama.

Prior to her akumatization, she lost her father to cancer. He often read her storybooks and she was fascinated with the fantastical tales. Heartbroken at this “bad ending”, she longed for a happy ending. Hawkmoth granted her the ability to search every reality for that happy ending.

In battle against Ladybug and Chat Noir, she proved a powerful opponent. Unlike most akumas, she manipulated the environment around her. Wielding paracausal and reality-warping abilities, she forced Paris to “glitch” and alternate between different versions of itself.

Her ultimate goal was to reach the Eiffel Tower and, from there, alter the entirety of Paris in search of the perfect universe where her father survived.

Ladybug and Chat Noir managed to restrain her with the former’s Lucky Charm, but realized to late that her akumatized object was not on her person, but was actually a storybook that she was using to conjure a portal.

Ladybug was able to destroy it, but was exposed to its paracausal and reality-warping energies, causing multiple Marinettes to converge on Ladybug!Marinette’s universe.

Extra Notes:

So, yeah, that’s Into the Mari-verse, or, at least the base concepts and ideas that I came up with. Thought I’d just throw this out there since I don’t know if I’m actually going to write the story. Pairings with the Marinettes are subjective until I finalize who I want with who. (Kinda gunning for a Chlonette/Kagaminette ending, though.)

Character development is based on how the Marinettes interact with each other, either clashing with or helping each other. For example, the Marinettes, looking for a way home, need Butterfly!Marinette to akumatize someone into Metadrama so they can create another portal. However, Butterfly!Marinette doesn’t know how to use her powers, or even how to be a superhero, so they spend their time teaching her. Another example is Ladybug!Marinette coming to terms with how she’s treated by her friends (i.e. Chat’s neglect of her personal space and feelings, her classmates invalidation of her feelings, and her own weariness of herself.) Over the course of the story, the other Marinettes support her and encourage her to believe in herself.

Characters outside of the Marinettes are still being worked on. I definitely want to include redemption arcs for certain characters, Chloè especially. I would like to put more spotlight on Kagami and Luka, both are characters with an incredible amount of potential. I’d like for Alya to have a moment when she comes down from her pedestal and actually apologize to Marinette for her behavior and confess her faults.

On the note of Gabriel Agreste/Hawmoth, I’m uncertain if I want to resolve the Agreste storyline. It’d be a good conclusion to have the Marinette expose his true identity, but it’d also deprive the show of its basis of Team Miraculous winning the day instead of a single character and her many selves. Also, it’d also leave out a future where Team Miraculous deals with Akumas rather than regular crime.

Anyways, thanks for reading. I hope you all enjoyed what I’ve got jotted down. If you’ve got some constructive criticism, please leave some notes. Share this around if you’d like, I’d love the promotion. It’d help me build this idea more.

Thanks again to @zoe-oneesama for letting me use Marigold in this story concept and thanks to @miraculouscontent for her amazing critique and “fixes” of ML canon.

#miraculous ladybug #tales of ladybug and cat noir #spider-man: into the spider-verse #into the spider verse #ladybug #marinette dupain cheng #ladybug!marinette #butterflymarinette #bee!marinette #dragon!marinette #cat!marinette #peacock!marinette #kwamiswap #au #fanfic #my way of promoting community creations #you are all amazing and i love you

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edosianorchids901 · 5 years

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“I can tell you’re lying.” angst

Thank you so much for the prompt!

Read on AO3 - there’s something horrifically broken with Tumblr’s mobile formatting and it refuses to let me fix it, so AO3 is likely your best bet if you’re on mobile.

Julian stormed down the corridors of their capturedJem’Hadar ship. Garak had gone too far this time, he really had. Months of jibesand passive aggressive remarks, and now this. Enough. It stopped now.

He turned the corner and found Garak already working. “Ah,Doctor. Good. I could use a hand with this power grid. It doesn’t seem to likeme, and we are on a tight repair schedule.”

Repair schedule bedamned. “We need to talk.”

Garak peered at him over a half-removed panel. “What we needis to complete these repairs. Or have you forgotten that we’re on a Jem’Hadarship with no warp capability? You were the one who made the calculations, afterall. Seventeen years, two months, and three days to Federation space, Ibelieve.”

“It’s about that, actually.”

“Oh?” Lips pursed, Garak peeled the panel off and set itdelicately on the floor. “Did your genetically enhanced mind malfunction? Aglitch in the code somewhere, perhaps?”

“What is wrong with you?”

“I believe the question is what’s wrong with you, my dearDoctor.”

“Don’t you ‘dear Doctor’ me,” Julian clenched his fists andstruggled to keep his tone level. It came out flat instead. “How dare you. Howdare you say things like that to me. Is your mind really so twisted that youthink it’s acceptable?”

Garak turned, taking on a combative stance. His gaze lockedon Julian’s with a startling intensity. “Whatever are you talking about?”

Now he was playing games? “I’m talking about all your damnedinsinuations. The smug, superior attitude that makes people like me sounpopular? The computer agrees with me because we think alike? Remember?”

Garak snorted. “Really, Julian. Is now the time to discussyour insecurities?”

“If you know they’re insecurities, why do you keep poking atthem?”

“You do recall you’re dating a Cardassian?” Sharp impatienceflashed in Garak’s eyes. “Cardassians argue quite frequently with our partners.And have you forgotten how you responded to my mention of your smug superiority?You certainly seemed to recognize the remark as a flirtation then, judging byhow quickly you removed my clothes.”

Heat suffused Julian’s entire body, heartbeat pounding inhis ears. “You’re an absolute asshole, you know that?”

“I believe you were well acquainted with me before we begandating. And now you take exception?”

“This is different!”

“What is different?” Garak tipped his jaw back and gaveJulian the look he usually reserved for his most frustrating customers. “Ourenvironment, certainly. Ah, but that’s not it. Of course. It’s that you’ve lostyour mask.”

What the hell was he on about now? “My mask?”

“You’re quite exposed these days, all your secrets scatteredto the wind. Perhaps it’s simply that you miss being able to hide.”

“You would know all about hiding, wouldn’t you? You’re doingit right now.” Julian stepped closer, right into Garak’s personal space.“You’re still hiding behind insults and passive aggressive remarks.”

“Oh, I’ve stepped quite beyond passive aggressive and into purely‘aggressive’, as have you.” Garak flashed a bright, patronizing smile. “Andwhat dark secret am I hiding from, Doctor? Tell me, since you seem to havepsychoanalyzed me. What childhood trauma do you plan to unearth this time?”

Julian’s throat went dry, and he struggled to get the wordsout. “Actually, I’d like to talk about my own childhood trauma.”

Garak stepped back, his own mask shattering under confusion.“That’s hardly the topic.”

“No, it is the topic. It’s been the topic all this time, allthese months. It’s just not on the surface.” Julian squared his shoulders. “So,let’s bring it to the surface.”

Silence descended in the corridor, only broken by irritablebeeps from the still-damaged power grid. Then Garak gave a bow, sweeping hisarms wide. “I am at your disposal, Doctor.”

“Still with all the glib bullshit. Drop it.” This was it.The question that sat between them at meals, shared their bed, lurked behindevery exchange. “Does it bother you that I’m genetically enhanced?”

Hesitation. Just a split second of hesitation. “Of coursenot, Julian.”

So, that was it. Julian’sthroat throbbed, and his stomach twisted. “I can tell you’re lying,” he said, holdingeye contact.

Garak was the one who looked away. “My dear, I—”

“I’m not even sure if you realize it.” Each breath becamemore of a struggle, and Julian leaned against the wall. Cold metal leeched heatfrom his body, and he shivered. “Do you realize it, Garak? Is your crueltyintentional or is it subconscious?”

“My cruelty?” Garak’s lip quivered and he gave a small headshake. “No, I was merely—”

“Don’t deny it. Just tell me the truth. Just this once.”

Motions slow and deliberate, Garak disconnected theremaining wiring. “It is…an adjustment,” he finally said.

As if Julian hadn’t been plunged into his own adjustmentthese past months, hadn’t spent every waking moment feeling the stares, thewhispers… “An adjustment.”

“Perhaps not an adjustment I’ve handled particularly well.”None of his usual theatrics permeated Garak’s manner. His tone was low, expressionthoughtful. Something—remorse, perhaps—flashed across his face. “I believe I’vebeen attempting to deny my discomfort.”

“You are damn good at denial.” Julian hugged his armstighter across his chest. Damn it, he should have brought this up months ago,back when he’d noticed the shift in Garak’s behavior. Garak wasn’t breaking upwith him yet, so this was already going better than expected. Should have just gottenit out of the way sooner. “You didn’t notice that you’ve been sniping at me formonths?”

Garak winced, still fiddling with the wires. “As I said, I wassomewhat in denial. Whatever my own troubles with the situation, they pale incomparison to your own. I know I haven’t been the most supportive—”

“I’m not worried about that, not right now.” In a way, theso-called support had been even worse. The cheery attempts to act like nothingwas wrong, the tentativeness. “I just want to have an open conversation withyou.”

Garak’s expression closed like an airlock during suddendecompression. “If that’s what you desire, you may have chosen the wrongpartner.”

Damn him. “Really? Is that it, then? Are we finished?”

The sudden panic in Garak’s eyes brought Julian moresatisfaction than he’d have ever cared to admit. Served him right. He should bepanicking, after all the suffering he’d inflicted.

“Fine, you want an open conversation?” Garak asked. “It doesbother me. For months, I’ve been asking myself who—or what—I fell in love with.Did that person really exist? Or were you merely a construct of your parents’hopes and dreams? I even questioned whether you’d been specifically programmedto appeal to me, perhaps as some sort of covert operation. After all, youappear to be everything I find attractive.”

It was like being pummeled repeatedly in the chest. “Howcould you possibly think that? Are you really that paranoid?”

Garak rolled his eyes. “You hardly need to ask thatquestion.”

No. No more damned evasion. “I do need to ask.”

To his credit, Garak didn’t look away this time. “Then, yes.I’ve spent these last months wondering who Julian Bashir truly is. Whether the personI love is a fabrication. Whether you are who you claim to be. Whether I knowwho you are at all.”

An odd sound burst from Julian. Laughter.

Garak stared at him as if he’d sprouted several additionallimbs. “Julian?”

“Oh, this is just too damn much.” Julian shook his head. Heshould have expected this, should have seen it. It was a perfectly reasonablething to wonder, really. But coming from Garak?

“What is too damn much?”

Julian fixed him with a direct look. “Don’t you think I’veever wondered the same thing about you? Elim Garak, the plain simple tailor.Except that you’re not at all. And you lie for fun, Garak. At least I was only lying for self-protection.”

Garak drew back, expression as wounded as if Julian hadslapped him. “After all this time, do you understand me so little?”

No matter how long they knew each other, he’d likely neverunderstand Garak. At least, not fully. “In what sense?”

The power grid gave another insistent beep. Garak slowlydisconnected the last wire, brow ridges casting deep shadows over his eyes.When he spoke, it was in a tight, strained voice. “Has it ever occurred to youthat perhaps I lie, not merely for entertainment, but because telling the truthhas never been safe for me either?”

The gap between them closed before Julian even realized hewas moving. He pulled Garak into a hug and buried his face against cool scales.

Garak stiffened in his hold, not breathing. Then he put hisarms around Julian and gave a low hum.

“I miss you.” Julian’s voice cracked, and he cleared histhroat. “I miss how things were. I’m still Julian.”

Oddly, Garak chuckled. “Just with an additional lightsprinkling of trauma?”

More than a light sprinkling, but the joke lifted some ofthe heaviness from Julian’s chest. “Something like that, yeah.”

Garak detached from the embrace, his expression unusuallyopen. “I’ve missed you as well.”

Enough heavy conversation—that admission was enough for now.“Well, now that we’ve sorted out our own respective crises…shall we fix thispower grid before the Jem’Hadar blow us up?” Julian asked with a tight smile.

“A wise precaution.” Garak bent over his work, and Julianjoined him. They could sort out the rest later, when things quieted down.

#garashir #garak x bashir #elim garak #julian bashir #star trek #deep space nine #ds9 #prompted writing #plain simple writing

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hoenn-hakase · 6 years

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TPP Bronze: Day 8. The End

Where we last saw Fifer, she had just become Champion for both Kohto and Kanto and had begun to explore the lengths of her domain as she'd hardly knew anything about Kanto. Prof. Koa gave her a Cave Pass that allowed her to go through Cerulean Cave where she found and fought her toughest opponent yet: TPP's own, AJ. Unable to beat him, she returned to Kanto's mainland where she seems to be seeking the greatest treasure of all: Her Purpose.

We start the day bright and early in Vermilion City. Having never been in a port city, but having been in a train station, Fifer sure wanted to check out the docks. What would be found down there? A big fancy boat? A rare pokemon in hiding? A gateway to HELL? Well.... APPARENTLY! D8!

Going down the stairs to where the loading area normally would be, Fifer instead stepped out of the port and into the Glitch Worl!!! Which bizarrely enough, also seems to be the source of the Plague o' Rocks that's been slowly trying to encase Kohto for some time now. A stray NPC tries to ask her if she came from Johto and admires her rare Pokemon he wonders can be found there. Glitch Worl seems to be a pretty enclosed space, having the doors blocked and buildings too fragmented to hold anything. No treasure to be found... So Fifer heads back to the Lost Boy and decides to ask the.... clone? Yes, she didn't notice at first, but there's a girl in blue who turned toward Fifer when she tried to get the girl's attention, and... SHE LOOKS JUST LIKE HER???

The girl suddenly takes her through another doorway, (down the rabbit hole indeed...) where she found herself suddenly TRAPPED in a mess of world fragments and somewhere in the distance, a horn blows, signalling that they're being taken away somewhere. Even as she can feel the "ship" moving, she eventually manages to kick the door open and stepped out to find... she was still in the same place. In front of the fragmented gym of the town she departed from anyway. How strange. Talking to another girl this time, or what she THOUGHT was another girl, turned out to be some copy of her as well and the pair of Fifers decided to shove her back into the pocket dimension to seal her away.

Wriggling out the side door this time, Fifer seemed to be quite put out with this place, and these... "twins" and decided to see if she could just fly back to Cerulean City. Somehow... that worked? She eventually went back to do a bit of a test, and certainly the port still lead into the Glitch Worl. But she could leave it just as easily with Fly. Having learned this, she heads back to the League, presumably to talk with the council about barring off the docks until they figure out how to prevent people from falling into The Void.

After dealing with those bugs, Fifer decides to go beat up some real bugs and does a long grind session in the Viridian Forest where she stumbles across a fisherman who is mad about someone telling him there was a good fishing spot there, but only bugs!

Feeling her training is complete, it's time to rechallenge AJ! And fail. ... Multiple times. So instead it's BACK to training! Off to the League to again get the help and advice of her fellow League members. There's something troubling about all this, I'm sure. AJ is known destroyer. Has he only been going easy on her?

Things only turn weirder (and Glitchier? Come on, Bronze you were holding up so well....;o; ) as she has a total WHITE out

Perhaps the answer isn't just in sheer brute strength, but something... more. Remembering Sabrina's words in how the power of the bond Fifer has with her Pokemon, the love they share, is more powerful than anything, Fifer appears to be working on strengthening her bond with Lucy

Working her way through the LITERAL Maze of Trees, Fifer finds a hidden house that seems to be some kind of Game Corner... Only there's no games inside the building. Instead a shady man tells her CONGRATS on her excellent sleuthing skills in being able to find the Secret Room. His friend then proceeds to give her AS MANY MASTER BALLS AS SHE WANTS 8O 8O 8O The chat proceeds to get so many, the game goes into a sort of "hyper mode" where the music, text, and character movements all suddenly move at an accelerated pace to speed things up XD

Having been deemed a Master of Glitchcraft, Fifer decides to test her strength elsewhere. She eventually heads to the Kanto Power Plant, where she walked through the door into the Old Couple's house in the heart of Deep Cave. Stepping out of the house proved she was, in fact, still in the cave, so it wasn't that they were removed to the Power Plant, but that she figured out how to create a portal of her own. Digging her way out, she returned to the Power Plant entrance just fine. Magic~ 8D <3

Fifer seems very excited to discover such powers and immediately decides she MUST try this elsewhere to give herself confidence in this new ability. She returns to the Glitch Worl and proves she doesn't even need to Fly to leave this weird place, as she can just step back through the doorway she created to enter it. Entering and leaving Vermilion City Gym also appears to form a gateway, giving her a shortcut back to Memoria Town.

A new plan forges as she seems to piece things together, eventually setting up a gateway at the entrance to Dark Tunnel that would lead her directly into Cerulean Cave so she could bypass the guards and go more quickly after AJ. In the end it was a long, and hard fought battle but with a bit of luck and strategizing, we FINALLY CLAIM VICTORY! >O

AJ actually doesn't have much to say (not to US anyway XD) and just as mysteriously as he appeared to Fifer.... he vanished. Leaving one to wonder if he was ever truly there... The credits roll and the Chat cries and Fifer... Well Fifer managed to warp into the game's true finale. A mysterious lookout spot where she could see all of Kohto through a lense and found --?!! waiting for her with a happy Congrats on her completing all there is to do in their tiny home. She also meets with Freako, a strange man who thanks for playing "the game". One of Koa's aides is even there, saying the professor sends his regards. Everyone's so proud of her ;o;

As she talks to all the people, and takes in the sights, her ItemFinder starts going off. A... a treasure? It doesn't appear to be in the building, but stepping outside reveals the "lookout" is in a house by the sea. It... It's Cerulean Cape! I mean, Enders Isle. Fifer continues to look around the clearing it sits in, thoroughly cut off from the rest of civilization. The ItemFinder starts to react to something outside now... she follows... She follows until she finds herself back in the gateway to Cerulean Cave and a soft mist fills the area. The Voices leave, some sending hearts and well wishes as they do so. The game ends.

This was long but still kind of fun. I think if I do this for the next run, I'll start doing it from Day 1 so hopefully I won't be SO far behind as I started this when it was almost over. I know my points of interest are kind of wonky, but I hope I could at least make these info-dumps amusing at least. Thanks! <3

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Okay, well since no one asked about it, here's a few bonus notes and lore ideas to come up while I was going through all this.

The PokeGear was back in full swing this run, and we had several numbers calling us at all hours of the day, but the ones that stood out to me the most were: Youngster Zach, Camper Nate, Lass Dana, and PokeFan Beverly. I suppose given the chat's reactions whenever one of them called had something to do with it. (Dana is Bae though apparently)

I'm not sure if it was a bug or what triggered it, but while we were in Viridian Forest, Mom called after EVERY. SINGLE. TRAINER. to tell us she went and bought something and it's in the PC. Whether she was pushing for PC use or simply seems to be gaining a bit of a shopping addiction due to just how much dough Fifer's been raking in through her battle and treasure hunting skills, it was really funny. I really do wonder if the same phone call just kept getting triggered even though she only meant to call us once, or if there actually was a new item in the PC for every time she called, but we'll never know.

For anyone curious, I believe I saw we had 171 Master Balls over the course of Bronze. According to Kelcyus: "and most Masterball'd mons: Master Alakazam, Master Golbat, Master Graveler, Master Goldeen and Master Tangela which was caught with the original masterball."

Speaking of, Kelcyus made a comic about the incident, but I didn't actually notice it since I was more or less skimming over events in my vid watching so while skimming I didn't see anything out of place with a trainer battle and the continuing on down Route 9 toward the Power Plant though knowing that the area was off limits now explains SO MUCH about the stuff that happened in that area. Like the gateways to different areas because nothing was programmed in place of the Power Plant and Rock Tunnel and so forth. If I calculated correctly, the Edna OH SHIT incident happened back on Day 7. While it's hilarious that after turning into a Magicarp, Edna accuses us of hacking, the truth is, the gate house to the underground between Cerulean City and Vermilion City was meant to block the path to Route 9. Instead it was about two spaces over, creating a one space gap for Fiver to simply walk through and then use Cut on the tree as normal.

While I keep making jokes about the Plague o Rocks that seems to be tormenting Kohto (that one village I never got the name for, Acre Forest, Cerulean Cape, ect all having the large square boulders blocking off places for seemingly no reason) and then finding them EVERYWHERE in the Glitch Worl, and the stray NPC still talking about Johto, (as well as a few others like in Saffon and in the Route 9 forbidden zone) I can't help but wonder if the random rocks are Glitchwork or actually (from a lore prospective) actually from the remnants from Brown when Johto was basically buried due to (I thiiiiink?) an earthquake. Seeing how Kohto and Kanto are directly connected, and both areas have these rocks to some extent, and Johto was basically destroyed, I wonder how far flung the effects of that disaster struck. o.O;

And that's all I can think of at the moment. ^ w ^

#twitch plays pokemon #pokemon bronze #fifer #fifi #summaries

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meeedeee · 7 years

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Final Fantasy FXV: Thoughts RSS FEED OF POST WRITTEN BY FOZMEADOWS

When I first heard that FFXV was going to break with franchise tradition by having an all-male central team, I was more than a little surprised. Final Fantasy has always been distinguished as much by its memorable – and central – female characters as by any other element; which is why, somewhat paradoxically, I never felt particularly angry about the switch, either. As a whole, video games are still male-dominated in a way that frequently sets my teeth on edge, but Final Fantasy has a strong line of credit with me: whatever my thoughts on the state of gaming as an industry – and while criticism of Square Enix’s decision in this context is nonetheless valid – I felt I could still attempt the game itself.

Thus far, at roughly eight hours in – which is, I’m aware, not very far at all – I’m enjoying myself immensely, though possibly not in a way that was intended. And in order to satisfactorily explain why that is, I first need to say a little about my history with the franchise.

The first Final Fantasy I ever played was VIII, which always made me something of an oddity among my friends: unlike everyone who started the series at VII or earlier, I had no established sense of how the combat system ought to work, and so took the VIII model, which was a widely-hated departure from canon, as my yardstick for the series. This meant I was not only frustrated by the traditional setup used in VII and IX, but irritated by the more cartoonish character designs. Which isn’t to say that I disliked either game, exactly: just that they were always less beloved to me than VIII and, later on, X and XII, whose advanced graphics and combat systems more closely resembled what VIII had been trying – with, admittedly, more ambition than success – to achieve.

Even now, XII remains my favourite Final Fantasy. The writing and voice acting were both incredible, and even though Vaan, rather than Ashe, was the POV character, I loved the departure from canon that made him a non-romantic participant in her narrative. By contrast, XIII was a clusterfuck, so much so that I quickly set it aside as unplayable: the writing was naff, the voice acting melodramatic (with the single exception of Sazh), the premise confused and the combat frustratingly garbled. I couldn’t understand how the best aspects of XII had been so thoroughly disregarded, and as such, I never bothered with the sequel, which makes XV the first new Final Fantasy I’ve played since 2010.

Aesthetically, then, XV is paying a great deal of homage to my favourite games in the series – VIII and XII – which predisposes me to love it. The opening premise of an invading empire and a missing heir to the throne is evocative of both Galbadia and Archadia, with Noctis’s early quest to recover lost weapons from ancient tombs running a close parallel to Ashe’s quest in XII. The fact that Noctis, Prompto, Ignis and Gladio spend the game driving around in a sports car might seem ridiculous on the surface, especially if you’ve got a preference for the airships of VII, IX and XII, but only if you’ve forgotten the convertibles and jeeps of VIII, where driving on the worldmap was also a feature, and where fancy cars were a staple of the more dramatic cutscenes.

In fact, there’s always been something of a roadtrip vibe to a lot of the Final Fantasy games, and not only in terms of the main party journeying thither and yon across multiple fictional worlds. The many flashbacks to Lord Braska’s pilgrimage in X show him broing it up with Auron and Jecht (to whom Gladio bears more than a superficial physical and vocal resemblance), while their decision to sphere-capture their adventures is a clear forerunner to Prompto’s photography. VIII didn’t lack for female characters, but the initial SEED test features a grumpily all-male party, with Squall, Zell and Seifer forced into a temporary alliance. Squall and Zell were always something of an odd pair, but delightfully so, and their dynamic has been revived – and, I’d argue, improved – in the byplay between Noctis and Prompto. Likewise, Ignis’s dry drawl and dryer expression are more than a little reminiscent of Balthier, though his dutiful priorities make him a closer equivalent to Auron and Basch.

In other words, the four protagonists of XV are themselves a homage to the male relationships of previous Final Fantasy games, and quite clearly so. Together, they interact much as you’d expect of a quartet of twentysomething men, joking and snarking at each other in equal measure. The writing and voice acting aren’t as good as XII, but they’re nowhere near the abysmal mess of XIII. I’d peg them as being on par with X: naff at times, but somehow endearingly so, and overall engaging. Granted, the background plot is complex – it helps to have watched the prequel movie, Kingsglaive, and there’s also an accompanying anime series – but part of what makes the quartet watchable is how clearly established their friendship is: we’re getting to know the characters by how they know each other.

As far as the gameplay and levelling systems go, I’ve got no complaints thus far. Even without being able to run through the full tutorial for fighting – my version kept glitching when it came to learning how to warp – I’ve still found it intuitive to use. It’s a dissimilar combat system to most FF games, in that it’s not turn-based, but neither is it as blindingly fast-paced or poorly-designed as the system used in XIII, and the ability to warp to targets makes for some engaging tactical options. It helps that I’ve just come off a huge Dragon Age: Inquisition jag: my preferred approach to combat in both games can best be described as “running in headfirst with a large sword and hitting things until they fall down,” with magic and projectile weapons left on auto until or unless I’m specifically forced to use them. Players who favour different tactics might have more complaints to level here, but for my purposes, it works just fine.

But what I’m really loving about XV is the extent to which – I assume unintentionally – it’s both hilarious and heavily queercoded.

I’ll deal with the latter first, because it’s arguably the more contentious point. Let me be clear: I’m not for one second giving Square Enix props for deliberately creating queer representation here, because I don’t think for a second that it’s what they actually meant to do – or at least, if they’re trying to muddle vaguely in that direction, then they haven’t had the guts to confirm it. Culturally, the lines we draw been homosocial and homosexual behaviour tend to be as historically arbitrary as they are fiercely policed, with any overlap subject to argument on both sides. But cultural differences is, I suspect, a large part of why XV reads the way it does: the game is originally Japanese, and in trying to cater to both Japanese and Western masculine ideals, Square Enix has wandered into what plays as a rather spectacularly queer compromise.

First and most obviously, there’s the wardrobe issue. Clearly, the all-black leather aesthetic is meant to look Manly and Cool and Deeply Heterosexual In A Traditionally Masculine Way, and if the designs were simple, functional and militaristic, then that would probably work, even given the youth and beauty of the characters (more of which shortly). But Final Fantasy, like a great many Japanese properties, is famous for its distinctive clothing designs, which means the characters look less like soldiers and more like scene kids en route to a metal concert. Specifically: Noctis and Prompto look like they shop at Hot Topic, Ignis is wearing Cuban heeled boots, driving gloves and seme glasses (seriously) and Gladio consistently looks like he’s posing for a Grindr photo. Like. I’m aware that he’s meant to be the most hypermasculine straight male self-identification fantasy of the four, what with the scar and the tattoos and the devastatingly Japanese mullet, but generally speaking, ripped guys in open leather shirts and tight leather pants are more visually reminiscent of Mardi Gras than the military. I’m just saying.

The fact that you can customise their outfits (to a degree), and that picking a new wardrobe changes their stats, isn’t a new development: in fact, it’s something the franchise first introduced with dress spheres in the all-female X-2, which makes its presence in the all-male XV a subtly pleasing symmetry. And yet it runs up against a standard of masculine gaming: changing your armour is one thing, because armour is Manly, but changing your clothes – which, stat bonuses or not, is what we’re functionally talking about – is something else entirely. It’s a truly strange demarcation, because there are plenty of instances where video game characters change outfits of their own accord, in cutscenes or for plot-specific purposes, or where the change represents a specific, all-over upgrade. But the option to alter the appearance of male characters for largely aesthetic reasons – to change how they look to you, the player, in clothes that are recognisably modern and fashionable – is not, I suspect, a common feature of games aimed at heterosexual men, nor is the in-game implication of the characters toting around a bunch of fancy matching outfits a particularly straight-coded thing.

And, okay. Even though we queer folk often telegraph our identities through fashion, there’s a degree of reductive stereotype inherent in judging sexuality on the basis of clothing choice, and if that were the only issue here, I wouldn’t have brought it up. (Except, of course, to point out the truly delightful ridiculousness of watching four goth boys run around the countryside in full club gear, often while complaining about the temperature. It’s like they’re headed for Glastonbury with monsters.) But the queercoding of XV is a package deal: it’s not just the clothes, but the clothes in combination with the characters themselves, the dialogue they’re given, and the way the four of them occupy the game.

Specifically: Final Fantasy is a gaming franchise that’s well aware, historically speaking, of its very large female fanbase. Even though the majority of the games have male protagonists, they’ve traditionally been designed for a straight female gaze – and more, I would argue, a teenage female gaze, given that the characters are usually in their teens or very early twenties – in line with aesthetics more Japanese than Western. Former heroes like Cloud, Squall, Zidane, Tidus and Vaan might be formidable warriors in-game, but they’re never beefed up: they’re overwhelmingly built lean, with much longer, more stylised hair than you typically see on masculine Western characters. They wear jewellery – often visible in their base character designs, and not just as a hidden accessory slot – and offhand, aside from various weird lines around Cloud crossdressing in VII, I can’t think of any real instances of sexism or misogyny from those characters that aren’t actively shut down. In fact, the number of female characters in the earlier games ensures that, in addition to any love interests, the leading men also have platonic female friends – something that’s still damnably unusual in most forms of media, let alone in video games.

All of which, thus far, holds true in XV, too: Princess Lunafreya, Noctis’s intended bride, is his childhood friend, as is Gladio’s sister, Iris. When the game begins, Noctis and his friends are travelling to meet Lunafreya before their (politically arranged) wedding; when everything goes awry because betrayal and empire, they’re forced to regroup and end up hanging out with Iris, who has escaped to the city of Lesallum. That’s where I’m up to so far, and what immediately stands out to me, as someone who spent a not inconsiderable portion of their adolescence and early twenties hanging around single straight guys, is the fact that the quartet barely ever talk about women at all. And the thing is, I can see why it’s been done! Final Fantasy has a heavy female fanbase, and in any case, they’re not the sort of games where the male soldiers sit around reminiscing about sexual conquests. But contextually, because of the way the game is presented – four friends driving and talking shit in real time, mocking each other, while initially on the way to see one of them married – the lack of talk about sex or romance of any kind is jarring.

Which isn’t to say the subject of women never comes up at all; it’s just that, when it does, the overwhelming impression is of dialogue written with a female audience in mind, but without any awareness of the queercoding implications of its delivery by these particular male characters. This means, for instance, that there’s a scene where the boys find a magazine article about Lunafreya’s wedding dress, and all of them start cooing about how beautiful it will be; Ignis notes that the dress is bespoke, designed by Vivienne Westwood, and Prompto starts enthusing about how pretty Lunafreya will look in it. In Hammerhead, the buxom mechanic Cindy, whose character design is clearly meant to please the straight male players, is someone who, in real life, you’d expect a bunch of straight boys on an ostensible stag trip to talk about. Except that they never do; and instead, the one time there’s a reference made to Gladio “chatting someone up,” it turns out to be a grumpily endearing scientist who wants you to go catch some frogs as penance for interrupting her research.

And then there’s Noctis taking a tour of Lestallum with Iris. Throughout this mini-quest, you’re given a set of binary conversational options to either encourage Iris in her enthusiasm for the town, or to disapprove. Then, at the end, she coyly suggests that being on the tour was almost like a date – an assertion you can either play off lightly, or outright deny: pointedly, there is no option to agree. If you deny, she laughs and says “you could at least play along for once,” suggesting that Iris knows Noctis isn’t interested in her and is willing to tease him about it – an odd thing to include, if you don’t want the audience to wonder about his preferences.

A little earlier in the game, Prompto asks Noctis what he ought to take more photos of: apart from declining, the only options are “me” (meaning Noctis), Ignis or Gladio. Again, there’s a gameworld logic to this – the photos are ultimately viewed by the player, who gets to pick which character they want to record the most – but in terms of the impact in setting, this is not an outstandingly heterosexual moment. Very possibly, there exists a group of straight bros whose designated photographer is happy asking, “Hey bro, which of our friends do you want to see more in pictures?” in an established No Homo way, and if so, more power to them. But if you want to find a context where that sort of exchange is an everyday thing, then look no further than the queer regions of Instagram. (Plus, it’s kind of conspicuous how often Prompto, when assessing the day’s photos, comments on how good Gladio the Perpetually Shirtless looks.)

And then there’s the occasional quirks of dialogue and voice acting: choices that, again, would be minor on their own, but which collectively become suggestive of something specific. Early on, Cor sends Gladio, Prompto and Ignis to make a distraction at a military blockade while he and Noctis sneak inside: the gambit is successful, and when the group reunites afterwards, Gladio says cheerfully, “The Niffs couldn’t keep their eyes off us!”. To which Ignis quips, in reference to Noctis and Cor’s arrival, “You spared us their attentions.” Offhand, I can think of about a dozen different ways to word that exchange that don’t remotely brush up against innuendo, and which are far more colloquially and contextually apt besides. The eyes/attentions combo is the kind of thing you’d expect a pair of femme fatales to say after seducing the guards and knocking them out in an action movie. (The fact that we don’t actually witness the initial distraction only adds to its ambiguity.) And yet, this is what they’ve gone with.

Other examples are smaller, but they all add up. Whenever you find new ingredients for Ignis to cook with, he stops to announce, with particular vocal flamboyance, that he’s just thought up a new recipe (exclamation mark!), and whips out a notebook to jot it down. (“I’ll taste test for ya,” Gladio says, in a playfully growling tone that always seems to have one eye on the bedroom.) And then there’s Prompto, who I’m inclined to think of as a confused bisexual puppy, whose voice turns dreamily fanboyish when discussing Cor’s exploits, and who gets just as excited on receiving Cor’s praise as he does at the prospect of seeing Lunafreya in her pretty wedding dress.

Put this all together, then, and what you have are a bunch of young men who are, by Western standards, more pretty than handsome, dressed in fashionable clothes and accessories that are more evocative of queer or queer-friendly subcultures than not, and who care enough about their appearance to have multiple outfits on hand at any given time. (You can, if you’re willing to sacrifice an accessory slot to aesthetics, buy hair gel for them to use.) These men are knowledgeable about fashion, have a platonic concern for the women they encounter, are constantly photographing one another for each other, have zero comments to make about the stupidly hot female mechanic unless they’re praising her competence, and whose idea of “chatting someone up” apparently means “talking to the grumpy frog lady about the local wildlife population”. This isn’t me leaping to conclusions, here: in the immortal words of Buffy Summers, I took a tiny step and there conclusions were.

All of which is a way of saying that, thus far, I’m delighted with Final Fantasy XV, though not in the ways I’d expected. The characters and setting are a homage to my favourite games in the series, and while I worried the absence of female characters would grate on me, our quartet of bumbling chocobros is stupidly endearing. At this point, Noctis is functionally useless as a prince: even when he’s recognised, the local yokels have no qualms about asking him to take their deliveries or run their errands, and while random sidequests are an RPG staple, they’re usually somewhat tailored to the protagonist’s perceived status. In FFXV, everything is rendered hilarious by the fact that Noctis is a prince, and is seen as a prince, and is still being asked to catch frogs in a swamp and grab shit from some random marketeer’s broken van.

(He’s also gloriously introverted: in dealing with people, his responses usually vary from monosyllabic to resigned disinterest, but when you come across a stray cat in need of feeding – a tiny sidequest that’s a deliberate throwback to Squall doing likewise in VIII – he talks to it at greater length and with more enthusiasm than he otherwise displays with anyone.)

As far as I’m concerned, FFXV is a magic road trip with a bunch of queer boys who have their wardrobes together, but not their shit. I can identify. And so, I suspect, can everyone else who’s fallen into the trashpile of this visually beautiful, thematically mishmash game. I honestly don’t care about the random anachronisms, like the fact that they’re carrying smartphones and fighting magic robots, but still using paper maps and newspapers, to say nothing of using a fucking dog as a messenger for vital correspondence through a warzone – or rather, I do care, but only because the clear discontinuity of it somehow plays as a feature instead of a bug. The entire thing ought to be ridiculous, and it kind of is, but pleasingly so, like a cat in a Halloween costume. The characters don’t take each other seriously, which frees the player up to do likewise – to laugh with them, rather than at them. And frankly, I’ll take that over XIII’s self-important melodrama any day of the week.

from shattersnipe: malcontent & rainbows http://ift.tt/2mJ436t via IFTTT

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absentkidposts · 4 years

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Wanda Vision plot theory

Wanda Vision is one of the many Disney+ exclusive shows that are directly connected to the MCU, his one is gonna be focusing on the life of Wanda Maximoff after the events of Endgame, so pretty much, life after loosing your brother, boyfriend, adoptive fathers, home, being erased from reality, being brought back to reality, being forced to kill your boyfriend and then seeing him being killed... So yeah, pretty chaotic, just as chaotic as her life on the comics. Wanda is Marvel’s most interesting character and her impact on her comics will love through Marvel’s history, what an iconic character that, I believe, has been managed fairly on the movies, because you can’t rush a character like her, you gotta tease and showcase her pain and power on subltle ways so people become hunry for her presence, and once she’s at her peak, there ain’t nobody (well there is but thta doesn’t matter) who’s gonna stop her.

Beginning

Wanda will live on a nasty apartment on New York and she’ll meet a nosey neighbour, her name is Agatha, on the comics, she was a very “Evil Queen” witch who lived on the middle of the woods, but that’s too vintage, so she’ll live on the apartment next to Wanda and she’ll teach her about witchcraft, just as in the comics, and eventually, reality warping. Wanda will use reality warping to bring Vision (boyfriend) back to reality, but first, she’ll create a different realm based on many TV shows (on the comics Agatha’s only knew humanity thtough TV shows). Inspired on many sitcoms, Wanda will live a very happy marriage with a fake Vision and eventually have kids (Wican and Speed) those kids, however, were born by the help of Mephisto, the devil of Marvel; Agatha, an ancient witch who could somehow serve Mephesto could link Wanda with him and help her have her kids.

Rising Problems

The thing with reality warping is that, on the Marvel Universe, is extremely difficult and tricky, so Wanda could start messing up the main timeline and have real consequences. The problems start with Wanda’s sitcom reality glitching, like a TV without signal, she’ll get out of her reality and strat mixing it with the tineline, giving Mephisto a bridge to the main reality. So he starts messing around with earth and manipulates Wanda with the existence of her kids and shows how powerful he is by killing fake Vision (again lol).

Wanda doesn’t give up and creates an infinity stone, the Mind stone that gave the original Vision power, to be precise, that calls the atention of S.W.O.R.D (a private FBI controlled by Nick Fury, it was teased at the end credits of Cap Marvel), since they control everything about space, this is where we get introduced to Monica Rambeu, daughter of Carol’s girlfriend, Maria. Monica was the original femmale version of Captain Marvel, (Fury met her in the movies, she probably worked for SHIELD and eventually for SWORD) so she’ll get in contact with the infinity stone and get her powers the same way Carol got hers.

Climax

While Wanda is trying to set her children free (she eventually will because she’s Wanda, duh), Mephisto will be out there capturing souls and causing all types of evil, and when magic is being badly utilized, of course, Doctor Strange will appear, in the movies he lost the infinity stone but his movie (that comes out right after wandavision debuts on Disney+) will explain how he got it back, and once he gets the Infinity Stone and goes back to being powerful he’ll make an agreement with Mephisto (just like in the comics) and all problems will be solved, except one, Wanda won’t happy with the results of her sudden experimentation, she never had contact with the infinity stone that she created, her kids are lost somewhere since she probably won´t be aware that they are actually a part of the main reality, and she’s literally at the starting point of the story, but with more trauma, what happens after that? Wanda escapes to another reality (the Ultimate one, so they could introduce the alt reality from Secret Wars).

Conclusion

The story ain’t over since we still got Doc Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, the movie is confirmed to be horror- inspired and will be directed by Sam Raimi (director of the original Spiderman trilogy). I have a plot theory for that movie but I’ll keep that for another time.

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minrcrafter · 5 years

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The Arcane Society [SMP] {Questing} {Lore} {Towny} {Economy} {Dungeons} {Player Run} {Unlimited Building} {Survival} {1.13.2}

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Rules

1. Listen to Staff

This rule is quite simple but extremely important. Listen to staff! Everyone on the staff team cares about you, and the well being of the server, it’s why they’re there! If a staff members ask you to do it, do it. If you are instructed to cease whatever you’re doing (spamming chat, being rude, being disrespectful, ignoring staff instruction) please just listen. If you don’t, well… whose fault is it if you end up in jail (or even worse, banned)? It’s never the staffs fault. However if you’re being abused by staff you can always report it to us on Discord. As stated earlier, we’re here to help you.

2. Be Respectful / Ethical / Common Sense

Being respectful ranges from a variety of things. This just means you should understand the general vibe of the server and not disrupt it. This can also mean being nice to people, or helping/listening staff. Being a bad boy or being rude to staff counts as disrespect. Just be a good boy! In another sense please be ethical. You have a built in moral compass and know when what you’re doing is wrong. Please don’t intentionally try to hurt someone or ruin someone’s day. This ties into both being respectful and ethical at the same time. Finally, please use common sense. Let’s say you fight staff, should you argue a lot you should realize ou might just get in trouble. Let’s say you find a secret room with some overpowered gear in it. If you know you can’t take it, ad know there’s a no raiding rule… well… taking it is going to get you in trouble. These three things are golden rules to live by even in real life!

3. Racial Attacks are Not Allowed

This means being racist man. Is it really that hard to understand? Don’t use any racial slurs, don’t be mean to someone for where they’re from. It ain’t cool, and will result in your soul going to limbo.

4. Griefing is not allowed

Players are not allowed to grief, griefing means any form of destroying player/staff made property. Doing so causes jail time. The only exception to this is during town wars. However those are official and watched. So you can’t make the claim you thought it was for war!

5. Taking from chests is not allowed

Don’t steal from player chests, simple!

6. Killing a player and taking their stuff is allowed

Should you kill a player in PvP, you are allowed to take their gear and keep it. You are NOT allowed to kill them with stolen goods. If the fight is kept clean you can keep what you get! Keep in mind getting your bahookie handed to you will feel horrible. You know why? It’s partly because you didn’t get the Victory Royale, and partly because all your stuff is gone. Don’t go complaining to staff about this; you took the fat L. Learn and grow from the mistake!

7. Do not beg staff for items/gear/materials

It’s always okay to ask for help; or if you’re in need of something. However constantly nagging at staff to give you materials or gear is not allowed. This ranges from a simple iron sword to enchanted diamond gear!

8. Do not spam the chat

You know what spam is, you’ve probably done it once or twice in your younger years. Please refrain from spamming stupid messages, memes, quotes, phrases, letters, numbers… etc. Keep the chat area lookin’ nice and tidy.

9. Hacked Clients are not allowed

There isn’t much to say here, using a hacked client that allows flying, XRay, god, spider… etc/etc. Is not allowed! You will face being IP banned on sight. Keep in mind you can submit ban appeals through the Subreddit; however half of that is being known and understood on the server. So, chances of you joining, using a hacked client, getting banned, and said ban getting appealed are slim to none. No one is stupid enough to think it was an accident. Stick to playing the game the way it was meant to be played.

10. Duping items is not allowed

Minecraft is a buggy game, we all know this. There is always a way to get something you have duplicated into another; does this mean you should? Or that it’s allowed? No! It isn’t allowed. Duping items in any form is not allowed. That being said exploiting the game in any way can be seen as punishable.

11. Do not promote products/servers that are outside of this server

People don’t come on to hear you talk about how cool another server is. If you are found promoting another product or server through us you will be terminated from existence. Most likely temporarily unless guilty of multiple infractions.

12. Please remember the staff team is here to help you!

Everyone who is on the staff team is here because they care about you, and your well being. When a staff member enters any given situation it is to cease the conflict. You may be right in said situation; and you may be wrong. However this is up to the staff to see!

13. Please report any bugs/glitches you find in game

This can be from a simple opening in a barrier to an infinite giving machine. Anything you find; please report it!

14. Staff are in charge for anything not listed here!

Please keep in mind anything not listed here doesn’t mean it’s out of the ball park. If you do something you know is wrong, it IS wrong! If you have questions about whether something is allowed or not just ask in game or DM in Discord.

Why did you make a server again?

Well, let me tell you. For too long, I feel like servers have stayed to the easy formula. Sure, it works; but what makes it different than the last? Our story begins in 2015, before this server was even created. My childhood favorite server was shut down unexpectedly. Something I'm sure we've all experienced before, the heartbreak of something you really enjoyed disappearing off the face of the internet. Well, since that day? I've been planning! We've only been public for about 11 days now, but we're growing at a good pace. So, you're probably wondering what we offer? Why not take a peek below!

So... What's the deal? Below are features that we offer!

Survival - Regular, and just the way it was when you built your first dirt home all those years ago!

Minimal Plugins - To be honest, we're tired of lazy servers. Run by the same plugins, same things to do, same everything. We're bringing it back to the roots. This server offers everything a heavily modified server offers, but we do it with class. No plugin, all people, all effort. This offers player versatility, and the chance to do quite literally anything they want.

Quests - What we call dynamic quests. These are handmade stories, which prove to be very difficult. No B.S here, a quest is server wide and can only be done ONCE. When a quest is completed, said player(s) who completed it push the entire servers story forward. Unlock new features, go down in server history forever, and of course... get rewarded!

Lore - This server also features a very deep story, one that can't be looked up. Remember the days when you played Runescape and didn't know how anything worked? Remember how there was no website that had all the answers? That's what you'll find here. Clues are scattered across the world; and YOU can be the one to uncover them. All of what we know, is uncovered by players. Find a dungeon? Delve it, to learn something brand new; and teach others what you find.

Dungeons - Handmade super-powered dungeons are the end game. Only for the hardcore players. These dungeons feature limited inventory, a cash reward, exclusive dungeon gear, high difficulty... the works.

Organic Ruins - Players can report other player made structures they believe are vacant or unused. Said structures will then begin to rot, rotting structures become overgrown, and break down overtime! The items left over become scattered, for the next player to find! Reporting a building grants a cash reward.

Player Run Towns - All towns in this server are run by players, and built in survival. Towns which become big enough are able to become an official town! These towns choose between two separate factions, either becoming an industrious town, or a religious town. These towns become part of the server story/lore!

Economy - This server features a credit system which is used for a variety of things. You can trade credits with players for gear, items... anything they offer! Credits can be spent on entering dungeons, or used on Quests; and biggest of all... Credits ARE your grief protection. Should your property be destroyed, you incur a credit amount which has to be payed in order to have it instantly repaired. If you can't afford the repair cost, you can get a bill. Which allows you infinite time to gain the credits needed. Players do not need to use economy, if they prefer hand fixing everything that is always an option. There are no chest shops, players are encouraged to trade goods between themselves and form authentic bonds. Not ones with a chest.

Ranks - We offer a ranking system that rewards players who, well... PLAY! Each rank is used as a show for status and achievement. Nothing more! Players who continue to achieve greatness are rewarded with special prefixes and suffixes. An example... if a player named Bill Nye completed many quests in their day. They can get a suffix to make their new name Bill Nye the hero, or a prefix like [Hero] Bill Nye

Seamless World Updating - Let's be honest, server wipes suck, and are extremely lazy. We offer the opposite. If you spend a ton of time building, you can sleep easy knowing we announce on Discord and Instagram when the world is being upgraded. Then you have until the NEXT update to request a home/village/whatever being moved. Here's an example, if you build a ton of stuff in Minecraft 1.13; and 1.14 rolls out. The 1.13 world is kept as a secret warp for admins, if you request your house to be moved, we will go to the coordinates, check that it's yours, and copy it into the new world so you never lose your progress! The 1.13 world would be kept until 1.15 comes out, then it is moved offline and the 1.14 world becomes the back up for players to request homes from.

Events - As the server grows, we'll begin offering competitions by the week! These can range from gaining a certain amount of materials in a week, to building competitions! The player who wins is rewarded, and has their creation added to spawn!

Curated - This server has very lenient rules, because we feel the most fun is had when everyone is in a relaxing situation. However this server IS curated by staff.

Unlimited Building - We don't like pesky world borders. You want to know what we're set at? 30 million by 30 million. Have fun!

Current world size is 28.8GB!

#Minecraft servers #minecraft

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symbianosgames · 7 years

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Game Developer magazine's Brandon Sheffield reflects on what designers can learn from their first video game loves. (Originally printed in Game Developer's March issue, available now.)

They say you're forever dating your first love. Not literally, of course, but the early patterns set by your first relationship, and the relationships of your parents, tend to strongly influence how you approach love and relationships for many years to come.

I wonder: Is the same true for games? Do those early games we played in our formative years influence what we now perceive as "good" and "bad" in interactive media? Do they influence how we design games? I submit that they may.

Let's think about a series like Dark Souls/Demon's Souls. These games are punishing, require rather exacting inputs from players, and have somewhat fiddly controls that require getting used to. That sounds like a nice recipe for a failure stew. So why did these games succeed?

One of the praises you often see from reviewers is that the series reminds them of the glory days of Japanese console and arcade games, which were built with much the same recipe. It's like a new love affair with an old flame - the same problems as always, yet sweetly, lovingly familiar. Japanese publication Dengeki said of Demon's Souls, "Fans of old-school games will shed tears of joy." IGN reviewer Sam Bishop echoed the sentiment, saying, "Those that can remember the good ol' days when games taught through the highly effective use of intense punishment and a heavy price for not playing it carefully should scoop this up instantly."

But what about people who didn't grow up with that experience? What about those who are more used to frequent checkpoints, and the game providing a full experience to blaze through in one go, rather than in halting steps? For them, the game is a harder sell, which is why Sony passed on publishing Demon's Souls in the West, and core-oriented niche publisher Atlus had to step up and do it instead.

For Demon's Souls, its link to the past helped it succeed. But perhaps the reverse can also happen: Our personal game heritages could, at times, make us slaves to our past interests. For example, I tend to like games that are interesting, but flawed. To me, a glitch in an otherwise super-polished Call of Duty is extremely glaring and illusion-shattering, but I'll happily forgive poor graphics and the occasional invisible wall in a game like Nier, which stabs out in all directions with new ideas. If a game tries hard to do something different, I'll forgive its faults - and if I want to be a designer who makes games that are good at making money, this preference for different-but-flawed could hold me back from making games with commercial appeal.

With this thought in mind, I decided to dissect my own past as a player to see what influence it might have had on my current interests.

My history is a bit odd - I went from the 2600 and Intellivision (which were already old when I got them, but they were affordable!), to the TurboGrafx-16, which I saved up for months to afford. And this is the console that informed my early days as a player of games.

The Valis series, for example, is not very well known, but I played it to death. It's an action, platforming, hack-and-slash affair that stars a high school girl, out to save the world, with a sword taking on a horde of monsters. Pretty standard fare for the 1990s.

You could jump, perform a sword attack, use magic (and could power up both of these attacks), walk, and roll. I replayed Valis III recently, and I noticed something about those rolls that may have influenced my current interests and design habits. Rolling allows the player to travel for a set distance, both under obstacles and across gaps. But this distance is such that, at times, beginning a roll just a few pixels one way or the other means life or death in a difficult platforming section. On top of that, the platforms themselves can occasionally have dressings that don't count as area you can stand on.

This is most likely something one would want to avoid in the modern era, because it feels like the game has tricked you, when you've clearly made the roll visually, but it's counted as a death. Less obvious, though, is the triumph you feel after defeating that particularly difficult section. It's as though you've succeeded in spite of the game's efforts to thwart you. You are actually fighting against the game itself, which we're generally told not to do - but in a modern game like Demon's Souls, it makes the thrill of victory that much more compelling.

There is a lesson here for me as a designer: I can sometimes focus too much on making things smooth for a player in the immediate term, versus their long-term experience.

I won't bore you with my history as a player, but revisiting these old game-loves continually revealed patterns in my current thinking. For instance, Bonk's Revenge's somewhat mystical and alchemic systems helped drive me to chase the elusive beast that is emergent gameplay in a simple game world. But is that my white whale? That pursuit has, at times, led to feature bloat (which is exactly what happened in the subsequent Bonk installment, incidentally).

Just to make sure I wasn't the only one who's influenced by his past, I asked my friends Tim Rogers of Action Button Entertainment and Frank Cifaldi of Gamasutra.com, with whom I record a weekly podcast (which is also called insert credit), to talk a bit about their formative games, and found them similarly branded by past experience.

For Cifaldi, it was The Secret of Monkey Island, which gave him the first glimpse of a full, living interactive game world. This colored his interest in games for years to come; when he was young, he made adventure games in HyperCard, and later, when he was working at GameTap, he made an interactive community adventure game called Captain McGrandpa.

Rogers, meanwhile, thinks Super Mario Bros. 3 is the best game ever made. SMB3 is very much about precision and timing of jumps and reactions, but also about secrets - warps, hidden passageways, and coin boxes in the sky. It's no wonder, then, that the first game he directed (ZiGGURAT for iOS) is a deceptively simple game about timing, precision, and nothing else - aside from the occasional secret.

For your human relationship problems, you can go to a therapist - but they'll just reflect back what you already know. I highly recommend you take a self-analysis approach to your game history. Going back and dissecting those early learnings can help you grow past your earliest ideas of what a game is, or can be, because while most lessons will be good, some will be bad as well.

The musical platformer Sound Shapes is an interesting case study: If you read the postmortem in the December 2012 issue of Game Developer, you'll see that the game's mastermind, Jon Mak, said, "I don't like platformers, or level editors, but in the back of my mind they made sense." He also added, "That was a thing that we learned: We couldn't achieve our design goals with what we would do naturally."

So here is an example of developers playing against their type, and against their early imprint. This worked well, and brought Sound Shapes to critical acclaim, and many IGF nominations. But at the same time, is it any wonder that (sorry, Jon) the game just doesn't feel like a solid platformer? It feels like an interactive music toy where platforming happens to be the mechanic to drive progress. Without the music element, this would not be a loving homage to the platforming genre.

There are lessons in our past for all of us. Try it out on yourself; think about the first game that really grabbed you. Maybe it's the first game that compelled you to keep coming back, aiming for a perfect score; maybe it's the first game that made you feel like games were a living world; maybe it's the first game that let you play against another player.

Revisit these games with new eyes. While playing them, think about the jump distances for platformers, or how you start a drift in a racing game, and how long that drift lasts. Think about the level progression in RPGs, or the score multipliers in a shooter. How has your current work reinforced those old ideas? How have they strayed? Should you be more critical of those old ideas? It's an interesting exercise which can yield some surprising results. Even if you don't come away with something practical, you may have an easier time explaining why you prefer to sink hours into Minecraft over Skyrim - or the reverse.

The kids of today expect autosaving, persistence, checkpoints, and massive interactivity on a Minecraft scale. And they're not wrong to expect it! That's what they grew up with, and that is to some extent the future of entertainment. But when they grow up, what will they expect from games? What will their first love affair teach them to love and hate?

Getting closer to the now, what about kids who grew up with the Nintendo 64? The precise magic of GoldenEye 64 has never been properly revisited. What of a child who grew up with the Dreamcast? Is anyone serving her needs?

I'm not suggesting we need to mine the past and prey on nostalgia. But attempting to serve similar experiences to those people felt in their youth - in new and modern products - can be a valuable goal. Nobody wants to play a new game that's exactly like GoldenEye 64. They want to play a game that feels like how they remember GoldenEye 64 at the time they were playing it. With a little self-analysis, and a careful study of these bygone eras of games, you might just get at that mystical and elusive feeling.

#IFTTT #Blogger

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nofomoartworld · 7 years

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New Subcultures Surface in the Future-Dystopian Films of Liam Young

Architects certainly think of the future when designing buildings, yet few approach their practice like a science fiction author, or even a skeptical futurist. Speculative architect and filmmaker Liam Young, on the other hand, actually uses science fiction and film to explore the impact of new technologies on cities, as he did a few years ago with his imaginary future city animations. In his latest exhibition, New Romance, now on view at Columbia University's Arthur Ross Architecture Gallery, Young presents three films that imagine love stories that were, respectively, filmed with drones, captured with LIDAR (laser scanning) technology, and made using digital detritus from render farms. The films, much like Black Mirror's dystopian satires of new technology, are part of what he calls a "visionary present" in which speculates about how existing and emerging technologies will reshape cities, cultures, and people.

"I'm interested in exploring the power of fiction as a tool to examine the architectural urban and global implications of emerging technologies," Young tells Creators. "What we're trying to do is explore new cultures that emerge around these new technologies like drones. We're doing this with all three films."

Still from Where the City Can't See. Lead image: Still from Where the City Can't See. All images courtesy of the artist.

"In the media, people talk about drones as either as these things that fly overhead dropping bombs in Afghanistan or they talk about them in terms of privacy," says Young. "But, when they become as ubiquitous as pigeons we start to find new applications for them, and they start to become cultural objects that get used in unexpected ways."

The William Gibson quote "the street finds its own uses for things" informed all three films. The characters of In The Robot Skies, two young couple in love (one of whom is under arrest at her council estate), have hacked a drone to pass messages back in forth in defiance of an electronic communications ban. Young and his collaborator, fiction author Tim Maughan, imagined hacker and graffiti culture inspiring the two kids to repurpose drones. In the opening scenes, a surveillance drone is tagged with graffiti, while the two have decorated their own drone with personalized ornaments.

Still from In the Robot Skies

This creative hacker mindset emerges in Young's second film in the exhibition, Where the City Can't See. Young shot the film entirely with LIDAR laser scanners, a technology currently being used in driverless cars to map and navigate streets, and which will soon be used to map cities and supplant CCTV. Set in the fictional Detroit Economic Zone (DEZ), owned and controlled by China, two young car factory workers live under constant LIDAR surveillance, which renders DEZ—and the entire film—in a surreal point cloud. The characters are part of a rave subculture that dons LIDAR scrambling glitch hoodies and tribal masks to find a time and space of anonymity.

"You used to go to warehouse raves because that is where you'd find gaps where the police weren't patrolling, so you could turn the music up, take drugs and dance," says Young. "But, in a city that sees everything, when it has these roving sensor networks of the driverless cars, where do you find those spaces of exception where you do what you want to do? We're exploring rave subcultures and how they've learned to hack smart city technology to find places to party."

Still from In the Robot Skies

Young even worked with an old-school Detroit DJ to compose the film's original soundscapes. He says the low end rumbling bass tones actually scrambled the LIDAR scanners, which Young used to his advantage, allowing the ravers to disappear into clouds of static as the film ends.

The escape in Young's new mixed reality film, Renderlands, is far less uplifting. In it, Young explores the life of a 3D modeler at a render farm in India. Trapped at work for long hours, the character imagines a virtual world where he lives with his dream girl. To make Renderlands, Young scavenged digital detritus from VFX movie models and 3D game assets that remain on studio hard drives—the remnants of what he says are cancelled production jobs.

Still from Renderlands

"Renderlands is about the implications of outsourcing facilitated by the network that connects the studio in LA, where I'm based, to render farms and animation studios in India," says Young. "What does it mean when they spend their entire lives immersed in these imaginary worlds that they're never going to access? What does this do to their hopes and dreams, to their perception of the West?"

Young wanted to focus on these workers and their dreams for the first time. So, the VR world that the worker escapes to is a sort of idealized, utopian version of California filled with golden sunsets, a muscle car, an American diner, and, of course, a blonde beauty—all things that the character and actual render farm employees work on but will likely never see.

Still from Renderlands

"All of these technologies are not solutions to anything—they're not solutions to cities or ourselves," Young says. "What technology does is exaggerate the contradictions that already exist. Any one of these technologies can be an extraordinary utopian moment that brings us together, or they can be used to overthrow an election, hack someone's credit card details, or groom a 14-year-old girl for sex."

"A city isn't just one type of person, it's many types of people," he adds. "It's rich people, poor people, it's people who are going to do good and wonderful things and people who are going to cause shit and trouble. And whenever we're imagining designing for these cities and these technologies we need to explore all sides of the spectrum of what happens when a technology is rolled out."

Click here to see more of Liam Young's work.

Liam Young's Animated Cities Imagine the Near-Future in 4K

Black Mirror's Production Designer on Crafting Season 3's Warped Realities

Single-Shot Drone Short Film Is Black Mirror meets 'Death of a Salesman'

from creators http://ift.tt/2pg9Ouh via IFTTT

#IFTTT #creators

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allcheatscodes · 7 years

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star fox adventures dinosaur planet gamecube

http://allcheatscodes.com/star-fox-adventures-dinosaur-planet-gamecube/

star fox adventures dinosaur planet gamecube

Star Fox Adventures: Dinosaur Planet cheats & more for GameCube (GameCube)

Cheats

Unlockables

Hints

Easter Eggs

Glitches

Guides

Get the updated and latest Star Fox Adventures: Dinosaur Planet cheats, unlockables, codes, hints, Easter eggs, glitches, tricks, tips, hacks, downloads, guides, hints, FAQs, walkthroughs, and more for GameCube (GameCube). AllCheatsCodes.com has all the codes you need to win every game you play!

Use the links above or scroll down to see all the GameCube cheats we have available for Star Fox Adventures: Dinosaur Planet.

Genre: Action, Adventure Developer: Rare Publisher: Nintendo ESRB Rating: Teen Release Date: November 15, 2001

Hints

How To Kill The Redtail Boss

Firstly when you enter the room you will see the redtail appear don’t be afraid he is easy to defeat. When you begin to fight him stay clear and get used to the area on each corner you will see a pad above a closed gate shoot that with your fire blaster the hid in it till the dinosaur is in his way the the second he turns the corner and growls thats when you stand on the pad this will knock him to the ground then go to the cage you opened pick up the bomb and throw it at hi while hes still on the ground repeat this several times to defeat him.

No Fall Damage

When you go off the edge of a building and foxstarts to swing his arms in circles just keeptapping X and he will roll and take nodamage. This won’t work on some buildings because theyare to high.

Lightfoot Village: Cheat Token

Go to one of the houses. A Lightfoot will ask you to find his three children who like to play in the woods. Go to where you can get in the wooded area around the whole village (by the tribe leader’s shrine and climb up.) There will be a blue shining thing in the air. You must chase those kids into it. Once they are all back, talk to the fatherand he will reveal a rocket boost pad. Use the rocket boost pad and head for forward until you get into half of the forest that was blocked by a log. Explore there and you will find a Cheat Token Well.

Thorntail Hollow:The Beacons

To re-light the Beacons, find the tree in the Hollow that has Branches on fire. Strike the tree to cause these flames to drop. Then, Strike them with your staff to douse the flames. Collect three of these and put one on each of the three torches scattered through the hollow. Then, have Tricky use his Flame on them to light the torches. Once all three are lit, you will receive the key to Moon Mountain Pass.

Moon Temple: Go Through Door

When you are in the invisible maze in the Moon Temple, if you make it to the end of the maze but fail on the way, the door to the Moonstone will start to shut slowly. If you time your speed correctly, you quickly do a somersault under the door before it slams shut.

Moon Mountain Pass: Staff Ground Quake Upgrade

There will be a rock that you can lift. The upgrade is under the rock.

Moon Mountain Pass: See Andross

The Krazoa statue in Moon Mountain Pass is Andross.

Lightfoot Village: Reentry

If you leave Lightfoot Village and connot get back in because of the locked gate, you must hit three trees with targets in a certain order. First, hit the one near the gate, tha the furthest from the gate, and finally the one in the middle. The gate will now be unlock.

Hi-Def Binoculars

You can find the Hi-Def Binoculars that Slippy droped in the store for 20 Scarabs.

Cloud Runner Fortress: Escaping The Dungeon

Once you get captured by General Scales, he takes your staff. You will need to get it back. To do this, get out or the room you are in and follow the hallway. Once you get there, you will see that a Sharp Claw has you staff. Go around him and do not step on any puddles or the Sharp Claw will wake up. Go down the hallway that is past the Sharp Claw and go the the room with the air current. Pick up one of the bombs and put it on the air current. Then, go over to the switch and stand there until the bomb explodes in the air. The ceiling will break. Slippy can now send you the Sharp Claw disguise. Use it and go next to the Sharp Claw that is sleeping on the desk. There will be an intermission sequence. He will leave. You can now grab your staff. First, open all the cages that are in the room. Save the dinosaur that is in the cage. He will follow you out and give you a Power key for saving him. Get out of the dungeon to continue with the game.

Red Eye King’s Lair: Staff Super Ground Quake Upgrade

Proceed until you see a Bomb Spore planting location. Plant a Bomb Spore there, then blow it up.

Small Scarab Bag

After you rescue Tricky, go to where the Sownhorn is located. Look around untill Tricky can dig. After he digs, you will get the Snowhorn’s food. Feed the hungry Snowhorn and he will give you the Small Scarab Bag, which holds 50 Scarabs.

Cape Claw: Energy Bar Upgrade

You must have a Portal Dievice ability. Go behind in the cave where the Sharp Claw is located, near the connon. Use the Portal Device on the door. Enter and defeat the Sharp Claw, use the connon and shoot the cracked rock. Go inside and get the energy bar upgrade.

Lightfoot Village: Snake Totem

To open a way to the next Krozoa spirit in the Lightfoot Village, climb up on the boxes and hit the switch. then, use your Fire Blaster to stop the snake totem pieces when the pictures on each section line up, one by one.

Cape Claw: Avoid Paying The Sharpclaw Guard

Instead of paying the guard 25 Scarabs, go around to the back of the walkway. In the water, there is a rock with a Rocket Boost Pad on it. You can use it to get up on the wooden walkway where the Hightop is located. When you leave, the guard will let you through and you will not have to pay.

Free Bomb Spores

Find a full grown Bomb Spore, shoot it with the staff’s fire blaster to get three Bomb Spore Seeds.

Medium Scarab Bag

Succsesfully release the second Krozora Spirits. Then the warpstone will warp you back Thorn Tail Hollow and give a Medium Scarab Bag, which holds 100 Scarabs.

Krozoa Shrine 3: Fear Test

Do not take your eyes off the meter for any reason. Since you cannot pause during that test, it is important you watch the bar the entire time. Sometimes it helps to press CONTROL-STICK LEFT and CONTROL-STICK RIGHT back and forth. However, do not count on this to save you, as the bar will suddenly jerk to one side.

Extra Scarabs

When you are in ThornTail Hollow go to the shop. Then go down to the mini-game area but don’t go in. When you are facing the curtain to the entrance of the mini-game room go backwards through the dark brown part of the wall and a large rock will be there. Lift it and get 30 Scarabs.

Volcano Force Point Part Deux

After you’ve defeated the giant RedEye King, you of course must return your shiny new SpellStone to the Volcano Force Point. It’s pretty straightforward until you ride the lift up to a path leading to a locked door. If you want to get through (which I’m sure you do), climb up the ladder near the lift. You’ll notice some different-colored flames along the upper walkway. In order to unlock the door, you must extinguish the flames using your Ice Blaster – but this is trickier than it may seem, as you have to extinguish the colors in a specific order. Put out the blue one first, then green, then red, then yellow. The door will then unlock and you can proceed with the game.

Big, Ugly Sharpclaw

Upon entering Cape Claw for the first time, be prepared for the huge bluegreen Sharpclaw that guard there. Their axes do a lot of damage, and they can block your attack, even when they’re down. Hold the R Button to block their first (and sometimes second) attack, then rush them. They require about 2 more hits than a regular Sharpclaw to be defeated.

Get Rid Of Boss Galdon

After transporting on the red Warpstone in Darkice Mines, you’ll be in a large chamber with a frozen dinosaur in the center. Use Tricky’s Flame Command to melt him. You’ll see him swallow the first Spellstone, and you’ll see how big he is. When he’s not turning around, run around and hit Galdon on the tail three times. He’ll get mad and swallow you. Hit his epiglotis (with the Spellstone in it) several times, then he’ll spit you out. His new weak spot is his chest. Wait until his chest opens, then shoot it with the Fire Blaster three times. He’ll swallow you again and you hit the Spellstone again. Galdon will spit you into the air (with the Stone), and he’ll fall down dead. You’ll have the Spellstone.

Display Credits

Find the Cheat Token in the ThornTail Store and drop it into the Game Well Maze well to get this option to appear on your Main Options screen.

Cheat Tokens

To open up Cheats in the game, you will need to find Cheat Tokens in wells hidden through out Dinosaur Planet. Once you find a Cheat Token, throw it in the well in the Game Well Maze below WarpStone to activate it. You’ll receive the message “Cheat Activated”, but you won’t know the name of the cheat. See individual cheats to see where and how the cheat menu is enabled.

Fortune Told

Find the Cheat Tokens in LightFoot Village, SnowHorn Wastes, Volcano Force Point Temple, and the Ocean Force Point Temple. When you throw them into the Game Well Maze well, they’ll tell you a fortune. LightFoot Village, rescue the children to make Rocket Boost Pad appear. Use it to reach a well on the upper ridge of LightFoot Village. SnowHorn Wastes, ride ice floes down the river to find the token well. Volcano Force Point Temple, drop down to the left of the main gate, plant a Moon Seed, then climb the vine. Ocean Force Point Temple, during your second visit, after the electric panels, swim off to the right to find a Portal Door.

Black And White Mode

Find the Cheat Token in Cape Claw, then drop it into the Game Well Maze well to make this option appear in the Main Options screen.

Dinosaur Language

Find the Cheat Token in Moon Mountain Pass, then drop it into the Game Well Maze well to make this option appear in the Language Options screen.

Play Music

Find the Cheat Token in Ice Mountain, then drop it into the Game Well Maze well to make this option appear in your Audio Options.

Rainbow Tricky

If you think Tricky’s colors are plain and boring then try this tip. Once you have a scarab bag that can hold 20; go to the store and buy Tricky’s ball. Once you have done that leave the store, go to your inventory, and select the ball. Once you’ve done that you can throw the ball and play fetch. Once you’ve done it enough he will change colors (green, blue, purple, yellow, ect.).

Tricky’s Flames

Hit Tricky many times with your staff and he will throw fire at you.

Cheap Tip

Throughout the game if you press start, your faithful companion Slippy will give you information that will get you to the next part of the game. Work inside because of the transmission. If you can’t get past a certain part, you can always ask Slippy for help. (Sorry about my last code, I sorta screwed it up.)

Cheat Mode

In the shop and several other places around Dinosaur Plant are wells that ask you to feed them Scarabs. Feed them twenty Scarabs and you will get a Cheat Token. Go to the Warp Stone Guardian (the large stone guardian) and enter the maze. It will take some wandering before you find a well inside. Open your inventory, highlight a Cheat Token, then press A. This will unlock a cheat or give you a hint. To activate the cheats, save the game, return to the main menu, and select “Options”.

Easy Money

In the basement of the shop in the Thorntail Hollow Play the mini game there. Avoid the dark scarabs and collect the glowing green ones. At the begining of the game this will help you with money problems.

Cheat Token Wells

Throughout the adventure you will see strange wells that ask for twenty scarabs in return for a cheat token. After you recieve the cheat token go to the warp stone maze. Look for a well in the maze and through the tokens into the well to unlock extras on the main menu at the games start.

Cheapskates R’ Us

When buying something at the shop, the shopkeeper will display the price on a scarab scroll. Move the joystick up and down to show what you will pay. But in the end the shopkeeper can tell if you are a cheapskate. This is very useful for buying maps which cost from 5-10 scarabs.

Maze

After you get to the warpstone, and get to the Snow place. You will soon have to race two bad guys who are taking away the Queen’s son. When you race them you have to bump into each of them 5 or more times to beat the race. Then you go to Snow Horn.

Fireflies

After you buy a lantern from the Store, so you can go in to the well to get the white grubtubs for Queen Earthwalker, you can also buy a firefly just in case 😉

Controler Neutral Position Reset

If the L or R Buttons are pressed or the Control Stick or C Stick or are moved out of neutral position when the power is turned ON, those positions will be set as the neutral position, causing incorect game control during game play. To reset the controler, release all buttons and sticks to allow them to return to the correct neutral position, then hold down the X,Y, and START/PAUSE Buttons simultaneously for 3 seconds.

Metamorphic Tricky

Go buy tricky’s ball (when want to buy an item lower then price 20% or 10% and some times the shop keeper will sell the item for cheaper) and through it for Triky about 15-20 times. Tricky will turn a new color (purple and green).

Cheats

Currently we have no cheats or codes for Star Fox Adventures: Dinosaur Planet yet. If you have any unlockables please feel free to submit. We will include them in the next post update and help the fellow gamers. Remeber to mention game name while submiting new codes.

Unlockables

Currently we have no unlockables for Star Fox Adventures: Dinosaur Planet yet. If you have any unlockables please feel free to submit. We will include them in the next post update and help the fellow gamers. Remeber to mention game name while submiting new codes.

Easter eggs

Currently we have no easter eggs for Star Fox Adventures: Dinosaur Planet yet. If you have any unlockables please feel free to submit. We will include them in the next post update and help the fellow gamers. Remeber to mention game name while submiting new codes.

Glitches

Currently we have no glitches for Star Fox Adventures: Dinosaur Planet yet. If you have any unlockables please feel free to submit. We will include them in the next post update and help the fellow gamers. Remeber to mention game name while submiting new codes.

Guides

Currently no guide available.

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