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atomkrp-blog · 5 years

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WELCOME TO XAVIER’S, HWANG MINO !

… loading statistics. currently aged twenty-three, entering first semester of xavier’s in seoul, south korea. decrypting files… mutant has the following records: strength +5, durability +4, agility +7, dexterity +4, intelligence +5. currently, he is classified under tier omega.

BACKGROUND.

the cartography of his veins spread before his eyes: here, where he bruised in metronomes — here, where he fractured his vertebra — here, where he dissected his laments.

against the riverbed where stories run in rivulets of red, in the stream of incongruence, lies the corpse of a manmade construct. called it death. named it fear. at the end of the day, its soot is ripe and ruined in his fisted palm, leaving inked teeth marks in shades of dying black.

the night sky thinks about a carnage that dreams: in this story, the sequence wears a reverse order.

sometimes, he is a motel with a crooked figured chalked on the creaky floor. all those streaks of blood that they scrub so hard but the wallflowers still remember what they witnessed. all the wallflowers that wilted, when murder sprayed their dormant status with sins. also the bed where he thrashed, all simulated forms of unspoken words transferred into acidic non-verbal. and that bed sheet wearing new colors, the hue melting like waxwork with flames that attracted these fallen, falling moths.

he is also the thump. victim now on the plane; bloodshed is beautiful when you are made of this chaotic smoke, imprisoned by your glass ribcage. quite a vision, quite a beauty.

the wooden boards, the outline. and everything in-between.

( glass of half-full / empty water; tv playing static like sorrow. )

rest with me: i am an aftermath of this death, but i’m not in the coffin. ( i am the coffin. )

out of soft violence he bloomed: marigold and cinnamon, seeping through the interstices of mama’s cusps. she sighed, milkflower petals of her skin dripping in vigilant white as she shared the space of a husband’s with someone else. he was three, he remembers vividly. other colors of the spectrum spoke on the concave and convex of her features; she splintered in ways that he never understood between the grips of a man that was not his father.

membranes of his unfinished bedtime spillage carved memories like no other. he was supposed to be fast asleep, lost in the depth of cocooned safety in his crib. a watchful, taciturn witness to the event that unfolded before him, he always pretended that this was not the guilt that marred her face years later — that this was not the shame that spun the partiture of her elegies. against the gossamer edge of time, she would always be reminisced, another sway of chandelier against the stark ceiling of their mansion. this was the first beauty that painted the inglenooks of his memories.

first and foremost, insanity is hereditary, and so is sadness.

II.

the child of threnody did not grow away from his mother; instead, he planted more seeds of lachrymose within the particles of his being, enveloped like chrysalis. the soothsayer across the street on an autumn day whispered to him little pieces of how to build a temple with his body, column per column, until he reached the sky shaped out of weary cultures and faded nebulas. spinal pillars stood against the horizon; he became acquainted with the after dark lullabies that ate away at his father’s core.

the difference was that his father was rotten with penumbra, while he soaked himself up in the act of liminal drowning. the similarity was that they both were too lost to be salvaged, feet tangled around the anchors.

he learned to love his mother in ways that she haunted his bones.

III.

the incisors: to love was to hurt. he had teeth marks inked on his skin, with his aching marrows to prove his dedication. wrought in a burial was his flesh burning with forgotten maggots, rigor mortis veneering his architecture. this was the universe’s design; this fruit of deathless christening, this flower of seared capillaries.

the boyhood museum inevitably let him rest in this catacomb where mourning became the norms. here, he fell in the charm of death, its brutal hands wrapped around his neck with the weight of affection. it claimed him; it claimed his mother, then it claimed him. he learned to love it, too, in ways that he loved his mother.

he, however, had always known how to love the anatomy, the bones — he had always known the blueprint of humane edifices by heart. from the gentlest to the harshest, pound by pound, it called for his name. and he held their ideas inside him for the longest time, until they were no longer the same. until they, too, clattered into the rush of dissonance.

open battlefields were ribbons of suffocation, wisps inside his knots of an esophagus. but violent streaks ran nowhere but in his bloodstreams, rhyming the overture of sleepless hours spent on the longing.

IV.

the revenants of revolution never skipped a heartbeat: there was always a lub-dub of life shivering underground. found himself stranded there before he, too, learned to love. and he loved, again and again and again, until he loved too much.

on the night three days before his eighteenth birthday, the moon hung itself like his mother did. stabbed and left for dead, their hatred mirrored his love — too much, too much, too much. he made a deal with the death for another paradox, promising that this time, he would learn to love better.

( in the end, he does not love better. death carved him into stalactites instead. )

the turpentine of twilight lures the deaths back to its morgue, sometimes in ashes, sometimes in commas – sometimes a period of crawling with smokes in-between. tattered teeth with keyholes and keywords, all rattling keys and sentences caught between the fangs, chewed up and spat out on the concrete. the start is always silent, the voices contained. in a room for two: housed between the flimsy walls would be him, bare to the skin to the flesh to the bones to the marrows. he drinks the quiet and lets it soak his blood vessels, veins and arteries creating a map like corrupted city streets.

nights are craters of the moonless dreams, deep enough to be called canyons. against the core of the bases would be arrhythmia waiting to happen. clasped to the soil would be footprints of indulgence – this is an elegy to addictions. every cursive of a movement creates a dynamic that he yearns so much, too much. every victory in the battlefield fractures the wasteland where he usually closes his eyes. wear and tear of the muscles and sinews, but here comes the marching sound of tomorrow; almost furtive, almost invisible. he doesn’t die tonight.

MUTATION.

darkness or shadow manipulation enables him to perform various tricks as long as there is the provided source of said element, which would be aplenty during the day and night. he’s able to mimic the darkness itself, using it as a means of transportation by opening portals through shadows, as well as producing offensive and defensive measures by solidifying the element, mostly by constructing weapons and shields. he can only use what’s available and enlarge it instead of creating it from full-fledged light.

STRENGTHS.

teleportation through shadows is what he primarily relies on, although this means that the shadows must not be too far apart — at four to five meters at the maximum in the distance, degree varying to his current stamina and energy. at this point in tier omega, he has yet to be able to merge himself fully in the darkness, so the transport is done via creating portals that he can dissolve into.

he can see in the dark due to enhanced vision, and this can be applied as seeing during the day. his sight is almost as perfect as it is in the light, although it could use some more honing. when new levels are unlocked, it’s possible for him to eventually see better in the dark than light. also, this application doesn’t require any adaptation.

umbrakinetic property construction via solidification of the element, and this includes weaponry to attack and protect himself with. solidified shadows work in the light as if it’s a solid matter as long as it’s been created to perfection by him prior to launch. this can also be used to trap people into their places by producing tendrils around the said people’s ankles, immobilizing his opponents.

WEAKNESSES.

up until this point he cannot create darkness out of nothing; there has to be sources, as small as they might be, to aid him during the expansion of darkness. he can make a small, condensed shadow into something bigger, but in the rare chances there isn’t any darkness at all, it will render his powers void.

distance of travel is limited, as teleportation through portals deplete his energy. it’s just faster than running, but it also consumes his energy as much as running would, just slightly less. when he’s exhausted, he won’t be able to perform this correctly, and there’s a possibility for him to be trapped within the portal for a few seconds.

moving shadows also prove to be troublesome towards his ability since it means that he might have to follow the shadows’ direction than his own. his teleportation also relies heavily on creating portal to portal from motioned shadows, causing this to be a hassle when it comes to reaching his destination.

he might be on par with light manipulators, depending on the opponent’s expertise. might find difficulties in adjusting his powers if all the shadows are erased via the light manipulation, which ends where he cannot perform his abilities at all.

while maintaining the solid features of the well-constructed items might not be a big problem, processing the dark energy to solid mass has proven to be a trouble for him, and it can take from below a minute for small projectiles like bullets, to up to five minutes to bigger weapons.

in the vein of inability to create darkness, while he can combine shadows to merge them into a bigger mass, but passing one shadow to the other via well-lit plane might exert more energy than necessary unless the shadows have been modified to be more solid.

#at:profile #tw infidelity #tw suicide #tw murder #tw gore

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ciathyzareposts · 5 years

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Game 333: Waxworks (1992)

The box CamelCases the second “W” but the title screen doesn’t. There’s a similar issue with whether the company is called HorrorSoft or Horror Soft.

Waxworks

United Kingdom

HorrorSoft (developer); Accolade (publisher)

Released in 1992 for Amiga and DOS

Date Started: 11 June 2019

Waxworks is the fourth major title from HorrorSoft, after . . . A Personal Nightmare (1989), Elvira: Mistress of the Dark (1990), and Elvira II: The Jaws of Cerberus (1991). (It is also the last; the company would re-brand itself AdventureSoft in 1993 and from then on publish essentially nothing but Simon the Sorcerer entries. That annoys me a little bit. I mean, “AdventureSoft” is too generic a name to be taken up by a company that just publishes one series. They should have called themselves “SimonSoft” and left “AdventureSoft” for a developer with a more diverse catalog.) I think I could make a case for the game not really being an RPG, but part of me is curious to see how the developer does without Elvira as the game’s centerpiece. I never really cared for the character, which I’m sure dragged down my enjoyment of the two previous titles.

Like the Elvira games, Waxworks is fundamentally an adventure game that does offer RPG-style character development, combat, and inventory. The interface is slightly redesigned from Elvira II. (The engine is called AGOS, a graphical version of an open-source engine designed for MUDs called AberMUD.) The system of health to individual body parts has been dropped, as has the useless beating heart. The compass is moved from the lower-right to the left, and character stats are on the bottom rather than between the two main windows. A control panel of icons in the upper-left lets you check inventory, manipulate objects, ready weapon, and attack.

I bought the GOG version and was confused for a while until I looked it up and discovered that the game came with two manuals, one of which GOG doesn’t offer. The second, The Curse of the Twins, explains the backstory in 13 pages of text by Richard Moran, who also wrote the manual to Star Control II.

The backstory casts the unnamed protagonist as a twin whose brother Alex disappeared when they were teenagers. They had been exploring an old mine. The siblings lived in the seaside town of Vista Forge, where their rich, eccentric Uncle Boris built a wax museum in his creepy mansion. Now an adult, the main character has returned to Vista Forge to attend Boris’s funeral. All kinds of mysterious signs, portends, and disasters accompany the trip, including the collapse of Boris’s grave, and disappearance of his coffin when a sinkhole opens beneath the cemetery. During the chaos of this event, the protagonist thinks he briefly sees Alex in the mine tunnels that run under the cemetery.

The hallways of Uncle Boris’s waxworks.

The protagonist remembers a tale that Uncle Boris once told, about a family ancestor who caught a witch named Ixona stealing one of his chickens. In retaliation, he chopped off her hand, for which Ixona cursed the family: “In every generation in which your family bears twins, one shall belong to Beelzebub.” The curse nearly immediately came true, when one twin son of the family became Vlad IV of Walachia, or Vlad the Impaler, who lived up to his name by tracking down and impaling the witch. Generations later, other twins in the family included Torquemada, the Marquis de Sade, and a female witch burned at the stake in Salem. [Having lived in Salem, I am obliged to point out with indignation that no accused witches were burned in Salem; they were all hung, except for one who was crushed under rocks. Also, they were all innocent.] It was these very individuals that Uncle Boris chose to populate his waxworks. Determined to lift the curse, Boris also funded a dig at Vlad’s castle in Walachia and recovered a crystal ball from the impaled corpse of Ixona.

The character enters the tunnels and returns to the location where Alex disappeared, finding evidence that someone has been living in the tunnels, eating bats and fish. The next day, at the reading of the will, the character inherits Boris’s estate. A letter left by Boris indicates that Boris knew Alex was still alive, and possessed by evil, and that the character can save him by using the waxworks to travel back in time and undo the curse.

Uncle Boris’s creepy, disembodied head speaks to me from beyond the grave.

The game begins at the door to the mansion, with Boris’s butler inviting the character in. The butler gives the protagonist (whom I guess I’ll describe in the first person from now on) a crystal ball in which I see Boris’s face. He tells me that I must use the waxworks exhibits to enter the worlds of the previous twins kill them, “destroying the power that feeds the curse.” I then find myself in front of an Egyptian exhibit. The Egyptian siblings technically predate the curse, but one of them was evil, which gave Ixona the idea in the first place.

Death is only the beginning.

I move throughout the mansion. Given the backstory, I expect to find exhibits depicting the Spanish Inquisition, the Salem Witch Trials, Dracula, and perhaps even the persecution and assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as performed by the inmates of the asylum of Charenton under the direction of the Marquis de Sade. But I guess those were just examples. What I see instead are:

A mine being overrun by a mutant plant

Did that happen in this town? If so, the authorities sure hushed it up.

Jack the Ripper approaching one of his victims with a knife

You’re not even stabbed yet, woman! Don’t swoon–run!

A bunch of zombies lumbering through a graveyard

I’m not sure this event was “historical.”

There are other closed curtains throughout the museum. I’m not sure if they’ll later be opened and reveal other exhibits.

I wonder if I’m supposed to take these on in a particular order, but the game has me covered there. I turns out I can talk to Boris by clicking on the crystal ball. He tells me that no, it doesn’t matter what order I choose–all of the scenes need to be “cleansed.” I realize later that talking to him has cost me “psy” points, so I’d better save it for when I’m really stuck.

. . . except that I’ll be Level 1 for the first one and like Level 20 when I go to the last one.

I decide to go in chronological order, although I’m not entirely sure where the graveyard fits into it. My best guess is that the order is Egypt – Graveyard – Jack the Ripper – Mine. Thus, I head back to the Egyptian exhibit and choose “Enter.”

A couple of flashes of light later, and I’m in a pyramid. A nearby room shows someone labeled “pyramid designer” stabbed in the back, his body hunched over a table. A piece of papyrus underneath the corpse has an image of Anubis and a set of nine hieroglyphics.

Some kind of puzzle already.

The room is full of baskets, jugs, pitchers, and other objects, and it turns out that, just as in Elvira II, you can pick up just about everything. Unlike Elvira II, there’s no spell system here that’s going to make use of all these items, so there’s probably no point in loading up my inventory. I do it anyway, mostly because I want to see if the 16 items the window holds are all I get, or whether it scrolls. It turns out that it scrolls. At this point, I realize that I can’t figure out how to drop things. Clicking and dragging them back to the environment doesn’t help. The manual says that “Drop” is supposed to be an object action when I click on an object, but it never appears. I hope there’s no limit to my inventory, then. I walk out of the room with a scarab beetle brooch (found in a chest), a dagger, a lamp, a bowl, a beaker, a stylus and ink block, two pieces of papyrus, three baskets, six jugs, a jar of oil, and a mat.

The scene in the first room. Most of this stuff will end up in my inventory.

Returning to the hallways, I start wondering if I’m going to have to map. I decide to try following the right corridor first, and if I get lost or confused, then I’ll map.

I turn a corner and meet a pyramid guard with a sword. Combat hasn’t really changed since Elvira II, either. You hit the sword icon to activate your readied weapon, then click in the screen itself to indicate what part of the enemy you want to target. The guard defeats me three times in a row.

And here’s where we learn that Horror Soft did not skimp on its customary gruesome death screens.

Finally, on the fourth time, I manage to kill him–with no hit points lost. That suggests that luck is going to play a big role in combat. From this one battle, my level increases to 2. I also get the guard’s sword.

As I walk, I realize I’m getting 1 experience point for every square I’ve never stepped in before. I soon go to Level 3. This is accompanied by an increase in maximum hit points.

Continuing down the hall, I meet another guard, who also slays me two times in a row. I finally kill him on my third try. I hit him about five times for every time he hits me, and I do hundreds of points of damage to him. These guys are tanks. I begin to wonder if I was really supposed to level up in one of the easier scenarios first. At this moment, let’s pause to note that the graphics are quite nice. Many are animated, which isn’t coming through in these static shots. But the only sound effects I’ve experienced in the game are the swishes and thuds of weapons connecting in combat. There’s music, but it’s loud and relentless and I turned it off.

This guy was a little easier. He looks easier.

After picking up some piles of sand, I meet a new enemy: a priest with a dagger. He dies a lot easier than the guards. At the end of a corridor, at a statue, I find a tuning fork in a pot. But it isn’t long before yet another guard kills me. I reload, kill him, step a few paces past him, and find a little pond. There, a crocodile kills me while I’m trying to fill a jug with water. Man, this game is rough.

Reloading, I walk a few paces past the crocodile, then meet an Egyptian guy with a spear:

The problem is that hit points don’t seem to regenerate automatically as you move. It occurs to me that Uncle Boris might be able to help. I contact him and, sure enough, using the bits of papyrus and pen that I picked up, creates three healing scrolls. Each one seems to heal 10 hit points. They don’t really help: the spear guy destroys me in two stabs.

I start paying attention to the statistics, and when I finally kill the bastard, I’m convinced the game is just making things up. When you strike someone, the box in the lower-left corner tells how many hit points of damage you’ve done. There were times that I hit the guy for over 200 points in multiple blows and he didn’t die. When I did finally kill him, it was after maybe 80 points of damage.

I come to a treasure room! Too bad that’s not why I’m here. Five pots, a weight, two cat statues, a golden calf statue, and a tile all join my overflowing inventory.

In a real RPG, there would be lots of cool stuff in a room like this.

I soon come up against a thick glass panel. Nothing will smash it. This sounds like a job for the tuning fork! After 15 minutes of rummaging through my stuff, I find it–somehow I accidentally put it into a basket. I use it and the glass shatters and collapses.

A few paces on, two blades come out of the ceiling and kill me.

Okay, it turns out that the blades are the result of a trap, indicated by the presence of a very thin piece of string stretching across the corridor. I’ll have to watch for those in the future.

I finally make it to a set of stairs upward, where I’m confronted by a puzzle: a pentagram with the number 0 at each point, plus four numbers (1, 3, 4, 6, 7) at each intersection of lines. Clicking on any of the 0s causes them to cycle through numbers 1 through 9, but it also starts an hourglass timer at the bottom. If I run out of time, as I did the first attempt (before I realized the hourglass was even running):

The mechanism by which this happened is unclear to me.

My guess is that it’s like a magic square: each line has to add up to the same number, with no number being used more than once, including the ones in the middle. That means I have to make do with 2, 5, 8, 9, and 0 at the points of the pentagram. It doesn’t take me long, though, to realize that isn’t going to work. The best I can do with no repeating numbers is make the totals come out to 16, 17, 18, 19, and 20.

So I focus on just getting them to add up to the same thing period. I spend some time messing with it in Excel and I finally come up with the answer, but I’m unsatisfied with my method. I know there’s a way to do it algebraically, and I just couldn’t figure it out. Solving math puzzles via trial-and-error never seems right. Anyway, I go up to Level 6.

Caught it just as the door was opening.

A few steps down the corridor and:

How did I end up barefoot, exactly?

I think I’ll leave it there. So far, it seems like a brisk game, but much like Elvira II, the RPG elements are unsatisfying. The deaths are kind of funny, but I wouldn’t be laughing if I prized myself on low reload count.

Time so far: 3 hours

source http://reposts.ciathyza.com/game-333-waxworks-1992/

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

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gravediggerslocal · 7 years

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What Gives?

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Toho has been paying money out of their own pocket for English language dubs of Godzilla movies for ages and American distributors rarely create their own Godzilla dubs these days. So why hasn’t Toho edited together and dubbed the Godzilla-related episodes of the television series Zone Fighter into movies they can license overseas? It’s been decades since the series was released and it’s clear nobody is going to license and dub the series for them. Toho has the money and stock footage necessary to turn selected episodes into a small catalog of films, so why haven’t they done it? Given how easily news of movies featuring previously unseen (in America) Godzilla footage will be twisted into “lost Godzilla movies,” the potential for big publicity could lead to bigger profits. I simply cannot comprehend why they haven’t done this already.

I’m surprised Svengoolie hasn’t been one of the hosts for Universal’s Halloween Horror Nights. They have already used hosts like Elvira and the Crypt Keeper in the past and Sven primarily shows films from the Universal library. One would think they’d be eager to capitalize on both the connection and popularity of Svengoolie.

Given its potential as an untapped comedy goldmine, it’s amazing how the Monster in My Pocket: Monster Rock cassette hasn’t become an internet sensation. I can barely find anything about it online. What makes this even more unusual is how I distinctly remember one of the tracks having lyrics to the effect of “I have a monster in my pocket and I really like to rock it!” How has the internet not taken that and run with it?

The days of 1-900 numbers are pretty much over, so why haven’t the owners of the various defunct scary stories hotlines tried dumping the contents of the master tapes onto the various streaming and digital download services? I know some fan put 45 minute long compilation of material from the Freddy Krueger 1-900 number, so it’s not like there’s too little material to work with.

How on Earth did Mattel beat out Kenner’s successor Hasbro in getting the new Ghostbusters license? There are so many toys from the old The Real Ghostbusters toy line they could have reused the molds for. Just put them into packages with images referencing the 2016 movie and you’re golden!

Various independent comic book companies have published comics which show new stories from horror franchises. Will anyone take the plunge and do something similar with the Waxwork films? Seeing how the people who visited the titular establishment and were killed off prior to the events of the first movie could be fun. The unseen adventures of Mark Loftmore which were so casually mentioned in Waxwork II: Lost in Time could also be a rich source of material.

Why hasn’t there been a definitive book about operating a haunted hayride? Find resources on setting up and running haunted houses and haunted trails can be easily found, but haunted hayrides have been unfairly left out in the cold. The only thing that comes even remotely close is Haunted Farms of America. There are plenty of haunted hayrides which have long since closed down. I can understand someone who currently owns a haunted hayride wouldn’t take on such a project in the fear of creating more competition, but what about the people who have closed down their hayrides years ago. You would think at least one of them former owners would release a book on the matter to make some easy money.

Both Doctor Who and all things Lovecraft are wildly popular. This is true in terms of audio dramas as well, with Big Finish even having a line called Doctor Who: The Lost Stories devoted to dramatizing unused scripts from the program. One such script was for “Avatar,” which was heavily influenced by the works of H.P. Lovecraft. But despite the potential from getting extra money from Lovecraft fanatics (and potentially getting them hooked on Doctor Who in the process), that particular script remains unadapted!

It boggles my mind how a role-playing game company created an adventure module based around a non-fantasy Midnight Syndicate album and yet nobody has done the same for Nox Arcana’s Blood of the Dragon.

How has all this time passed without any studio snapping up the rights to the Super Scary Stories for Sleep-Overs line of books? I think they would be the basis for a great series of horror anthology movies. I remember one tale about two children communicating with a restless spirit whose corpse is buried under a house which was particularly chilling. At least they would be paying for the name recognition and the rights to use original stories, unlike the proposed Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark movie where the company is paying to use the name for a film adapting folk tales and urban legends they could have basically done on their own without paying extra. Seeing as how Brilliance Audio made audio versions of the old Goosebumps wannabe Strange Matter back in 2008, I’m sure there would be an audience for an adaptation of this lesser known 90’s series as well.

Halloween music sharing blogs are very popular despite their tendency to get shut down due to copyright issues. But even then the owner of the blog usually tries to switch hosting services in order to keep things going. So why not switch over to Halloween music that’s available under a Creative Commons license? They could host stuff for free over at the Internet Archive (assuming the albums aren’t there already) without any worry. Fear of getting the blog shut down due to accidental use of Creative Commons material which utilizes copyrighted works can’t be an issue, as people who run such blogs already don’t seem to care about copyrights. That said, I personally do think it would be better if they stuck with Creative Commons material that is completely original in order to avoid the issue altogether.

Most discussions of Robot Monster claim it was shot in 4 days and note how the titular character is realized through the use a gorilla costume with a domed helmet because it was less expensive than renting or building a robot costume. It has been documented George Barrows supplied his own gorilla costume and acted in the film for $40 per day. This works out to a grand total of $160. I seriously doubt it would have cost more than $160 to scrounge up some cardboard boxes and silver paint to create a more traditional robot costume. Where they really that blind to the matter?

Is it just me or has the Halloween and haunted attraction community all but ignored the possibilities offered by the “Airwalker” balloons? They seem fairly easy to dress up given how they have to be assembled and some of them are positioned in the classic crouch already! Their seeming to move based on air currents will leave people guessing whether or not they are looking at a lifeless dummy or not. One can only imagine the possibilities if they were already available looking like frightening monsters.

#opinions #Weird Musings #What Gives?

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