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mindthump · 3 years

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Language supermodel: How GPT-3 is quietly ushering in the A.I. revolution https://ift.tt/3mAgOO1

OpenAI

OpenAI’s GPT-2 text-generating algorithm was once considered too dangerous to release. Then it got released — and the world kept on turning.

In retrospect, the comparatively small GPT-2 language model (a puny 1.5 billion parameters) looks paltry next to its sequel, GPT-3, which boasts a massive 175 billion parameters, was trained on 45 TB of text data, and cost a reported $12 million (at least) to build.

“Our perspective, and our take back then, was to have a staged release, which was like, initially, you release the smaller model and you wait and see what happens,” Sandhini Agarwal, an A.I. policy researcher for OpenAI told Digital Trends. “If things look good, then you release the next size of model. The reason we took that approach is because this is, honestly, [not just uncharted waters for us, but it’s also] uncharted waters for the entire world.”

Jump forward to the present day, nine months after GPT-3’s release last summer, and it’s powering upward of 300 applications while generating a massive 4.5 billion words per day. Seeded with only the first few sentences of a document, it’s able to generate seemingly endless more text in the same style — even including fictitious quotes.

Is it going to destroy the world? Based on past history, almost certainly not. But it is making some game-changing applications of A.I. possible, all while posing some very profound questions along the way.

What is it good for? Absolutely everything

Recently, Francis Jervis, the founder of a startup called Augrented, used GPT-3 to help people struggling with their rent to write letters negotiating rent discounts. “I’d describe the use case here as ‘style transfer,'” Jervis told Digital Trends. “[It takes in] bullet points, which don’t even have to be in perfect English, and [outputs] two to three sentences in formal language.”

Powered by this ultra-powerful language model, Jervis’s tool allows renters to describe their situation and the reason they need a discounted settlement. “Just enter a couple of words about why you lost income, and in a few seconds you’ll get a suggested persuasive, formal paragraph to add to your letter,” the company claims.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. When Aditya Joshi, a machine learning scientist and former Amazon Web Services engineer, first came across GPT-3, he was so blown away by what he saw that he set up a website, www.gpt3examples.com, to keep track of the best ones.

“Shortly after OpenAI announced their API, developers started tweeting impressive demos of applications built using GPT-3,” he told Digital Trends. “They were astonishingly good. I built [my website] to make it easy for the community to find these examples and discover creative ways of using GPT-3 to solve problems in their own domain.”

Fully interactive synthetic personas with GPT-3 and https://t.co/ZPdnEqR0Hn ????

They know who they are, where they worked, who their boss is, and so much more. This is not your father's bot… pic.twitter.com/kt4AtgYHZL

— Tyler Lastovich (@tylerlastovich) August 18, 2020

Joshi points to several demos that really made an impact on him. One, a layout generator, renders a functional layout by generating JavaScript code from a simple text description. Want a button that says “subscribe” in the shape of a watermelon? Fancy some banner text with a series of buttons the colors of the rainbow? Just explain them in basic text, and Sharif Shameem’s layout generator will write the code for you. Another, a GPT-3 based search engine created by Paras Chopra, can turn any written query into an answer and a URL link for providing more information. Another, the inverse of Francis Jervis’ by Michael Tefula, translates legal documents into plain English. Yet another, by Raphaël Millière, writes philosophical essays. And one other, by Gwern Branwen, can generate creative fiction.

“I did not expect a single language model to perform so well on such a diverse range of tasks, from language translation and generation to text summarization and entity extraction,” Joshi said. “In one of my own experiments, I used GPT-3 to predict chemical combustion reactions, and it did so surprisingly well.”

More where that came from

The transformative uses of GPT-3 don’t end there, either. Computer scientist Tyler Lastovich has used GPT-3 to create fake people, including backstory, who can then be interacted with via text. Meanwhile, Andrew Mayne has shown that GPT-3 can be used to turn movie titles into emojis. Nick Walton, chief technology officer of Latitude, the studio behind GPT-generated text adventure game AI Dungeon recently did the same to see if it could turn longer strings of text description into emoji. And Copy.ai, a startup that builds copywriting tools with GPT-3, is tapping the model for all it’s worth, with a monthly recurring revenue of $67,000 as of March — and a recent $2.9 million funding round.

“Definitely, there was surprise and a lot of awe in terms of the creativity people have used GPT-3 for,” Sandhini Agarwal, an A.I. policy researcher for OpenAI told Digital Trends. “So many use cases are just so creative, and in domains that even I had not foreseen, it would have much knowledge about. That’s interesting to see. But that being said, GPT-3 — and this whole direction of research that OpenAI pursued — was very much with the hope that this would give us an A.I. model that was more general-purpose. The whole point of a general-purpose A.I. model is [that it would be] one model that could like do all these different A.I. tasks.”

Many of the projects highlight one of the big value-adds of GPT-3: The lack of training it requires. Machine learning has been transformative in all sorts of ways over the past couple of decades. But machine learning requires a large number of training examples to be able to output correct answers. GPT-3, on the other hand, has a “few shot ability” that allows it to be taught to do something with only a small handful of examples.

Plausible bull***t

GPT-3 is highly impressive. But it poses challenges too. Some of these relate to cost: For high-volume services like chatbots, which could benefit from GPT-3’s magic, the tool might be too pricey to use. (A single message could cost 6 cents which, while not exactly bank-breaking, certainly adds up.)

Others relate to its widespread availability, meaning that it’s likely going to be tough to build a startup exclusively around since fierce competition will likely drive down margins.

Christina Morillo/Pexels

Another is the lack of memory; its context window runs a little under 2,000 words at a time before, like Guy Pierce’s character in the movie Memento, its memory is reset. “This significantly limits the length of text it can generate, roughly to a short paragraph per request,” Lastovich said. “Practically speaking, this means that it is unable to generate long documents while still remembering what happened at the beginning.”

Perhaps the most notable challenge, however, also relates to its biggest strength: Its confabulation abilities. Confabulation is a term frequently used by doctors to describe the way in which some people with memory issues are able to fabricate information that appears initially convincing, but which doesn’t necessarily stand up to scrutiny upon closer inspection. GPT-3’s ability to confabulate is, depending upon the context, a strength and a weakness. For creative projects, it can be great, allowing it to riff on themes without concern for anything as mundane as truth. For other projects, it can be trickier.

Francis Jervis of Augrented refers to GPT-3’s ability to “generate plausible bullshit.” Nick Walton of AI Dungeon said: “GPT-3 is very good at writing creative text that seems like it could have been written by a human … One of its weaknesses, though, is that it can often write like it’s very confident — even if it has no idea what the answer to a question is.”

Back in the Chinese Room

In this regard, GPT-3 returns us to the familiar ground of John Searle’s Chinese Room. In 1980, Searle, a philosopher, published one of the best-known A.I. thought experiments, focused on the topic of “understanding.” The Chinese Room asks us to imagine a person locked in a room with a mass of writing in a language that they do not understand. All they recognize are abstract symbols. The room also contains a set of rules that show how one set of symbols corresponds with another. Given a series of questions to answer, the room’s occupant must match question symbols with answer symbols. After repeating this task many times, they become adept at performing it — even though they have no clue what either set of symbols means, merely that one corresponds to the other.

GPT-3 is a world away from the kinds of linguistic A.I. that existed at the time Searle was writing. However, the question of understanding is as thorny as ever.

“This is a very controversial domain of questioning, as I’m sure you’re aware, because there’s so many differing opinions on whether, in general, language models … would ever have [true] understanding,” said OpenAI’s Sandhini Agarwal. “If you ask me about GPT-3 right now, it performs very well sometimes, but not very well at other times. There is this randomness in a way about how meaningful the output might seem to you. Sometimes you might be wowed by the output, and sometimes the output will just be nonsensical. Given that, right now in my opinion … GPT-3 doesn’t appear to have understanding.”

An added twist on the Chinese Room experiment today is that GPT-3 is not programmed at every step by a small team of researchers. It’s a massive model that’s been trained on an enormous dataset consisting of, well, the internet. This means that it can pick up inferences and biases that might be encoded into text found online. You’ve heard the expression that you’re an average of the five people you surround yourself with? Well, GPT-3 was trained on almost unfathomable amounts of text data from multiple sources, including books, Wikipedia, and other articles. From this, it learns to predict the next word in any sequence by scouring its training data to see word combinations used before. This can have unintended consequences.

Feeding the stochastic parrots

This challenge with large language models was first highlighted in a groundbreaking paper on the subject of so-called stochastic parrots. A stochastic parrot — a term coined by the authors, who included among their ranks the former co-lead of Google’s ethical A.I. team, Timnit Gebru — refers to a large language model that “haphazardly [stitches] together sequences of linguistic forms it has observed in its vast training data, according to probabilistic information about how they combine, but without any reference to meaning.”

“Having been trained on a big portion of the internet, it’s important to acknowledge that it will carry some of its biases,” Albert Gozzi, another GPT-3 user, told Digital Trends. “I know the OpenAI team is working hard on mitigating this in a few different ways, but I’d expect this to be an issue for [some] time to come.”

OpenAI’s countermeasures to defend against bias include a toxicity filter, which filters out certain language or topics. OpenAI is also working on ways to integrate human feedback in order to be able to specify which areas not to stray into. In addition, the team controls access to the tool so that certain negative uses of the tool will not be granted access.

“One of the reasons perhaps you haven’t seen like too many of these malicious users is because we do have an intensive review process internally,” Agarwal said. “The way we work is that every time you want to use GPT-3 in a product that would actually be deployed, you have to go through a process where a team — like, a team of humans — actually reviews how you want to use it. … Then, based on making sure that it is not something malicious, you will be granted access.”

Some of this is challenging, however — not least because bias isn’t always a clear-cut case of using certain words. Jervis notes that, at times, his GPT-3 rent messages can “tend towards stereotypical gender [or] class assumptions.” Left unattended, it might assume the subject’s gender identity on a rent letter, based on their family role or job. This may not be the most grievous example of A.I. bias, but it highlights what happens when large amounts of data are ingested and then probabilistically reassembled in a language model.

“Bias and the potential for explicit returns absolutely exist and require effort from developers to avoid,” Tyler Lastovich said. “OpenAI does flag potentially toxic results, but ultimately it does add a liability customers have to think hard about before putting the model into production. A specifically difficult edge case to develop around is the model’s propensity to lie — as it has no concept of true or false information.”

Language models and the future of A.I.

Nine months after its debut, GPT-3 is certainly living up to its billing as a game changer. What once was purely potential has shown itself to be potential realized. The number of intriguing use cases for GPT-3 highlights how a text-generating A.I. is a whole lot more versatile than that description might suggest.

Not that it’s the new kid on the block these days. Earlier this year, GPT-3 was overtaken as the biggest language model. Google Brain debuted a new language model with some 1.6 trillion parameters, making it nine times the size of OpenAI’s offering. Nor is this likely to be the end of the road for language models. These are extremely powerful tools — with the potential to be transformative to society, potentially for better and for worse.

Challenges certainly exist with these technologies, and they’re ones that companies like OpenAI, independent researchers, and others, must continue to address. But taken as a whole, it’s hard to argue that language models are not turning to be one of the most interesting and important frontiers of artificial intelligence research.

Who would’ve thought text generators could be so profoundly important? Welcome to the future of artificial intelligence.

#IFTTT #Feedly #good to know #tech #hmmm #TIL #science #future

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zenithlux · 4 years

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Cadence Update - CH 14

I’m too excited to post these chapters. I should probably slow down a bit. But with everything going on in life nowadays, the Cadence train is keeping me sane. So please, Enjoy this update :)

Catch up on the story here!

In which Vergil gets used to his new home and makes another deal with Roxy.

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A heartbeat without harmony Is moonlight without dark The heart seeketh equilibrium With balance will your worry part.

“Equilibrium” - Final Fantasy 14 OST

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When Vergil woke up alone for the first time three days later, it took him far too long to get used to the silence. Nero and Nico had stayed until the night before, split between Vergil and Roxy’s apartments until the boat to Fortuna returned. Vergil had offered to open a portal for them and hadn’t realized until after Nero nearly punched him that it had sounded more like he was trying to get rid of them. Thankfully, Dante had understood (“cool it, kiddo. He’s just trying to help”), and Nero had apologized. Except both were left perplexed when they both apologized at the exact same time, something that had taken Vergil an embarrassing amount of courage to do.

But Vergil hadn’t missed the hint of approval in his son’s eyes, and the last two days were the best they’d been since Vergil had come back. They still didn’t talk all that much (unsurprising), but they also didn’t fight. Dante got called away after the electricity went out (odd considering Vergil had paid the bill himself two weeks ago). Nico stayed with Roxy to give Vergil time to adjust to this new life of his, and Nero hovered close to him as if not quite sure what he was trying to do.

And just before the two hunters left, Nero had looked relieved, more so than Vergil had seen in a long time. “You’re doing better than I thought,” Nero said as he brushed his fingers through his hair (most certainly a nervous tick, Vergil decided) “just don’t forget to visit once and awhile.”

And that had meant more to Vergil than anything else Nero had said that weekend.

Now, Vergil was alone (not counting the woman who he was certain was already awake down the hallway), and he didn’t know what to think of it. Had he truly gotten so used to Dante’s incessant presence that he felt strange without it? Vergil assumed he would get used to it over time, but he hadn’t expected it.

The apartment was more than adequate, so moving in had been simple. The layout was the same as Roxy’s, only flipped as it was on the opposite side of the building. She had taken great care on the decorations, having chosen a mixture of blues and golds for the furniture including the intricately woven rug filled with whimsical, golden stars. The paint on the walls was the same, but the artwork was different; less fantasy creatures and more landscapes. He had two couches instead of one, with a coffee table between them. There was also no television, something he’d been surprised by, as he’d only mentioned his annoyance with them in passing. Instead, the far wall was covered with two, dark, mahogany bookcases with a generous amount of books. And while those were impressive enough, Vergil had quickly found the gift card with a note- “$500, get whatever you need =)” - and hadn’t bothered trying to give it back. Roxy never accepted returned gifts, but Vergil had yet to find out how or why she was so frivolous with her money.

But there would be plenty of time for that.

For the moment, Vergil stared at a water-colored, sunset landscape that was suspiciously similar to the bookmark she’d given Vergil eons ago. His bedroom was more empty than hers, but he didn’t mind it. The bed was far bigger than the one in Devil May Cry, and he had yet to figure out how she found a queen-sized bed long enough that he didn’t have to curl up into an awkward ball to lie down like a normal person.

Not that he did that often. Of course. What a waste of time that would be.

His mind did drift, however, to the single room she’d left empty; the studio. Apparently Roxy’s apartment had not been the only one to receive such an upgrade, though he had a feeling the ones on the other floors probably weren’t so lucky. She’d left a note on that door too; “Let me know what you want”. But Vergil hadn’t known what he wanted to do with it. The space was almost menacing in a way. He didn’t want to waste it frivolously, but he also didn’t know what he would use such a thing for. For now, he’d bought a single desk, a chair tall enough for him, and a decently priced laptop that spent more time in Roxy’s apartment than his own. It would do for now, until Vergil figured out what exactly he wanted out of it.

The only downside to the entire set up was Aki, as the little owl-griffon seemed oddly fascinated with Vergil’s presence. He’d caught the demon prowling around his living space no less than four times. Now, Vergil smelled the creature everywhere, even though the scent was nothing compared to Kuro’s down the hall. Roxy had apologized profusely twice now, chastising the demon, but Vergil knew from experience that cats rarely cared what their owners had to say. And, knowing Aki was far too intrigued to listen to her, Vergil let it go, and the familiar slipped between the walls as he pleased. Vergil couldn’t help but imagine Shadow doing the exact same thing. She would be stalking his new partner, waiting to decide if Roxy was trustworthy or not.

Besides, since the familiar had started visiting, Vergil’s sleep had been oddly better. He couldn’t imagine why, as neither Aki’s nor Kuro’s presence felt particularly soothing. Roxy herself had left him alone since the move, letting him seek her out instead. But, so far at least, Vergil had actually been able to rest for the first time in what felt like decades.

For all he knew, it had been.

It was 7 am when the music started; a quiet, harmonious chorus of female voices with a subtle beat of drums and an accompanying violin. Vergil had heard it a few times now, as Roxy listened to music before going to sleep, but he hadn’t focused on it for longer than a few seconds. And now that he was, he was intrigued enough to skip breakfast (a formality, really), grab his coat, and wander over to her apartment.

He found Roxy in her studio with Kuro sleeping on a cleaned off part of the desk. Aki was on the floor, chirping a string of excited noises. Roxy responded in a few short “yes” and “no’s”, but clearly wasn’t paying much attention. Instead, she stared at the blank canvas before her, occasionally glancing down at the unopened bottles of paint on a table beside her, courtesy of Vergil’s little errand a month prior. He almost knocked on the door but thought better of it. He was certain Aki had seen him, and startling Roxy now would likely cause an expensive catastrophe.

As the song shifted to the first verse, Roxy began to sway. It was subtle, and Vergil was fairly certain she had no idea she was doing it. The voice that followed was that of another woman, her pitch a few octaves higher than normal.

The sigh of a shifting sea The kiss of a salt sweet breeze, The white of a silken dress Stained in red.

Vergil’s head tilted as he tried to discern the song’s meaning. Another pastime of his, though Dante’s taste in music was pretty bland. Roxy’s, however, was much more pleasing, and dwelling on the lyrics was actually thought-provoking.

A memory fading fast Her mother sits, eyes downcast A torn uniform in hand Farewells unsaid.

“The song is actually quite sad when you think about it,” Roxy said without looking at him. “Her mother, consumed by grief at the loss of her husband, abuses her daughter who prays to the goddess Sophia for help.”

“And?”

“The goddess demands equilibrium,” Roxy said as the lyrics continued.

So still this broken melody And therewith shoulder thee One last step only leaving An empty hearth down by the sea

“The daughter kills her mother,” Vergil said.

“And then herself,” Roxy said, her voice quiet. “And thus, equilibrium is maintained.” Aki gave a quiet chirp, and Roxy nodded. “A client sent this song along with a bunch of reference material. Apparently this goddess comes from a video game of some sort. He called it a ‘primal’.”

“Primal?”

She nodded. “Apparently, these creatures can be summoned with energy and fervent prayers. Collect enough power in one place and boom,” She waved one hand in the air in a dramatic arc. “You’ve got yourself a primal.” She sighed as she crossed her arms again. “So he wants a painting of this one for his girlfriend.”

“Sounds simple enough,” Vergil said.

“In theory,” Roxy agreed. “But he’s giving me free rein. The only thing he asked is that I don’t just draw her and call it a day.”

“Do you have a plan?”

Roxy sighed. “Not yet. I was hoping listening to the song in here would inspire something but…” She frowned as she looked back at the canvas. “I said I’d send him some sketches tomorrow before I committed to the canvas.”

“He doesn’t want a digital copy?”

“Local client,” She said. “They usually ask for canvas work. The sketches will be on my tablet though.” She shifted to the desk and gently eased a black screen out from under Kuro’s belly. The dragon huffed but otherwise didn’t stir. “If you want,” Roxy said with an excited grin. “I can show you my process and whatnot if that’s something that interests you.”

Vergil nodded. “Only if you’re feeling well.”

She chuckled nervously. “I may need a few demons.”

“A few?”

“I haven’t absorbed anything in a few days,” She said defensively. “ I didn’t exactly have the time to slip away.”

“You should have said something.”

She snorted. “I don’t think I could have,” She said as she shook her head. “Your family is… something else.”

“Indeed.”

“I don’t know how you handle them on a daily basis.”

A pause. “I don’t.”

Her laughter was more pleasing than the song that had all but faded to the background. “I guess I’m not surprised,” She said as Aki hopped onto her shoulder. “If I’m honest, you do seem to be very different from them.” She paused, then quickly said. “Not in a bad way! They’re just…”

“Loud?” Vergil said. “Controlling?”

She snorted again. “I’d imagine you’d be quite good at controlling people.”

Vergil didn’t know why he smirked at that. “How so?”

He wasn’t surprised when her face flushed a far deeper shade of crimson than usual. “I just get… that feeling… I suppose…” She mumbled as she quickly averted her gaze. “You know?”

“Afraid I don’t.”

“Oh hush.” She waved him off as her smile returned. “Aki found some demons nearby if you want to join me. Or you can make coffee or breakfast or go read or…”

“Isn’t the point of this arrangement that I go with you?”

Roxy’s eyelids fluttered. Her heart skipped a beat. Alarm swept through Vergil when her pupils shifted to Kuro’s ice-blue hue. He was by her side in an instant, hand hovering inches from her arm. Part of him wanted to reach out and catch her preemptively. The other half of him pulled away, the sheer thought of touching her…

Except… he wanted to.

Why?

His fingers brushed her back when she stumbled. Her hand shot out, reaching for something. Vergil took it without thinking and forced himself to keep hold. Her skin was so… warm. So different from the frozen Roxy he’d seen forever ago. And her hands were so soft and supple… so much different than his own

“Whoa,” She said. “That was… weird.”

Her hand slipped from his grasp, and he ignored the empty feeling in his chest. “What happened?” Vergil said as he took a small step back.

She blinked slowly before she looked at him. “I… don’t know. I just… blanked.” She shook her head. “Kuro…”

“I saw,” The dragon said “But I cannot explain it any better than you.”

“Maybe I’m just tired,”

“You need to hunt,” Vergil said.

“Probably that too.” She agreed. “Are you okay?”

“What do you mean?”

She hesitated, and took a deep breath before speaking again. “I know its… hard to touch me.”

With the way she said it, Vergil wasn’t certain if she was talking about his aversion to touch, or her own. He tried to split his answer somewhere down the middle: as diplomatic and truthful as he could manage. “I believe it is something we’ll both have to get used to.”

Slowly, she nodded. “I used to hate it,” She said quietly. “After the accident, at least. Between the doctors and the nurses and my father and my former friends… Everyone insisted on helping me. Very few actually did.” Her eyes drifted closed, but her heartbeat remained the same. “I started to loathe the feeling of… well anyone really.” She chuckled, but it was hollow. “Kind of ironic how much I miss it now.”

Vergil was silent, unable to speak through the war inside his mind. What could he say? How did he respond to such an honest admission? A normal person would respond in kind, but he wasn’t ready to do that. He wasn’t ready to admit that he hadn’t felt another’s touch in years. Decades. Even hugging his brother felt foreign. All he could remember was pain. Suffering. Pure torment.

But the last thing he wanted was for her to think he wasn’t listening. Or to retreat into the same shell that he often made for himself. So, just as her expression shifted to uncertainty, Vergil said, “I have the opposite problem, it seems.”

“You… don’t miss it?”

He paused, pondering before he spoke again. “I don’t know,” He said finally. “I…”

“It’s okay,” She said. “If you don’t…”

“I spent a very long time alone.”

A moment of silence passed between them, and he swore he saw a hint of understanding in her eyes. “By choice?” She said.

What kind of question was that? How could she have possibly guessed what was going on in his head? Or maybe she was just shooting in the dark, trying to understand him as much as he seemingly wanted to understand her. And what good would it do to ignore such a question?

“No,” He said. “But I have made plenty of mistakes.”

“Not enough to deserve something like that.”

You don’t know me was his first thought, but it died before reaching his lips. A part of him felt that she was irrevocably wrong. He did deserve those years of torment. He’d thrown himself into hell with reckless abandon. He’d left behind a son without considering that one might even have existed. Then the Qliphoth… and everything in between.

But another part of him wanted to believe that she was right. He wanted to hold onto that hope that he was better than the sum of his failures. That he didn’t deserve the pain which so many others thought he did.

But it was difficult… more so than he thought it should have been.

“Maybe,” Roxy said slowly. “We could help each other.”

“What?”

She flinched before Vergil realized how hostile that sounded. “I’m not suggesting anything crazy,” She said before muttering a “lord knows I’m not ready for that.” But before Vergil could ask what she meant, she held her hand out. “I mean with simple, everyday things. Like handshakes.”

Vergil was seconds from refuting her, until he realized the only hand he’d shaken recently was… no one’s. Not Morrison after Dante had introduced them. Not Kyrie or Nico or anyone else he’d met over the last six months. Not even hers (on purpose, anyway). He’d avoided it without thinking, relying on his brusque personality to keep people away. He never imagined this hesitation was the real reason why.

“One thing at a time,” She said as her smile finally returned.

Slowly, he took her hand with a nod. “One thing at a time.”

Ko-fi – Master List – AO3

#zenni-writes #dmc #fan fiction #vergil #vergilxroxy #vergilxoc #cadence #update #ya'll we're starting to get to the really good stuff #I can't wait

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japanessie · 4 years

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MY FIRST STORY & Saitama Super Arena capacity

I received this question on Twitter regarding the attendance at MFS TamaAri Tour Final. I think it would be interesting to share with my readers especially for those who might aspire to enter the showbiz.

Disclaimer: Answers were based on my personal observations as a longtime music fan. Also, I used ONE OK ROCK as a comparison because that's what my readers are familiar with. Peace everyone 😊

Question:

So I just read that MFS TamaAri was 18000 tickets? Normally I know the venue has a much larger capacity, so why is that? Are they taking it safely? And do you know what’s more important to secure bigger venues? Is it to sold out or the number of tickets you had there? Just trying to understand if this was necessary to get to Tokyo Dome. It just kinda makes me sad because they deserve so much!

I always just assumed that it’s 37000, didn’t know there was two modes, any idea on what’s the difference and why they went with arena mode instead of stadium.

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MFS held an “arena" tour NOT “stadium" tour

First of all, from the start, MFS had declared their Kobe World Hall & Saitama Super Arena dates as “ARENA Tour". They never said “stadium". So, it only made sense that they booked Saitama Super Arena in its arena mode.

Based on MFS' proposed seating plan, they were honest from the start that they were NOT aiming for >30000 capacity. Just look at how small the space they allocated for standing spectators. The rest were all seated. They were pretty realistic about their crowd attracting capability & current limitations. They knew they were not OOR who could easily dedicate the entire floor area for standing spectators.

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Saitama Super Arena was designed to be mechanically multi-sized to suit multiple purposes

Look at the “Stadium vs Arena” diagrams from the venue's official website.

Saitama Super Arena does have TWO modes i.e "stadium" and "arena". It is a multi-purpose venue which means it can be used for concerts, sports events, exhibitions, death memorials (if you want) etc. Thus, to serve the different functions, it was designed in such a manner.

What is meant with max capacity of 37000 pax is the entire fixed seats taken up PLUS the maximum additional seating that the floor area can take, which is more suited for sports events where a smaller space for the athletes/performers is needed e.g. boxing, wrestling etc. For sports such as soccer or baseball, the floor area obviously will not be used for seatings.

Stadium vs Arena configuration

Stadium = the full length space with seats all around facing the centre.

Arena = the space is partially blocked off reducing the seats & floor area.

Stadium Mode

Let's look at a typical concert stage end side configuration.

1. A chunk of the space is already taken up by the stage. Meaning the seated area behind the stage is already unusable for the spectators. Then, some artists have a runway or even multiple runways extending into the floor area. To my eyes, at least 1/4 or even 1/3 of the space is already reduced. Then, when you put designated seats on the arena floor, the number of people will be reduced even more because chairs take up more floor space per person than a free-standing area.

Arena Mode

How about centre stage configuration to maximize the viewing?

Here is an example of a centre stage from KOBUKURO LIVE TOUR 2015 at Saitama Super Arena. Even with this configuration and a more packed crowd than MY FIRST STORY, this only packed in 21000 spectators.

http://music.emtg.jp/liveReport/20150806213e27519

For safety reason, you can’t pack in more people than the officially declared maximum capacity

I'm not sure how the Law is in Japan or what legal obligations that the management of Saitama Super Arena needs to comply. However, generally, it concerns evacuating people safely and quickly in the case of fire or any disaster.

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However, it looked like MFS didn't quite reach the number they were originally aiming for.

Got to be honest, there was a big block of unused seats at the end of the arena. The staff covered it with a huge piece of cloth. There was also some rather generous spaces around the floor seating area. They are not yet at OOR level who can easily attract >30000 crowd. But overall, it was good enough and not disastrous like the Shanghai show (unwise choice of venue that one... sorry my boys).

Photo by Taka Tallman

The difference of the Final outcome compared to the Original plan based on the official photo.

Why was it announced as "Sold Out"?

1. Logistics reason.

They needed to finalize the layout of the seatings and the number of chairs they actually needed. If they kept the ticket sales open to the performance day, it would be difficult for the staff to arrange the overall seated / standing areas. Notice how they often announced on-the-day tickets (toujitsuken) for their free standing Livehouse shows but not for Halls and Arenas. It's easy to squeeze in free standing audience as long as it is safe enough.

2. They very likely had already reached the sales target to cover the cost of the concert.

If you already sold out the quantity you needed to make profits, then it's not a lie to declare it that way. "Yeah, we sold out!". MFS is blessed to be an indie band because the money they earn mainly goes to them. Well, looking at the luxuries MFS members pampered themselves with (a huge rehearsal studio, holidays abroad, head-to-toe designer fashion etc), these guys made A LOT.

Despite playing to smaller crowds and playing less shows per year, MFS members are able to live comfortably at a more leisurely pace. Compare that to the major-label-and-talent-agency-tied OOR who certainly sell more in quantity but is being worked to death by their management with every Tour to make $$$!

3. In showbiz, image is everything.

Notice how once an actor won an Oscar, his publicity promo will always attach the term “Oscar winner (insert name)" with almost every appearance? Because it gives “value" to his name! Even if you only got nominated, being known as “Oscar-nominated actor" elevates your status.

It's the same with music artists. Saying “the band held a Sold-Out show at (insert a place)" gives “value" to your resume. The general public rarely ask the numbers or even question it.

Not only MFS, even OOR plays the same publicity game. For example, their Nagisaen show has always been hailed as attracting >100000 people. What is being downplayed is it was >100000 people over TWO days. Meaning >50000 pax per day and many of them actually went to BOTH days. But still, saying >100000 sounds better and it's not like they're lying. It's technically correct. So MFS saying, “Thank you. We sold out!" is technically true if they had passed their profit threshold. Anything extra is a bonus 😊.

Why still went for such a huge venue even though their fanbase still has not reached that level?

Just a basic management strategy no matter what field you’re in. Once you set a big target, you need to measure your achievement from time to time. They want to do Tokyo Dome. So, they need to see how far they can reach and what to plan to achieve it. With the Nippon Budokan, they knew that they could do 12000 pax. With Makuhari Messe and Yokohama Arena, they knew that 18000 figure was in their hands. With Saitama Super Arena, they very likely wanted to see if they could reach more than 20000. Now that MFS knew 20000 is a figure they need to still work on, they can plan from now what to do next. My prediction, there is a HUGE chance that the Tokyo Dome show would be fully or mostly seated.

What’s more important to secure bigger venues? Is it to be sold out or the number of tickets?

Strictly from the economic point of view, the number of tickets you can sell is more important. You'd want to earn enough to recoup your investment first & foremost. The venues don't care if your event is sold out or not. They just want their money. Being “sold out" is more for the artist's image.

Every artist has their own sales threshold of what they can call “sold out". MFS put limited standing tickets from the start which means they have a lower “sold out" threshold compared to a bigger band like OOR who allocates a lot more standing tickets.

The bigger your name, the higher the stake. I still remember when the late King of Pop Michael Jackson was deemed a failure for selling “only" around 45000 tickets for a stadium concert in the UK back in the late 90s.

So, was MFS playing it safe with Saitama Super Arena?

Nope.

On the contrary, they were daring themselves to take the risk in order to know where they are at. But hey, ANY indie artist in the world would KILL to have 18000 people per night. It’s awesome that MFS could reach that number as an independent band.

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My 2 cents

Why did MFS struggle a bit to fill up Saitama Super Arena?

To me it still boils down to one thing. Their archrival ONE OK ROCK.

This had been the first time ever that MFS was doing a major Tour head to head against OOR. They even had a few clashing dates!

* (Remember that Summer Sonic Tokyo (MFS) vs Osaka (OOR) incident? A small crowd in Tokyo vs a packed crowd in Osaka?）

OOR by Julen Photo

For the most part, getting the majority of their fans from OOR fandom has been a huge blessing for MFS. But we must take note that many of them still keep OOR as their main band and thus, are more likely to spend their money on the OOR Tour instead. Not to mention that OOR ticket & merch prices are higher.

MFS hardcore fans are still way smaller and probably will never top OOR, which is fine to me (seriously, I don’t want MFS to compromise their music like OOR did 😑 ). However, I do believe that the day will come when MFS can attract 30000 crowd in one show but it will take more time for that to happen.

But comparing it to OOR, it wasn’t too bad even though it is still a long way to go :-)

Someday MFS will be able to pack in fully standing crowds on the floor 😃 !

What MFS needs to do?

1. Keep on with their current strategy of reaching out and expanding to fans outside of the OOR crowd. Keep on collaborating, guys!

2. I personally hope that the little darling Hiroki can continue being careful with anything that comes out of his mouth so as not to make another faux pas e.g that misunderstood MC at Summer Sonic (OOR fans accused him of jealousy towards Taka again because of it... oops 🙈), that "kiddy tantrum" at Storyteller Tour Osaka (your warped sense of humour may not necessarily work outside of your band & crew, Hiro 😑). Watching him in the later part of 2019, I do feel Hiro had learned a bit from it all though.

3. Continue strengthening the bond with the existing fans. It’s important to cherish their loyalty. I had talked before about the benefit of keeping your core fans. Thankfully, MFS is doing it right in this area. Bringing awareness to ALS, dedicating their songs to special selected fans and helping in realizing their dreams. After all, support is a two-way street.

4. Connecting with the younger crowd like they did during the ALONE era with the “university tour” might be a good idea too 🤔. I still remember photos of the members walking through the crowd among the stalls at students’ fairs 😃. That was an exciting time 😊

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So, what do you all think 😃?

#reply #my first story #maifasu #マイファス #one ok rock #oor

16 notes · View notes

rkmason · 5 years

Photo

▰▰▰▰▰▰ MNET GLOBAL AUDITIONS, SEASON 5 ˟ EP. 2 PERFORMANCE ▰▰▰▰▰▰

memories come flooding back the him the more he goes through the motions of the competition. he remembers asking luna for her opinion on his stage outfits so far, on what he ought to go for next, running into someone he didn’t know would become his sunbae in nova to ask something similar: how to step up his fashion game other than stealing from ty’s closet, something his roommate at the time was bound to notice when they competed on the same reason, on the same stage.

walking into the set for the next round, with its new layout, its less crowded layout, it feels bittersweet. he’s already lost a few friends from the last round to this one and he lets out the breath he didn’t know he’d been holding onto. compared to last week, he realizes it’s better to show his nervousness, to show weakness, but it’s a concept he has to become comfortable with. [he won’t grow otherwise, will stop changing if he doesn’t.]

his palms are sweaty and he still isn’t done using the same tired ass joke about eminem and 8 mile, as if he focuses on it to keep his own spirits up instead. maybe he needs to. because he heard about how his appearance was edited, how it looked, how he seemed too casual for someone coming back after debuting once already, acting like he didn’t leave two companies by now. patting his hands on his pants, he takes another deep breath, looks around for a familiar face.

when she walks in, sakura comes by to greet him and he feels calmer, sated, relaxed again for a moment because seeing sakura reminds him of seeing his little brother again, makes him feel as if he’s seeing his own little sister. he hugs her back, gives her wishes of good luck and affirmation that she’ll do great but saying that to her, seeing the chairs surrounding them remind him this is a competition and it could come down to them in the rapping category. she’s someone he wouldn’t want to go against because he’d feel weakened by it and it reminds him of the conversations he’s had since they left the set last week.

▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀ PAUSE, REWIND ⭯

“hey dabin—”

“not right now, hyung.”

“oh, okay. yeah, later then.”

he’d stopped by the apartment dabin shared with seik and it didn’t feel like home the way it used to a few years ago before he moved where he is now. it didn’t feel like he could crash on their sofa again and wake up to seik scolding dabin for not telling him when they ran out of something in the kitchen again. everything had its own routine back then, when things were simpler, but not anymore.

seik walks out of his room, hair messy after waking up from his nap because of a particular door slam. “he still upset?”

“…yeah.”

“he’ll get over it.”

“feels different this time.”

“maybe he’s jealous.”

“what?”

chuckling, seik quirks his brows, pouring himself a glass of water and sitting on the edge of the kitchen table. he looks more amused than minho thinks anyone should be when his friends are at odds like this. his exasperation only grows as seik doesn’t speak just yet, taking sips until he finishes, accented by the loud ahh he lets out, the clink of the glass in the sink the only sound until minho’s patience wears out.

“come on, man. explain yourself.”

“you didn’t make the same offer.”

brows furrowing, his face twists in confusion as he follows seik to the living room. “what offer?”

“to give your spot to him.” this time, he’s the one who goes silent and all he can manage is wetting his lips, eyes widening every once in a while before returning to their previous state, just more hesitant in expression.

“i get it.” seik’s voice is softer this time, almost apologetic, the past coming back to him too. “but to dabin… the hyung he followed for so long, the one he defends every time…”

“yeah.” minho doesn’t sound like himself when he says it, nodding his head, fists clenched at his side, and, instead of going to dabin’s room, he leaves the apartment quietly.

going to the only other place he knows as well, the other place he’s as comfortable in on his own, he goes to the dance studio they rent for Kill.U.Strate. it’s empty today, not in as much use as before when they practically lived there now that the guys’ projects began to split off, and he lays there. eyes closed, hands folded on his stomach, legs crossed at his ankles, he just lays there.

he doesn’t have any answers for his family, for his friends, and the joy that he found after finding out he moved on, after getting that call from mijoo when she watched the episode air and hearing her cry because of him again but for a good reason, that joy is slipping from his fingers again. he doesn’t know what to say to kikwang either when he comes into the practice room and he’s sitting up, letting out a slight groan because he’d been in that position for too long. the smallest things could affect your back and posture after all. he should’ve been more careful.

not much has to be said and he’s glad kikwang is a good enough friend to join him, to talk like things are normal, and to not skip a beat when minho asks, “do you wish i could give you my spot on the show?”

“i meant what i texted you. i want you to win this season, hyung.” they spend some time in the practice room just hanging out, dancing a little, before kikwang says it’s all his so he can prepare for the next episode filming. he can’t get a protest out in time before kikwang’s gone and he’s running his fingers through his hair, sighing as he looks around, the room only seeming more glum when he’s alone.

there’s no progress when the door opens an hour later and the last person he expected to come in walks through. there’s a cap over his head, shielding half his face, but minho would recognize him anywhere. sure, some of his friends remind him of his younger brother but, on days like this, dabin pretty much is minho’s little brother and he’s gesturing for him to come over. the hug is brief and dabin sighs as he stands in front of the older.

“i don’t want you to give me your spot.”

“i know.”

“so if y— wait… you know?”

“yeah.”

“seik told you.” dabin gets the same answer and he inhales sharply, exhales slowly. “i thought that’s why you left the apartment without saying anything. i thought you were gonna go…”

the thought is there even if the sentence is left hanging, words dabin doesn’t seem to want to say, and minho shakes his head as he puts a hand on dabin’s shoulder. “i care about ya as much as i did jaebum back then but… i’m not planning on giving my spot up for anyone this time.”

“okay.”

“you jus’ sayin’ that or are you okay with it?”

“i’m good.”

narrowing his eyes, he wraps an arm around dabin’s neck, pulling him closer. “so… you thought it meant i like jaebum more than you?”

“hyung.”

▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀ PRESS PLAY, BACK TO THE SCHEDULED PROGRAMMING

finding a seat proves more difficult than he thought it would be and when more people settle in, minho realizes he needs to figure out what he’s doing soon. although he could sit near sakura and talk to her, he knows she’s there with friends and that he’d end up distracted. besides, when people were still convinced he broke his contract for dating without his own confirmation, he doesn’t want to add fuel to the fire. instead, he goes another route, ends up recognizing someone from their performance last time and how he liked their vibe.

so he’s standing near them, calling out and going, “hey do you have ig? let me add you” because he’s thought of the first face-to-face impression he wants to make and is committed to it as stupid as it is. the name is given to him and he types it in as quickly as he was told, opening the messages and sending him one.

can i slide into that seat next to you like i slid into ur dms

the laugh he gets is enough of an answer for him to sit down with a proud grin, laughing at himself. even if he told himself not to brush everything off, to not laugh everything off, there are some moments that ought’a be like this. his instagram is distinguishable enough to him as he gets comfy in his new seat and this time he’s the one that bursts into laughter when ian says to him, “anyone ever tell you that you’re a thirst trap?” definitely not the first time and minho shares that sentiment before opening his phone to look at ian’s posts too. it was a good distraction in the meantime but when it appears all the sears are filled, he feels the nerves building up again, his thoughts wander and they go back further than he should let them.

he had a wounded ego years ago. thought too much of himself and his future and yet not enough. a dream to be someone of influence but not decisive enough to follow through, ill-educated about life in general. there are days he still doesn’t feel ready but no one wants to know about that. at least, that’s what he’s told himself for years. no one wants a gloomy gus. no one wants to hang out with the weird kid in the back sulking over the lack of acknowledgment by his father. no one wants to be the friend of someone who dwells too much in the past instead of making sure every moment is a good time. that was the lesson he insisted on from a young age. on days that his brother was too busy, that her sister was annoyed by everything, days when his mother was too tired to cook, days that his little brother whines for someone to play with, he knew what his role was. a mood-maker, a mood-lifter.

the performances he gave years ago were bits and pieces of him, scraps sewn together by a beginner. this song feels more complex, more complete, each thread and stitch made by someone more honest with himself. because it’s okay not to feel like the best sometimes. because he told the audience back then not to let anyone convince them otherwise and ignored that the person who told him that most was himself; the one that convinced him he wasn’t the best he could be was always him.

his mother called him the same night he’d talked to kikwang and dabin in the practice room and his mind is still hazy, he can’t think coherently about a song or anything. whether he should dance or not, but just before that hung up that day, his mother said something he’s brought with him today, on his mind, in his heart, lyrics dancing around in his head, ready to spill from a thirsty mouth— thirsty to tell the truth, to put his truth out there. “don’t keep everything inside.”

when he first heard about the comments, was told about them, read them himself, he thought he should just let it go, push his heart back into its proper place when it lodged itself in his throat. two minutes, two minutes to show who he is again, and answer the concerns that’d been brought up. answers, answers, answers.

in school, we’re taught the same. find the right answer. every time, find the right answer but he doesn’t follow that. rules in black and white, but he operates in shades of gray. that’s how he finds his next song. a simple beat, but lyrics with a powerful message. this isn’t for his ex-group members, for his parents, for his siblings, for his girlfriend, or for his friends. this is for his own clarity by letting his heart purge. instead of layering it with band-aids, wrapping it to be kept safe, he lets his heart bleed onto the page. he adds color to his own world.

●●●●●● NEXT ON STAGE, CHOI MINHO, EP. 2 — 7월 4일 ●●●●●●

one more time today, his hands are sweaty. no eminem joke. it doesn’t even cross his mind because his heart is climbing, racing as it tries to scale his throat, and he swallows thickly, wills himself to breathe.

shit, just breathe.

▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀ 탓 BLAME ♫ SELF-WRITTEN TIME STAMPS ( IN ORDER ) 0:20 to 1:10 / 1:20 to 1:26 / 1:48 to 2:15 / 3:02 to 3:29 NOTE: his gestures and expressions are similar to that of vinxen’s in the video if not written !

▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀ 난 이 늪에 있어 난 이 늪에 있어 I’M IN THIS SWAMP, I’M IN THIS SWAMP

모두가 날 내려다보는 이 늪에 있어 I’M IN THIS SWAMP WHERE EVERYBODY IS LOOKING DOWN

넌 내 옆에 있어 주기를 바랬던 마음 I JUST WISHED YOU WERE NEXT TO ME

아직 선명히 남아있어 등 돌리던 날 BUT IT’S STILL VERY CLEAR, THE DAY YOU BETRAYED (ME)

나 혼자 늪에 있어 혼자 늪에 있어 I’M ALONE IN THIS SWAMP, ALONE IN THIS SWAMP

저 네티즌가 날 비웃고 하늘 날고 있어 THESE NETIZENS* ARE MAKING FUN OF ME, FLYING UP HIGH

난 알고 있어 애초에 알고 있었어 I KNEW IT, I KNEW IT FROM THE BEGINNING

흐려져가는 시야를 탓하고 있어 I BLAME (IT ON) MY BLURRY VISION ▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀

nothing confirmed, but it’s easier to believe anything that way, isn’t it? it didn’t matter if sphere spared him the scandal, spared the group the scandal, it would follow him and being lonely has to be about his love life. his age. the audacity he has to come back. how he should be giving other people a shot. he’s seen it all and instead of letting it go, he wears it on his sleeve. he lets the weight of his own guilt show instead of hiding it away with i’m okay and i’m gonna do me like he’s been saying since he walked out of the company one last time.

he stops pretending that he wasn’t hurt by the fact that he did know who outed his relationship, that he did know who wanted to see him fall.

▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀ 난 이 늪에 있어 난 이 늪에 있어 I’M IN THIS SWAMP, I’M IN THIS SWAMP

아주 더럽고도 추잡한 이 늪에 있어 I’M IN THIS SWAMP FULL OF TRASH*

냄새도 못 맡을 정도로 떨어져 멀리 GO AWAY SO YOU CAN’T SMELL ME

보이지도 않니 손에 미세한 떨림 CAN’T YOU SEE MY FINGERS SHAKING

넌 변해있어 많이 변해있어 YOU CHANGED A LOT, YOU CHANGED A LOT

나란 그늘을 치우니 안색이 밝아졌어 AS I REMOVED MY SHADE FROM YOU, YOU LOOKED OKAY

위로 혹은 악연으로 포장해낸 것들이 PLEASE BLAME ME FOR WHAT HAPPENED

내 탓이라고 말해줘 제발 EVEN THOUGH IT LOOKS LIKE MISFORTUNE ▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀

when he left, he told himself he was laying in the bed he made and it’s why as he raps, he can’t make eye contact, can’t look directly at anyone. he’s avoiding people and it was a tell-tale sign that he wasn’t okay, a sign he ignored for months because he kept busy, said he didn’t see people as often because he was working but it was more than that. he didn’t know how to feel.

it was still his fault in the end. still because of him that he had to leave. reckless, stupid, all the insults he had for himself in high school chase him to this stage again, try to stain the page with spilled ink, with trash, but he holds the pen, keeps it held high the same way he holds onto the microphone.

the news article said he chose to depart from the group. it was right. he just didn’t know how far back the decision was that sealed his fate.

▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀ [NEW HANGUL PENDING] THOUGHT IT WAS UNFAIR THAT NO MATTER HOW HARD

[NEW HANGUL PENDING] TRAINEES AND IDOLS DO, IT’S NOT ENOUGH

확실히 압살하고자 아빠 손 벌려 잡은 지하방에서 손꼽아 기다리고 있어 FOR MY COMPLETE VICTORY, I WAIT IN THE ROOM I BOUGHT WITH THE MONEY MY DAD GAVE ME

난 기대치를 두 배로 올려 I DOUBLE MY EXPECTATIONS

그래야 상실감이 거대해지니까 SO I CAN DISAPPOINT BADLY

그래야 사람이 더 초라해지니까 SO I CAN FEEL MORE MISERABLE

그래야 내가 정말 간절해지니까 SO I AM MORE DESPERATE

아니 얼마나 더 간절해야 합니까 NO, HOW CAN I LOOK EVEN MORE DESPERATE?

박수 갈채는 누굴 위한 겁니까 WHO IS THE APPLAUSE FOR ?

대학에 가라는 아버지 말을 웃어넘기고 대충 끄덕거린 나는 불효자 되는 겁니까? I LAUGHED AND NODDED AT MY DAD* WHEN HE SAID I SHOULD GO TO UNIVERSITY*, AND DOES THAT MAKE ME A BAD SON? ▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀

there’s so much in life that was given to him and nearly everything left unsaid. how miserable he was about the competitive lifestyle when he was in nova, how he felt left out at times but pretended he was fine. the truth about how he felt when how he told his friends he didn’t mind that they were moving onto bigger and better projects without him, how his family was living their lives without him, how he was missing everything, how he couldn’t see his girlfriend for months, how he felt like life was still being decided for him and he had no clue what the hell he was doing.

he goes here and there, only says no sometimes, and none of it feels right because he’s not saying a damn thing. underneath everything else, underneath the rules he follows, the routine he keeps to, the predictable patterns he lives by, he let himself be defined by black and white, then wondered why he was unhappy living without color, without doing whatever he could to paint everything himself.

▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀ 주변에 대입해 그런진 몰라도 I THINK I MESSED* UP MY OWN LIFE

볼수록 뭣같이 느껴져서 MAYBE BECAUSE I COMPARE MY LIFE WITH THE OTHERS

내가 날 가둬둔 상황이 위안이 돼 BLAMING MYSELF FOR EVERYTHING COMFORTS ME

아직 말해줄 게 많아서 BECAUSE I STILL HAVE A LOT TO SAY

모르겠네 사람들이 피해 보인 탓 DON’T KNOW WHY I STARTED TO AVOID* PEOPLE

몰라 내가 이 노래를 불러버린 탓 DON’T KNOW WHY I STARTED SINGING THIS SONG

몰라 내가 한심하고 어이 없는 탓 DON’T KNOW WHY I AM PATHETIC AND DON’T HAVE NERVE*

몰라 내가 여러 기회들을 날린 탓 DON’T KNOW WHY I BLEW MY CHANCES AWAY ▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀

it could’ve started years ago, when he found out things about his past, when he didn’t get into trc on his first audition, when he was rejected the first time by mijoo, when he fought with seik for the first time about being an idol. every time he didn’t take a call from his brother. every time he let himself go this way or that way during training without any real aim or purpose. he did this to himself. that must be why he ended up in rap unit instead of dance unit in convex. his roots are no longer his and he’s not seen as a dancer. training made him a rapper and he secretly let it make him miserable instead of embracing it like he does now, his voice wrecked with emotion as he starts to yell. the peak of the song and he puts the mic stand behind him, mic in his hand as he shouts.

▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀ 모르겠네 사람들이 피해 보인 탓 DON’T KNOW WHY I STARTED TO AVOID* PEOPLE

몰라 내가 이 노래를 불러버린 탓 DON’T KNOW WHY I STARTED SINGING THIS SONG

몰라 내가 한심하고 어이 없는 탓 DON’T KNOW WHY I AM PATHETIC AND DON’T HAVE NERVE*

몰라 내가 여러 기회들을 날린 탓 DON’T KNOW WHY I BLEW MY CHANCES AWAY ▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀

he’s social. friendly. a moodmaker. he tells himself this again. everything that made him come as far as he did, all the positive traits he showed off and every negative thing he hid. that’s what he considers different this season. he’ll show all of it. he’ll lay it all out so that he can finally be himself too, so he can leave and be a performer again instead of just going through the motions, filling whatever spot he needs to. the stage feels covered in color, his yells were red, his tears were blue, and when he places the mic back on the stand, bowing deeply, he makes sure to take those colors, his favorite colors, with him, so that his heart doesn’t just bleed but heals.

PROFILE / SKILLS / AUDITION / EPISODE 1 ▀▀▀▀▀▀▀ EP. 2: PERFORMANCE / INTERVIEW

#rkmga5 #rkmga5skill #rkcheri #rksakura #rkxkikwang #rkluna #xrkyoona #rkjooyoung #yeets this out wHILE I CAN #i probably have to add more tags later but we'll worry about that then

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shadowofthetombraiderreview-blog · 4 years

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Shadow Of The Tomb Raider Review

Release Date on September 14, 2018

There are two things I have always loved about Shadow of The Tomb Raider Free Download Game Walkthrough in all my incarnations: beautiful, exciting and dangerous places to explore, and Lara Croft herself. Shadow of the Tomb Raider ranges from East to South Inca cities and modern-day Peru jungles and towns, with missionary cry to climb, dive, and South American locations to the east. But it gives Lara a disservice, who turns her into a deadly mud-camouflaged jungle warrior who, while not interesting to say, is pushed by a plot that is more predictable than its main character and Is more concerned with supernatural artifacts. It’s so silly that you can explain it without sounding ridiculous: Lara is pursuing a secret militia organization across the South American continent to prevent them from stealing a silver thong and bringing about the end of the world. PC Games For free

Lik the first Shadow Tomb Raider Review video games in this contemporary trilogy by Crystal Dynamics – although this closing access changed into developed by means of an extraordinary studio, Eidos Montreal – Tomb Raider’s Shadows gradual-paced exploration, treasure-hunting, and surround historical tombs. Allegations of creating buzz echo the course to high-adrenaline action-movie-style play. Lara gets trapped in mudslides and earthquakes, scrambles off collapsing buildings and blows up invading helicopters, but as opposed to hiding behind cover with an assault rifle, she frequently ignores herself in tall grass or against partitions. Suppresses, anonymity hunts down the armed forces in the darkish. Lara has “advanced” from a determined survivor right into a silent killer, which gives the player a welcome spoil from capturing things. Sending a poisoned arrow into the thigh of a guard from the wooded area cover is more exciting than losing pistols into them one by one through pointing pistols at them and pressing them to fall down. As the spectacle, Tomb Raider’s shadow is the nice fight feasible. It is a revelation in its beauty. Whenever Lara emerges from a wooded area or cave, the digital camera rests on sundown-yellow badlands and beautiful temples to find out some new wonders of the historical world. Walking round rocks and crumbling homes is vertical and interesting; It always looks like you're an inch far from falling for your loss of life. The animation and environmental layout are definitely brilliant, and you're generally given time to transport speedy in preference to coping. Sadly, the shadow of Tomb Raider’s series Wonderful Places is prepare under a plot that collapses beneath the slightest scrutiny. The narrative is an inconsistent mess that is going beyond the standard action movie/online game suspension of disbelief – how do Lara’s weapons paintings perfectly even after an hour of driving through an underwater grave? – and simply shakes up their investment in what’s occurring in the sport. The plot makes little feel, fundamental man or woman motivations are absolutely absent, and Lara spontaneously meets random preoccupation for almost every body. To pick out one in every of many examples: Why, whilst Lara seems in an undisputed local colony full of people who've escaped from the out of doors world for loads of years, is she right away welcomed and served to settle their disputes is going? How does he communicate fluently with them? At first, Tomb Raider’s narrative ignites a shadow of inconsistencies, however with each new handy puzzle or magical artifact, needless revelation, or paper-skinny person, my tolerance for the useless Thin Thin. It is also worth noting that during historical Central America, seeing the aristocracy sporting wings and animal skulls and taking pictures enemies dressed in a ceremonial gown, English Lara Croft is deeply uncomfortable. Killing endless streams of militias may be seamless, but at the least the optics aren't so extreme. In the opening scenes, it is Lara’s cruel plunder of a Mayan tomb that kills the apocalypse, but any comment here about Lara’s method to ejecting artifacts from other cultures is made by a plot, which later leads her to The native holds as the protector of the population. Beautiful backdrop Shadow of the Tomb Raider Photograph: Eidos Montréal Most disappointingly, Lara Croft is uninteresting herself. At the beginning of this trilogy, whilst he turned into now not compared to the bulletproof aristocratic adventurer he had already completed, everyone did now not love it, but it changed into at least an try and humanize him. In 2013’s Tomb Raider, she became trying to continue to exist on an island; In Rise of the Tomb Raider, she become tracing her late father’s footsteps everywhere in the world to discover what brought on her loss of life; Here, his motivations are a whole lot much less clean and his conscience character is placed in a grandiose plot of a world-finishing. Any introspection about who she is and what she is doing is hidden in the menu, wherein the artifacts tested indicate some lines for Croft. In light of the reality that neither of the authors of the previous games has been credited right here, and the transition to a brand new studio, you surprise if this recreation is suffering from a improvement drama. In the Shadow of the Tomb Raider there is a lot greater to comply with its story – monitoring treasures from clues written on monoliths, exploring remarkable hidden tombs with the fine riddles in the game, looking jungle creatures, Unravel neighborhood mysteries in populated areas. These efforts are a lot of amusing, in particular hidden tombs, but the rewards are unusually meaningless. Salted outfits provide meaningless bonuses for Lara (“get extra experience for hitting”), the crafting substances are so considerable that they are now not an thrilling reward, and new skills or guns are rarely used. Oddly, objects together with lockpicks that open up opportunities to are seeking for new treasures are offered through traders, not earned thru exploration. It is very abnormal that this alternative material is so badly included. Shadow of Tomb Raider is a strange and vaguely disappointing game, however no longer a horrific one. Sneak round within the jungle, combating jaguars, exploring historic crypts that grapple with danger, soar and climb round exquisite Peruvian scenes, the satisfying “thunk” of an arrow finding its target; This is all fun, if not new. The locations Lara visits and the things she does, particularly when she doesn’t have a gun in her fingers, are lovely and enjoyable. But it lacks a coherent plot or innovative imaginative and prescient to put all of it together, and the opportunity to create an exciting individual out of Lara Croft is meaningless. Shadow of the Tomb Raider Recommended Requirements OS: Windows 10 sixty four-bit Graphics Nvidia GTX 1060 6GB or AMD Radeon RX 480, 8GB Processor: Intel Core i7 4770K, 3.40 GHz or AMD Ryzen five 1600, 3.20 GHz Memory: sixteen GB DirectX: 12 Version Storage: forty GB Dedicated Video Memory: 6GB

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listoriented · 5 years

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The Cat Lady

cw: suicide, mental illness

The Cat Lady is a sidescrolling horror-adventure game. It contains: long sections of dialogue, item-based puzzles, jump scares, slow-moving character animations. It was released in 2012. It was made by Harvester Games, an independent studio from Poland. Apparently a sequel, Lorelai, was released earlier this year. Curiously, three out of the last five games now have been made by different Polish studios.

The protagonist/Cat Lady in question is Susan Ashworth. Susan is a forty-year-old woman who lives in an apartment, more or less fully alone aside from the occasional company of stray neighbourhood cats. Susan is suffering from severe depression — the game begins with her attempting suicide. She ends up in a limbo realm where the French-accented ‘Queen of Maggots’ tells her to go back to the living realm and kill five psychopaths (“parasites”). So she does, kind of, but the subsequent quest to do this is very mixed in with Susan’s own path to recovery.

The Cat Lady is a perplexing, frustrating, interesting patchwork mess of a game. I don’t know what I think of it. I don’t know whether to celebrate its relatively (to most other games) thoughtful depiction of mental illness or discuss how this is still overly enmeshed in problematic depictions of violence. I don’t know whether to commend the game’s partial unwinding of the lonely cat lady trope or to reflect on how it reaffirms this idea of depression as something that makes someone act like an arsehole to everyone around them.

The whole game is kind of like this. It uses surrealism and unreliable narration to imply discursive thinking into the altered states of perception produced by mental illness, but then it seems to narratively validate these altered states because the plot of the game involves murdering, and getting murdered by, serial killers and psychopaths. It has lots of overbearing, superfluous dialogue, mixed in with some genuinely thoughtful and insightful moments – which it then undercuts, again, with ridiculous violence. For example! The first time The Cat Lady made me think, oh, maybe this game is actually going to take this subject seriously, was in the second chapter when Susan talks to a psychiatrist and it gave you these dialogue options of, like, talking seriously about your past, yay, the game is making the implicative link between trauma and illness, maybe there is hope! And then….. and then the psychiatrist MURDERS YOU because he is A SERIAL KILLER.

And it’s just like. What?

I think, in a vacuum, this sort of tonal rollercoaster would be fine, if this was one game among many that explored different depictions of different kinds of experiences of mental illness – sure, that would be totally valid. The Cat Lady has one of the more interesting explorations of mental illness I’ve seen in games. But this is both a medium that is very prone to violence, and one in which mental illness has largely been tied with the motivations of evil boss characters, in much the same way that we often look for it as the motivation for crimes without necessarily trying to understand the social underpinnings that go into it. Video games have been more likely to stigmatise mental illness rather than engender understanding. Working with this background, continuing to tie violence to mental illness poses an associative problem that, through its spectral depiction of surrealism, it never really shakes itself of – it doesn’t work hard enough against the pre-existing tropes, basically. But that isn’t to say it’s wrong, only that I don’t know if it can be categorically declared ‘a success’. Like, sure, I get that maybe it’s meant to be read as allegory, or maybe we’re meant to appreciate that not knowing what is real is indeed one of the game’s core points about depicting mental illness – but then, the logical leaps it makes are so large, it frequently undermines so much of the sensitivity in its world-building. It’s hard to find much to hold onto, or know where to orient ourselves to parse what these depictions of these themes are saying.

It’s all over the place in so many ways. It starts poorly – the first two chapters are the weakest – but I liked it better the more I played of it. Some of puzzles are a little infuriating, though I ended up enjoying how they played out more often than not, particularly once I’d picked up the rhythm of the game’s thinking. The voice-acting is extensive though not always convincing. The penultimate chapter has a neat sleuthing layout that really slinks into a cool, elaborate whodunnit puzzle. After the chaos of the first two chapters, I liked the way the game built up through the middle, reorienting around depictions of Susan’s apartment and the warmness of the little moments like having coffee and a cigarette on the balcony. I appreciated the morose, mostly monochrome pallet with sparing and smart interjections of colour. I liked the way the art feels cut together, lo-fi but intricate. Some of the jump scares are pretty good.

It’s…I don’t know. I feel like I’ve mostly read positive things about it, but I can’t get totally on board, nor do I really have the time/energy to more coherently unpack why I think it doesn’t always deal with its heavy subject matter that well. Maybe it’s an angle thing. If you’re asking “does it have a good depiction of depression for a schlocky horror game?” then yes. But remove the genre requirement, then no. Everything is relative.

update 9/10/2019** Some people have already discussed The Cat Lady with regards to representing mental illness with a bit more clarity and nuance than I have. Sarah Stang (2018) at First Person Scholar discusses The Cat Lady alongside Fran Bow and Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice, acknowledging that while these depictions have shortcomings, they represent a comparative step forward for games:

The particular strength of all three games discussed above is that they feature female protagonists with mental illnesses and emphasize healing rather than curing. In Fran Bow and The Cat Lady, the clear message is that people with mental illnesses can help others and themselves, can overcome adversity and live with trauma, and can form meaningful relationships.

Stang links to a couple of other articles that give a reasonable background on the problematic relationship games have with mental illness. Sarah Nixon in 2013 gave a concise rendering of how horror games particularly tend to use and stigmatise mental illness. Aaron Souppouris (2015) looks at particular mechanics more extensively in discussion with a clinical psychologist.

I also liked Eric Swain’s short and sweet take in 2015 (from ~5 minutes in), on a critical distance confab postcast in discussion with Austin Walker in 2015. Swain described the game as Freudian studies “through a 2000s nu-metal aesthetic”, noting how interesting the game looked and also the nice balcony scenes, but mentioning that it was hard to know what the game’s creator wanted to say about certain sensitive topics. **

Duration: Eight hours.

When/Why: A few years ago I was friends with a guy named John. We were in a book club with a bunch of other ex-classmates from uni. John also liked playing Dota, during the period of my life where I, too, was on that horse. I played Dota with John and his friend a few times, and was shocked at how angry and rude he was in game, this everyday fairly polite and thoughtful guy. Anyway, at some point John mentioned or recommended The Cat Lady in the context of a discussion at book club, which is, I think, how I came to buy it in a steam sale in early 2015. I played it for a bit but found the physical slowness of the game too patience-testing at the time, given that at the time I was, as mentioned, addicted to the dopamine gambit of Dota. When I later mentioned this – my inability to get through the first chapter of the game he’d recommended - to John, he agreed that it was “a bad game”, further confusing me as to why it was brought up in the first place, and indeed I’m not sure if John has actually played it, seeing as it doesn’t come up as something that exists in his steam library, or at least, on the steam account of his that I’m friends with. So, that’s the long story as to how this game came to be here. But why else do you read this blog?

up next is Cat Quest

#game78 #the cat lady #harvester games #games of poland #games of 2012 #horror #depression games #adventure games #sidescroller

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courage-a-word-of-justice · 5 years

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The shows that have made it this season will be getting their tags...soon. Because I fell behind early in the season, trying to read ahead is nastier than it really should be...

Update: I forgot to roll out the tags...! Sorry about that.

One Punch Man 2 1

This season’s name…sounds counterintuitive, to say the least.

I love how Genos is carrying a box of hijiki (which looks like hair) and Saitama’s wearing a shirt that says “hair” (in kanji) all over it. It’s funny for a bald man and his “work of modern art”.

I never knew Genos was so blunt. Maybe because the last season was a good 2 – 3 years ago…and was by Madhouse and Shingo Natsume, and so this feels slightly different.

Oh, Sonic…! I didn’t realise how much I missed you! (Not to mention, you look hot with the off-the-shoulder shirt, y’know?)

“Enoki” is a type of mushroom.

Oh, Garou!...Oh wait, there isn’t much more of the episode left, is there…?

Afterlost 1

Oh great…this is the second time the subs don’t work on my device of choice. Then again, it seems to be a problem with the ad blocker and not the video…Okay, fiddling with the ad blocker worked.

Let’s play Spot the Main Character Amongst All the CGI Guys! Yay! (obviously sarcastic)

Without the volume…this OP is, to not put it lightly, s***.

Shoumetsu means “extinction”, not “lost”.

And the reward for Jankiest CGI this season belongs to…

Okay…this is stupid…if it f**ks up even more, I’m out of here!

I know the horned owl is your mascot, but that doesn’t mean you needed a real owl.

Waittttttttt…how did the scientists know Yuki’s father was responsible for this stuff anyway?

I feel like Takuya was shoehorned in. I mean, there’s a better example of this character type in Naofumi (Shield Hero).

This guy’s name, as we know it, is Geek. Wow (sarcastic). Also, I find it funny Takuya has a “ta” on his licence plate.

“…she’s just a package.” - Welp, you don’t get any more blatant than that for female denigration! I think Anime Feminist had a field day with this one.

Come to think of it, I saw some helmets back at Geek’s place but Takuya never seems to use one…

You had one job, Takuya…*sigh*

I swear I said a few previews ago I don’t like 1st person cam…no one ever listens to me, do they???

Not dis shitto agen!

Okay, enough complaining. It seems Yu-no wasn’t bad enough, so they had to produce something like the Chaos Dragon and Seisen Cerberus of old…

RobiHachi 1

It’s Takamatsu being Takamatsu again. Also… I forgot to mention this earlier, but…Taiga Umatani seems to be related to Kurari Umatani (who is credited for Boueibu), so…I wonder if it’s a collective writer’s name for Studio Comet, like Izumi Todo for Toei? The only thing that goes against that is the fact “Kurari” existed during the Diomedea days of Boueibu. Also Isekandar seems to be related to Yamato’s Iscandar (which Takamatsu seems to like, based on the fact he once used Matsumoto metres as a shorthand for being in space). If you don’t understand, Yamato’s endgoal contains a place called Iscandar and that’s by Leiji Matsumoto.

Okayyyyy…what are these rabbit creatures…? But yes, it does smack of Boueibu simply because the episode layout’s the same.

Hmm…? So Robby seems be En (the do-nothing life) in spirit, but Kinshiro in background, but also he runs away from his fortune. “Hmm” indeed.

Oh! That’s what this string of misfortunes reminds me of! The monsters of the day from Boueibu.

Acrymalide.

Hatchi is a Kinshiro in looks but an Atsushi by being a goody-goody.

Hmm…they actually bother to show girls now…apparently Takamatsu went to a boys-only school, which is why his original works focus on dudes (as in, you can pick out when Takamatsu is adapting someone else’s work because it has a heavier focus on girls as supporting characters).

Mechs and spaceships are probably two of the only ways I accept CGI…and you, Takamatsu sir, have just done it (the latter)!

Aw! Lookit his (Hatchi’s) face light up like a Beppu’s! It’s cute!

Hatchi getting out the hatch…lame, but still somewhat effectve on me (because that’s my wordplay game you’re playing, Takamatsu…!).

LOL, it’s a transforming mech. It seems my words from a few comments earlier were basically foretelling the future.

Kimetsu no Yaiba 2

Yikes, “Sakonji Urokodaki” has a lot of strokes…

My Little Sister Lives For Headpats…hey wait, don’t all anime kid sisters do that(?)

For some reason, I know the “Don’t Lose Your Way” meme from Kill la Kill and yet I’ve never…watched KlK…?(!)

I swore that was Giyu (it’s the haircut, I swear), but it’s a random demon…

When all you have is a hatchet…use your head. (LOL)

Ooh, nice eyecatch!

This is really black comedy, in a sense. (I remember this demon fight from the manga which is why I say that.)

Hmm…this wispy stuff wasn’t in the manga.

Come to think of it, I don’t know how Tanjiro got his scar…

If you squint really hard, you can see CGI Urokodaki and Tanjiro…

He probably has no footsteps because of his shoes. Or the fact he’s a ninja. Were there ninja in the Taisho era…? Update: Tanjiro has the same kind of shoes…oops.

Come to think of it, Daisuke from DN Angel had to dodge traps every day before he became Dark…(thinking of this because I reread the first volume of DN Angel recently)

Oh! Manga panel preview! That’s quite fun, really.

Kimetsu no Yaiba 3

I just really like how Tanjiro’s eyes grew larger with what was clearly resolution before he closed the door.

Why do the non-descript hunters look like Giyu too…?

I’ve never seen KnY so comedic…and that’s coming from someone who thought the Head Demon fight from last episode was funny.

Welp, this is…kinda interesting (<- says a fan of Touken Ranbu).

This letter writing…it reminds me of Kekkai Sensen somewhat.

This realistic water…it’s beautiful, but it looks like it came straight out of Niagara Falls. Is that…too realistic for anime?

“No matter…”

It’s a fox version of Speed of Sound Sonic! Then again, the real Sonic is around this season and probably won’t be happy about that comparison…

Is “that guy”…Giyu? Or the demon who slaughtered Tanjiro’s family?

Spider lilies! I didn’t mention it last time, but the symbolism of the spider lily makes the ED real cool.

Bungou Stray Dogs 26

I’v read the wiki page for Chuuya enough to know the next few eps involve the LN Fifteen, so even though I haven’t read a translation of the source material, I know some of the ins and outs of it already.

Ooh! Kitty! (If you’re a manga reader, you’ll know the cat’s significance.)

I think at this point in time, all viewers are used to Dazai’s bulls*** by now.

Is it just me…or did Bones use CGI for the city? It actually looks kind of good…! Sasuga Bones!

I have a fic that predates Fifteen and could be set in the same period (the fic’s vague enough that it could’ve been them at 15, 18 or even 12)…and basically the only thing I got wrong was the fact Chuuya doesn’t have his hat (because I wrote Chuuya as having his hat in the fic). Also, the banter is tenser than I imagined it, but that’s subjective and something only I, the fic writer, can compare.

I wonder who the yellow-tinted Ability holder is…? Update: That’s Randou. Spoke too soon.

There was a box in the subs…I wonder what symbol that might’ve been.

“…closest to the explosion.”

BSD 3 2

Oh, so that’s what Randou was for! I see now.

Chuuya may be OP, but he’s one heck of a fun character…also, he’s not as OP as Saitama, so…yeah.

Oh, the ED from last time is the OP. I should’ve known.

I like the almost storybook-style of this episode!

I thought Dazai was faking releasing the hostages…I was wrong.

Face-stealing aliens return! (They were around last ep too, I think, but they were harder to see then.)

Again, watch for the cat!

Well, with only one suspect (or 3, if you count the Sheep kids), it was quite easy to figure out one of them was behind it. I kind of suspected Randou, anyway, considering what I’ve learnt from all the mysteries I’ve read.

Because I was watching this episode with the volume down low (so I could hear the OP and ED), the volume really did work wonders for the plot this ep…!

King of Prism – Shiny 7 Stars 1

This is the final debut of the season, so basically how this and Shield Hero perform will decide what will stay and what will go. Oh, yeah…apparently this is the companion to a movie, but the movie and TV series have slightly different content.

This dude’s (the one at the very start’s) so grumpy.

…welp, I didn’t expect it to be that much CGI.

This chunk of exposition…makes me feel like I missed something. It was probably in the previous movies, come to think of it…

Basically, this is…uh, Makura no Danshi or Room Mate all over again??? I’m noping out of here…! Bye!

Shield Hero 14

I’m putting this on the chopping block…just so you know.

…uh, age gap romance? It’s hard to tell at this stage, but they (Filo and Melty) sure act like it is romance.

Welp, this survived the chopping block. “Raphtalia backstory” is a good enough reason to stick around for, isn’t it?

Double Decker! EX 3 (FINAL)

I always miss the OP when I’m not watching Double Decker, but I miss the ED even more…

I can’t believe they tried to get away with a Spirited Away parody…!

I can’t believe I get to see Dr Apple all buttered up like this…

I love how Kirill is censoring himself. (At least he can prove he’s not a girl, unlike Valery/Milla, whose entire shtick is the confusion between genders.)

Oh! I think I know the answer to the case already! It was Kirill’s soap, so Doug is the “killer”. But then…why is it Derick, of all people???

LOL, the angles were so reminiscent of Detective Conan…

Underwear-stealing sextuplets…? Why does that kind of sound like Osomatsu-san…?

Ahh…I really am going to miss this ED. See you next time!

Shield Hero 15

I never thought Raphtalia would be so angry…that’s Naofumi’s job.

Okay…it’s the age-old question: do demis listen with their animal ears or their human ears? Do they even have human ears??? (That’s 2 questions, isn’t it…?)

Uh…CGI dinosaur, much?

Shield Hero 16

…and of course, the Queen is a loli. Of course (<-sarcastic).

“Why’d I even have to feed this KFC farm?” – LOL, but I wonder what it sounded like in Japanese…? (i.e. I didn’t listen to it and when I try to do that, there’s always something over the top of it…)

Sarazanmai 2

I wonder if I’ll ever get used to watching Ikuhara on a weekly basis…?

Kappamaki…geddit?

Wait…y’mean, Keppi’s breath smells like cucumbers? Uh…okay, TMI.

Enta’s Japanese house kind of looks like the one in Mawaru Penguindrum.

Wait…why does the Japanese word for “Fish Buffet” (Osakanazanmai) end in –zanmai? Does that mean Sarazanmai is…Dish Buffet?! (LOL)

Notably, one of the signs said “Union” in katakana. It must be an English play on words…y’know, trade union and union = connecting with each other? I’m surprisingly enjoying myself a lot with Sarazanmai, by the way. I didn’t think I would, but I am!

I think that might be Irohassu water. Or Dasani. I saw both those brands in Japan, but I don’t remember which had the green flowers.

Oh…my goodness! Nekoyama (Cat Mountain) Mokichi (written with kanji for “hair” and “luck”). It’s a Boueibu monster! Frick, I’m laughing too hard!

It’s very small and very thin, but the word next to the cat in the eyecatch is neko.

“…Meow God!” – It’s a pun on “Oh, My God!” but with a “meow” in it. It’s pretty forced, but it does get the nuance of the joke across…

Why the heck did the subbers choose “herb” as the word for weed in this? “Weed” is sufficient, right? Right…?

Well…if that spurt of water wasn’t symbolic…I don’t know what is.

The title translates better as “…but I want to steal”. Y’know, add a little force into it.

The two As and the “sara” below it seem to make a zombie face, huh?

Ooh, that ending…

#simulcast commentary #one punch man #sarazanmai #tate no yuusha no nariagari #Chesarka watches Tate no Yuusha no Nariagari #the rising of the shield hero #RobiHachi #double decker #bungou stray dogs #King of prism - shiny seven stars #Kimetsu no Yaiba #shoumetsu toshi #afterlost #Double Decker! Doug and Kirill #Demon Slayer #Chesarka watches KnY #Chesarka watches OPM #chesarka watches bsd #Chesarka watches Sarazanmai

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frederator-studios · 6 years

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Tiya Zhong: The Frederator Interview

vimeo

Tiya Zhong, known to the interweb as Addictiya, is an animator, illustrator, designer and doll artist still brushing off glitter from her graduation just a few weeks ago. Her final film as a student of Sheridan College’s Animation program, “Lost, Stolen, Dropped,” is an autobiography of her daily struggle. It is also among the most relatable, inspired and squishy 2 minutes of animation I’ve seen in a good long while. Enjoy the short above, then read on for Tiya’s journey from schoolgirl doodling in her textbooks to professional artist!

Did you always want to be an animator or artist?

I discovered my passion for drawing when I was 4 years old, and I have always loved doodling figures on my textbooks, reading comics, and watching animation. When I was little, I never thought about becoming an artist - I just thought it would be fun if I could draw forever. In high school, I wanted to be a comic artist, but I became fascinated with making characters come to life. Animation was even more vivid than comics, which is why I chose to major in it.

How did you decide to move from China to Canada to attend Sheridan?

I grew up in China, so at first I planned to attend a university in Beijing that features the best animation program in China. In an extra-curricular art school where I was studying to pass the university’s entrance exam, I met a substitute teacher who'd studied abroad. Talking with him made me realize how many opportunities and great artists are out there. That’s when I started to research animation schools in North America, and got to know Sheridan.

What did you like best about studying at Sheridan?

I learned a lot at Sheridan. The school has great, experienced teachers. But I learned the most from my peers, who are all amazing artists. Being in that group gave me no choice but to improve. What I enjoyed most is how free the environment is, compared to the one I’d been in. I also had a lot more resources at my disposal. Being at Sheridan really helped me discover my own art style.

Did you work any jobs during your time in college?

Since high school, I have always worked on stuff for conventions: things like zines, charms, and commissions. During college I actively kept my eyes on the industry and started to take freelance jobs. I’ve done character illustrations for games, art for a published illustration tutorial, design work, and more commissions, mostly with Chinese companies. I think it’s really important for artists to have at least some experience working with partners or employers before finishing school.

What are your favorite techniques, considering you've worked in both 2d and stop-motion? And those are just the two I know for sure!

Yes, I’ve done a little bit of 3D for assignments, but so far I’ve only worked in 2D and stop motion. I love both techniques equally! They are two different forms of art and each has stunning aspects. I love how free 2D can be, and how much you can play with crazy distortions, squash and stretch. I also love the process of crafting puppets and sets and being able to hold them in my hand.

What inspires you and your work the most?

Japanese anime definitely influences my work. They are my childhood and what made me keep the pencil in my hand! In the process of creating, I also look for references in many forms: live action movies, fashion, short films, photography. Anything related to art.

Is there anything that comes up in your work over and over?

I built my interest in life drawing while studying at Sheridan. Now, emphasizing the beauty and curls of human bodies has become a core part of my drawings.

How was the experience of creating "Quarters" in a team of 9 animators?

Creating “Quarters” with 8 other amazing artists was a really great experience! It was our first try, but there were no conflicts and everything went smoothly. Everyone pitched an idea for the film and we voted for the ‘four neighbors’ idea, which became “Quarters”. I worked on layout designs, prop and sets fabrication, shooting area setups, animation, and some post-production color corrections. We spread the work pretty much equally to everyone, so that we could all gain experience in every stage of creating a stop motion film.

vimeo

What inspired you to create "Lost, Stolen, Dropped"?

I had two other ideas for my final film before “Lost, Stolen, Dropped,” but they didn’t feel authentic to me. Personally, I prefer telling stories on subjects that I’m knowledgeable about, or have experienced myself. So one month into my 4th year, I gave up my first idea and all the storyboards I’d done for it. I thought, “What subject am I really familiar with? Is there anything that I know better than anyone else?” At the same time, I lost my brand new Cintiq pro pen. Not long before then I had lost my wallet. Aaaand my portable hard drive. My roommate commented that losing things is my everyday life. That’s what inspired me - I am really good at losing things! So I decided to make a film about that.

Love it. Do you often pull from your own life in your stories?

Actually, I can trace it back all the way to primary school! I used to draw comics as my diaries. With four panels comics, I’d record anything that happened in my life that I found fun. By the end of grade 7, I had a whole sketchbook of my personal life. I only showed it to my closest friends.

What were the biggest changes you made to "Lost, Stolen, Dropped" while working on the film? What were the biggest challenges?

I made a big change in the story. At the end of the first version, I made lots of copies of the main character, which came from all the different scenarios or timelines. They all appeared in her messy room, staring at her and guiding her to find her phone. That ending had a very dark and absurd feeling to it. The problem was, in order to explain that story and deliver the right feeling, the film would need to be a lot longer. And so, too much work for me. In the end, I changed lots of things and compressed the storyboard so I could finish it.

What do you plan to do now that you've graduated? Sorry to ask that question, I know it's the worst for new grads, haha.

Haha, I was so lost on this before, but now I kind of have a blueprint! The very first thing I want to do is find a job that I like, start saving, and get my PR (permanent residency) here in Canada, which is very realistic. I'll use my savings to go to grad school or take online classes: anything to improve my skills and broaden my perspective. Eventually, I want to work on personal projects without having to worry about financial issues.

Do you have a favorite cartoon, film, or artist?

Different films have been my favorite at different times in my life... I just love work that has great stories or strong emotions. I can’t really pick one film as my favorite, but Masaaki Yuasa is definitely one of my favorite directors! What I admire most about his films is how the abstract parts serve the expressive storytelling, and the drawings are always loose. That’s what I need to learn!

What's your biggest dream?

My biggest dream used to be becoming a zoologist! That was when I was 8. Now, my dream is to connect with great artists and studios over the world. To learn from them, work on fun projects, live a happy, healthy life, and occasionally go on vacations so that I can work on my other hobbies!

What are your hobbies outside of animation?

I’m interested in a wide range of things! Biking, gym exercise, photography, choreography, sculpting, sewing, leathercraft. But my greatest interest, outside of animation, is dolls and puppets! I love all kinds of dolls and toys. Different doll artists always make dolls with different characteristics, and that self-expression element is what appeals to me. I want to be able to create my own porcelain or resin doll one day. I am working hard toward that goal! ❀

Follow Addictiya on Instagram

Thank you for the interview Tiya! Love your work and am so looking forward to seeing what you do next. Enjoy home and your summer vacation pre-Adulting, you’ve earned the heck out of it!

- Cooper ❀

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qwertsypage · 4 years

Text

Flutter Crash Course for JavaScript Developers

Welcome! I’m glad you’re here again for some more Dart and Flutter magic.

✨ In the previous episode of this series, we looked at Dart and went from basically zero to hero with all those types, classes and asynchrony. I hope you had enough practice on Dart because today, we’ll move forward to Flutter. Let’s get started!

Quick heads up: the “👉” emoji will compare JS and React with Dart and Flutter language examples as of now. Just like in the previous episode,, the left side will be the JS/React, and the right side will be the Dart/Flutter equivalent, e.g. console.log("hi!"); 👉 print("hello!");

What is Flutter, and why we’ll use it

Flutter and Dart are both made by Google. While Dart is a programming language, Flutter is a UI toolkit that can compile to native Android and iOS code. Flutter has experimental web and desktop app support, and it’s the native framework for building apps for Google’s Fuchsia OS.

This means that you don’t need to worry about the platform, and you can focus on the product itself. The compiled app is always native code as Dart compiles to ARM, hence providing you the best cross-platform performance you can get right now with over 60 fps.

Flutter also helps the fast development cycle with stateful hot reload, which we’ll make use of mostly in the last episode of this series.

Intro to the Flutter CLI

When building apps with Flutter, one of the main tools on your belt is the Flutter CLI. With the CLI, you can create new Flutter projects, run tests on them, build them, and run them on your simulators or emulators. The CLI is available on Windows, Linux, macOS and x64-based ChromeOS systems.

Once you have the CLI installed, you’ll also need either Android Studio, Xcode, or both, depending on your desired target platform(s).

(Flutter is also available on the web and for desktop, but they are still experimental, so this tutorial will only cover the Android and iOS related parts).

If you don’t wish to use Android Studio for development, I recommend VSCode. You can also install the Dart and Flutter plugins for Visual Studio Code.

Once you’re all set with all these new software, you should be able to run flutter doctor. This utility will check if everything is working properly on your machine. At the time of writing, Flutter printed this into the console for me:

[✓] Flutter (Channel stable, v1.17.4, on Mac OS X 10.15.4 19E287, locale en-HU) [✓] Android toolchain - develop for Android devices (Android SDK version 29.0.2) [✓] Xcode - develop for iOS and macOS (Xcode 11.5) [!] Android Studio (version 3.5) ✗ Flutter plugin not installed; this adds Flutter specific functionality. ✗ Dart plugin not installed; this adds Dart specific functionality. [✓] VS Code (version 1.46.1) [!] Connected device ! No devices available

You should get similar results for at least for the Flutter part too. Everything else depends on your desired target platforms and your preferred IDEs like Android Studio or VS Code. If you get an X for something, check again if everything is set up properly.

Only move forward in this tutorial if everything works properly.

To create a new Flutter project, cd into your preferred working directory, and run flutter create <projectname>. The CLI will create a directory and place the project files in there. If you use VS Code on macOS with an iOS target, you can use this little snippet to speed up your development process:

# Create a new project flutter create <projectname> # move there cd projectname # open VS code editor code . # open iOS Simulator - be patient, it may take a while open -a Simulator.app # start running the app flutter run

And boom, you’re all set! 💅

If you don’t wish to use the iOS simulator, you can always spin up your Android Studio emulator. Use Genymotion (or any other Android emulation software), or even connect a real device to your machine. This is a slower and more error-prone solution, so I recommend to only test on real devices when necessary.

Once they have booted, you can run flutter doctor again and see if Flutter sees the connected device. You should get an output something just like this:

... [✓] Connected device (1 available) ...

If you got this output - congratulations! 🎉 You’re all set to move on with this tutorial. If, for some reason Flutter didn’t recognize your device, please go back and check everything again as you won’t be able to follow the instructions from now on.

Hello world! 🌍

If you didn’t run the magic snippet previously, run these commands now:

# Create a new project flutter create <projectname> # move there cd projectname # open VS code editor (optional if you use Studio) code . # start running the app flutter run

This will spin up the Flutter development server with stateful hot reload and a lot more for you. You’ll see, that by default, Flutter creates a project with a floating action button and a counter:

Once you’re finished with playing around the counter, let’s dig into the code! 👨‍💻

Flutter project structure

Before we dig right into the code, let’s take a look at the project structure of our Flutter app for a moment:

├── README.md ├── android │ └── ton of stuff going on here... ├── build │ └── ton of stuff going on here... ├── ios │ └── ton of stuff going on here... ├── lib │ └── main.dart ├── pubspec.lock ├── pubspec.yaml └── test └── widget_test.dart

We have a few platform-specific directories: android and ios. These contain the necessary stuff for building, like the AndroidManifest, build.gradle, or your xcodeproj.

At this moment, we don’t need to modify the contents of these directories so we’ll ignore them for now. We’ll also ignore the test directory as we won’t cover testing Flutter in this series (but we may look into it later if there’s interest 👀), so that only leaves us to these:

├── lib │ └── main.dart ├── pubspec.lock ├── pubspec.yaml

And this is where the magic happens. Inside the lib directory, you have the main.dart: that’s where all the code lives right now. We’ll peek into it later, but let’s just have a look at the pubspec.yaml and pubspec.lock.

What are those?

Package management in Flutter - pub.dev

When building a project with JavaScript, we often use third party components, modules, packages, libraries, and frameworks so that we don’t have to reinvent the wheel. The JavaScript ecosystem has npm and yarn to provide you with all those spicy zeroes and ones, and they also handle the dependencies inside your project.

In the Dart ecosystem, this is all handled by pub.dev.

So, just a few quick facts: npm 👉 pub.dev package.json 👉 pubspec.yaml package-lock.json 👉 pubspec.lock

We’ll look into installing packages and importing them into our app in the last episode of this series, in which we’ll create a fun mini-game.

Digging into the Dart code

The only thing left from the file tree is main.dart. main is the heart of our app, it’s like the index.js of most JS-based projects. By default, when creating a project with flutter create, you’ll get a very well documented code with a StatelessWidget, a StatefulWidget, and its State.

So instead of observing the demo code line by line together, I encourage you to read the generated code and comments by yourself and come back here later.

In the next part, we’ll look into what are widgets and the build method.

We’ll learn why it is @overrided, and what’s the difference between stateful and stateless widgets. Then we’ll delete all the code from main.dart and create a Hello world app by ourselves so that you can get the hang of writing declarative UI code in Flutter.

Go ahead, read the generated code and the documentation now! 👀

In Flutter, everything is a widget!

As you have been reading the code, you may have noticed a few things. The first thing after importing Flutter is the entry method I have been talking about in the previous episode:

void main() { runApp(MyApp()); }

And then, you could see all those classes and OOP stuff come back with the line class MyApp extends StatelessWidget.

First things first: in Flutter, everything is a widget! Oh, and speaking of widgets. Components 👉 Widgets!

The StatelessWidget is a class from the Flutter framework, and it’s a type of widget. Another kind of widget is StatefulWidget and we’ll look into the difference between those and how to use them later.

We can create our reusable widget by extending the base class StatelessWidget with our own build method. (By the way, render in ReactJS 👉 build in Flutter). We can see that the build returns a Widget because the return type is defined, and we can see an odd keyword in the previous line: @override.

It’s needed because the StatelessWidget class has a definition for build by default, but we want to replace it (or override it) with our own implementation - hence the keyword @override. Before we dig further into the code, let’s have a peek at using widgets in Flutter:

// using a React component <button onClick={() => console.log(‘clicked!’)}>Hi, I’m a button</button>

// using a Flutter widget RawMaterialButton( onPressed: () { print("hi, i'm pressed"); }, child: Text("press me!"), ),

You can see that Flutter has a different approach with declarative UI code.

Instead of wrapping children between ><s and passing props next to the component name (e.g. <button onClick ...), everything is treated as a property. This enables Flutter to create more flexible and well-typed widgets: we’ll always know if a child is supposed to be a standalone widget or if it can accept multiple widgets as a property, for example. This will come in handy later when we’ll build layouts with Rows and Columns.

Now that we know a bit more about widgets in Flutter, let’s take a look at the generated code again:

@override Widget build(BuildContext context) { return MaterialApp( title: 'Flutter Demo', theme: ThemeData( primarySwatch: Colors.blue, ), home: MyHomePage(title: 'Flutter Demo Home Page'), ); }

The build method returns a MaterialApp that has a type of Widget and - unsurprisingly - comes from Flutter. This MaterialApp widget is a skeleton for your Flutter app. It contains all the routes, theme data, metadata, locales, and other app-level black magic you want to have set up. 🧙

You can see the MyHomePage class being referenced as the home screen. It also has a property, title, set up. MyHomePage is also a widget, and we can confirm that by looking at the definition of this class.

Quick tip: if you are using VSCode as your editor, hold Command and hover or click on the class reference and you’ll be directed to the code of the class.

We can see that MyHomePage extends a StatefulWidget. However, the structure of the code itself is a bit squiggly and weird. What’s this MyHomePage({Key key, this.title}) : super(key: key); syntax? Why doesn’t this widget have a build method? What’s a State? What is createState?

To answer these questions, we’ll have to look into one of the more hard-code topics in Flutter: state management.

Local state management in Flutter: StatefulWidgets

I previously talked about the two main types of widgets in Flutter: StatelessWidgets and StatefulWidgets. StatelessWidgets are pretty straightforward: a snippet of code that returns a Widget, maybe some properties are being passed around, but that’s all complexity.

However, we don’t want to write applications that just display stuff! We want to add interactivity! And most interactions come with some state, whether it’s the data stored in an input field or some basic counter somewhere in your app. And once the state is updated, we want to re-render the affected widgets in our app - so that the new data is being displayed for the user.

Think of state management in React: it has the very same purpose with the goal of being as efficient as possible. It’s no different in Flutter: we want to have some very simple widgets (or StatelessWidgets), and some widgets with a bit of complexity and interactivity (or StatefulWidgets).

Let’s dive into the code: a StatefulWidget consists of two main components:

a StatefulWidget (that is called MyHomePage in our case)

a typed State object (that is called _MyHomePageState in this example)

We’ll call these “widget” and “state” (respectively) for the sake of simplicity. The widget itself contains all the props, and a createState overridden method. As you can see, the prop is marked with a final - that’s because you cannot change the prop from within the widget. When you modify a prop of a widget, Flutter throws the current instance away and creates a brand new StatefulWidget.

Note that changing either the prop or the state will trigger a rebuild in Flutter - the key difference between the two is that changing the state can be initiated from within the widget while changing a prop is initiated by the parent widget.

Props help you pass data from parent to children. State helps you handle data change inside the children.

Now, let’s look into changing the state: inside the widget, we have a createState method that only returns the state, _MyHomePageState(). When modifying the state with the setState method, this createState method gets called and returns a new instance of your state. The old instance gets thrown away, and a new instance of your widget will be inserted into the widget tree.

(Sidenote: the widget tree is only a blueprint of your app, the element tree is the one that gets rendered for the user. It’s a bit more advanced, under-the-hood topic, so it won’t be covered in this series - however, I’ll link some video resources later on that will help you understand how Flutter works and what’s the deal with the widget tree and the element tree.)

The _MyHomePageState class has a type of State, typed with MyHomePage.

This is needed so that you can access the properties set in the MyHomePage instance with the widget keyword - for example, to access the title prop, write widget.title. Inside the state, you have an overridden build method, just like you’d see in a typical StatelessWidget. This method returns a widget that renders some nice data, both from props (widget.title) and from the state (_counter).

Notice that you don’t need to type in anything before the _counter. No this.state._counter, no State.of(context)._counter, just a plain old _counter. That’s because from the perspective of the code, this variable is declared just like any other would be:

int _counter = 0;

However, when modifying this variable, we need to wrap our code in setState, like this:

setState(() { _counter++; });

This will tell Flutter that “Hey! It’s time to re-render me!”.

The framework will call the previously discussed createState method; a new instance of your state gets created; built; rendered; and boom! 💥 The new data is now on-screen.

It may seem a bit complicated or seem like you have to write a lot of boilerplate code to get this running. But don’t worry! With VS Code, you can refactor any StatelessWidget into a stateful one with just one click:

And that’s it for managing your widget’s state! It may be a lot at first, but you’ll get used to it after building a few widgets.

A few notes about global state management in Flutter

Right now, we only looked at working with local state in Flutter - handling app-level, or global state is a bit more complex. There are, just like in JS, tons of solutions, ranging from the built-in InheritedWidget to a number of third-party state management libraries. Some of those may already be familiar, for example, there is RxDart and Redux, just to name a few. To learn more about the most popular solutions, and which one to choose for your project, I suggest you watch this awesome video about global state management in Flutter by Fireship.

Widgets, widgets, and widgets

I already talked about how everything is a widget in Flutter - however, I didn’t really introduce you to some of the most useful and popular widgets in Flutter, so let’s have a look at them before we move on!

Flutter has widgets for displaying texts, buttons, native controls like switches and sliders (cupertino for iOS and material for Android style widgets), layout widgets like Stack, Row, Column and more. There are literally hundreds of widgets that are available for you out of the box, and the list keeps growing.

The whole widget library can be found here in the Widget Catalog, and the Flutter team is also working on a very nice video series with new episodes being released weekly. This series is called Flutter Widget of the Week, and they introduce you to a Flutter widget, it’s use cases, show you code examples and more, in just about one minute! It’s really binge-worthy if you want to get to know some useful Flutter widgets, tips, and tricks.

Here a link for the whole series playlist, and here is the intro episode.

Some useful widgets in Flutter

As you’ll work with Flutter, you’ll explore more and more widgets, but there are some basic Flutter widgets you’ll absolutely need to build your first application. (We’ll probably use most of them in the next and last episode of this series, so stay tuned!)

First and foremost: Text.

The Text widget delivers what its name promises: you can display strings with it. You can also style or format your text and even make multiline texts. (There’s are a lot of line of text-related widgets available, covering your needs from displaying rich text fields to creating selectable texts.)

An example Text widget in Flutter:

Text('hello world!'),

Adding buttons to your Flutter app is also easy as one two three. There are numerous button-related widgets available for you ranging from RawMaterialButton to FlatButton, IconButton, and RaisedButton, and there are also specific widgets for creating FloatingActionButtons and OutlineButtons. I randomly picked 🎲 the RaisedButton for us so that we can have a peek at how easy it is to add a nice, stylish button into our app:

RaisedButton( onPressed: () { print( "hi! it's me, the button, speaking via the console. over.", ); }, child: Text("press meeeeeee"), ),

Building layouts in Flutter

When building flexible and complex layouts on the web and in React-Native, the most important tool you used was flexbox. While Flutter isn’t a web-based UI library and hence lacks flexbox, the main concept of using flexible containers with directions and whatnot is implemented and preferred in Flutter. It can be achieved by using Rows and Columns, and you can stack widgets on each other by using Stacks.

Consider the following cheatsheet I made:

Remember how I previously praised typing the props of a widget and how it’s one of the best tools in Flutter’s declarative UI pattern? The Row, Column and Stack widgets all have a children property that want an array of widgets, or [Widget]. Lucky for you, the VS Code automatically completes the code for you once you start working with these widgets:

Just hit tab to let Code complete the code for you! Maybe in the future, you won’t need to write code at all, Flutter will just suck out the app idea out of your brain and compile that - but until then, get used to hitting tab.

Let’s look at an example where we display some names underneath each other:

Column( children: <Widget>[ Text("Mark"), Text("Imola"), Text("Martin"), Text("Zoe"), ], ),

You can see that you create a typed list with the <Widget>[] syntax, you pass it as a prop for the Column, create some amazing widgets inside the list, and boom! The children will be displayed underneath each other. Don’t believe me? Believe this amazing screenshot. 📸

Alignment

The real power of Columns and Rows isn’t just placing stuff next to each other, just like flexbox isn’t only about flex-direction either. In Flutter, you can align the children of a Column and Row on two axes, mainAxis and crossAxis.

These two properties are contextual: whilst in a Row, the main axis would be horizontal, and the crossing axis would be vertical, it would be switched in a Column. To help you better understand this axis concept, I created a handy cheat sheet with code examples and more.

So, for example, if you want to perfectly center something, you’d want to use either the Center widget; or a Row or Column with both mainAxisAlignment and crossAxisAlignment set to .center; or a Row and Column with their mainAxisAlignments set to .center. The possibilities are basically endless with these widgets! ✨

Rendering lists (FlatLists 👉 ListViews)

Whilst thinking about possible use cases for columns, you may have wondered about creating scrollable, dynamic, reorderable, or endless lists.

While these features could be achieved by using Columns, it would take a lot of effort to do so, not even mentioning updating your list data or lazy rendering widgets when there’s a crapton of data. Lucky you, Flutter has a class for rendering lists of data, and it’s called a ListView!

There are several ways to use a ListView, but the most important ones are the ListView(...) widget and the ListView.builder method. Both of them achieve the very same functionality from the perspective of the user, but programmatically, they differ big time.

First, let’s look into the ListView(..) widget. Syntactically, they are very similar to a Column except that they lack the main and cross-axis alignment properties. To continue on with our previous example for columns when we placed names under each other, I’ll display the very same column converted into a ListView:

ListView( children: <Widget>[ Text("Mark"), Text("Imola"), Text("Martin"), Text("Zoe"), ], ),

Tada! 🎉 Your first ListView in Flutter! When refreshing or rebuilding the app (by either pressing a small or capital R in the Flutter CLI), you’ll see the very same thing you saw previously.

However, if you try to drag it, you are now able to scroll inside the container! Note that when a Column has bigger children than its bounds, it will overflow, but a ListView will be scrollable.

ListView builder

While the ListView widget is cool and good, it may not be suitable for every use case. For example, when displaying a list of tasks in a todo app, you won’t exactly know the number of items in your list while writing the code, and it may even change over time. Sure, you are able to run .map on the data source, return widgets as results, and then spread it with the ... operator, but that obviously wouldn’t be performant, nor is it a good practice for long lists. Instead, Flutter provides us a really nice ListView builder.

Sidenote: while working with Flutter, you’ll see the word “builder” a lot. For example, in places like FutureBuilder, StreamBuilder, AnimatedBuilder, the build method, the ListView builder, and more. It’s just a fancy word for methods that return a Widget or [Widget], don’t let this word intimidate or confuse you!

So how do we work with this awesome method? First, you should have an array or list that the builder can iterate over. I’ll quickly define an array with some names in it:

final List<String> source = ["Sarah", "Mac", "Jane", "Daniel"];

And then, somewhere in your widget tree, you should be able to call the ListView.builder method, provide some properties, and you’ll be good to go:

ListView.builder( itemCount: source.length, itemBuilder: (BuildContext context, int i) => Text(source[i]), ),

Oh, and notice how I was able to use an arrow function, just like in JavaScript!

The itemCount parameter is not required, but it’s recommended. Flutter will be able to optimize your app better if you provide this parameter. You can also limit the maximum number of rendered items by providing a number smaller than the length of your data source.

When in doubt, you can always have a peek at the documentation of a class, method, or widget by hovering over its name in your editor:

And that sums up the layout and list-related part of this episode. We’ll look into providing “stylesheets” (or theme data) for your app, look at some basic routing (or navigation) methods, and fetch some data from the interwebs with HTTP requests.

Theming in Flutter

While building larger applications with custom UI components, you may want to create stylesheets. In Flutter, they are called Themes, and they can be used in a lot of places. For example, you can set a default app color, and then the selected texts, buttons, ripple animations, and more will follow this color. You can also set up text styles (like headings and more), and you’ll be able to access these styles across the app.

To do so, you should provide a theme property for your MaterialApp at the root level of the application. Here’s an example:

return MaterialApp( title: 'RisingStack Flutter Demo', theme: ThemeData( // Define the default brightness and colors. brightness: Brightness.light, primaryColor: Colors.green[300], accentColor: Colors.green, // Define button theme buttonTheme: ButtonThemeData( buttonColor: Colors.green, shape: CircleBorder(), ), // Define the default font family // (this won’t work as we won’t have this font asset yet) fontFamily: 'Montserrat', // Define the default TextTheme. Use this to specify the default // text styling for headlines, titles, bodies of text, and more. textTheme: TextTheme( headline1: TextStyle(fontSize: 72.0, fontWeight: FontWeight.bold), headline6: TextStyle(fontSize: 36.0, fontStyle: FontStyle.italic), bodyText2: TextStyle(fontSize: 14.0, fontFamily: 'Muli'), ), ), home: Scaffold(...), );

These colors will be used throughout our app, and accessing the text themes is also simple as a pickle! I added a RaisedButton on top of the app so that we can see the new ButtonThemeData being applied to it:

It’s ugly and all, but it’s ours! 🍋 Applying the text style won’t be automatic, though. As we previously discussed, Flutter can’t really read your mind, so you explicitly need to tag Text widgets as a headline1 or bodyText2, for example.

To do so, you’ll use the Theme.of(context) method. This will look up the widget tree for the nearest Theme providing widget (and note that you can create custom or local themes for subparts of your app with the Theme widget!) and return that theme. Let’s look at an example:

Text( "cool names", style: Theme.of(context).textTheme.headline6, ),

You can see that we are accessing the theme with the Theme.of(context) method, and then we are just accessing properties like it’s an object. This is all you need to know about theming a Flutter app as it really isn’t a complex topic!

Designing mobile navigation experiences

On the web, when managing different screens of the app, we used paths (e.g. fancysite.com/registration) and routing (e.g., react-router) to handle navigating back and forth the app. In a mobile app, it works a bit differently, so I’ll first introduce you to navigation on mobile, and then we’ll look into implementing it in Flutter.

Mobile navigation differs from the web in a lot of ways. Gestures and animations play a very heavy role in structuring out the hierarchy of the app for your user. For example, when a user navigates to a new screen, and it slides in from the right side of the screen, the user will expect to be able to move back with a slide from the left. Users also don’t expect flashy loadings and empty screens when navigating - and even though there are advancements on the web in this segment (e.g. PWAs), it’s by far not the default experience when using websites.

There are also different hierarchies when designing mobile apps. The three main groups are:

Hierarchical Navigation (e.g. the Settings app on iOS)

New screens slide in from left to right. The expected behavior for navigating back is with a back button on the upper left corner and by swiping from the left edge of the screen to the right.

Flat Navigation (e.g. the Apple Music app)

The default behavior for this hierarchy is a tab bar on the bottom.

Tabs should always preserve location (e.g. if you navigate to a subscreen inside on tab one, switch to tab two and switch back to tab one, you’d expect to be on the subscreen, not on the root level screen.)

Swiping between tabs is optional. It isn’t the default behavior and it may conflict with other gestures on the screen itself - be cautious and think twice before implementing swipeable tab bars.

Custom, content-driven, or experimental navigation (Games, books and other content)

When making experimental navigation, always try to be sane with the navigation. The user should always be able to navigate back and undo stuff.

I created a handy cheat sheet for you that will remind you of the most important things when in doubt:

Also, all of these can be mixed together, and other screens like modals can be added to the stack. Always try to KISS and make sure that the user can always navigate back and undo things. Don’t try to reinvent the wheel with navigation (e.g., reverse the direction of opening up a new screen) as it will just confuse the user.

Also, always indicate where the user is in the hierarchy (e.g., with labeling buttons, app title bar, coloring the bottom bar icons, showing little dots, etc.). If you want to know more about designing mobile navigation experiences and implementing them in a way that feels natural to the user, check out Apple’s Human Interface Guideline’s related articles.

Navigation in Flutter

When routing on the web with React or React-Native, you had to depend on third-party libraries to get the dirty work done for you (e.g. react-router). Luckily, Flutter has native navigation capabilities out of the box, and they cover every need of most of the apps, and they are provided to you via the Navigator API.

The applications of this API and the possibilities to play around with navigation are endless. You can, for example, animate a widget between screens; build a bottom navigation bar or a hamburger menu; pass arguments; or send data back and forth. You can explore every navigation-related Flutter cookbook here. In this series, we’ll only look into initializing two screens, navigating between them, and sharing some widgets between them.

To get started with navigation, let’s create two widgets that we’ll use as screens and pass the first into a MaterialApp as the home property:

import 'package:flutter/material.dart'; void main() { runApp(MyApp()); } class MyApp extends StatelessWidget { @override Widget build(BuildContext context) { return MaterialApp( title: 'Flutter Demo', home: ScreenOne(), ); } } class ScreenOne extends StatelessWidget { @override Widget build(BuildContext context) { return Scaffold( body: Center( child: Text("hey! 👋"), ), ); } } class ScreenTwo extends StatelessWidget { @override Widget build(BuildContext context) { return Scaffold( body: Center( child: Text("hi! 👋👋"), ), ); } }

This was easy as a breeze. If you run this app in a simulator, you’ll see “hey! 👋” on the center of the screen. Now, inside the MaterialApp, we can define our routes:

return MaterialApp( title: 'Flutter Demo', home: ScreenOne(), routes: <String, WidgetBuilder>{ '/hey': (BuildContext context) => ScreenOne(), '/hi': (BuildContext context) => ScreenTwo(), }, );

Then, we’ll need something that will trigger the navigation. I’ll add a RaisedButton to the ScreenOne:

return Scaffold( body: Column( mainAxisAlignment: MainAxisAlignment.center, crossAxisAlignment: CrossAxisAlignment.center, children: <Widget>[ Text("hey! 👋"), RaisedButton( child: Text("take me there"), onPressed: () { print("hi!"); }, ), ], ), );

And now, we can navigate the user to the next screen when the button is pressed. Notice that I replaced the Center with a Column with both its main and cross axises centered. This was required because I wanted to have two children underneath each other: a Text and a RaisedButton. Inside the RaisedButton, we only have to push the route to the stack and let Flutter handle the routing and animation:

Navigator.pushNamed(context, '/hi');

By default, we can navigate back to the previous screen by swiping from the left edge of the screen. This is the expected behavior, and we don’t intend to change it, so we’ll leave it as it is. If you want to add a button on the second screen to navigate back to the first screen, you can use Navigator.pop(); method.

Don’t ever push to the same screen the user is on, nor the previous screen. Always use pop when navigating backward.

This will be just enough to cover your basic navigation needs. Don’t forget, if you want to check out more advanced navigation features such as animating widgets between screens or passing data back and forth, check out the related Flutter cookbooks.

Networking, HTTP requests

Now that you can build widgets, layouts, display lists, and you can navigate between screens with Flutter, there’s only one thing left: communicating with your backend API. One of the most popular BaaS providers for mobile and Flutter is Firebase by Google. It allows you to use real-time databases, push notifications, crash reporting, app analytics, and a lot more out of the box. You can find the Flutter Firebase packages on pub.dev or you can follow this step-by-step tutorial.

If you are a more experienced developer and you have a complex project with a custom backend in mind, or if you are just genuinely looking forward to using your own selection of backend APIs - Firebase just won’t suit your needs.

That’s where the http package comes in handy.

Just add it into your dependency list inside the pubspec.yaml, wait until flutter pub get finishes (VSCode automatically runs it for you if it detects changes in the pubspec.yaml), and then continue reading:

dependencies: flutter: sdk: flutter http: any

http is a Future-based library for making HTTP requests. To get started with it, just import it:

import 'package:http/http.dart' as http;

And then, you can start making requests with top-level methods like http.post or http.get. To help you experiment with making HTTP requests in Flutter, I have made a demo API that you can GET on. It will return some names and ages. You can access it here (https://demo-flutter-api.herokuapp.com/people).

Parsing JSON data in Flutter and Dart

After making your GET request on the API, you’ll be able to get data out of it by accessing properties like this:

void request() async { final response = await http.get("https://demo-flutter-api.herokuapp.com/people"); print(response.body); // => [{"name":"Leo","age":17},{"name":"Isabella","age":30},{"name":"Michael","age":23},{"name":"Sarah","age":12}] print(json.decode(response.body)[0]["name"]); // => Leo }

However, this solution should not be used in production. Not only it lacks automatic code completion and developer tooling, but it’s very error-prone and not really well documented. It’s just straight-up crap coding. 💩

Instead, you should always create a Dart class with the desired data structure for your response object and then process the raw body into a native Dart object. Since we are receiving an array of objects, in Dart, we’ll create a typed List with a custom class. I’ll name the class Person, and it will have two properties: a name (with a type of String) and age (int). I’ll also want to define a .fromJson constructor on it so that we can set up our class to be able to construct itself from a raw JSON string.

First, you’ll want to import dart:convert to access native JSON-related methods like a JSON encoder and decoder:

import 'dart:convert';

Create our very basic class:

class Person { String name; int age; }

Extend it with a simple constructor:

Person({this.name, this.age});

And add in the .fromJson method, tagged with the factory keyword. This keyword informs the compiler that this isn’t a method on the class instance itself. Instead, it will return a new instance of our class:

factory Person.fromJson(String str) => Person.fromMap(json.decode(str)); factory Person.fromMap(Map<String, dynamic> json) => new Person( name: json["name"], age: json["age"], );

Notice that I created two separate methods: a fromMap and a fromJson. The fromMap method itself does the dirty work by deconstructing the received Map. The fromJson just parses our JSON string and passes it into the fromMap factory method.

Now, we should just map over our raw response, use the .fromMap factory method, and expect everything to go just fine:

List<Person> listOfPeople = json .decode(response.body) .map<Person>((i) => Person.fromMap(i)) .toList(); print(listOfPeople[0].name); // => Leo

Sidenote: I didn’t use the .fromJson method because we already parsed the body before mapping over it, hence it’s unneeded right now.

There is a lot to unwrap in these few lines! First, we define a typed list and decode the response.body. Then, we map over it, and we throw in the return type <Person> to the map so that Dart will know that we expect to see a Person as a result of the map function. Then, we convert it to a List as otherwise it would be an MappedListIterable.

Rendering the parsed JSON: FutureBuilder and ListView.builder

Now that we have our app up and running with our basic backend, it’s time to render our data. We already discussed the ListView.builder API, so we’ll just work with that.

But before we get into rendering the list itself, we want to handle some state changes: the response may be undefined at the moment of rendering (because it is still loading), and we may get an error as a response. There are several great approaches to wrap your head around handling these states, but we’ll use FutureBuilder now for the sake of practicing using new Flutter widgets.

FutureBuilder is a Flutter widget that takes a Future and a builder as a property. This builder will return the widget we want to render on the different states as the Future progresses.

Note that FutureBuilder handles state changes inside the widget itself, so you can still use it in a StatelessWidget! Since the http package is Future-based, we can just use the http.get method as the Future for our FutureBuilder:

@override Widget build(BuildContext context) { return Scaffold( body: FutureBuilder( future: http.get("https://demo-flutter-api.herokuapp.com/people"), ), ); }

And we should also pass a builder. This builder should be able to respond to three states: loading, done and error. At first, I’ll just throw in a centered CircularProgressIndicator() to see that our app renders something:

return Scaffold( body: FutureBuilder( future: http.get("https://demo-flutter-api.herokuapp.com/people"), builder: (BuildContext context, AsyncSnapshot<http.Response> response) { return Center( child: CircularProgressIndicator(), ); }, ), );

If you run this app, you’ll see a progress indicator in the center of the screen running indefinitely. We can get the state of the response by the response.hasData property:

builder: (BuildContext context, AsyncSnapshot<http.Response> response) { if (response.hasData) { // loaded! } else if (response.hasError) { // error! return Center( child: Text("error!"), ); } else { // loading... return Center( child: CircularProgressIndicator(), ); } },

And now, we can be sure that nothing comes between us and processing, then rendering the data, so inside the response.hasData block, we’ll process the raw response with previously discussed parsing and mapping method, then return a ListView.builder:

// loaded! List<Person> listOfPeople = json .decode(response.data.body) .map<Person>((i) => Person.fromMap(i)) .toList(); return ListView.builder( itemCount: listOfPeople.length, itemBuilder: (BuildContext context, int i) => Text( "${listOfPeople[i].name} (${listOfPeople[i].age})", ), );

And that’s it! 🎉 If you run this snippet right now, it will render four names and their corresponding ages next to them. Isn’t this amazing? It may have seemed like a lot of work for a simple list like this, but don’t forget that we created a whole-blown class, parsed JSON, and converted it into class instances, and we even handled loading and error states.

Summing it all up

Congratulations on making it this far into the course! You have learned a lot and came along a long way since we started in the previous episode.

You went from zero to hero both with Dart (types, control flow statements, data structures, OOP, and asynchrony) and Flutter (CLI, widgets, alignment, lists, themes, navigation and networking).

This really has been a lot of work, and you’ll still have to learn a lot until you get fluent in Flutter, but in the end, the only thing that will matter is the result of your hard work. And that’s what we’re going to harvest in the next and last episode of this Flutter series: we’ll build a fun mini-game with Flutter! 🎲

I’m really looking forward to seeing you here next week. Until then, stay tuned, and happy Fluttering! ✌️

All the bests, 🍻 Daniel from RisingStack

Flutter Crash Course for JavaScript Developers published first on https://koresolpage.tumblr.com/

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mushroomhedgehog · 7 years

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GAME REVIEW: Marvel VS Capcom: Infinite (2017) The latest entry in the iconic Marvel VS Capcom series has finally arrived, and since at least the past summer, the game has been notably bashed by a large number of gamers. But the question remains of whether this hate is justified. Without further ado, let's dive into the other major superhero fighter of 2017, Marvel VS Capcom: Infinite. Marvel VS Capcom: Infinite is the sixth crossover between the characters of Capcom and the Marvel Comics universe, originally beginning with X-Men VS Street Fighter in 1996. In this entry, we return to the original format of two-man teams, but like the aforementioned first game, returns to sidekick characters no longer being able to provide assist attacks. This is a bit of a shame compared to previous games, but it at least shows that Capcom knows how the series got started. What is also worth noting is that due to Marvel's recent policy on certain characters whose film rights are currently controlled by Fox, all characters associated with the X-Men and Fantastic Four have been excluded, leading to multiple mainstay characters such as Wolverine, Doctor Doom, and Magneto not returning for this game. This marks the first time in the history of the MvC series that Wolverine does not appear as a playable character. In addition to changes made by Marvel, this game marks a major change to the series, as Capcom has altered the gameplay to allow newcomers to not get overwhelmed by its mechanics. This has resulted in many special move motions being altered from previous games. For instance, my usual character, Spider-Man (no surprise there) has a different motion for his Spider-Sting attack. Originally this was a reversed motion of the same input used to perform Ryu's Shoryuken, a very similar uppercut move that Spider Sting is likely based off of. Now, the input requires you to press down twice before pressing the attack button. Other characters such as Captain America have also been affected by this. Ironically, Ryu's Shoryuken was not affected by this. In addition, Capcom has scrapped the previous game's format in which four attack buttons could all be used for special attacks, aside from the uppercut that launched opponents into the air. The game now has two punch and two kick buttons, allowing for new special moves such as Spider-Man's Spider-Cannon attack, Ryu able to charge his Hadouken to create a short beam-like version, and Captain America able to throw his shield in different ways, as well as reflect projectiles with it. This is important to know, for everyone claiming the game was just like UMvC3, when in actuality, the characters play nearly nothing like they do in that game due to various aspects like new moves and button layouts. While I appreciate that Capcom recognized that learning how to play this series is difficult, I was hoping they'd offer more detailed tutorials split into sections like NetherRealm Studios has done. The game is still a bit difficult to learn, and an easy combo mode isn't a good way to learn how the game works, since it teaches nothing. There is an area of mission mode that does focus on the basics of gameplay, but the character-specific missions focus more on doing nearly impossible combos instead of certain special moves or basic combos. Injustice was much better at teaching new players how to play as certain characters in its mission mode. Putting that aside, the combat has greatly improved. It's much easier for players to perform combos, and while it won't help them for previous entries in the series, it will be a nice introduction to fighting games, particularly if you've gotten comfortable with Super Smash Bros, which doesn't require much effort in its special move inputs. Next up are the graphics. Contrary to what most are claiming, the graphics aren't nearly as bad as they are made out to be. The characters have had a major facelift since the last entry in the game. One of the biggest issues with Ultimate Marvel VS Capcom 3's graphics was hair on certain characters. Not only does character hair look magnificent this time around, but plenty of details are visible that weren't on past incarnations of the series. For instance, incredibly strong characters like Mike Haggar and Hulk have visible veins on their bodies. Characters with metal suits such as Iron Man, Thanos, X, and Arthur, also have detailed shining on their metal suits, making them look better than ever. A lot of people have even gone as far as comparing Captain America's appearance to that infamous drawing by Rob Liefeld, which, even for exaggerations, is ludicrous. If there is one complaint I have about the graphics, it's definitely that the alternate costumes for most of the characters in the game are massive disappointments. Unlike the previous game, which featured full recolors with new patterns, many of which were based on actual alternate costumes, this game merely recolors the characters, texture patterns and all. This makes for some notably sloppy edits of costumes that would otherwise be something like Spider-Man's symbiote suit. So far, only Hulk has been the one to feature skins that match the quality of his UMvC3 skins, particularly the skins of his original grey appearance, and of his enemy, Red Hulk. Finally, with this being the first game in the series to feature a cinematic story mode akin to Mortal Kombat and Injustice, the cinematics and voice acting need to be taken into question. Many actors from UMvC3 have returned to voice their respective characters, but the most notable characters that feature new actors include Spider-Man, Chun-Li, and Ghost Rider, to name a few. The replacement actors for these three arguably gave these characters better voices, especially Robbie Daymond as Spider-Man, who now has a more fitting voice of the geeky kid that doesn't just sound like a generic teenager like Josh Keaton does. Ghost Rider also sounds a bit more demonic, though some might consider it corny compared to his previous voice actor. Other characters that have new actors such as Doctor Strange, Rocket Raccoon, and Dormammu, aren't bad either. Frank West of the Dead Rising series, also sees the return of his original voice actor after the disappointing portrayal by a new actor in Dead Rising 4. Other characters who see the return of their actors, such as Morrigan and Arthur, now feature a lot more emotion behind their lines, rather than all of their lines sounding like fitting their personality instead of emotion. It's also nice to see that Capcom wants to pursue a bigger story in their games, considering the character interaction in previous games like Street Fighter IV and UMvC3. But it should definitely be noted that there's likely a reason why Capcom and Marvel have been such a significant match in the past. The story is being criticized for various aspects, and it seems people were expecting something of Injustice or Mortal Kombat quality. Even when Capcom was featuring story cutscenes through arcade mode, it was clear that they aren't nearly as dark as NetherRealm is. Just as it would be ridiculous to compare certain aspects of the Marvel Cinematic Universe to those of the DC Extended Universe, it's not a good idea to compare certain aspects of Injustice to those of Marvel VS Capcom. As a matter of fact, the storyline to this game is significantly similar to Mortal Kombat VS DC Universe, but done much better, as unlike Darkseid and Shao Kahn, who have next to nothing in common, Ultron and Sigma are both robots focused on destroying all of humanity, among other issues that are addressed such as the better combinations that have resulted from the worlds of Marvel and Capcom colliding. The only real issue with the story mode is that there is not much of an explanation as to how Ultron and Sigma were able to merge the Marvel and Capcom universes, and that the game isn't played in chapters focusing on certain characters to allow us to familiarize ourselves with them. If you do wish to play the story mode, I would definitely recommend you do some reading on the history of these characters in the various media they originally came from, as the game seems to expect you to already understand the backstories and original works of the characters. Despite the inclusion of more single player modes and the roster featuring more starter characters than Injustice 2 at launch, there's a lot of complaints that Capcom hasn't learned from Street Fighter V. This is not the case. The game feels like a full game this time around with what there is to do. Now this doesn't mean there's not room for improvement, like featuring endings for arcade mode other than a simple "Congratulations", and there could have been more characters since many like Black Panther and MODOK appear in the story mode, but also because unlike Injustice, MvC has more than one player character per match, so the argument of having more playable characters is somewhat obsolete when this is considered. Another issue regarding characters that should be pointed out is that several characters who have deserved a spot in this series for a long time like Demitri Maximoff, The Punisher, M. Bison, and Daredevil, are still nowhere to be found. Hopefully somewhere down the line, Marvel VS Capcom: Infinite will be updated similarly to Street Fighter V: Arcade Edition, which will be available at no cost to players who had already purchased the original version of the game and on a separate disc for new players this January. Until then, Marvel VS Capcom: Infinite gets a grade of a solid B from me. It's not as exciting as Ultimate Marvel VS Capcom 3 was, but it's a welcome title to the MvC series that surprisingly does well despite its shortcomings. It's just a shame that Marvel was too picky with film rights to allow series mainstays like Wolverine, Magneto, and Doctor Doom, to return.

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victorluvsalice · 7 years

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Today in Newcrest Adventures -- house remodeling! Yes, inspired by my own recent move, I decided I wanted to give the Van Dort house a makeover. So after feeding the Emma and having everyone else take care of their needs really quick, I shooed them all outside, went into build mode, and went to work. Here’s the major changes:

-->The house now has a long straight hallway connecting all the rooms! Now everyone can have their privacy maintained when getting from one place to another -- no more walking through Victor and Alice’s bedroom to get to Emma’s, for example.

-->The bathroom has been moved to the other side of the kitchen, closer to the bedrooms! I realized the other way around was bad layout, especially post-move with our new house’s bathroom so conveniently close to mine. Now everyone can get to the toilet easier! (I do however want to figure out how to add at least another half-bath (aka just another toilet and sink) to the house at some point. It would be convenient to have. Hmm.)

-->The living room has been chopped in two, with the other room becoming a music room for Victor! Been wanting this for a while. . .even though now that music room looks distressingly empty. I wanted to move Victor’s ladybugs in there, but I wasn’t sure what table or shelf to put them on. Next time you might see some more decorations in there.

-->Added another small room to the side of the house to give Alice her own art studio! I feel bad that her room is so long and thin compared to Victor’s, but -- well, the LOT is long and thin, and the only way to expand it was longways. It does fit her easel, paintings, and other stuff very well, though.

-->Turned the outdoor eating area into a proper patio, with cement flooring and everything! So now it looks a lot more tidy. And I do indeed have plans later on to add a little pool.

-->Traded Victor’s planter boxes for a proper in-the-ground garden! I didn’t realize you COULD just plant things in the ground when I first started playing, otherwise I would have done it earlier. Fortunately, I discovered you can move plants out of planter boxes, so I just plopped them in the dirt, sold the boxes, and got that nice layout after buying some more fruits and veggies so Victor can have a proper garden with all sorts of yummy produce. The whole idea is inspired by The Sim Supply -- specifically, the little fenced-in garden he made for the Power family in his recent Parenthood LP. I really liked that and wanted to do something similar, if a bit more fancy, for Victor.

-->New paints, wallpapers, and rugs! Made good use of some of the psuedo-Victorian stuff from the Vampire game pack. Victor’s music room has a butterfly theme (natch), while Alice’s studio has a spooky forest one (I thought it fit her). I just wanted the house to have a little more color -- all that white in the living room was depressing.

-->A small kitchen upgrade! I was actually going to get them better COUNTERS, but then I saw the icebox and the vaguely Victorian oven, and thought, “Yup, need those.” Cost a good chunk of change, but I love the way they look. :)

So yeah -- that was the major event of the day! I don’t think it’s the world’s best house, but it seems an improvement on what came before. But, of course, my Sims had to live their lives in this new place -- how do you think their day was?

#newcrest adventures #sims 4 #van dort house #yay remodeling!#seriously after I moved into my new place #I realized just how poorly put together this house was #hallways are a good thing people #I do like how this all came together #and I know I'll be able to fill it up with clutter and other good stuff as time goes on #and thanks Sim Supply for inspiring me with the garden #seriously watch his stuff he is most amusing XD #queued

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papermoonloveslucy · 7 years

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Lucy and the Great Bank Robbery

S3;E5 ~ October 19, 1964

Synopsis

When Lucy rents out Viv's room to two gentlemen visiting for the World's Fair, they turn out to be bank robbers who stash the loot in Viv's mattress.

Regular Cast

Lucille Ball (Lucy Carmichael), Gale Gordon (Theodore J. Mooney), Vivian Vance (Vivian Bagley), Candy Moore (Chris Carmichael), Jimmy Garrett (Jerry Carmichael) and Ralph Hart (Sherman Bagley)

This is Ralph Hart's first appearance in season 3. This is the first time the entire regular cast has been together since “Ethel Merman and the Boy Scout Show” (S2;E19).

Guest Cast

John Williams (Carter Harrison) was born in England in 1903. He is perhaps best known for his role as Chief Inspector Hubbard in Dial M for Murder, a role he played on Broadway, in Alfred Hitchcock's classic 1954 film, and on television in 1958. From 1924 to 1970 he appeared in more than 30 Broadway plays, winning a Tony Award in 1953. This was his only appearance opposite Lucille Ball.

On "Here's Lucy" Gale Gordon will also play a character named Harrison Carter.

Lloyd Corrigan (Gordon Bentley) was a portly character actor who played bit parts in silent movies before switching his attention to writing and directing. He returned to acting in the 1940s, appearing in two films with Lucille Ball. He first appeared as Mr. Holly in “Lucy Puts Up a TV Antenna” (S1;E9). He will return for “Lucy the Choirmaster” (S4;E13).

In the end credits, John Williams is listed as playing Bentley and Lloyd Corrigan as Harrison. When the characters introduce themselves to Lucy, they say the reverse.

Roy Rowan (Radio Announcer) was the off-camera announcer for every episode of “My Favorite Husband”, “I Love Lucy” as well as “The Lucy Show” and “Here’s Lucy.” He was also the voice heard when TV or radio programs were featured on the plot of all three shows. He was first heard announcing the TV football game in “Lucy is a Referee” (S1;E3). His first on-camera appearance was in “Lucy Takes Up Golf” (S2;E17).

Hazel Pierce (Bank Customer) was Lucille Ball’s camera and lighting stand-in throughout “I Love Lucy.” She also made frequent appearances on the show. Of her many on-camera appearances on “The Lucy Show” only once was she given a character name and credited, in “Lucy Plays Cleopatra” (S1;E1). She was also an uncredited extra in the film Forever Darling (1956).

Uncredited background performers play the police officers, bank staff and customers.

This episode was written by Bob Schiller and Bob Weiskopf. Although they departed the series as regular writers in season two, Lucille Ball convinced them to contribute several scripts to season 3.

This episode was filmed on June 4, 1964, before the production went on hiatus for the summer. It was aired out of filming sequence.

The night this episode first aired, “The Lucy Show” was aired opposite “The Andy Williams Show” on NBC, which featured frequent “Lucy” guest star Tennessee Ernie Ford.

Viv and Lucy discuss Ralph Bagley, Vivian's ex-husband.

The two boarders claim they're in Danfield for the nearby 1964 World's Fair held in New York City. The New York World’s Fair was held in Flushing Meadow, Queens, opening on April 22, 1964, just three weeks after this episode first aired. It closed on October 17, 1965, although it was not open during the winter months of 1964/65. It was first mentioned in “Lucy and the Scout Trip” (S2;E26). Due to the great influx of tourists to Queens during the Fair, it was not uncommon for residents to rent rooms to visitors.

August 31, 1964 was Lucy Day at the World’s Fair! Ball was treated to a parade through the fairgrounds, a VIP tour, and an honorary luncheon and performance.

Chris mentions The Beatles. The day this episode was filmed (June 4, 1964) The Beatles began their first and only world concert tour starting with a performance in Copenhagen. The Beatles were previously mentioned in “Lucy and the Plumber” (S3;E2).

Bentley calls Harrison the "Bard of the bandits." Only a few months before this, John Williams (Harrison), had played William Shakespeare, 'the bard of Stratford-upon-Avon,' on “The Twilight Zone.” This is the second episode in a row to mention the CBS sci-fi anthology series.

Harrison says he wants to stop robbing banks and rob art galleries instead: “Imagine pilfering a Picasso.” Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) is regarded as one of the greatest and most influential artists of the 20th century. He is known for co-founding the cubist movement and the invention of constructed sculpture. He was previously mentioned Picasso in “Lucy Builds a Rumpus Room” (S1;E11) and “Lucy Decides To Redecorate” (S2;E8).

The two boarders also wonder about robbing drive-in banks: “Just toot for the loot and scoot.” The first drive-in bank window dates back to 1928. The post-World War II spurt in automotive sales saw steady growth in drive-up banking.

This is the fourth time we have seen Viv’s bedroom and each time the layout has changed. In this episode, the bed has been moved across the room. In all four episodes, however, Viv has the same headboard. Before the remodeling in “Lucy Decides to Redecorate” (S2;E8), the painting above the dresser was on the living room wall.

Viv's lumpy mattress was previously the subject of “Lucy and Her Electric Mattress” (S1;E12).

Lucy thinks the cash in the mattress belongs to Viv, calling her Mrs. J.P. Morgan. John Pierpont Morgan (1837–1913) was an American financier and banker who dominated corporate finance and industrial consolidation in late 19th and early 20th century.

Reading The Danfield Tribune, Viv notes that Oscar the butcher has a special on rump roast. This is the third butcher to be mentioned on the series. The first was Ernie (Joe Mell) in “Together for Christmas” (S1;E13). The second was Mr. Krause (Tom G. Linder) in “Lucy and the Plumber” (S3;E2).

Viv says the all those henna rinses have finally pickled Lucy's brain. Henna Rinse was the dye that Lucille Ball (and Lucy Ricardo) used to keep her hair its distinctive orange color. Bear in mind that TV viewers still had not seen Lucy's red hair because CBS had yet to air “The Lucy Show” in color!

The robbers stole $8,500 dollars from the bank's safe. The radio announcer (Roy Rowan) says the theft would not normally have been reported until Monday, but Mr. Mooney showed up at his desk, forgetting that it was Saturday. This neatly closes a loophole in the plot and earns a laugh from the studio audience.

Of course, Lucy immediately assumes Viv stole the cash. Lucy compare her to Ma Barker. Kate Barker (1873– 1935) was the mother of several criminals who ran the Barker gang. She traveled with her sons during their criminal careers. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover described her as "the most vicious, dangerous and resourceful criminal brain of the last decade." Her legend was kept alive by the 1960 feature film Ma Barker's Killer Brood starring “I Love Lucy” veterans Lurene Tuttle (“The Club Election” ILL S2;E19), Tristram Coffin (Harry Munson) and Paul Dubov (“The Handcuffs” ILL S2;E6). Ma Barker was parodied as Ma Parker in a 1970 episode of “Here's Lucy” starring Carole Cook as the maternal criminal.

Viv asks Lucy to “stop acting like a mystery guest” and explain her accusations. 'Mystery guests' were participants in the CBS TV quiz show “What's My Line” (1950 to 1967). Lucille Ball appeared on the show numerous times.

Callbacks!

When Lucy hides the loot under her baggy sweater and stretch pants, her look is similar to when Lucy Ricardo tried to smuggle raw eggs under her clothes in “Lucy Does the Tango” (ILL S6;E20).

Blooper Alerts!

Beauty Sleep! At the start of the episode Viv says that she is not wearing any makeup, but it's obvious that Vivian Vance is wearing both eye makeup and lipstick.

Name That Tune! At least on the official 3rd Season DVD, the music heard on Jerry's portable radio is definitely not The Beatles. Sometimes licenses for music expire and producers must replace the original soundtrack with a royalty-free version. Whether that is the case here remains unclear.

Seeing Double! The bank seems to have two adjacent bulletin boards, each with the exact same notices posted on them.

Stray Props! When Lucy's grocery bags break (as well as the robbers' shopping bags), a couple of items are left underfoot in front of the teller window.

Crash Prevention! When Lucy is turning the mattress in Viv's room, she nearly knocks over the lamp on the bedside table. Lucille Ball takes a moment to steady it before continuing.

Door is Ajar! When the thieves return from the World’s Fair, they leave the front door open. This may have been intentional to facilitate the easy entrance of Mr. Mooney and the policemen.

“Lucy and the Great Bank Robbery” rates 4 Paper Hearts out of 5

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recentanimenews · 4 years

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Review: Pokémon Sword and Shield

Pokémon has moved forward several half-assed steps at a time, and that’s not a criticism. The series has existed comfortably in its own bubble and where other games would get lambasted for looking inward, Pokémon has thrived on reiteration and the slow crawl of minor innovations to the template. Pokémon games primarily get compared to other Pokémon games and no one expects the series to change drastically from its rock-solid fundamentals after so many years. Even as people forget weird features like poffins and Pokémon Musicals, they can take solace in the notion that even the jankiest gimmicks all work towards crafting the definitive Pokémon game, whatever that might look like in the future. Well, that future died with the announcement that Sword and Shield would mark the end of the full Pokémon roster and we would all need to leave the old “gotta catch ‘em all” mantra in the past.

Pokémon Sword and Shield is the eighth generation in the mainline series of games and the first to appear on home console. It’s set in the Galar region, a place inspired by the art director’s experiences as a youth growing up in the United Kingdom. Players assume the role of a silent protagonist chasing the dream to become the Pokémon Champion, a lofty goal that is pursued with much more fervor by the player’s rival, a perennial loser named Hop who is also the current champion’s younger brother. In my mind, the player character I created, a young Pokémon trainer named Tomoyo, has lived the entirety of her life stuck in this one-Pokémon Center town knowing nothing more about the world other than what’s filtered down to her through Hop’s experiences in the comforting shade of the champion’s cape. Her growth into a person with her own story to tell spurred me on to leave home but unfortunately Hop won’t be shaken off so easily.

Even as Hop is vaunted as a formidable rival, he crumbles within seconds of any given Pokémon match against the player character and typically loses to other mid-card trainers off-camera. Loser rivals have become a staple of the series ever since Game Freak decided to let players hold type advantage over the rival’s starter Pokémon a few generations ago. For the most part, this hasn’t been a problem as balanced team-building has to grow from the initial Grass-Fire-Water triangle of effectiveness. The purpose of the rival has always been to test the player’s progress against what’s to come, gating off high-level areas until the player proves they’re capable. Hop’s path toward the Gym Challenge Finals is tightly woven with the player’s own journey and while I welcome the idea of a rival/ally having greater involvement in the storyline, Hop simply sucks at Pokémon for the longest time. And here’s the kicker to all this: everyone in Galar sucks at Pokémon.

II.

When people claim that Pokémon is “easy” and offers “zero challenge,” they tend to forget that they come in armed with a huge advantage of prior knowledge of the mechanics. By design, the player is meant to become the Pokémon Champion and there are no alternate routes to some other final destiny. That said, Sword and Shield puts up a considerably weaker fight than its predecessors. You never get the impression that the trainers are trying at all to compete and the Routes between towns are now more than ever a vestige of environment design better suited to the capabilities of the classic Game Boy. Galar’s layout evokes memories of theme parks and my quick, unimpeded dominance of the region made me feel less like a champion and more like an asshole ruining the illusion for the rest of the patrons.

Separate from Galar’s underwhelming Routes, the Wild Area received a lot of buzz when it was first unveiled and to be fair, it’s the most exciting part of the game despite its flaws. The diversity of the wild Pokémon encounters more than makes up for lame trainer battles. It’s never more apparent that certain conventions are dead and gone than when running into high-level final evolutions of Pokémon that have never appeared in the wild before. In the past, wild Pokémon were more of a nuisance than anything, hardly worth the time spent inputting the commands for an easy one-hit knockout. Along with the variety present from field to field, many of Sword and Shield’s wild Pokémon also give juicy experience points, frequently outleveling the trainers present in the immediate area. The delicate level curve of the game is easily broken as a result of meandering through the Wild Area for too long but it’s still a welcome change of pace to decades of grinding trash mobs.

Players that think too hard will look at the Routes, then at the Wild Area, and will then ask themselves why the developers didn’t just design travel around the more gratifying open world environment. The issue is that the Wild Area doesn’t have that Breath of the Wild butteriness to it, perhaps an unfair comparison considering BotW wasn’t connecting to hundreds of other players at all times. Wild Area performance takes a huge blow while online even with the console docked and although chop is reduced if a player disconnects from the internet, that defeats the purpose of the lively community feel of the Wild Area. Given how erratic the Wild Area renders under the strain of weather conditions and online connectivity, I see it more as a fun experiment than the cornerstone of Sword and Shield’s design. It shows that Game Freak is at least attempting to evolve and it’s unfortunate that the shrinking Pokédex became the symbol of change when the Wild Area is the best new idea the studio has had in years.

III.

The region of Galar is dominated by the influence of one benevolent businessman named Chairman Rose who has sculpted the culture of competitive Pokémon battles around Dynamax, a Galar exclusive phenomenon in which Pokémon get really, really big. Stadiums are built on top of “power spots” that allow Pokémon to Dynamax for the entertainment of the crowds, building up matches as a festival occasion on top of being a legitimate sport. As nice as it is to have the gyms back, this aspect of the game hasn’t grown much at all despite how they dress it up.

Even once you catch a whiff of the true nature of Dynamaxing and strange instances of Pokémon going berserk, the game is dismissively patronizing about keeping players focused on their regular journey, with characters insisting that the Gym Challenge is more important than giant Pokémon running amok in the stadiums. This subplot eventually does come to the forefront at the worst possible moment and by this point, solving the crisis that’s about to unfold has zero momentum compared to the Pokémon League. The whole farce regarding the dark omen threatening Galar wraps up as soon as it’s introduced, making me wonder why the game even bothers raising the stakes to some world-ending catastrophe if it’s compressed into a handful of battles.

For all the emphasis placed on Dynamax, the battle feature is one of the more underwhelming gimmicks in a series that’s full of them. The story explains that its use is anchored to locations featuring power spots, isolating it to stadiums and raids in the Wild Area. Despite the showy nature of the effect, it’s never utilized in any meaningful way in battle and it only takes a couple of fights to see the full extent of what the system has to offer. So long as a player can survive three Dynamax moves, the threat of actually wiping out in a Gym Leader match will have more to do with type disadvantages than the power of Dynamax. The max raids against wild Dynamax Pokémon are far more challenging than what you’ll see against trainers and the rewards from the raids are stupid good, so the gimmick isn’t entirely a worthless feature. Still, it doesn’t clear the air of this idea that Dynamax wasn’t worth the trouble.

IV.

Held up to the light at any angle, Sword and Shield is marred with flaws, but I still wouldn’t want to go back to the early generations after experiencing Pokémon on the Switch. The story is an absolute shambles but if your game is to raise, train, and tinker for the perfect critter, Sword and Shield is a considerable step up from the 3DS era’s mature metagame functionality. Untold millions of hours will be saved as a result of cutting out so much of the bullshit regarding stats, natures, and leveling. The interface is clean and responsive, controls can be set to play with a single joy-con, and the decision to give players almost-unlimited access to their Box storage is a lifesaver when it comes to breeding and farming Pokémon eggs. People that approach Pokémon at the surface level will see the same game they’ve been playing for years but the maniacs that put in the time and effort to hunt for shiny Pokémon or train for competitions will be grateful at how much the process has been streamlined.

I finished the main story at about 30 hours with a third of that time spent either going out for detours or idling to prepare coffee. The main game isn’t much longer or shorter than the past couple of Pokémon games but the scarcity of unique things to do after the credits roll is somewhat insulting. “No postgame” is an exaggeration but “minimal postgame” would be hard to argue. I can’t blame people for feeling cheated with the first $60 console Pokémon game having a single post-game quest to capture the box art legendary and no other high-priority content outside of the meta. Going back to pick up missed items and face trainers in rematches isn’t nearly as compelling as uncovering secrets after becoming Champion, especially if you have no interest in playing past catching rare Pokémon. I took myself past the 75-hour mark to complete my Pokédex and as fulfilling as it was for me, I wouldn’t claim that it’s a significantly worthwhile endeavor for the average player. By comparison, Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon had its own post-game quest, an extensive roster of legendaries to hunt down, and yeah, full support of all Pokémon going back to Ruby and Sapphire for GBA. Whatever the reasons might be, Sword and Shield has a very definitive end to its adventure that comes all too soon.

For all the controversy in the lead-up, Sword and Shield ended up being more than a little OK, if not a messy success that could still be better. The future of the series will be challenging as long as Game Freak commits to the idea of rotating Pokémon in and out of the main games, guaranteeing that the next game will have limited compatibility with this generation out of the box. Nintendo and co. took a calculated risk with Sword and Shield and now that the games have sold a verified and very real One Billion copies at retail, they can reasonably infer that they won’t have to bend to the will of a few thousand rowdy fans clamoring for a return to the old ways. They have a healthy base of players comprised of casuals who don’t give a shit about Dexit, newer fans that aren’t too miffed about leaving the 3DS games behind, and folks who just like Pokémon too much to complain too loudly. I found my own enjoyment in Sword and Shield, but I’m also not rushing to post #thankyougamefreak without seeing the shape of Pokémon to come. You don’t have to like it, but odds are you already paid for it.

Pokémon Sword and Shield originally appeared on Ani-Gamers on December 21, 2019 at 6:17 PM.

By: David Estrella

#Anime #News #Ani-Gamers

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ciathyzareposts · 4 years

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Consulting Detective Vol. II – Hint Book Review & Final Rating

Written by Joe Pranevich

The time has come to put another game into the cabinet and officially close out 1992! We played a staggering 38 adventure games this year. I’ll leave the year-end commentary to Ilmari, but we are moving on quickly to 1993 which somehow has even more games. It’s an exciting era in video game history and I am thrilled that we are able to document so much of it.

Before we move onto the final rating, I have one last piece of business: the “unauthorized strategy guide” for this game. I purchased it while I was stuck on the second case but did not end up using it. Long time readers may know that I have an interest in old strategy guides and this one was quite a find! Not only is it surprisingly detailed, it was also written by one of the industry’s great game designers: Bruce C. Shelley. We haven’t seen Shelley in our corner of the gaming world (in fact, he has only one adventure game credit to his name, a 1993 children’s adventure which didn’t make the cut), but he was a former Avalon Hill nut who became Sid Meyer’s “assistant” and later co-designer on a number of games. Civilization, Railroad Tycoon, Covert Action, Age of Empires, and their spin-offs and sequels would not be the way that they are today without Shelley’s influence. That makes this hint book one of the best pedigreed in the industry. Let’s get to it!

Nothing beats a deerstalker and pipe.

Although I have collected a number of hint books over the years, there are a few things that I do not understand yet and that I should research further. There was a period in the early 90s when “unauthorized” strategy guides were all the rage. This was fueled in part by newcomers Prima Games (founded in 1990) and Brady Games (1993), but there were plenty of other publishers searching for a cut of the video game market. Someday, I may compile the most boring ever history of hint books and game guides, but I doubt anyone would read it. This particular guide is from Prima’s “Secrets of the Game” series, but it doesn’t advertise itself as such on the cover. One feature that a number of these “unauthorized” guides had in common was a fictionalized retelling of the story of the games. I’ve seen that in Sierra guides and the same is true here. These guides alternated story bits (that would reveal answers to puzzles narratively) with more straight up strategy notes. Did they do that to provide legal cover? Was it “fair use” to produce unauthorized guides this way? I have absolutely no idea.

Shelley clearly poured his heart into the research for this guide. He even went to the tabletop version to flesh out details for his narrative and to point out where the computer game missed a plot point in the conversion. In the forgery case for example, he reveals that the floorplan for the National Gallery was a much larger part of the mystery. Players had to use it to understand and map out how the thief made it from the crates to the gallery and then out, but these details were not included in our version of the game. And while the guide was “unauthorized”, Shelley was able to get the original scripts from Viacom for all three games so that he could document the dialog as the developers intended. Thanks to his research and his own love of the Holmes mysteries, the “fictionalized” retellings are perhaps some of the best in the hint book industry.

Shelley also plays the game differently than I did, but you may want to try it his way: After solving the case the first time, Shelley recommends working out the exact clues that Holmes used in order to get his score. He sees it as a logic problem to identify the minimum number of witnesses needed, whether you have to go yourself or send one of the Irregulars, etc. He tracks his score closely after each witness and worked out that (usually) you can tell the value of a witness by now many points you scored. Each key witness increments the score by seven, while relevant-but-unnecessary witnesses increase it by ten. Following a red herring nets you an amazing twenty points. Keep in mind of course that the goal is to have as few points as possible! This isn’t the way I would like to play the game, but if you are looking to wring a few more hours of play time out of the game, that may be something to try.

Bruce Shelley in the late 90s or early 2000s.

Shelley divided each of the nine included cases into three sections:

Holmes’s Story – The fictionalized version of the case.

The Evidence – A description of the relevant evidence, including each newspaper article and the witnesses that is required for judgement. The witness sections are lightly narrated.

The Solution – The annotated solution and why I fell in love with this guide. Shelley goes through Holmes’s solution, usually proving that he couldn’t actually have solved it the way that he claimed. This may be because he skipped clues that he would have needed or had information in the epilogue that he never learned.

The “Solution” section also includes bugs and issues that he discovered with the case, beyond simply Holmes cheating to get the best possible score. He found:

Case #1 – The game is inconsistent whether Barry O’Neill broke one leg or two, with the video showing only one. One of the newspaper articles is mid-dated (in July instead of March) so that you miss learning about one of Thomas O’Neill’s criminal misadventures.

Case #2 – The whole case is, as I suspected, misdated. The newspaper should have been January 22, plus it has an auction announcement on June 9 that should not have been there. Although the solution requires you to know how the thieves left the gallery, the game never tells you. Other details such as the museum layout were omitted completely.

Case #3 – This case was mostly bug-free but the game excised two newspaper articles, although neither are absolutely required. This was probably because they were misdated in the tabletop version as well.

Shelley’s reason for writing this guide is perhaps not surprising. Although he was a huge success in Microprose initially, he left in 1992. For the next two years, he seems to have bounced around before settling into Ensemble Studios where he would eventually design Age of Empires. Those two years were filled by writing at least six guidebooks and one children’s adventure game (Peter Pan: A Story Painting Adventure). Even after moving to Ensemble, he continued to write the occasional guidebook, including one for his own Age of Empires II. There is a great story here waiting to be told and I hope someday we will be able to research and tell it in full.

With my diversion out of the way, let’s jump into the final rating!

Order in the court!

Final Rating

I have been torn over how this game would come out. I thought at first that it would score the same as its predecessor: it was the same engine, developed by the same people, using stories from the same source. Given the bugs this time around, I no longer think that is the case. While the previous game had something to prove (and sold more than 250k copies as a result), this game seemed to have been developed with a somewhat less expensive attitude. We’re just have to see how that impacts each of our scoring categories.

You sunk my battleship!

Puzzles and Solvability

This game and its predecessor are not traditional adventure games. I questioned last time whether we should be covering them at all, but ultimately decided that they counted because of their innovative premise and the way they pushed on the status quo. Without inventory puzzles, we are ultimately left with only the cases themselves and the way they are presented.

The game is stateful, but only in the sense that you have to trigger each of the required scenes before you can access the judging area. This makes the endgame for each case a bit less exciting, although I had not considered this aspect before. Maybe you personally didn’t piece together the evidence correctly, but if you can go into the judging then you must have all of the required info. If you only follow red herrings, you cannot even get in so it does narrow the scope of the ending quite a bit. This game also felt like it leaned on multiple choice questions more than the previous one, but that may be just my shoddy memory. I admit that more than once I had to deduce from the choices rather than working out the answers myself just from the witness testimony. If you don’t care about your score, all you need to do is do the judging over and over again until you pick the right option.

The three cases in this game were solid overall. Unlike the first game where I doubted the plausibility of hynotism as a murder weapon, all of the cases were within the realm of possibility. I had fun! The second case was the weakest link when it came both to complexity and bugs, but it wasn’t so bad.

My score: 5.

The directory can still be painful to search.

Interface and Inventory

Usually, when judging “Interface and Inventory”, we have a variety of similar games to compare against. Is it a text adventure? Point-and-click? A hybrid? With this series, ICOM crafted something unique, an interface that both adapted the tabletop game roots of the series while also being pretty darned effective as a simple multimedia menu system. The problem is that they added absolutely nothing this time around except for judging videos.

I ended up using the in-game newspaper this time around, thanks to the lack of online documentation and my inability to purchase a copy that actually contained the manual. (I bought two! Both lied!) The found the in-game interface to be serviceable, although reading that much text in low resolution will never be fun. I did not deduct any points for this because a real player in 1992 wouldn’t have had difficulty with the manual. The directory interface continues to be confusing with its odd mismash of category headings and direct alphabetization. As in the example above, “Aberdeen Navigation” appears under “S!” Add that to my spelling difficulties and the directory became a weak link in my enjoyment of the game.

My score: 4.

A dinner party during a robbery! How chic.

Story and Setting

Individually, each of the cases in this set had something interesting on offer: the first had an interesting view of circus life and the tragic deaths of two trained lions, the second had a fantastic forgery puzzle where we came to learn that there were no real paintings at all, and the third offered a “spy thriller” as we witnessed the scheming of multiple European powers over a British military weapon. In these cases, this era of London is well-depicted, even as we have very few scenes that are more than the interior of yet another sitting room. For a group of midwestern actors on a shoestring budget, they did well… but some exterior shots and maybe an actual trip to London would have gone a long way.

Although I forgave it last time, I am less inclined to forgive that the cases are not connected at all. They build to nothing. We are playing the stories out of chronological order, so there can be no character or plot development. The single reference to a previous case that I found was to the “Society Burglar” of the previous game, but even that was just intended as a red herring if you didn’t recall that you followed those clues once already. Holmes fans will point out that there are nearly no connections between his original cases either, but at least Doyle gradually shows us Holmes and Watson growing and changing over their careers. All we have is out of order cases.

My Score: 4

The corsage budget alone was millions.

Sound and Graphics

While the previous game was revolutionary in its extensive use of video, this game only pushes the envelope in a few small ways. The new judging scenes are great, replacing a static drawing of a judge used in the previous cases. (I believe that re-releases of the first game included fully recorded judging, but the edition I played did not.) The cinematographer better lit the scenes this time around so we could see more of the details; I expect that he or she did not realize the limitations of low-resolution graphics as clearly in the first game. Improving the picture quality had the drawback that the green screen effects are much more obvious this time around.

I mostly ignored the sound, but there were some nice touches including background music in many of the scenes and striking musical cues when a critical clue was discovered. It’s not high art but I appreciated it.

My score: 6.

Environment and Atmosphere

I wish I could say that Victorian England comes alive in this game, but with so many scenes in nearly identical offices and sitting rooms, it is difficult to get a feel for the place. The occasional sepia-toned illustration helps, but this game needed a larger filming budget. Accents were often thick and exaggerated, except for the handful of main actors. There are a handful of moments that transcend what they were limited with, but overall I felt less invested in this world than I did the first game. That investment is the best way for me to measure the intangible “atmosphere” component of the game. It wasn’t bad at all, but far from perfect.

My score: 5.

These lambchop sideburns are awful.

Dialog and Acting

As one of the few games of this era to offer real “dialog and acting” for me to score, this category should be fun. Overall the scripts and acting are good, but the combination of dialog errors and overly broad actors pulled it down a bit. The game is propped up by its selection of Holmes and Watson and they do wonders with what they have to work with. I found Holmes to see more tired and world-weary this time around, although that makes little sense narratively as the cases span his entire career. I’d love to learn more about the acting and staging of this game, but the actor that played Watson did not respond to my requests for an interview.

There were a handful of really “great” scenes– the two academics arguing at London University will remain one of my favorites– but the game is primarily held together by two talented actors that managed to make dry material better. They deserve a ton of credit for making this game successful. Kudos!

My score: 7

Final Tally

Let’s tally up those scores: (5+4+4+6+5+7)/.6 = 52! I’m not going to add or subtract any bonus points, so let’s just leave it right there.

When I started this game, I expected it to about equal its predecessor. In a lot of ways, it did with both improved lighting and the new judging videos. And yet, it also feels like a cheaper production overall with more use of obvious green screen and (at least to my memory) less dynamic and interesting locations. The cases were a mixed bag with more bugs than the previous game, but at least we didn’t have pseudo-science. The previous game scored 59 points and a drop of seven does seem a bit high, but I feel good about where it ended up.

With an average guess of 56, most of you thought this would do worse than the previous game but not this much worse. With an exact guess, Leo Velles is our winner! Congratulations on your new CAPs. I only hope you have caught up enough to read this post and see your fabulous winnings.

With that, I am signing off on “new” games for a while. I am undergoing extensive training so that I can thumb wrestle Will for a few Missed Classic spots. We have one more bonus post coming before Trinity (1986), plus I am currently playing our Christmas adventure. My next mainline game will be Space Quest V, seven games from now. I first volunteered here because I wanted to review Space Quest IV and finally getting around to the sequel feels nice.

CAP Distribution

200 CAPs to Will Moczarski

Classic Blogger Award – 50 CAPs – for blogging through Curse of Crowley Manor

Classic Blogger Award – 50 CAPs – for blogging through Escape from Traam

Classic Blogger Award – 50 CAPs – for blogging through Earthquake – San Francisco 1906

Classic Blogger Award – 50 CAPs – for blogging through Saigon: The Final Days

105 CAPs to Joe Pranevich

Blogger Award – 100 CAPs – for blogging through Consulting Detective II for everyone’s enjoyment

To the Manor Born Award – 5 CAPs – for discovering the weird coincidence of two ‘Manor’ games released in the same year

35 CAPs to ShaddamIVth

Simba’s Pride Award – 5 CAPs – for the best possible solution to the Lions case (the lions themselves wanted out of the smuggling business)

Send In The Clowns Award – 5 CAPs – for passing on some corsage wisdon

Classic Prediction Award – 10 CAPs – for guessing equal closest to Curse of Crowley Manor

Isn’t it Ironic Award – 5 CAPs – for pointing out the irony of the game mentioning a bug in the program, then having an actual bug in its own program that made the game unfinishable

Classic Prediction Award – 10 CAPs – for getting the closest guess to Earthquake

34 CAPs to MorpheusKitami

Part-time Companion Award – 9 CAPs – for playing along but giving up halfway through

Moral Supporter Award 5 CAPs – for making me feel better about the second case

CSI Award – 5 CAPs – for wondering why a coroner doesn’t know about exit wounds?

Second Biggest I’ve Ever Seen Award – 5 CAPs – for letting us know about the obscure LaserActive

Classic Prediction Award – 10 CAPs – for getting the closest guess to Escape from Traam, but still being off by 8 points!

20 CAPs to Voltgloss

Unfasten and Unfurious Award – 20 CAPs – for succeeding in Will’s challenge to solve the first puzzle of Saigon

20 CAPs to Laukku

Genre Support Award – 5 CAPs – for letting us know about the removal of some Sherlock Holmes games for sale

Kickstarter Award – 5 CAPs – for mentioning the Summer Daze kickstarter before we did our official article on it.

Classic Prediction Award – 10 CAPs – for getting the closest guess to Saigon

15 CAPs to Mayhaym

Alerted an Author to Awesome Alliterative Alternatives Award – 5 CAPs – for appreciated advice after article appelation already actioned

Classic Prediction Award – 10 CAPs – for guessing equal closest to Curse of Crowley Manor

11 CAPs to Lisa H

Insight Award – 6 CAPs – for insightful commentary throughout

Hello Boys Award – 5 CAPs – for knowing a lot about Aleister Crowley

10 CAPs to Ilmari Jauhiainen

Help Granted Award – 10 CAPs – for helping with a request for assistance

10 CAPs to Vetinari

As the Crowbar Flies Award – 10 CAPs – for correctly predicting the crowbar’s continued use in Earthquake

10 CAPs to Leo Velles

Psychic Prediction Award – 10 CAPs – for guessing the final CAP rating

6 CAPs to Voltgloss

Comparison Award – 6 CAPs – for looking up stuff in the tabletop version

5 CAPs to infidel

Blue… No, Yellow Award – 5 CAPs – for teaching us about video production

5 CAPs to Reiko

Proofreeding Award – 5 CAPs – for spotting many typos in the mulitple choice answers

5 CAPs to Vetinari

Funny Lions Award – 5 CAPs – for giving us more on Lenny Bruce

source http://reposts.ciathyza.com/consulting-detective-vol-ii-hint-book-review-final-rating/

#retro games #dos games #retro #crpg #adventure #amiga #oldcomputers #8bit #16bit #blog #repost

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