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mollybearrttrpg · 23 days

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how do you make lethality fun in TTRPGs?

As a gamemaster, you've probably run into this problem. Your players mess up, or maybe you made a fairly unbalanced encounter, or maybe it's pure dumb luck, but one of your players has to die. Naturally, the person playing this character is going to be fairly upset. After all, they've invested time into this game, immersed themselves in this character, dedicated thought and energy to who they are and what they do, not to mention put together the character sheet, which in a lot of systems can be a chore and a half.

What do you do, as a tabletop game designer, to mediate this issue? In some systems, they make the concept of death a far off thing that only happens in the most dire of circumstances, and something that can be reversed. In some, they allow proverbial second and third chances, such as death saves in Dungeons and Dragons or Pathfinder. Some systems just forgo the concept entirely, providing a different host of negative consequences for failure. Some games don't even give thought to this issue, bluntly presenting you with the idea that your character can die and this should be expected, while not really softening that blow in any way, or reducing the personal involvement you have to have in a character.

These examples would lead you to the conclusion that death is somewhat of a necessary evil in tabletop games, something that is unfortunate and not too fun but that needs to exist. I disagree.

To solve this particular issue, instead of looking to other tabletop games, I look to video games. In video games, specifically those with "permadeath", the tradeoff is that when you do come back as a new person, it requires very little from you as a player, starting you at square one and letting you go free. Roguelites are a fantastic example of this: you invest time and thought into a build/run, but yet death is omnipresent and something that must constantly be outrun or avoided. This idea, that death can come at any time, anywhere, leads to very dynamic gameplay situations with built-in, real stakes.

To translate this philosophy to EX-OP, my TTRPG system, I recognized two major systems that would need to be molded to fit it: character creation, and moment-to-moment combat.

Character creation need to quick, snappy, and intuition-friendly. Something that can be memorized, and that after a few games you should be able to create most of a character in your head. The Proficiencies system is very conducive to this, as characters are assembled piecemeal through a "bucket of legos" list of skills and abilities. If you want to play a stealthy sniper who has a pension for drinking and general merriment, you would approach this in game terms by selecting the Major Proficiencies of Spotter and Infiltrator, along with the Minor Proficiencies of Sniping and Revelry. This is a very simple system that allows you to put together a character in a very short time. This means building a character is easy, quick, and is more focused on what they do rather than who they are, allowing that to develop naturally.

Moment-to-moment combat is a harder thing to balance. Excess lethality is a double edged sword. On the one hand, enemies are easy to kill, and combat is more satisfying. On the other, players can die almost as easily as enemies, depending on where they're hit. In order to balance these things together, combat needs to be tactical and with as much player agency as reasonably possible. There should be means for skilled players to make it through entire encounters with hardly a scratch, and at the same time, means for players to die if they do something stupid or poorly planned. Players need to have deep toolbelts, and a lot of actions. For example, in EX-OP, a given player with 6 REFLEX and some decently leveled Proficiencies may be able to take up to seven actions on and off of their turn. They get four Action Points, where one is spent to do a Half-Action and two are spent to do a Full Action, and at 6 REFLEX they get three Reaction Points, which allow you to perform Half-Actions in response to being attacked. In addition, movement is handled as it's own system completely, meaning every action you take will be spent on tangible maneuvers.

This means that players on their turn have capacity for complex, involved maneuvers, while not sacrificing their freedom to position themselves advantageously. Having this number of moves means that players should always have a move to make, and getting trapped between a rock and a hard place is rare. Thus, when they die, they will most likely be able to recognize what they could have done to avoid it.

My core point here is a bit counter-intuitive: In order to make lethality fun, you have to give your players enough agency for death to be their fault. In EX-OP, you don't die because some giant enemy happened to crit you twice in a row, you die because you were in a bad position and used your actions poorly. While this might seem like handing off the responsibility to the players, the end result is that players consider their actions with far more weight and care. They see their characters as independent entities which they have sole responsibility over. This creates stakes and drama, without much if any input from the GM or the game itself.

TL;DR: In order for you to have a fun game with high risk of death, you have to make the death of the player the fault of the player.

#ttrpg #table top rpg #ttrpg design #roleplaying games #rpg #tabletop #tabletop games #table top games #story games #collaborative storytelling #table top role playing game #lore #ttrpg lore #writing #creative writing

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olderthannetfic · 2 years

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Oh if we're talking about the DSMP thing, I've got a buddy who's ranted to me about it so I've got a bit more context.

There are two major distinctions ao3 seems to be missing. One, how the fictional characters the you tubers are roleplaying as in Minecraft are different from RPF (it'd be kind of like saying Critical Role chars are the same as their players. There's the real people pulling the strings since it's a tabletop game, but also its own internal fictional universe that has its own fandom). This seems to be confusing ao3 because the streams themselves are pretty much fictional content while the streamers themselves are actors, either doing planned performances or winging it it, but no distinction is being made so that, plus how there's a lot of confusion over real name vs online alias vs character, is really mucking things up for people not into RPF. I might be totally into the fictional character one of these streamers play in the fictional Minecraft universe they've set up but not care at all for the RL person outside of it.

The second is that SMP stuff and video blogging just gets lumped together with no individual fandoms. DSMP is only one, there's tons like Hermitcraft and so on. It'd be like if boybands were all lumped under Bands rather than music being the medium while bands each get their own individual fandom tag. In this case they're treating Minecraft SMPs like their own fandom when it'd be more accurate to call it a genre or even a medium of its own. This also has totally screwed over the Minecraft game fandom tag for those who are not into youtubers because there's no way to actually... filter out the youtuber stuff. It used to be fine when it included only a few youtubers with comparatively smaller fandoms, but with how SMP stuff has blown up you cannot feasibly filter everything out since there's no unified tag. I've tried and even after filtering for a good 50 tags I found better luck just looking at older fics from before the SMP stuff blew up.

So even just an official tag for different SMPs would certainly help, as would more clear ways to divide the characters from the streamers performing them. Because at this time, you cannot filter any of that out. And in such a large fandom it's both a mess on its own and overwhelmed smaller fandoms such as normal Minecraft fic or smaller SMPs that get lumped in with it. It's made ao3 pretty unusable.

Yeah, there are a ton of posts on my tumblr from a few weeks ago with similar explanations of the whole mess.

I reiterate that this is the kind of thing that happens when everyone clusters on one big archive instead of making topic-specific ones. There are advantages in terms of a big archive staying up more reliably (at least in AO3's case) and having more readers but minuses in terms of things not being properly tailored to each fandom.

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just-jammin · 2 years

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>>y’all can go on anon, say any fucking thing you want, and sign with a name<<

So back in the decade of the 1980s, tabletop pencil and paper roleplaying games like Dungeons & Dragons were growing in popularity. Video games were still in their infancy. The internet did not have its present form. People would actually get together, gather around a table, and pretend to be elves and wizards trying to slay a dragon.

So the two major American publishers of superhero comics licensed their superhero universes for publication as RPGs. Marvel licensed their superheroes to appear in a game published by TSR, the makers of Dungeons & Dragons. DC licensed theirs to a company called Mayfair, and I don't know what their flagship product at the time was.

So, here's the thing I want to say: If a player tries to create an original character using Mayfair's DC Heroes game, it involves a budget of points to buy Powers, Skills, Attributes, and the like. Buying a power involves two costs: a base cost, which is a number of the points to just have the power on your character sheet rated at zero, and a factor cost, a price to buy each point that would make the power do something.

And Growth, the super power of getting bigger and stronger and tougher as you get bigger, like Scott did in the second Ant Man movie; has a negligible base cost of 10, but has a factor cost in the highest category, also 10 but the 10 means something different there. It's the same category for factor cost that Continuum Control is in. Continuum Control is a super power that combines a death ray and time travel and the ability to bring back people killed by the death ray. It's a power that only Darkseid has. The major difference is Continuum Control also has a base cost of 500, so it costs a lot more points overall to do that well than it does to get really big.

I don't know why this is the stuff I think about. If I could put this much energy and attention into physics, I'd have created a grand unified field theory. Instead, I think about how a fight between Colossal Boy and Darkseid would go.

Cheers,

JustiN

this is. something—

#warning.long.post #it is interesting tho #good job :p #that was stupid #<= (a tag for me speaking)#idk anymore #inquiries of a fennec #diogenescynic2288

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kookiebunnii · 4 years

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d4u || c’s get degrees

sept. 2018. this is my first time having a class with guk. we like to make bets on things to satisfy jungkook’s competitive instinct and the reward is usually food-related. i guess this quarter will be no different.

pairing: bestfriend!jungkook x reader

genre: slice of life

word count: 2.4k

warnings: n/a

sept. 2018

If there was one thing Jungkook loved, it was competition. You still remember the phase where he’d respond “bet” to anything you said, even if it made no sense.

Let’s have Chinese takeout for dinner. Bet.

Don’t forget your keys like you did last time. Bet.

If you say “bet” one more time, I’ll throw your Widowmaker mousepad out the window. Bet.

He’d always be the one to suggest playing rock, paper, scissors for the last slice of pizza, betting that if a coin turns up heads then you would have to do the dishes tonight instead, or begging you to play some new video game with him so he could 1v1 you over a large sum of five dollars. Maybe it was the adrenaline he craved or the fact that he could rarely find something he was not skilled at. However, after all the years he’s known you, he has realized that he’s finally met his match. You always watch uninterestedly as the coin lands on tails and Jungkook howls in pain over the kitchen sink. Similarly, you grew used to noncommittedly charging him $5.00 on Venmo as he repeatedly demands a rematch because the game was bugged or his character was lagging.

Perhaps the boy was known for being good at everything, but it seemed that luck was always on your side.

Breaking out of your reverie, you watch as Jungkook dashes across the apartment in search for something. While you spread Nutella over a piece of lightly browned toast, your eyes follow his frantic movements in amusement. Biting into your breakfast for the day, you hum happily as the chocolate-y flavor spreads across your tongue.

“What are you looking for e-boy?” you ask before taking a sip of the milk in your cup.

“I can’t find my penny board…have you seen it?” he starts opening all the cupboards one by one, as if his skateboard would be in the kitchen shelf next to the canned spam.

“I hid it,” you casually state, hiding your grin behind a nibble of toast.

He stops in his tracks, looking you dead in the eye before calmly replying, “And why would you do that?”

Brushing the crumbs from your fingertips onto your plate, you skip past him to respond in a chirpy tone, “Every time you used that cursed thing you’ve come back with a new cut or scrape. We’re running out of my favorite Hello Kitty band-aids, so I’ve decided you need a break from your precious board.”

He seems to be ready to retort something back in response, but with one look at his right arm he’s forced to agree that maybe he should rely on his own two legs for the next week or two. Huffing indignantly, he grabs the other piece of toast you’ve left for him on the plate and begins spreading generous amounts of the hazelnut spread while you get ready for class.

Surprisingly, you and Jungkook have the same class this quarter on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Since the two of you were different majors, you never really discussed schedules with him and only ever really asked about his classes to know when you should expect him to be at home. However, it turns out that this class in question is notorious for being an easy pick to fulfill a GE requirement all students had to complete for graduation, so you couldn’t say it was a complete surprise that the two of you were simultaneously enrolled.

Minutes later, you cover your mouth as you yawn at the doorway, watching Jungkook sling his backpack over his shoulder. He freezes, mumbling something that you assume is a list of all the things he needed for the day to ensure that he doesn’t forget anything.

As he does this mental recital, you reach up and smooth out some hair sticking up at the top of his head. He’s rather tall, so you do your best to tip-toe and ensure that the gel in his hair is adequately spread over his brown locks to make him look as presentable as possible—which you admit must be tough for the poor gel product. He flicks you gently on the forehead as soon as he notices you holding in your laughter over this thought.

“I know you’re thinking something funny about me again. Stop.”

You give him your most innocent smile before heading out the door, slipping your earbuds in to listen to your regular “commute tunes” playlist.

After the short bus ride, he gently bumps into your side to get your attention. You pull out your earbuds and give him a questioning look and soft shoulder bump of your own. Based on the mischievous look on his face, you knew that the premonition you had this morning about Jungkook’s competitiveness was a warning sign.

“Since we have the same class this quarter, how about we bet on who will get the higher grade?” he grins happily, his whole body seemingly lit with excitement.

“Are you sure, Mr. Film Studies major? This is a philosophy class,” you quip, watching as masses of students trickle around the two of you like slippery salmon in a never-ending stream.

“It’s not like you’d have an edge either Miss International Business major” he laughs, and you can hear the confident tone in his voice. Jungkook genuinely thinks he has a chance.

How cute.

Right before you two enter through the classroom door, you pull him aside. The confident way he leans back to look at you tells you that he knew you wouldn’t be able to reject his offer. You never backed down on his challenges, and that’s why he liked you so much.

“Loser treats winner to Korean BBQ,” you state plainly, casually glancing down at your phone to check the time. Two minutes before class starts.

“Sure.”

Satisfied, you head into class and look around for two empty seats that were side-by-side. It wasn’t a habit that you were used to, since you rarely had friends in your university courses. However, with Jungkook beside you, it felt like a natural and customary reaction to scan the room for two empty seats instead of one. It was like pulling out two plates for dinner every night, stopping at a bakery when your cravings hit to buy your favorite dessert and a slice of banana bread to-go, or sending him a meme as you scroll through Reddit that you knew would make him laugh. You were unconsciously conscious of him.

The weeks passed like a summer’s breeze, so enjoyable that you’re left awestruck until it’s over. You enjoyed dodging around Jungkook’s questions whenever he struggled with the homework, watching him nap on his notebook while you took lecture notes, and distracting him with text messages when you didn’t want to pay attention in class so that he wouldn’t be able to either. It was almost like high school again, back when you used to be able to spend time with him and mess around in class with the teacher being none the wiser. Before long, finals had come around and you were feeling a little nervous to say the least. Jungkook refused to tell you what he got on the midterm, and by extension his grade in the course, thereby keeping you in the dark. Your grade wasn’t terrible, but you knew that Jungkook wasn’t a complete dummy because he always performed well when he was focused. Free Korean BBQ could do that to a man.

“Do you want to study together?” you ask, finding him laying on the couch and playing a racing game on his phone. You watch as his round eyes focus on the screen intently, waiting for him to blink.

“Sure. I’m not helping you though.”

You laugh, bringing your face close enough that it was right above the phone in his hands. Making weird faces to distract him from his game, you reply, “As if. I’m just checking to see how behind you are in this class.”

He finishes and tosses his phone on the tabletop. Looking at you disinterestedly, he pinches one of your cheeks and gets up when you wiggle out of his grasp. It looks like he’s going to get his stuff, so you head into your own room to prepare your books for a productive study session.

One of the highlights of your university was its library. You always came here to study instead of studying at home or going to a café. Being at home was sometimes distracting, especially when you could hear Jungkook roasting his team over voice chat well into the late night. Given how much you were consuming at your new barista job, you also decided to avoid places with delicious pastries, lest you wanted more feelings of disappointment during your next weigh-in at the doctor’s.

Finding a table with space for two, you sit down and begin pulling all of your supplies out of your backpack. Your enjoyed studying with a particular organization of notes and texts, so you had your favorite animal post-its on hand. Using them to indicate the beginning of your lecture notes, you begin going through what you’ve written with a light yellow highlighter. After doing this for a few pages, you peek at Jungkook’s work to find him doodling in the margins.

Leaning over, you draw a cute stick figure pointing to Jungkook’s doodle in awe. To get the full effect, you include a speech bubble of the character saying “WOW!”

He smiles before giving your stick figure a gorgeous mustache and top hat.

Surprisingly, the two of you get a lot done that day. You expected to be consistently distracted, but Jungkook kept to himself whenever he was really focused. Maybe he was always like this with studies he was interested in, but either way you quite liked how focused he was being. His wide eyes were trained on the text in front of him as he absentmindedly tapped his pen against his cheek in thought. Once in a while the pen tilts dangerously close to his mouth, and as you catch him proceeding to take an unconscious bite of the cap, you pull his hand away in alarm.

“You have a habit of putting things in your mouth. Perhaps you’re into that, but for your health let’s not,” you chastise, pulling the pen out of his grasp and tapping him on the head with it.

Grinning, he proceeds to try and bite your shoulder. You almost screech in alarm at his attack before remembering that you’re in a very public library with students already taking notice of the way you were practically falling out of your chair in horror. Clearing your throat and straightening your jacket, you give Jungkook a dirty look before turning away to focus on your textbook again.

Finals turned out to be much easier than you anticipated, which matched up to the past experiences you’d gathered from previous students of the course. It was clear to you that you and Jungkook had over-studied, but what captured your interest with greater intensity was the final grade in the course. As you happily noted the bright 97.6% flashing back at you on the screen, you could practically taste the yummy samgyeopsal on your tongue. Guess what makes food even better? When it’s free!

You slide over to Jungkook’s room and peek inside, hoping he wasn’t in the middle of a game. Luck finds you again when you witness him exiting out of the League of Legends application on his setup and spinning around in his bright orange gamer chair to greet your new intrusion. He quickly pulls his headset off to hear you better, to which you respond by diving face-first onto his bed and rolling up in his blanket like Y/N burrito just to bother him. When he makes a sound of annoyance and begins prying the sheets off you, you know you’ve attained your goal and begin helping him unravel you.

“What do you want?” he prods you off the bed so he can redo his sheets.

“Have you seen your PHIL grade yet?” you begin pretend-boxing with his back as the punching bag. He doesn’t seem to like this very much either, because he quickly spins around and grabs onto your fists to stop you.

“I have. Guess you’re taking me to KBBQ tonight?” he tries to tickle you out of spite, but you know he’s in a good mood. You’re rarely this playful with him, preferring to silently annoy him or treat him more like a troublesome younger brother to look out for. But what can you say? A free dinner peaks your mood.

“What’d you get then smartass?”

He pretends to think for a bit with his hand on his chin, “You first.”

Confidently, you stand up to him and puff your chest out in pride while jabbing his chest with each digit that comes out of your mouth.

“97.6% baby. Anyways, there’s this new spot 15 minutes away Luce told me about, I think you should treat me there-”

“Hm, 97.7% here baby,” a smirk sliding easily across his features as he mocks your previous tone, “What was that about a new place?”

Wide-eyed, you demand to see his grade on the university’s portal page. There’s no way this slick kid managed to get a higher grade than you…especially by a tiny percentage point! He’s got to be joking, maybe betting that you wouldn’t actually fact-check his claims or something…

Alas, as he shows you his screen while laughing in crazed triumph, you feel like breaking his obnoxious rainbow-lit keyboard as he runs around his room doing victory laps. You always thought luck would be on your side, especially when it came to studies, but perhaps you had used up all your free passes this year.

Breezing past him, you head to your room to find a light coat for the evening and your car keys. Jungkook seems to find that following you as you complete this task is entertaining, because you have to try your absolute best not to look at him as he tries to get your attention by making his typical crackhead expressions.

“Put on one of your weeb hoodies with the anime chicks and let’s go.”

“Wind out of your sails Y/N?”

He grabs you by the shoulders in an attempt to spin you around, but one well-aimed knee to the balls later, Jungkook seems to enjoy lying on the floor clutching his precious package more than teasing you with his antics.

Mental note: never make a bet with Guk again.

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warsofasoiaf · 4 years

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Have you played Fallout 4? What did you think of it?

Joseph Anderson had a phenomenal video on Fallout 4. Although it is enormous, so be careful. Overall, there were things to like and things not to like about Fallout 4. I’ll start with what I liked first. Throwing a cut in here because it’s long.

Combat in the first-person Fallout games has always been clunky, and enemy AI relatively largely consisted of straight charging or shooting from as maximum range as possible. Difficulty came primarily from enemy quantity, high damage output, or incredibly enemy hitpoints. The last of these has been a particular Bethesda problem in their games, with enemies being incredible damage sponges, making late-game fights a boring slog as you slowly whittle down their health while being impossible to damage in any meaningful capacity. While enemy variations aren’t nearly as high as the game’s fans would have you believe if you conceive of them as AI patterns, the AI activity did have some nice variations. Human enemies used cover, ghouls bobbed and weaved as you shot them, mole rats tried to ambush you. It’s got nothing on games with fully realized combat system, but it does make the combat that you do engage in much more enjoyable.

All of the random crap you can pick up in a Bethesda game having a purpose is another positive. It is a true nuisance to find out when playing a game that I hit my encumbrance limit only to find out it’s because I’ve picked up a bunch of brooms, bowls, and other garbage accidentally while grabbing coin and other worthwhile treasures. Actually having these things mean an object is worthy mechanically, aside from level design; typewriters are useful as items as opposed to something that shows you that the ruined building you’re in was formerly a newspaper. As crafting is a big portion of the game, having these things provide component parts that you use for crafting on their own creates more utility in these elements of clutter which still require modeling, rendering, placement, etc. Now if you need aluminum, you’ll try to raid something like a cannery because it will have aluminum cans, which is an excellent way to create player-generated initiative. It also reinforces one of the primary themes of the game which is crafting and design, where even the trailers of the game suggest building as a key idea of the game. Certainly sensible for a post-apocalyptic game to focus on building a new society upon the ruins of the older one, and given what the game was trying to do with their four factions mechanic, it’s clear that this was their intent, and good job for trying to ensure that things factor back into their principal intent.

Deathclaws look properly scary, the animations with Vault Boy were funny, there’s some pretty window dressing. The voice work wasn’t bad, the notable standout being Nick Valentine. The Brotherhood airship was an impressive visual. I had a little fun creating some basic settlements, particularly in Hangman’s Alley where I tried to create a network of suspended buildings and Spectacle Island where I had room to grant every prospective settler a shack. Bethesda clearly looked to create a game with mass market appeal, and I believe the metrics bears out that they succeeded in that regard. The robots in the USS Constitution quest were very funny, the writers were able to make the absolute ridiculousness of the situation work (curse you Weatherby Savings and Loan!) and framed it well as a comedic sidequest, with a final impressive visual if you side with the bots and the ship takes flight.

Now that this is out of the way, I think that a lot of what Fallout 4 did was not the right move.

The quest design was particularly atrocious in this regard. Most of the radiant quests boiled them down to a simple formula - go to the dungeon, get to the final room where you need to either kill the boss or get an item from the boss chest, return. In this game though, the main story quests often were boiled down to just this simple formula. You need to find a doodad from a Courser to complete your teleporter? Go to the dungeon, kill the boss, recover the item. The Railroad needs you to help an escaped synth! Do it by going to the dungeon and getting to the final room. This really hampers the enjoyment of games because the expressiveness of the setting and elements of an RPG is often explored through quests. Quests are meant to get you out into the world and give you an objective, but they are also meant to connect you to the people that you’re dealing with. If every quest is boiled down to the same procedure, that hurts the immersion, but the bigger sin is that when you return you have another quest waiting for you. That robs the player of the sense of accomplishment because there is no permanent solution to problems, even for a minute. There is no different end-state for the player to see the transition from one to the other and feel accomplished that they were the ones who did it. Other RPG’s always understood this - a D&D game might have a party save a town investigate an illness dealing with a town, take out an evil druid who has charmed the wildlife into attacking supply and trade shipments, slay goblins who are raiding cattle, there are a lot of possibilities that might even feel samey: if you’re killing charmed dire wolves or goblin cattle thieves, you’re still going to the dungeon and fighting the boss, the usual flair and variation came from encounter design. After you’d do that though, the NPC’s might say “Hey, Mom is feeling better after you cured that disease, she’s starting to walk again,” “Hey, we were able to send a shipment of wine from the vineyards out to the capital, here’s some coin for the shipment as reward for your service,” or even just a simple “Hey, thanks for taking out those cattle thieves.” There’s a sense of accomplishment even if it’s a fleeting “we did a cool thing.” Computer RPG’s are tougher in this regard, part of the sense of accomplishment in tabletop gaming is also with your friends, it’s a shared activity, but usually in that the reward was some experience and character growth and going to new content. There isn’t new content here in Fallout 4 though, because of the samey quest design and lack of progression.

The conversational depth was also ruined, with so much of the voice choices mangled by the system of conversation they designed. By demanding a four-choice system, they limited themselves to always requiring four options which completely mangled interactivity. The previous menu design allowed for as many lines as you wanted, even if the choices were usually beads on a string. The depth and variation, however, are even lower than what could be found in games like Mass Effect 3, and the small word descriptions were often so inaccurate that it created a massive disconnect between myself the player and the Sole Survivor, because they weren’t saying what I thought they would be saying. That prevented me from feeling immersed, because a “Sarcastic” option could be a witty joke or a threat that sounds like it should come out of a bouncer. The character options were already limited, with Nate being a veteran and Nora being a lawyer, but this lack of depth prevents me from feeling the character even moreso than a scripted backstory. You get those in games, but being unable to predict how I’m reacting is something that kills character.

Bethesda needs to end the “find (x) loved one” as a means to get people motivated to do a quest, or if they don’t want to rid themselves of that tool in their toolbox, they need to do a better job getting me to like them. More linear games can get away with this, but open world games encourage the sort of idle dicking around that doesn’t make any sense for a person who is attempting to find a family member. Morrowind did this much better, where your main task was to be an Imperial agent, and you were encouraged to join other factions and do quests as a means to establish a cover identity and get more acquainted with combat. Folks who didn’t usually ended up going to Hasphat Antabolius and getting their face kicked in by Snowy Granius. Here though, what sort of parent am I if instead of pursuing a lead to find my infant son I’m wandering over east because I saw what looked like a cool ruin, and I need XP to get my next perk (another gripe, perks that are simple percentage increases because they slow down advancement and make combat a slog if you don’t take them, depressing what should be a sense of accomplishment). By making us try to feel close with a character but by refusing to give us the players time with them, there is no sense of bonding. I felt more connection to James in Fallout 3 than I did for Sean, but even then, I felt more connection to him because he was voiced by Liam Neeson than because of any sense of fatherly affection. The same goes for the spouse and baby Sean, I feel little for them because I see them only a little. I know that I should care more, but I also know that I the player don’t because all that I was given is “you should care about them.” You need time to get to know characters in game, along with good writing and voicework. I like Nick because he quoted “The Raven” when seeing the Brotherhood airship and I thought that was excellent writing, I didn’t have any experiences with Sean to give me that same sense of bonding.

They’ve also ruined the worldbuilding. The first-person Fallout games have always had a problem with this, with Fallout 3 recycling Super Mutants, the Brotherhood of Steel, and other iconic Fallout things into Washington D.C. Part of this is almost certainly the same reason that The Force Awakens was such a dull rehash of the plot of A New Hope, they wanted to establish some sort of continuity with a new director to not frighten off old fans who they relied on to provide a significant majority of the sales. The problem of course, is that this runs into significant continuity problems, now needing Vault 87 to have a strain of FEV and having a joint Vault-Tec/US Government experiment program there on the East Coast, so we can have Super Mutants. Jackson’s chameleon isn’t native to Washington D.C., but we need to have Deathclaws because they’re the iconic scary Fallout enemy, as opposed to creating something new with the local fauna, which is only made worse because they did do that with the yao guai formed from the American black bear (the black bear doesn’t typically range in the Chesapeake Basin near DC these days, but it’s close enough and given the loss of humans to force them back they could easily return to their old pre-human rangings). Some creatures are functions of the overall setting and can be global, ghouls are the big one here since radiation would be a global thing and fitting considering Fallout is a post-apocalypse specifically destroyed by nuclear war. Others though, are clearly mutated creatures and so they would be more localized. Centaurs and floaters were designed by FEV experiments and collared by Super Mutants, they should really only be around Super Mutants. Radscorpions shouldn’t be around, there would probably be instead be mutated spiders. Making things worse are that the monster designers do develop some excellent enemies when they think about it. Far Harbor has a mutant hermit crab that uses a truck as a shell (a lobster restaurant truck, which is passable enough for a visual joke even if it falls apart when you think about other trucks that they might use) and a monster that uses an angler lure that resembles a crafting component - these are good ideas but the developers needed to awkwardly shoehorn in iconic Fallout things that have no place there. This isn’t to say that I’m in love with a lot of Fallout’s worldbuilding, a lot of the stuff in Fallout 2 I found to be kind of dumb particularly the talking deathclaws, but as the series went on it took objects without meaning. The G.E.C.K in Fallout 3 was pretty much a magic recombinator which makes no sense as a technology in a world devastated by resource collapse, something similar can be said about the Sierra Madre vending machines.

Fallout 4 though, had a lot of worldbuilding inconsistencies that really took an axe to the setting. The boy in the fridge outlasts the entire Great War, but apparently never needed to eat or drink water. This is, of course, stupid, because ghouls have always been shown to need to eat and drink - Fallout 1′s Necropolis section has a Water Chip but if you take it without finding an alternate source of clean water, the ghouls will die. Ghoul settler NPC’s that flock to your player-crafted towns require food and water. The entire thing was ruined from a complete lack of care, to build a quest where you reunite a lost boy with his still-alive ghoulified parents. I think this one bothers me not simply because of the egregious worldbuilding which isn’t even consistent in the very game it’s written it, but it’s done so frivolously for a boring escort quest. It feels scattershot, and that’s the problem I think with a lot of Fallout 4′s quests. They feel disconnected, like every writer worked in a cubicle without talking to any of the other writers. Same with things like the Lady in the Fog.

Are we done with that? Good, because now we’re going into the parts that I really dislike - the main quest and the factions. These are just awful. The developers took what folks really liked when it came to Fallout 2 and Fallout: New Vegas (Fallout 1 did have interesting factions but they were largely self-contained, more towns than anything else) and completely botched it. New Vegas was the clear inspiration for these factions, with the four faction model of NCR, Legion, House, and Indepenedent meaning that there were four different ways to go forward into the future, so we get three factions that fight each other and a fourth more player friendly faction that roughly resembles the Independent Vegas where you can pick and choose which factions you bring in with you and which you get rid of. Thematically, this fits in with the core of the game, crafting is a big portion of what you do and so crafting what sort of world the Commonwealth would be is simply a logical extension of it. The factions aren’t presented well though. The Railroad are impossibly naive and don’t demonstrate any rougher edges like denying supplies to humans in order to fuel their synth effort, even though such a thing should be evident if the post-apocalypse of the Commonwealth is to be believed. The Institute are sinister murderers and replacers without bringing any of the advanced technology that could provide some benefit such as the gigantic orange gourd that can grow. So much of their kill-and-replace mentality seems to be done for no great overarching purpose. The Minutemen are basically blank, pretty much just a catch-all for the player-built settlements, though the player as the leader of the Minutemen ends up getting bossed around by Preston to the point of the faction rejecting your commands to proceed with the main quest, a significant problem with Bethesda factions where you are the leader but never get any actual sense of leadership. There doesn’t appear to be any addressing of the failures of the previous Minutemen whether that be the previous summit, or new problems such as settlements feuding with each other requiring the general to intervene and mediate. The Brotherhood come the closest to a real faction with advantages and drawbacks if you squint, they are feudal overlords with the firepower to fight Super Mutants and other mutated nasties, but also violently reject ghouls and synths as part of their violent dogma except for seemingly not caring when you bring a companion around or killing ghoul settlers in settlements they control. But even then, we don’t really see the Brotherhood providing protection to the settlements that they demand for food, the typical radiant quest to destroy a pack of feral ghouls or super mutants is directed from a Brotherhood quest giver to a randomly determined location, hardly a good way to illustrate whether or not the Brotherhood is actually protecting settlements that they administer. We see little change in the way of the Commonwealth save that certain factions are alive or not because the game needs to stay active in order to perform radiant quests, so not even the signature ending slideshows can give us the illusion of effects building off of our actions. This is contrary to the theme of building a better world in the Commonwealth because there is no building.

Special notice must be given to the Nuka-World raiders because they show the big problems with the factions. You can be a Raider in Nuka-World but only after becoming the Overboss, which is fair enough. But you’re already a Minuteman, but the Minutemen don’t activate any kill-on-sight order and Preston still helps you out. The game is so terrified of people losing out on content that they make permanent consequences rare, and when you do something like order an attack, it can be rescinded automatically if one of your companions is there. As an Overboss, you do grunt work in the Commonwealth, and the factions get mad and pissy if you don’t give them things despite even if you only give one section of the park to one of the factions, that’s more than they got from Colter. It’s like they don’t exist until the player shows up, which is exactly how a lot of modern Bethesda character and faction building seems to be. While in most computer games a sort of uneasy status quo is the desired beginning state because it gives the protagonist the chance to make ripples while justifying the existence of a status that allows the player to change it, it has to be applied consistently.

The main quest itself is silly. There’s a decent twist with Sean becoming Father that sort of works, which would have worked much better if we had actually gotten a chance to bond with him, although the continuity of everything gets wiggy quick. When he said that he looked over the world and saw nothing but despair, I was wondering if they were going to actually bring a big question up and a debate between Father and the Player, the idea of what worth the people on the surface have, but it goes nowhere, it’s a missed opportunity. The main quest is just a means to meet all four factions and it’s a barebones skeleton at best. There are some interesting concepts they try, but what they do often falls flat. They try to establish some sort of empathy for Kellogg in the memory den, but it’s lazy and cheap because he kidnaps a baby and wastes your spouse, a wasted effort of empathy only made worse when you get criticized for not showing any sympathy. Kellogg then shows up in Nick’s memory for one second and then that little story nugget is ignored. The half-baked nature of the story keeps being brought back up, which is a pity because we actually saw them do a competent job in Far Harbor. The Followers of Atom are crazy and they really aren’t sympathetic in any way, but some of the folks inside the sub aren’t so bad that it might prevent you from wanting to detonate the sub, or at least you might think enough that you look for another solution. DiMA did some monstrous things, and if you bring him to justice, the game actually takes the time to evaluate whether or not you helped out Far Harbor, with meaningful consequences being taken if you took the time to do the sidequests which imparts far more meaning to them.

While there’s a lot of problems that show up in terms of binary completion, the question of whether to replace Tektus and turn the Children of Atom to a more moderate path is a good question, it actually gives a lot more merit to the Institute if they were ever to have been shown to enact the same level of care. That only makes the Fallout problems stand out more, because it shows that they were capable of it but didn’t. This isn’t the only missed opportunity, synths themselves become a big problem. The goal was to create a very paranoid feeling but it was so sorely under-utilized that I never grew suspicious of folks because the game never gave me enough incentive to be suspicious of them. I didn’t think that Bethesda made synths that would give you false information or ambush you because that would have been potentially missed content. The idea of whether you are a synth or not is clearly an attempt to give the game more depth than it is presenting. You’re not a synth, Father’s actions make no sense if you are one, and DiMA attempting to make you think you are is silly because you know you aren’t one.

I think the game would have been much better if they had dropped the notion of Fallout entirely. If they had instead looked to create an open-world post-apocalyptic game focusing on crafting and building towns, perhaps with an eventual goal state of building many towns, establishing transportation networks, and rebuilding a junkyard society as a decent place (or going full Mad Max Bartertown complete with a Thunderdome for players looking for an evil and over-the-top option). That might have been an interesting game for Bethesda to potentially develop a new IP, even contracting with smaller studios for those who wish to tell story-heavy games in the setting. Instead, they applied Fallout like a bad paint job, cobbling together weak RP elements and story that made the game feel like a hydra that couldn’t recognize it was one being with multiple heads, constantly tearing the other parts of itself to ribbons.

If I wanted to further improve it, I think I would have instead made the spouse a synth. It would require some serious reworking, but I would have made it so that Sean did believe that synths were people, or that they were real enough that the difference was negligible, they had free will. During the initial grab, the Institute took the entire cryopod where Sean was, baby and parent both. They used Sean to create the next generation of synths, but something happened with the parent, and they died during defrost. Sean hates the Institute for what they did, but what happened was truly a medical complication, not malicious in any way. When he learns that the player character is active, he creates a synth programmed to believe they are the spouse. He believes that exposing who he really is to the surviving parent would be traumatic, and as he hears that the player character is thriving, he wants to give them a chance at a normal life, and to alleviate the loss that he had in his life with the loss of his own parents. So the spouse is sent to you, and for a long time, you and the spouse have no idea. You adventure together, you build settlements together, the game encourages you to have a good relationship. It doesn’t have to be hunky dory, and I’d argue it’s actually better if it’s not. Have the spouse be programmed with some rough experiences in the Wasteland, so they’re nervous, skittish, maybe even a little resentful that the player character snoozed their way through everything, but slowly rebuild the relationship. That way, when the quest eventually comes where you find the truth, the player character has to confront that reality. Then when you confront Sean, Sean explains himself and the player is given the choice to forgive him, be understanding but still angry, or be hugely pissed at the manipulation. That’s drama that uses the core theme of what synths are about with the whole kill-and-replace motif the Institute does. There’s a plot twist that batters the player, there’s one that’s just messy and gross and tough to reconcile. There’s one where the conclusion the player comes to is valid because it’s the player themselves deciding what the meaning of it is.

So overall, I see Fallout 4 as a bunch of missed opportunities and clumsy writing wrapped up in the popular shallow open-worlds that triple-A games end up having.

Thanks for the question, Jackie.

SomethingLikeALawyer, Hand of the King

#fallout 4 #fallout #video game reviews

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thegayagenda-forkids · 5 years

Text

T.J. Goodman and Cyrus Kippen

AO3 Link

Sequel

“I have no idea if this is the cutest or the dorkiest couple outfit you two could have come up with,” Buffy said, adjusting her red and gold tie.

“Says Hermione Granger,” Cyrus retorted, gelling up his hair, frowning as he tried to get it to look *just* right. “You got the flashcards, right?”

“I did,” Buffy said cautiously. “And I think T.J. is going to flip when he sees all of this effort you put in.”

“Of course he put in all this effort,” Andi said, straightening out her bow tie. “Besides, I think I win at the nerdiest outfit.”

Both of her friends groaned. “It doesn’t count if you’re going as an actual nerd!” Cyrus said. “And I still can’t believe I lent you my old glasses for this.”

“You don’t even use them anymore because the prescription is out of date,” she argued back. “Besides, look who’s talking about borrowing clothing items.”

“This is different,” he said as a matter of fact.

“Why is it different?”

“Because...this is the only way to sell it...Besides, my outfit belongs to Buffy.”

“And you can keep it. That is from two basketball teams ago,” she said. Finally Cyrus smiled when he got the hair right and pulled on a zip-up hoodie, leaving it open so that the Jefferson Middle School Basketball jersey underneath was visible.

“Well? Ladies?”

“Whoa…you’re selling it,” Andi said.

“Yup. You look like him.”

Cyrus looked in the mirror and smirked. “I’m no longer Cyrus Goodman. Until Midnight tonight, call me T.J. Kippen.”

______________

Soon there were knocks at the Goodman’s front door. It was the GHC’s dates for the night, and Jonah, all in costume ready to see their other halves. Jonah wore a Shazam costume since everyone said that the actor who played Billy Batson looked like him. He wasn’t really into costumes all that much but they all begged him to the point he felt like a total jerk if he didn’t wear it.

Marty was dressed up like Ron Weasley, so even though he also wore a Gryffindor robe and tie, he swapped out the usual sweater for a burgundy one with a big gold “R” on the font and even found a twig, snapped it, then wrapped an ungodly amount of tape around it. He knew Buffy would commit and stole some of her dad’s old law books to carry around.

Amber wore her cheerleading uniform, but kept her hair down and curled, only putting up a small section into her giant hair bow. Her sneakers were shining white. Her couple outfit with Andi would be the nerd and the cheerleader, but with a gay twist. Instead of fighting for some boy like Taylor Swift’s “You belong with me” video, they were dating each other.

But T.J.’s won out of those guys, and he was excited to see Cyrus’s interpretation. He was dressed up in a patterned button down, had a messenger bag, and even slicked his hair down some. Just in case, he had the old Bar Mitzvah sweatshirt tucked in the bag just in case people didn’t realize what he was doing.

Cyrus’s mom opened the door and T.J. immediately put on his cheesiest smile and went “Hello, hello, hello!”

Mrs. Goodman couldn’t help but start laughing. “Oh my god, I’m not sure if this means you two hang out too much or you two are perfect for each other.”

“Both.” Marty and Amber said together.

“Hey, don’t hate,” he said back to them. “So...where is the wonderful, amazing, puppy-dog of a human being T.J. Kippen?” He joked.

“All three of them are upstairs,” she said. “And I want pictures of you all before you leave for the party!”

They were all headed upstairs and knocked on the bedroom door. Cyrus, dressed as T.J. was the one who opened the door and both boys almost lost composure immediately. They tried not to let it show, but they quickly took a breath and looked looked at each other. “Cyrus, My man,” Cyrus deepened his voice as much as he physically could. “You look Niceberg.”

T.J. had to bite his tongue for a second so that he didn’t laugh and he started talking, getting more and more excited and speaking faster as he did. “Wow Teej, you look absolutely amazing because you are amazing because this is going to be the best Halloween ever and you’re wearing a hoodie that matches your eyes and your jersey which you always look super hot in…”

“Oh my god, what did we sign up for,” Amber groaned and moved past them to go kiss her Nerdy Andi.

“I’m just gonna hang with my totally fly Cy guy,” Cyrus said, pulling a step stool from behind the door and standing on it so he could simulate the reverse of the height difference between the two. Jonah actually broke down laughing at that.

“And I get to be with my super cool, absolutely amazing boyfriend,” T.J. said, looking up at Cyrus. So that’s how it felt for him. T.J. was suddenly very aware of his own height.

“Good god, and I thought we were bad with out-extra-ing each other,” Marty said, putting his arm around Buffy’s shoulders. “Let's get to the party before this they somehow derail everything.”

“How would they even derail it?” Andi asked.

“Sure, act like we aren’t standing in front of you,” T.J. said.

“Do not underestimate my brother’s narcissism,” Amber said. “The sooner we’re out in public, the more guaranteed we are for having the two stay within a PG rating.”

“Hey, just because I can shoot three pointers with ease, or cross the court in seconds flat, doesn’t mean I am so self-absorbed,” Cyrus said, and everyone but Buffy and Andi looked at him in awe.

“What did you say?” Marty asked.

“What? Just tossing out some b-ball lingo. I’m just saying that it doesn’t matter that I truly rock because I can shoot nothing but net from half court, I’m just that amazing of a point guard,” he said. “But I’m an even more amazing boyfriend to my muffin of a man.”

T.J. was staring at him open-mouthed. “H..how?”

Buffy sighed and pulled a twenty dollar bill from her robe pocket. “I regret this so much...you all honestly could not begin to imagine.”

“Now I understand completely,” Marty said. “Come on, we have a party to get to.”

_________________

Everyone piled into the Kippen minivan that Mrs. Kippen allowed them to borrow, with T.J. driving and Cyrus in the passenger seat. “Are you sure you should drive, Underdog?” Cyrus said, back in T.J. mode. “I mean, you did almost fail your driver’s test.”

“I aced the written part and technically passed the driving part by like...a point,” T.J. replied. “I’m sure I’m fine for one night. Besides, your mom thinks I’m a good influence on you.”

“You totally are, you got me to start getting help for math. It was totally Niceburg.”

T.J. hissed under his breath, “I said it that word one time….”

Cyrus smirked at him from the passenger seat.

Marty opened his mouth and Buffy cut him off. “If you say blimey or bloody hell, I’m throwing you out of this car.”

Marty closed his mouth.

“I’m feeling very single right about now,” Jonah said.

“Ironic considering just about everyone attracted to men has had a crush on you,” Buffy said. “Except for me. You were too...swoopy for my type.”

“Swoopy?”

“You know...like Justin Bieber back in the olden days? Swoopy.”

“And now I’m…?”

“Still a little swoopy, but much more human.” Everyone let out noises of agreement.

“Human?” He raised an eyebrow. “Ironic considering I’m dressed like...well…” he swished his Shazam cape.

“Dude, you were above the whole world back in the day,” Cyrus said. “Like some unattainable god! I couldn’t even just say Jonah when I talked to you. I had to say your full name.”

“Wow...so wait...you had a crush on me?” Jonah asked.

“Ladies and gentleman, the most oblivious man on earth,” Marty announced holding his arm out and presenting Jonah. “Raise your hand if you’ve ever been attracted to Jonah Beck.”

Everyone in the car except for Buffy and Marty (and obviously Jonah himself) raised their hands.

“Wait...Andi and Amber I know because I’ve dated both of you on and off...Cyrus...well...yeah I can see that...but...T.J.?”

“Yeah T.J.,” T.J. said. “Why else do you think I was a total dick to you in little league...or just a dick overall?”

“Never doubt the powers of heterocompuslivity and internalized homophobia,” Cyrus said.

“That intense?” Jonah asked and literally everyone except Buffy in the car shouted “YES!”

“Yeah Jo, you and I are the only non-queers in here as far as I can tell.”

“As far as you can tell?”

“Well, I know I’m straight,” she said. “You haven’t said straight or otherwise.”

He paused. “I mean...I’m into girls…”

“Be free to be,” Marty said. “That’s all that matters.”

“Sounds good to me,” he said. “So Buffy is the only confirmed straight, and I just have a question mark dangling.”

“Hey, still unique even among the majority,” she teased.

___________________

The party was being held in some warehouse downtown, and everyone was in costume, some as a couple, most as a standalone costume. Buffy and Marty were just playing around with each other, daring the other to the tabletop games and later, to who could stay in a kiss the longest. People told them to get a room, and those people got the finger.

Amber and Andi spent the whole night dancing and mingling with other people in costume, though sometimes a guy would try to hit on Amber and brought a friend with them to hit on Andi. They always seemed confused when she said that she was in a relationship, and then once or twice, got so annoyed that she pulled Andi in by the bow tie and kissed her deeply.

T.J. and Cyrus meanwhile, continued their shenanigans, pretending to be the other, complimenting both themselves and the other, being all sappy with each other. T.J. even sat down for most of the evening so that Cyrus could stand and keep the height difference.

People loved seeing how in sync the couple were, and even let them choose several songs over the course of the night so the two could dance together. They were even able to reunite almost everyone and do a reprise of “Born this Way,” except this time one of T.J.’s hands was occupied by Cyrus holding it tightly and kissing the back of it. They ended their night with the final chords of the song and kissed each other deeply on stage while everyone cheered. Buffy and Marty also kissed next to Andi and Amber who kissed as well. Jonah jokingly hugged himself tightly and jumped up and down.

_____________

They were all pretty much exhausted by the time they were leaving and thankful that the Macks agreed to host the group sleepover, with the rule being that they all had to sleep in sleeping bags in the living room to police each other.

T.J. and Cyrus were the last ones awake and they were cuddling, leaning against the couch, using their sleeping bags as blankets as they watched some Disney movies on mute with subtitles on as to not wake up the others.

“Hey,” T.J. said softly, his arms around Cyrus, who was using him as a pillow. “You know I love you, right?”

“Yeah,” he said sleepily, smiling up at T.J. “I love you too.” They leaned in and kissed each other softly. “I love you Mr. Goodman,” Cyrus teased.

“And I love you Mr. Kippen,” T.J. teased back, his fingers dancing playfully over Cyrus’s palm. “You know...I actually kinda like the sound of that. Mr. Goodman…”

“I was about to say the opposite,” Cyrus said back, his eyes close to closing. “I prefer the sound of Mr. Kippen.”

“How about a compromise then,” T.J. said, starting to get tired as well, but wanting to stay awake for as long as Cyrus was. “Mr. Goodman-Kippen.”

“Mr. Goodman-Kippen,” Cyrus yawned that last part. “I really like that...I can’t wait…”

T.J. watched him fall asleep, breathing evenly against his chest and turned off the T.V., adjusting the two of them so that they were lying down and making sure that Cyrus didn’t wake up. T.J. thought about his plans of surprising the group with a trip to Disney World for their senior year graduation trip, and then presenting Cyrus with a very special small box with a special and important gift inside. He smiled at the thought and laced his fingers with Cyrus’s. “Yeah...can’t wait either…”

Tag list: @theobligatedklutz @anarcoqueer1994 @honey-aes @luzawithoutu @tyrus-and-the-swings @losrgeekwhatevr

#My fics #andi mack #tyrus #ambi #cyrus goodman #muffy #tj kippen #amber #buffy

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canvaswolfdoll · 4 years

Text

CanvasWatches: Carole & Tuesday

A charming SciFi anime focusing more on the cast’s day-to-day lives than some major sociopolitical conflict that requires laser gun diplomacy? Set on a Terraformed Mars with brick and mortar solarpunk aesthetic? I can get into that.

The fact that Carole & Tuesday is a science fiction story came as a surprise, as most of the buzz and promotion that crossed my social feeds focused on the street performance aspects. Then, surprise! Tabletop fast food ordering and pizzerias that grow their tomatoes in house![1] Which is the sort of speculative fiction I’m enjoying nowadays: normal life with the fantastic acting as seasoning to spice up the world around them.

I’ve never paid special attention to music. I listen to music obviously, but rarely in any sort of analytical capacity. It’s pretty sounds that help fill in the background while I write, or to convey emotion in a musical, or to mark the start and end of a show I’m watching. I’ve never sought out music to listen to when looking for entertainment, it’s always a byproduct of whatever media I’m engaged with at the moment. Heck, these days, when I’m too lazy to set my car radio up to play a podcast, I just drive in silence.[2]

I sometimes feel I’m missing something by not engaging with the art form in a more conscious manner, and I only recently became aware that albums are a carefully curated thing instead of a collection of the performer’s most recent songs, so… yeah. Kind of a cultural blindspot.[3]

This tangent doesn’t even end with a neat little note of how Carole & Tuesday had inspired me to consume music in a more deliberate and contemplative manner. The soundtrack includes plenty of insert songs I happily threw on my background noise playlists,[4] and what few albums I seek out are video game and anime soundtracks.[5]

Carole & Tuesday was chiefly directed by Shinichiro Watanabe, who’s name was made with the Jazzy Space Epic Cowboy Bebop and Hip-Hop Samurai Series Samurai Champloo. It was probably inevitable he would produce an anime where music took front stage instead of informing tone.

Carole & Tuesday takes inspiration from Pop, but is unafraid to feature and mix other genres, such as Opera and Rap.[6] What’s really exciting is the decision to have the insert songs performed in English.

Historically, when diegetic music is present in anime, the song is performed in Japanese, and most dubs make the smart decision to leave the japanese audio and subtitle them. I may prefer dubs for my various reasons, but I wouldn’t dare ask for the policy on subbed music to change. Carole & Tuesday took an international view to its production, and thus used the most widely spoken language when no one (reasonable) would begrudge the use of Japanese performers.

Netflix picked up the show as part of their continued haphazard attempts to seize the genre with an attitude out of the early 2000s, and the company tapped to record the English dub did an admirable job matching voice performances believably similar to the singing voices.

Which may be the first time that speaking actors were hired to fit the singers.

The story takes place on Mars in the future year of… 50 years after humanity started migrating to Mars. I cannot find a year cited, which is the smart and wise choice and I am super annoyed I’m not going to be able to make jokes about the production's attempts and failure to predict the future.

50 years after starting to migrate over to the red planet, humanity has terraformed large swathes of Mars into a Solarpunk paradise. Earth is apparently not in a great state as refugees are desperately making their way to the planet, but Earth remains offscreen for the entire run. Fortunately no one has any giant robots,[7] so the two planets aren’t at war. While Mars has been made hospitable enough, the atmosphere does occasionally mess with the genetics of residents.

That’s just background details, however. The story is really about the titular duo. Tuesday is introduced fleeing the mansion of her politician mother, hopping onto a cattle train like Kiki, and riding off to Alba City with only a quitar and robotic luggage to keep her company, where she stumbles upon Refugee Orphan Carole busking with a keyboard. The two have a jam session and decide to become a musical act.

Meanwhile, famed child star Angela Carpenter[8] is setting to transition from a modeling career to an exciting career singing. Her mother pulls strings and utilizes her connections to team up with Tao, a genius of Artificial Intelligence Design who is willing to use his technology to provide Angela with computer generated music and lyrics.

Thus we have the start of a sci-fi John Henry Tale where the battle is not hammer and steel but instruments and voice.

I say ‘the start’ because while the two teams utilize different methods to produce their music, their methods are never weighed against one another. In fact, there’s barely a one-sided rivalry, as Angela is jealous of the titular duo’s ability to enjoy their career, and our two heroes take only a polite, professional view of Angela’s rising career.

Carole and Tuesday are both weighed down by a common problem with anime protagonists: they’re just nice. There’s a certain fear when writing protagonists, especially females, of accidentally making them off-putting that the writers overcorrect and don’t let the hero make mistakes or have much personality, to the point that Carole and Tuesday have very little agency.

Instead, it’s Gus, the ex-rock star manager the duo acquire, that does the leg work and takes risks while Carole and Tuesday just sing nice songs then sit back while the plotlines orbiting their rise to success are resolved by the men.

The show also can’t choose a lane, playing with several story threads that could carry full 24-episode stories by themselves, but instead are dealt with as lightly as possible.

We start with the story of a run-away from decadence and a refugee bringing their world views together, but that instead goes into a tournament arc disguised as a talent contest, then the drama of navigating the music industry, before ending with the presidential run of Tuesday’s mother causing public unrest. Carole and Tuesday don’t make a meaningful choice that affects any of these stories.

Meanwhile, Angela gets a story of asserting her identity while already in public view, facing dangers both external and internal on her journey.

Surprisingly, this is the first show in a while that I didn't resent for transitioning out of the episodic, playing with the premise portion. While Carole and Tuesday were attempting to get their big break, bopping around misadventures trying to get contacts, gigs, and filming a music video, Angela looms in her plotline, building up to the inevitable rivalry.

Angela is introduced just before her mother, Dahlia, starts reworking Angela's career from modeling to singing, hiring Tao, renowned AI designer, as Angela's producer. Angela experiences mild paranoia from Tao's standoffish nature, machinery, and making a holographic simulation of Angela. So Angela had a more consistent narrative during the first arc.

Introductions out of the way, it's time for everyone's favorite trope: the tournament arc! In the form of ‘Space!'s got Talent’ Generic Brand Named into Mar's Brightest. The main duo meets their rival, backstage drama ensues, some very good music is performed, and things are set up to technically give both Carole and Tuesday as well as Angela a win at the end.

With publicity achieved, Gus starts getting to work preparing the girls' debut album and booking appearances, as well as meeting other artists and (briefly) Carole’s father. We learn about Gus’s past client, Flora, who dropped Gus as soon as she found success, then found herself without a support base and spiraled into depression and addiction. Carole and Tuesday remain upbeat and optimistic.

Meanwhile, Angela starts getting harassed by a stalker and feeling helpless and poorly supported by those around her. Tao takes point on stopping the stalker when the police fail, ultimately taking him down before the stalker could pull a Mark David Chapman.

The story bleeds into the final act, as the presidential campaign of Valerie Simmons, Tuesday’s mother, moves forward in prominence. The AI algorithm Valerie is utilizing suggests she take an anti-immigration stance, which the woman follows in an attempt to further her career. Musicians are getting harassed by law enforcement, Tuesday’s brother Spencer is becoming uneasy with being an accessory to the campaign, and starts meeting with a reporter with information that Valerie’s campaign manager orchestrated a terrorist attack to villainize immigrants. Spencer and the reporter argue over how many chances to give Valerie, and agree on Spencer taking the evidence to Valerie, and if she doesn’t back down, then they’ll leak the scandal. Valerie, seeing the crimes committed for her benefit, gracefully renounces her candidacy. It’s very heart warming.

Carole and Tuesday write a protest song, and gather friends to sing it. This protest song has no observable impact.

Meanwhile, Angela learns she’s adopted, and her mother suffers a heart-attack shortly before Angela is set to win a Martian Grammy, and Angela spirals into depression and prescription drug abuse, to the point of collapsing at the end of her Grammy performance, being rushed to the hospital and missing her mother’s passing and funeral. Angela is adrift. She has no family, no support, and is just lonely.

Tao, who was working to sabotage Valerie’s campaign and burning as many bridges as possible after being targeted for refusing to assist the campaign, appears in Angela’s hospital room to drop a bomb: both he and Angela are designer babies, and though Tao must go into hiding now, he does intend to look out for his little sister.

Angela joins the performance of Carole and Tuesday’s protest song.

If it’s not already clear, I feel the story of Carole and Tuesday themselves was pretty lacking.

So, how would I rework this? Step one: we’re either cutting Carole and Tuesday, or combining them into a single character and making Angela the second. With the second option, Angela can maintain her backstory, but take Carole’s introduction of fleeing her family mansion and attempting to strike out on her own, meeting up with Carole and forming an act. To maintain the final arc, Carole would need to be reworked into the abandoned daughter of Tuesday’s late father, making her the half sister of Spencer and something to be hidden by Valerie Simmons’ campaign.

We then intermingle the two plotlines: Gus maintains his managerial position, and eventually convinces Angela to use her connections and mother to get her career jumpstarted, Ms. Carpenter still brings in Tao to write music, and now we can lean more into the AI-written music versus human compositions subplot as well as creative differences, which can lead to an arc where Angela and Carolday split to attempt solo careers, each taking a different manager.[9] Dahlia still has her issues and passes away, Angela her depressive spiral, but now Gus gets pathos by being there to help his client out of self-destruction, and the final number can also be a reconciliation of the main musical duo. The song can even be a combination of AI and human composition.

Carolday, meanwhile, discovers her relation to the anti-immigrant candidate and has to decide if she wants to finally have a family with Valerie and Spencer or stand up for her beliefs and assist a politician in bringing the campaign down. The resolution of the political plot can remain a happy compromise, but Carolday gets a slightly more active role in it.

The animation and world-building is great, and Angela’s arc is very strong. But the writing was too afraid to let either Carole or Tuesday dip into unlikeability that they become props to their own storyline, which is made further unfortunate as their supporting cast that do make decisions are mostly men.

The series is also riddled with a lot of good starts. Many short vignettes or minor details that could be made into full animes by themselves. Show more of Carole and Tuesday’s attempts to break into the music industry while also trying to pay bills and put food on their table. An expansion on the other competitors at Mars Brightest.[10] Heck, expand the roster of the competition and dig more into backstage drama. Carole’s father, who was sent to prison and found his wife dead and daughter sent to another planet upon his release, could carry a story of his own on his back! Valerie’s presidential run and the plight of Earth immigrants given more attention. Heck, even the story of how Earth, the origins of the human species, fell into being a third-world planet people are desperate to leave.

I’d even watch a series about the solarpunk pizzeria that grows their own tomatoes.

The music is really good, however, featuring many artists and styles, and those by our main duo wouldn’t sound out of place on a car radio or licensed on a primetime television show.

It’s a good show, but not an eternal classic. Maybe a second choice for someone digging deeper into anime. However, if its placement on Netflix means it’s someone’s introduction to Anime, that wouldn’t be terrible. Give it a watch if you want something to wind down for bed, or want inspiration for your own speculative fiction.

Kataal kataal.

[1] Solarpunk’s neat. [2] Mostly because I lost all my preset stations last time I took my car in for fixing, and I don't actually know any to punch in. Also, I use youtube for music when writing. [3] Also means I’m wholly unprepared to find music when I finally get a podcast project off the ground. [4] The soundtrack is very present on Spotify, which is nice. [5] I am finding myself increasingly intrigued by vinyl records, however. Probably a bit extravagant, and difficult considering my narrow interests. [6] Presumably to annoy fans of both. [7] Bam! Gundam reference! Anyone have Bingo yet? [8] Though I could swear they never use her last name on screen. [9] I’d find it amusing if Angela takes Gus and Carolday teams up with Dahlia, but the rest of my outline works better if Angela remains with Dahlia. [10] Though this one’s not a major loss. Typical tournament arc stuff.

#CanvasWatches #carole and tuesday #anime #CanvasReviews

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aion-rsa · 4 years

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Cyberpunk 2077: Lore and History of the Game’s Universe

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Cyberpunk 2077 is far and away one of 2020’s most anticipated games. Not only is it the latest project from the studio behind the brilliant Witcher video game series, but it’s based on the incredibly popular Cyberpunk tabletop RPG franchise which many genre fans consider to be one of the medium’s finest in terms of world-building and storytelling.

Considering that the universe of Cyberpunk contains enough lore to fill several books, it’s understandable that you may feel a bit overwhelmed when you think about jumping into this world for the first time via Cyberpunk 2077. So far as that goes, an understanding of even the basics of the Cyberpunk’s lore may help you feel better prepared for the adventure developer CD Projekt Red has spent years crafting.

So while we could spend weeks completely breaking down the history of everything Cyberpunk, here is a brief primer on some of the most notable pieces of Cyberpunk 2077‘s lore and the greater history of the Cyberpunk universe.

The History of Cyberpunk 2077’s World

Up until a point, the history of Cyberpunk 2077’s world largely echoes that of our own (plus or minus some obvious deviations in terms of certain historical events and characters). However, that all changes by 1990.

It was around that time that the United States stepped up its war against drug cartels and corrupt governments in Central America. Their desire to win the war on drugs becomes so intense that they even resorted to forms of chemical combat. Such tactics not only cause former allies to denounce the U.S. but inspired the most powerful cartels to take the drug war battles to U.S. soil. In 1993, a cartel is even able to detonate a nuclear device in New York City.

In 1994, a global market collapse, and another nuclear incident in Pittsburgh, plunge the United States into further disarray. Corporations began taking over more aspects of Unites States life (including control over agriculture production) in an attempt to stabilize an increasingly uncertain world. Nevertheless, things somehow get worse in 1996 when the President and Vice President of the United States are assassinated.

As various gangs rise across the country in response to this incredible shift in the power structure, the NSA, CIA, FBI, and DEA form the “‘Gang of Four” and the Defense Secretary of the United States claims executive power in order to declare martial law. We hope this won’t come as too much of a surprise, but that move is not successful. More and more gangs appear across the United States as officials struggle to keep up with the madness. Around that same time, a variety of natural and unnatural disasters kill millions and inspire some states (including California) to secede.

It’s then that more and more corporations step up and use their resources (which now include private armies in most cases) to effectively secure control of what remains of the United States and many other parts of the world. Instead of bringing peace, though, these corporations soon launch new wars against each other for optimal business opportunities.

Somewhere along the way, advancements in technology afforded people the opportunity to enhance themselves with various cybernetic implants. While those implants are largely used by gangs, soldiers, and operatives, they’ve also worked their way into daily life. This discrepancy between available technology and the horrors of the world (as well as some drastic gaps in financial equality) is why you see some areas that look incredibly advanced and “futuristic” next to areas that appear to be dangerously underdeveloped.

That’s the rough state we find the world in at the start of Cyberpunk 2077.

What is Night City?

In 1992, a wealthy corporate executive named Richard Night began work on a massive urban development project he referred to as Coronado City. Night’s goal was to establish a city that would essentially be a corporate paradise and a testament to the philosophy of capitalism.

Night also believed that the city could one day be free of the crime and economic horrors that plagued the rest of the United States (as well as many of the laws which attempted to regulate corporations). Considering how many poor workers died building the city, though, that vision was certainly a matter of perspective.

In 1998, Night was murdered by organized crime elements who felt nobody left room for them in Night’s vision for Coronado City. That’s when Coronado City was renamed Night City in honor of its founder.

That’s also when various gangs started to clash with the corporate armies on the streets of the new city. That battle lasted until around 2005 when the corporations decided to pull out of Night City and leave the gangs to battle for control over what remained. At the peak of the Night City gang wars (around 2011), the Arasaka corporation intervened to take on the now weakened gangs in order to secure Night City for the corporations once more.

While the corporations did gain control of Night City for all intents and purposes, gangs and the corporate armies still clash with and amongst each other often by the time you enter Night City in Cyberpunk 2077.

What are the Badlands?

Night City seems to be located roughly near the geographic region of San Diego, but a series of devastating droughts and various unnatural disasters essentially dried out the area’s lush landscapes. This newly formed desert is regularly referred to as the Badlands.

Over the years, the people who either grew tired of Night City’s corporate power structure or simply had no other options began to form nomadic gangs that roamed the Badlands in search of what little food, water, and other vital resources remained. If you’re picturing the world of Mad Max, you’re not far off.

While some smaller gangs remain in the Badlands, the two largest “families” (the Aldecaldos and Wraiths) control most of the region. Those gangs will occasionally perform favors for the corporate rulers of Night City (as well as some of the city’s biggest criminal factions), but the largest corporations in Night City try to maintain border security and keep the Badlands gangs away.

Interestingly, a character creation option in Cyberpunk 2077 will allow you to start as a Badlands nomad who eventually works their way to Night City. This just confirms that it is possible for individuals to work their way into the urban area.

Games

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By Matthew Byrd

What Are the Major Night City Corporations?

Various “megacorporations” have outposts in Night City where they battle for control amongst each other and with the organized (and less-than-organized) crime elements that roam the city streets. These megacorporations are comprised of various smaller corporations that share general interests and revenue streams. Here are some of the biggest megacorporations you’ll encounter in Night City:

ManuCorps

Arguably the biggest and most powerful megacorporation in Night City, ManuCorps focuses on the steady industry of manufacturing. Corporations under the ManuCorps banner include Araska, Militech, Mitsuzuki, and EBM.

AgriCorps

When various farms across the United States began to go under in the ‘90s, corporations stepped in to form AgriCorps: a megacorporation that controls much of the agriculture in the United States and nearby independent areas. Agricorps is largely comprised of Petrochem, SovOil, ConAg, and Akaromi BioCorp.

CyberCorps

Cybercorps is basically the Silicon Valley of Cyberpunk. This megacorporation handles most of the technological development in the world. CyberCorps corporations include Zetatech, Microtech, and Akari Heavy Industries.

BioCorps

BioCorps primarily handles the development and implementation of human augmentation technology, while some companies under this umbrella focus on genetically altered crops. BioCorps companies include Biotechnica, Cyphire Cyberware, and Bakumatsu Chipmasters.

ArmaCorps

The companies that form the ArmaCorps megacorporation focus on training and deploying security forces. They include some of the largest corporations in the Cyberpunk universe such as Arasaka, Militech, and Lazarus.

MediaCorps

MediaCorps is just a good old-fashioned media conglomerate. While much of the content that they produce is controlled by various influences, they have sources pretty much everywhere and attempt to know at all times what is really happening in this world. MediaCorps companies include Network News 54, Nippon Network, and World News Service.

Which Gangs Roam Night City?

Hundreds of gangs potentially roam the streets of Night City at any time, but these are some of the biggest/most notable groups that have been confirmed for Cyberpunk 2077:

Animals

Just as their name implies, the Animals are a particularly ruthless gang who prefer to use their own fists (sometimes amplified by chemical and technological enhancements) over more elaborate forms of weapons.

Scavengers

Another aptly named gang, the Scavengers make most of their money by harvesting other people’s technological enhancements. They’re not the biggest players in Night City, but they’re certainly among the most feared.

Voodoo Boys

Years ago, the Voodoo Boys were not only one of the biggest drug-dealing gangs in Night City but among the most violent. However, Cyberpunk 2077 portrays a different version of this gang which primarily exists to protect the residents of their community.

Maelstrom

The Maelstrom is an aggressive and large gang that relies heavily on high-tech gear. They used to control the docks, but it seems they’ve been pushed out of that area by the timeline of Cyberpunk 2077.

Tyger’s Claw

This gang used to be all about their pure martial arts abilities, but the version of them we see in Cyberpunk 2077 seems to have embraced modern technology and cybernetic ehancements. It’s believed that they’re funded by Arasaka.

Lizzies

One of the more “entertaining” gangs in Night City, the Lizzies are just really big fans of the singer Lizzy Wizzy. That said, they’re still quite dangerous and usually high.

6th Street

The 6th Street gang sees themselves as city protectors, but their views on what constitutes the idea of “protection” are, to say the least, loose. More often than not, they do more damage than the gangs they say they protect the city from.

Is Cyberpunk 2077 Canonical?

There seems to still be some debate on this subject, but the short answer is that Cyberpunk 2077 is based on the events of the Cyberpunk tabletop RPG and appears to be a continuation of the events in the Cyberpunk 2020 edition of that series. However, it seems that the game will ignore many of the details of the controversial third edition of Cyberpunk: Cyberpunk V3.0

At the moment, though, there is still some confusion regarding how the events of Cyberpunk may affect future editions of tabletop series and its related materials. It’s still entirely possible that Cyberpunk 2077 will take some creative liberties with the series which may not be reflected in subsequent Cyberpunk productions outside of the video game. It’s also possible that some of the events that take place between 2020 and 2077 may be altered in future editions of the tabletop game and related Cyberpunk stories.

Having said that, the basic lore that we’ve described above will still serve as the narrative foundation of Cyberpunk 2077.

What Role Do You Play in Cyberpunk 2077?

That will be entirely up to you.

While you will encounter notable characters from the Cyberpunk mythos during your time in Cyberpunk 2077 (such as Johnny Silverhand and Adam Smasher), you are not playing an established character in the Cyberpunk lore. You’ll create your own character, choose their backstory, and perform actions that will define who you are in this universe as well as the effect you have on the overall lore of this series.

How else Cyberpunk 2077 will honor, alter, and further the events of the Cyberpunk universe thus far remains to be seen.

The post Cyberpunk 2077: Lore and History of the Game’s Universe appeared first on Den of Geek.

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#aion-rsa #Den of Geek

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svartalfhild · 5 years

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2018, I Won’t Miss You

A.k.a. I call out this year for all the ways it fucked me over and reflect on a few good experiences.

This year was the first year I’ve ever had a smart phone, which ended up being pretty damn useful, even essential at some points. However, the counterbalance was that I had to go through finding out how to live in a post-school existence, and that was not pretty, because it put me at all new levels of social isolation and uncertainty. I stressed super hard about finding a new job. I ultimately didn’t get one and lost hours at my current job because I thought I was going to be transitioning to a better job at a toy store, but they laid me off only a few weeks after hiring me to replace me with someone with better availability. They said I could stay on as a “seasonal worker” but it’s past Christmas and I haven’t been asked to fill a single shift since they benched me in September, so saying I still work there is kind of a joke at this point.

The good news is, despite the stress of failing to get a better job, I’ve added art as an occasional source of extra income, starting with doing the cover illustration for a short story my mother published earlier this year and later with opening commissions to the online community.

My mental health didn’t have a super great year, though, especially in the first half. On top of the job bullshit and the dealing with not knowing how to live life without school, I was feeling intensely bleak about my existence. I was in an excruciating amount of emotional pain because of things I couldn’t control, and it festered because I had the free time to ruminate about how lonely and dejected I felt. I hadn’t felt quite that bad in several years, actually. It’s hard to compete with the shit I was going through in middle school, but this came alarmingly close.

I think my biggest mistake was trying to force myself to be fine again as soon as possible when it took me a couple years to get past the shit that plagued me when I was 12. I honestly think, though, that there was a little while there from about July to late September when I was coping pretty well. I don’t know what happened in late spring to make that happen, but I was in a state of higher functioning for a bit in the summer.

The sad thing is that here at the end of the year, I am once again struggling with the same shit; I’m just a whole lot better with how that affects my behaviour towards other people now. I do feel like I’ve learned how to better interact with people and shield those I love from the worst of my mental health nonsense. In turn, I think that has greatly improved my relationships and made me less prone to beating myself up over the things I say. Progress.

And hey! I did manage to do some pretty rad things this year, despite all the crap my physical and mental health were hefting onto me. I got on a plane for the first time and traveled by myself to Oregon to be with some of my closest friends, who I’d only ever known through the internet before. We went to a convention together and had a really awesome time getting our asses kicked at AtlA themed dodgeball dressed as our DnD characters. I went through a haunted house for the first time and found out that I’m too rational to be scared by a lot of that sort of stuff (but it was still fun). I got to go to huge bookstore and see a first American edition of Fellowship of the Ring. I think the best part of that whole trip, though, was just living with friends and getting a taste of what life without my family’s control could be like. For once in my life, I trusted that everyone and everything was going to be okay, and for a few days, I was really happy. Because of that, though, I spent a lot of the day that I left crying or trying not to cry. Having so much of what you want and then having to leave it is...really upsetting, as it turns out.

But anyway. I also managed to complete an application to grad school, so even though my whole Find A Good Job plan didn’t work, I still took a step towards some kind of life goal and I don’t have to have a total existential crisis just yet. I don’t have high expectations about being accepted, but I do have some hopes and that’s something I can hold onto going into next year.

A lot changed with my family this past year. Dealing with the wake of my grandfather’s sudden death was a major issue all year that seemed almost handled until my grandmother died just a couple months ago, which threw everything back into chaos and despair. Death and loss have been an awful theme for me this year in general. On top of my grandparents’ deaths, my dad’s best friend committed suicide, and a friend of mine, who I know to have been suicidal in the past, completely disappeared from the internet when I wasn’t looking, and I was unable to track her down to find out if she was okay. Other friends lost people who were dear to them as well. The world was ravaged by increasingly terrible disasters on top of that. Needless to say, my empathy circuits are fucking fried.

Thankfully, life handed me some pretty great distractions from its bullshit, like an awesome DnD campaign and lots of time with assorted other TTRPGs, or numerous video games like Pillars of Eternity II: Deadire, Fallout 4, and Overwatch. Netflix brought me countless hours of enjoyment, and my brother got me to watch all of Stargate SG1 with him, which I wasn’t super into at first, but it grew on me. I started knitting again for the first time in years, because I love knitting scarves for people. I did a lot of fic writing, but it wasn’t really fanfiction so much as additional content for my tabletop games. Same goes for art.

It’s been over a year now since I’ve posted any proper fanfic or fanart, which feels weird, but I think I’ve become so exhausted with the politics of being a fan content creator that I haven’t had the motivation for it. It’s much easier to keep your passion for something going when you don’t hope to attract the attention of thousands of people, and instead you’re making things for a story you made up with your closest friends. The only people whose attention you need to care about then are a handful of people who are already inherently invested.

Of course, that’s not to say that I don’t get sad about my work sometimes anyway, regardless of what I’m creating and for whom. Depression is and has been a real dick this year, and it made me procrastinate on my grad app manuscript to the point where I had to stress years off my life cramming the creation of a 10k word original short story into a single month just before the deadline. I managed it, though, and that’s the important thing.

I don’t know what to expect from 2019 except more nonsense, because there’s always copious amounts of nonsense. Having high expectations, given what the past few years have been like, seems rather silly at this point. I suppose what the new year shapes up to be will largely hinge on whether I get accepted to grad school in March or not. If I do, then it’ll be a year of big change in my life, going away to live on my own in a different state. If I don’t, then it’ll just be More Of Same, still living with my parents, working part-time at a shit food service job, looking for a new job, and tearing my hair out trying to get everything together for more grad school applications.

One way or the other, though, I intend to try to finally get treatment for my mental illness. I am tired of being like this and I’m tired of having my memory and focus abilities steadily destroyed by this shit. If anything goes right next year, let it be that.

#personal

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warburtonstoryaddict · 6 years

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Adapting to Adaptations

Some people say this is the golden age of television. Netflix Hulu and Amazon are developing their own original series to much critical acclaim and much of what spring-boarded them into success was adapting pre-existing works from other formats. House of Cards, Orange is the New Black, and Hemlock Grove, some of Netflix’s earlier and more successful series were all based on books, and more and more cable networks are optioning scripted series to compete with streaming services and the likes of HBO and Showtime. Others say that we’re in an endless age of recycling the same thing over and over. That the lack of originality is killing more creative works by sucking all the oxygen out of the room. When Disney, a company already astute at milking series for all they were worth, acquired the mega-franchises of Marvel Comics and Star-Wars, they guaranteed that both creative universes would live forever. This is great news for the fans, who can now look forward to reboot after reboot of their favorite stories, but when theaters have to compete for every hard-earned dollar an increasingly selective audience will spend at the box office, rehashing the same blockbusters repeatedly means that other, more esoteric movies will not even be shown. Despite the challenges these trends present for new writers, I feel that overall, the proliferation of adaptations and the fragmentation of the media market are good for creators.

Let me explain why.

When I was growing up, three media franchises had a profound effect on me. Looking back on them now, I realize they each had their own unique gifts to give me, not only as a consumer of stories but as a student of storytelling.

FRANCHISE 1: Pokémon - Video Games and World Building serve as a springboard for fiction.

Featuring a video game world of lavish detail and intricate mechanics for its time, the Pokémon franchise was created by a game journalist named Satoshi Tajiri as a passion project. Pokémon has turned into one of the most successful video game and media franchises in the world.

The concept of the games is simple, Tajiri wanted to capture the spirit of insect collecting that he had enjoyed as a child, but with a fantasy angle. In the game, children go on quests to capture and train “pocket monsters.” Elemental beasts that inhabit the world instead of wild animals. Pokémon trainers can trade their Pokémon with each other or pit them against one another in (kid friendly) gladiatorial battles. The battles are turn-based and much of the strategy, like in other RPGs requires you to play to the monsters’ strength or weakness types and stats. For example, Fire beats Grass, etc.

My first experience with Pokémon though was not the video games, but with the Trading Card Game, which brought the idea of strategic collecting and battling to the real world. I became interested in the show and games shortly after that, but if it weren’t for adaptation of the Pokémon games into other media, my experience would have been different.

The exploration of the created system inspires the player to imbue the tasks they undertake with added meaning or drama. Building on the fundamental plot of the video games, the player enhances the addictive gameplay with personal meaning. Fans of the series, loving the world, creatures and concepts Tajiri created, went on to adapt the world of Pokemon into Manga (comics), Anime (animated TV series), Feature Animated Films, a Wildly popular Trading Card Game. The scaffolding provided by Tajiri provides the basis for players, myself included, to attach their own epic quests to the repetitive strategic tasks of the gameplay. The video game mechanics lend themselves to replay value and inspire storytelling through other media, in the same fictional world.

FRANCHISE 2: Harry Potter - Addictively good fiction leads to empire building franchises; If you tell a good story, they will come.

I don’t need to tell you what Harry Potter is, or how huge a phenomenon it is. Really, Harry Potter and Pokémon need little to no introduction. Still, the fictional world of Harry Potter is compelling on multiple levels. It’s compelling because it follows the typical hero’s journey in a unique and more modern way, drawing on other classic fantasy works already in the collective cultural deposits and making them accessible to everyone. It’s compelling because author J.K. Rowling’s world-building is as in-depth as Tajiri's, allowing fans to immerse themselves in her created space and stake out their own nooks to explore through fanfiction, and cross-media adaptation. Third, the story of Harry Potter is compelling because, in many ways, it mirrors the journey of its creator. Harry Potter is a rags-to-riches, coming-of-age story about a young boy who rises out of a lowly situation to become famous and beloved. Similar to the eponymous hero, J.K. Rowling brought the story of Harry Potter to life as a struggling single mother who was rejected by multiple publishing houses, only to turn it into one of, if not THE most successful book series in the world. The smash success of the books spawned adaptations to film, video games and various additional merchandise, such as board games, clothes and toys inspired by the “Wizarding World.”

Rowling’s modern-fantasy reimagining of the Hero’s Journey has captured the imaginations of millions. Like Pokémon, Harry Potter is an excellent example of world building. Unlike Pokémon, the mechanical structure of media like video games was not the main driver of its success but contributed to that success and was further built upon as created works proliferated, inspired by the excellent fiction writing skills of J.K. Rowling.

FRANCHISE 3: Middle Earth – World building at an unparalleled level, coupled with excellent fiction writing and adaptation skills, leads to the creation of a classic.

J.R.R. Tolkien’s story-universe Middle Earth, the setting of famous The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings tales as well as many other stories is one of my most beloved worlds to explore. I first encountered Middle-Earth because of adaptation. I was first introduced to The Hobbit through a radio dramatization of the book. After that, I read the novel and later, The Lord of the Rings. I listened to the audiobooks, watched and own all of the movies, and have played several of the video games. The video games that I felt were the worthiest contributions to the franchise were the ones that were either direct adaptations of the source material or entirely new works based on the same world. In recent news, Amazon will be creating a new series based on the world of Middle Earth.

Tolkien’s world-building has inspired many. Aside from the various adaptations mentioned already, it is also credited as the inspiration of the popular tabletop RPG Dungeons & Dragons, not to mention the countless “high-fantasy” or “sword and sorcery” titles that have followed and owe it a debt. Tolkien did not create The Lord of the Rings in a vacuum, however; he borrowed heavily from Anglo-Saxon mythology, Norse Mythology, and Judeo-Christian Mythology. Interpreting and compiling them with his love of languages, Tolkien labored to create his own languages and build the world and peoples that would have created them. The point is, that Tolkien himself was an “adapter,” in fact, he translated one of the versions of Beowulf that we have today. Tolkien’s adaptations spawned other adaptations of his work and inspired many others. The reason his works are so beloved and of such high quality is because of his fantastic world-building abilities, his ability to spin a tale, and his own skills at riffing on the cultural heritage available to him. This combination ensures stories that a wide audience can engage and explore.

The idea that this increase in rebooting or adapting of existing works is a new problem, or even a problem at all, is a fallacy. There is “nothing new under the sun,” as the saying goes. The increased reimagining of work is to be welcomed. It provides an opportunity for new creators to flex their muscles while paying tribute to the works they admire. It could be a problem if, as stated previously, adaptations were all that was being created at the expense of all other content. Fortunately, though, the media market is shifting, and there are now more ways than ever to produce and publish content. So, let the major production companies rehash the stories that we already know and love. They have money to do it right and to do them justice. The rise of new streaming services and original television or web-series programming empowers creators to produce their own original works and expose them to the public eye in due time. I, for one, am glad to be along for the ride.

#full sail university #creative writing mfa #adaptation #transmedia #mediaconvergence

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loadinglord552 · 3 years

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Best Dnd Games

The Warlock of Firetop Mountain. Not based on D&D but an adventure gamebook of the same name, The Warlock of Firetop Mountain: Goblin Scourge Edition is a unique experience on the Switch. More like a tabletop game than most of the games on this list, it even lets you switch (pardon the pun) things up and play as one of the. Dungeons & Dragons video games for XONE sorted by popularity among gamers. Xbox One is the 8th generation console and the third in the Xbox family from Microsoft (a successor to Xbox 360). It was released on November 22nd, 2013, initially only in 13 countries over the world.

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Best D&d Games For Xbox One

Not only is Planescape: Torment the best D&D game to have been made thus far, many would argue its place as the best RPG game ever made.

In addition to those games inspired by Dungeons & Dragons, the property has been the host of many officially licensed D&D games over the years - many of which stand as classics in their own right. Peruse our ranked list of the top ten D&D video games below, and share your picks in the comments at the end of the article.

Manticore Games, creator of Core, chose to honor the iconic RPG with a massive contest, inviting hundreds of players to create D&D-inspired experiences on its system. These fan-made adventures are all completely free to play right now on Core, and players can even access a special hub world that will teleport them to the contest winners.

D&D has been part of popular culture for over 40 years.

Even its creator Gary Gygax could not have possibly predicted the reach and popularity that this pen-and-paper tabletop game would achieve. Naturally, its successes have allowed it to seep into different types of media—video games included.

Thus far, D&D’s video games have followed the RPG formula. These titles also tend to translate the tabletop’s intricate rulesets into engaging video game mechanics, where players can create and customize characters. Plus many titles on this list boast fantastic narrative and writing, thanks in part to a significant amount of published literature and tabletop content for D&D.

Let’s dive in and see which games are the most fun to play in the D&D franchise.

NOTE: Unless otherwise specified, the video games on this list are available only on PC (either Windows, Mac or Linux).

10. Dungeons & Dragons Online

Released in 2006, Dungeons & Dragons Online (DDO) is the franchise’s first major take at an MMO title.

When it originally came out DDO scratched the online multiplayer itch with third-person perspective combat, cooperative quest-based progression, and customizable build paths.

Its graphics were functional in quality, but they sufficed for the game’s basic premise.

Unfortunately DDO hasn’t aged very gracefully in either graphics engine or gameplay.

Still, it earns a spot on this list for being a decent first shot at an online D&D video gaming experience. On the bright side it also came before D&D as a franchise really took off through Internet fandom, so maybe there’s hope for another similar multiplayer title.

9. The Temple of Elemental Evil

Released in 2003, The Temple of Elemental Evil follows the RPG formula taken by D&D video game titles from the previous decade.

However this game takes players away from the Forgotten Realms setting, which had become something of a favorite for D&D content.

Instead we are taken to Greyhawk, the first world designed by Gary Gygax for the tabletop’s first edition.

Temple of Elemental Evil uses turn-based combat, and many of its mechanics are based on the D&D 3.5 edition ruleset that released in the same year.

This title’s fidelity to the tabletop’s rules serves as a particular highlight overall, though it does lack the same narrative punch and writing chops as some other video games in the franchise. Still a really fun game to play if you’re a big fan of D&D as a whole.

8. Tales from Candlekeep: Tomb of Annihilation

Released in October 2017, Tales from Candlekeep: Tomb of Annihilation is set in the Chult region of the Forgotten Realms, one of D&D’s flagship settings.

The game’s main story follows the same plot threads as D&D 5th edition’s Tomb of Annihilation adventure module.

Unlike many preceding video games in the franchise, Tales from Candlekeep shies away from basing its mechanics too wholly on any one edition of D&D’s ruleset.

Instead combat follows an amalgamation of rules that resembles standard D&D fare adjusted particularly for a dungeon crawler focus.

In that regard, the gameplay is more reminiscent of the turn-based combat seen in the XCOM series than previous D&D video games.

Players get to choose the members of their main party from a set of premade adventurers, each with their own specializations that give you leeway to develop multiple iterations of tactics and combos.

Typical of RPGs, adventurers progress by undertaking quests that reward experience, gold, items, all that fun stuff.

The game also contains a map generation system that lends itself to multiple replays so it’s probably gonna keep you entertained for a while.

7. Neverwinter

Unrelated to other Neverwinter-themed titles (which we’ll come to later), Neverwinter is a free-to-play MMORPG available on PC, PS4, and Xbox One.

The game takes place in the eponymous city of Neverwinter where players can undertake different quests and storylines.

All the narratives and locations take inspiration from novels written in the Forgotten Realms setting. However recent content includes tie-ins to official modules published for the tabletop game.

You can also experience player-created content through the game’s “Foundry” system.

Neverwinter initially started with mechanics that took after D&D’s 4th edition rules. Gameplay involved players creating characters based on one of eight classes, each with its distinct roles and abilities(typical of D&D).

Players could team together in up to five-man parties while completing content. With the advent of D&D’s 5th edition, however, the game rebalanced its classes in 2019 to better match the most recent edition’s ruleset.

Like other MMORPGs, your characters grow more powerful by leveling up and acquiring better equipment. Though now you can do it in D&D-style!

6. Icewind Dale: Enhanced Edition

This isometric RPG takes place in the eponymous Icewind Dale, a region in D&D’s Forgotten Realms setting.

Based on the Icewind Dale Trilogy by R.A. Salvatore, the game boasts fantastically-written dialogue and hours of content through quests and exploration.

Players create and control an adventuring party of up to six characters. Each character receives special class designation and stats, which determine their effectiveness in combat, skill access, and spellcasting ability.

You also improve these characters by earning experience points from quests and enemies.

Black Isle Studios(who is responsible for other great favorites on this list) developed the original Icewind Dale game.

Much later Beamdog took over its Enhanced Edition remake, which packaged in the original DLCs as well.

The Enhanced Edition features improved graphics, UI changes, bug fixes, and gameplay tweaks.

For both new and experienced D&D fans I’d say Icewind Dale will definitely scratch that classic RPG itch.

5. Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition

The original Neverwinter Nights had been developed by Bioware with Beamdog taking over the game’s 2012 remake.

This title contains hundreds of hours of content set in D&D’s Forgotten Realms.

In addition to the main storyline there are numerous side-quests and subplots. Players receive rewards (such as experience and items) for completing content outside of the main questline, so there is a lot of incentive to partake in engaging different characters and exploring areas—a highlight of the Neverwinter Nights experience.

The actual gameplay mechanics are mainly based on D&D’s original 3rd edition ruleset, which gives you many options in customizing characters.

Practically everything you do in the game relies on chance, based on a 20-sided die roll. You have some control over the results based on character stats and abilities, but there will always be a level of randomness to the successes and failures.

The game also has modding compatibility which adds more replay value through fan-made mods(and there are dozens of them). Also at this point there’s little reason not to go with the Enhanced Edition since it already contains the DLCs packaged in.

4. Neverwinter Nights 2

A top-down perspective RPG title brought to us by Obsidian Entertainment. This 2006 game provided audiences a taste of what this developer could do with the RPG genre(and some of you may know Obsidian for their much later work on Pillars of Eternity and The Outer Worlds).

Taking place in the same setting as Neverwinter Nights, this sequel title features equally stellar writing and depth of content to its predecessor.

The fact that this title improves on some of the first game’s flaws is what gives it the edge on this list.

Neverwinter Nights 2 faithfully adapts D&D’s 3.5 edition ruleset to create an authentic tabletop gaming experience right at your computer.

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Players go through an intricate character creation system, much like the tabletop game, that lends itself to customization and optimization.

This title also has three different DLCs, though only two were developed by Obsidian. But with these extra DLCs players who enjoyed the base game can opt into the expansions for some really fun additional content.

On top of having mod support, Neverwinter Nights 2 (as with its predecessor) benefits from an active modding community so players can find a lot of replay value here as well. Highly recommend this if you’re big into PC gaming.

3. Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition

Baldur’s Gate takes place in the ever-popular Forgotten Realms setting, specifically (and unsurprisingly) in the city of Baldur’s Gate.

Players dive into an intricate story of intrigue and interfaction conspiracy that threatens to spark open conflict in the region.

During the adventure your burgeoning hero can be joined by several colorful characters, and you may even encounter some big names of Faerûn fame, like Drizzt Do’Urden.

Best D&d Games For Xbox One

The original and remake games’ mechanics take after the 2nd Edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons ruleset.

And just to clarify: the original 1998 game “Baldur’s Gate” is fantastic in its own right. In fact, it was hailed one of the best RPGs ever released… though I have to hand it to Beamdog for remaking the Enhanced Edition into a more superior title fit for modern standards.

In addition to looking better, the Enhanced Edition stays true to many of the original’s gameplay mechanics. But it adds hundreds of quality-of-life changes along with content and player options. I mean, it’s fair to say gaming has changed a lot in the past 20+ years.

The remake also contains the original Baldur’s Gate expansion pack, Tales of the Sword Coast, while having its own exclusive DLC called Siege of Dragonspear.

2. Baldur’s Gate 2: Enhanced Edition

Even in the realm of video games, the sequel curse exists—where a great work is followed by a not-so-great sequel.

I’m happy to say Baldur’s Gate 2 kicks that curse to the curb.

This succeeding game builds on what made the first one so memorable. Baldur’s Gate 2 takes the player deeper into Forgotten Realms, this time focusing on the country of Amn.

Much like the original Baldur’s Gate, here you are plunged into an epic adventure on a scale to rival or even exceed its predecessor’s story. With different class choices you can eventually build up your character to be a walking army, accompanied by a cast of fleshed-out recruitable companions.

Like its other D&D remakes, Beamdog’s take with Baldur’s Gate 2: Enhanced Edition polishes graphics with a more advanced engine along while adding many modern changes (such as functional multiplayer capability).

The remake also maintains its fidelity to the 2nd Edition of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons.

All the while the Enhanced Edition keeps to what made the 2000 original game such an impressive RPG: its great story, in-depth characters, and hundreds of hours’ worth of adventure.

1. Planescape: Torment

The top spot on this list indisputably goes to Planescape: Torment and its remake, Planescape: Torment: Enhanced Edition.

I have to admit the remake does well to update graphics to more modern standards that most gamers expect.

Not only is Planescape: Torment the best D&D game to have been made thus far, many would argue its place as the best RPG game ever made. Period.

You play as an immortal amnesiac protagonist known as The Nameless One.

Though based in the central hub of Sigil, the City of Doors, you will have to brave all the dangers and oddities of the Planescape multiverse (imagine every universe in existence).

Your goal?

To search your memories and understand how you came upon your immortal state. Of course, your quest won’t ever be as simple as that. And the game’s setting is a gift that can give one memorable highlight after another.

One can only imagine the utter weirdness and hilarity that can ensue when you mix creatures from every nook of existence, sometimes of utterly different moral alignments.

Luckily the writing is top-notch to keep up with the possibilities of the game’s multiverse.

Planescape: Torment just hits all the ideal RPG beats you want in a game.

A fantastic setting where you don’t always know what to expect. Complex and well-written, with tight dialogue and a gripping narrative. The chance to round out your party with compelling characters all with their own sub-plots to resolve.

And lastly, this is a game system that encourages different builds and customization.

Whether you’re new or a veteran of the RPG genre, Planescape: Torment is a must-play experience.

Special Mention: Baldur’s Gate 3

While Baldur’s Gate 3 hasn’t seen the light of day yet(as of this writing), I wanted to give it a special spot as possibly the most hyped D&D video game since Planescape: Torment: Enhanced Edition released.

This title will be brought to us by Larian Studios, developers of the acclaimed Divinity: Original Sin game series.

What we know so far is that it will take place (again) in Forgotten Realms, and gameplay will include some aspects of D&D’s 5th Edition ruleset.

Fans should also get excited at the prospect of encountering the terrifying Mind Flayers, a notorious creature borne more of Lovecraftian mythos than typical tabletop fantasy.

While Larian Studios and Wizards of the Coast have been keeping this title’s finer details under wraps, Baldur’s Gate 3 promises to be a must-have RPG-experience if its predecessors are anything to boast about. Keep your eyes peeled for this game’s release as we move into the 2020s.

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dipulb3 · 3 years

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LG G1 OLED TV review: Tough to improve on near-perfection

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LG G1 OLED TV review: Tough to improve on near-perfection

For years OLED TVs have delivered the best image quality available with display technology that has remained largely unchanged, but LG promised something even better for 2021. The G1 has an all-new panel not available on any other TV LG sells. The company calls it Evo and says it achieves higher brightness and improved color. My verdict? Yes, it’s slightly better than before but even in a side-by-side comparison, it was difficult to tell the difference.

Best picture quality we’ve ever tested

Slightly brighter than previous models

Beautiful slim design perfect for wall-mounting

Don’t Like

Expensive

Image quality improvements over cheaper OLED TVs are minor

I set up the G1 next to the CX, the best TV I reviewed in 2020, measured both and watched a variety of TV shows, movies and games. The G1 was indeed a bit brighter than the CX but color was nearly identical, as were other aspects of picture quality like video processing and uniformity. Both looked spectacular, however, and in most material I really couldn’t say one looked better than the other.

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The main advantage the G1 has over the CX and pretty much every other OLED TV is its unique design. This TV is made to be wall-mounted — quite literally; it doesn’t even come with a stand! If you want to put it on a piece of furniture, as shown in the images in this review, you’ll have to pay $100 extra for LG’s little side legs. And that would be a shame, because something this thin should really be on a wall.

New for 2021 LG has improved its already best-in-class gaming features by adding picture modes especially for games, as well as a convenient menu that shows all gaming info and adjustments in one place. There’s a new remote and a new smart TV homepage, too. The more affordable C1 shares those features with the G1, however.

At this point, the G1 is the best TV I’ve ever tested — by a nose. I have yet to review its competitor from Sony, the A90J, which also promises a brighter panel, or any other high-end TVs like Samsung’s Neo QLED models, so that title might not last. But for people who don’t have money to burn, the extra picture quality of the G1 probably isn’t worth the extra money over mainstream OLED models like the CX or C1.

Get to know the LG G1 series

It comes in three sizes and costs a bundle: 55-inch ($2,200), 65-inch ($3,000) and 77-inch ($4,500).

It differs from the less expensive C1 series by offering fewer sizes (the C1 has 48-inch and 82-inch options too), that Evo panel and the slimmer, wall-mount-centric Gallery design. The C1 also lacks a far-field mic for hands-free voice and a Next-Gen TV tuner, both relatively minor extras included on the G1.

OLED display technology is fundamentally different from the LED LCD technology used in the vast majority of today’s TVs, including Samsung and TCL’s QLED models.

The best LCD TVs I’ve reviewed so far scored a 9 in image quality, while OLEDs TVs like the G1 have scored a 10. High-end LCDs (especially with HDR) are brighter than OLEDs, but the picture quality on OLED TVs, including that of this G1, is superior overall.

All OLED TVs are more subject to both temporary and permanent image retention, aka burn-in, than LCD TVs. We at CNET don’t consider burn-in a reason for most people to avoid buying an OLED TV, however. Check out our guide to OLED burn-in for more.

Throw it at the wall

A TV doesn’t get any more minimalist than this. Like many sets these days the G1 is pretty much all picture when seen from the front, but it’s the side view that sets it apart. It measures just 0.8 inches deep and is designed for nearly flush wall-mounting. And as I mentioned at the top, it doesn’t even come with a tabletop stand: If you want a stand mount, it will cost $100 extra.

The G1 comes with a wall-mount bracket inset into a cavity on the back for a practically flush mount.

Sarah Tew/CNET

Here’s what it looks like flush against the wall.

Sarah Tew/CNET

This TV’s design is wasted if you don’t wall-mount it. LG includes a custom bracket in the box and instructions that make it easy to slap up yourself if you’re at all handy — although I’m guessing most people in this price bracket will hire somebody to do the job. Thanks to an inset on the back of the TV the wall mount doesn’t add any extra depth, allowing the G1 to hug the wall and present a very slim profile. Channels are built into the TV’s back to run cables through, for a cleaner installation behind the TV. LG recommends using molding to hide cables on the wall itself. Note: I didn’t mount it myself in my test basement, but I’ve mounted plenty of TVs before and this one seems like it would be a simple job.

LG’s redesigned remote still has lots of buttons and motion control.

Sarah Tew/CNET

LG revamped the remote a bit. It kept my favorite features, namely the scroll wheel and motion-tracking, while slimming it down slightly. The biggest difference is the shortcut keys at the bottom: four for streaming services and two more for the built-in voice assistants, Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa. The former wasn’t yet available on my G1 review sample, but LG says it will be soon.

The G1 is also equipped with a far-field mic (not available on the C1) so you can simply say the wake word to get the TV to respond, no remote required. It responded just like I’d expect from a smart speaker to my “Alexa” commands.

Based on my experience with the CX, both Google and Alexa can do all the usual assistant stuff, including control smart home devices, answer questions and respond via a voice coming out of the TV’s speakers (yep, both voices). Basics like “What’s the weather?” works as you’d expect, complete with onscreen feedback. The G1 also works with Apple’s AirPlay 2 system, just like many other TVs, allowing my iPhone to share photos and video to the screen from the Photos app and mirror my Mac and phone screens.

LG’s webOS menu system got a facelift for 2021 — and I’m not a fan. Gone is the small, unobtrusive overlay at the bottom of the screen that lets you keep tabs on what you’re watching. Instead there’s a full-screen homepage, similar to Roku, Fire TV and Android TV. But it has fewer apps and more, well, junk. The top two-thirds of the screen are devoted to the weather, setup tips, a search window and a Trending Now section with a random collection of TV shows and movies. Below that is an app row and, further down, sections devoted to inputs and particular streaming apps. In general it feels like a hodgepodge with too much going on, and most systems are simpler and easier to grasp.

The new homepage takes up the entire screen.

Sarah Tew/CNET

Features galore, state-of-the-art connectivity

LG says its Evo panel, available only on the G1 this year, uses a “new luminous element” for more precise lighting. The construction of the OLED pixel itself is different, with new materials for red and blue and a new green layer, all of which have narrower wavelengths compared to the pixels used on other OLED TVs.

Key TV features

Display technology OLED LED backlight N/A Resolution 4K HDR compatible HDR10 and Dolby Vision Smart TV Web OS Remote Motion

Otherwise the G1 has the same image quality features as the C1, starting with the new Gen 4 a9 processing chip that adds scene detection and upgraded object enhancement over last year’s version. Both the G1 and C1 also have a 120Hz refresh rate. The entry-level A1 OLEDs, meanwhile, have a more basic a7 processor and 60Hz refresh rate.

Just like last year, LG’s OLED TVs’ picture settings include a Filmmaker Mode. As promised, it turns off the soap opera effect for film-based content (yay) but so do many other modes in the G1. While plenty accurate, Filmmaker Mode is also relatively dim so I ended up using Cinema and ISF Bright for most critical viewing.

Sarah Tew/CNET

All of LG’s recent OLED models (except the A1) include the latest version of the HDMI standard: 2.1. That means their HDMI ports can handle 4K at 120 frames per second and variable refresh rate (VRR, including NVIDIA G-sync and AMD FreeSync), as well as enhanced audio return channel (eARC) and automatic low latency mode (ALLM, or auto game mode). That means they can take advantage of the latest graphics features available on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X and S. New for 2021 is a Game Optimizer mode that puts all of the TVs’ gaming-related settings in one place; see below for details.

The selection of connections is otherwise top-notch, though it no longer supports analog component video. There’s also a dedicated headphone or analog audio output and another for IR blasters, which could ease some installations.

Four HDMI inputs with HDMI 2.1, HDCP 2.2

Three USB 2.0 ports

Optical digital audio output

Analog audio 3.5mm headphone output

RF (antenna) input

RS-232 port (minijack, for service only)

IR blaster port (minijack)

Ethernet (LAN) port

Sarah Tew/CNET

Picture quality comparisons

With its slightly better picture and a couple of other minor improvements the G1 beat the CX, my previous picture quality champ, in side-by-side comparisons. According to my measurements and eyeballs, however, the brightness difference was minor enough to be invisible at times, and just about every other aspect of picture quality was virtually identical. Both TVs looked a tad better than the less expensive Vizio OLED.

Dim lighting: The G1 performed like a champ with the lights down low — and so did the other two OLED TVs in my comparison. I checked out The Hobbit, An Unexpected Journey on standard Blu-ray, and they all appeared more or less uniformly excellent: perfect black levels in the letterbox bars and deep shadows of Bilbo’s living room during the dark Dwarven chant (36:58) and plenty of details in the shadows and clothing of Thorin and company. I couldn’t see any real advantage of the G1 with this kind of theatrical situation in standard (non-HDR) material.

Bright lighting: For a TV billed by LG as an improvement in brightness, the G1’s measurements didn’t really stand out. Yes, it did measure brighter than last year’s CX by 129 nits in the most accurate HDR modes, but that’s not a huge leap and proved tough to discern in most program material. I was also surprised that the C9 I reviewed from 2019 was brighter at maximum light output and basically the same in its accurate mode. As usual, any high-end LCD is much brighter.

Light output in nits

TV Brightest (SDR) Accurate color (SDR) Brightest (HDR) Accurate color (HDR) TCL 65R635 1,114 792 1,292 1,102 Sony XBR-65X900H 841 673 989 795 Vizio P65Q9-H1 768 629 1,305 1,084 Samsung QN65Q80T 664 503 1,243 672 LG OLED65G1 377 334 769 763 LG OLED65CX 377 290 690 634 LG OLED65C9 (2019) 451 339 851 762

I asked LG’s representatives whether my particular review sample’s brightness was typical of other G1’s and they said it was. As always, different sizes and samples can produce variations.

LG OLEDs of recent vintage have a setting called Peak Brightness that boosts the light output for SDR sources in Cinema and Expert modes. The idea is to increase contrast for brighter viewing environments while maintaining the superior color accuracy of those modes. As with most TVs, the brightest mode for HDR and SDR (Vivid on the G1) is horribly inaccurate. For the accurate color columns above on the G1, I used ISF Expert Bright (Peak Brightness: High) for SDR and Cinema mode for HDR — I recommend G1 owners do the same to get good color in bright rooms.

All recent OLED sets are still plenty bright enough for just about any viewing environment. Yes, they do get quite a bit dimmer than LCDs when showing full-screen white — a hockey game, for example — but even in those situations they’re hardly dim. The G1’s screen preserved black levels and reduced reflections very well.

Color accuracy: LG claims better color with the new Evo panel but according to my measurements and eyeballs, it’s tough to spot any difference. Color on the CX was excellent and the G1 was basically the same. An LG rep told me that the G1’s white color could look more pure, like in a hockey match, but I didn’t see or measure any differences in full-field white/gray (ones that weren’t due to very small differences in grayscale after calibration, at least).

Watching The Hobbit was mostly the same story, although at times greens, like the grass and hillsides of the Shire (12:24), appeared a bit more greenish and less yellowish on the G1. It was a subtle difference at best, and again I didn’t see or measure any difference in green test patterns, but it could be due to the new panel. Maybe.

Color on the G1 was nonetheless extremely accurate both before and after calibration. The warm tones of Bag End’s interior and Bilbo’s skin were inviting and intimate, and outside his hobbit hole the green of the grass and trees in the golden hour sun, and the red and blue circular doorways on Bagshot Row, looked brilliant and natural. The same could be said for the other OLED TVs, however, and none delivered significantly better color than another.

Video processing: LG goes to great lengths to tout the improvement of its processing every year, but watching various material in the best picture settings the CX and G1 looked largely identical to me.

Motion handling on the G1 is excellent and a touch better than the CX. Under TruMotion, the new Cinematic Movement setting (the default for Cinema mode) served up 24-frame cadence with a very slight hint of smoothing, improving on last year’s too-smooth Cinema Clear setting while preserving 600 lines of motion resolution. 24p purists who want no smoothing at all will opt for the Off position (the default for Filmmaker mode) and suffer the low motion resolution, while tweakers will appreciate the fine granularity of the User De-Judder mode to dial in the right amount of smoothness; anything four or lower introduced some judder to my eye, conveying a sense of film rather than soap opera effect. De-Blur settings of five or higher deliver the full 600 lines of motion resolution.

User also opens up the OLED Motion Pro menu with three levels of black frame insertion that further improve motion resolution, with 800 lines in Low and a full 1200 in Med and High. The latter introduces flicker, unfortunately, and all three are a bit dimmer than Off, but if blur really bugs you then they’re worth experimenting with. One improvement over last year is that engaging OLED Motion Pro no longer totally crushes shadow detail — it’s a bit worse but still very good. Still, I’d choose to leave it off and sacrifice some motion resolution for maximum light output and shadow detail.

Uniformity: Like all OLEDs I’ve tested the G1 was exemplary in this area, with no significant brightness or color variations across the screen and nearly perfect image quality from off-angle. Compared to the CX I did see a bit more color shift toward magenta in extreme angles with full-field mid-bright and brighter test patterns, but it disappeared when I moved closer to on-axis and never affected the image from a normal viewing angle.

Sarah Tew/CNET

Gaming: The G1’s superb image quality carries over to games, and some of its biggest 2021 features upgrades are gaming-related. The new Game Optimizer is the name of both a picture mode and a full menu system. The latter offers all-new tweaks including four game genre modes: Standard, FPS mode (said to boost shadow detail), RPG mode (to boost contrast) and RTS mode (said to enhance mid-grayscale areas). There are also sliders labeled Black Stabilizer (for adjusting dark areas) and White Stabilizer (for bright areas), as well as the OLED Motion Pro setting described above (LG says it’s particularly useful for games) and the Reduce Blue light setting (said to be easier on the eyes).

I started my test in standard mode with settings at their defaults with Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla at 4K/60Hz and HDR running through my distribution amp so I could compare against the other TVs. Conducting a nighttime raid, the G1 looked most similar to the CX and the Vizio in its standard mode and all three TVs looked excellent, with the G1 delivering a touch better shadow detail already. Switching to FPS upped details even further but washed out the image a bit much for this cinematic game — although I can see it being useful in an actual FPS game if you want to reveal lurking enemies, or a very dark HDR game like Ghost of Tsushima. The RTS setting did boost midtones at the expense of some contrast, while RPG looked quite close to standard, if not as impactful to my eye. In any case it’s cool having these extra adjustment options, and I liked that they each get a dedicated menu.

Next I connected my Xbox Series X directly to the G1 to test advanced video features. VRR worked as expected, significantly reducing tearing in Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla, and I appreciated the prominent toggle and indicator in the Game Optimizer menu that assured me VRR was engaged. Another slider labeled Fine Tune Dark Areas is available to address the issue of VRR looking too dark. I headed deep into a crypt where VRR was crushing shadows a bit — cranking up that setting, as well as the Black Stabilizer, helped. The flipside is that doing so spoiled black levels and washed out the look of the game, so (as a card-carrying contrast fiend) I’d avoid using it unless it really hurts your gameplay.

I also tried 4K/120Hz on Gears 5 and Star Wars: Squadrons, but the extra smoothness and framerate were difficult to discern in most cases. I appreciate that some games, like Ori and the Will of the Wisps, showed a splash screen indicating that 120fps was active, but most did not. I looked for confirmation in LG’s display menu but, unfortunately, it doesn’t have any. Samsung’s new 2021 Game Bar, on the other hand, does indicate 120fps.

Sarah Tew/CNET

Buried within Game Optimizer is another setting labeled “Reduce input delay (input lag)” with two options, Standard and Boost. The former, which is the default for any game, serves up an excellent lag number similar to past LG OLED models: just 13.1ms for both 1080p and 4K HDR sources. Engaging Boost cuts lag even further, to just under 10ms for both. The catch is that Boost is only available for 60Hz sources, so you can’t use it with 120Hz games or VRR. And no, I don’t think many humans would notice the extra 3ms of lag.

HDR and 4K video: It’s with HDR that you’d expect the G1’s brightness advantage to be most visible, but watching the 4K Blu-ray version of The Hobbit, differences were again very slight. Highlights like the sky behind the elven king as he turns away from Thorin (7:59) or the window in Bilbo’s study (9:06) measured slightly brighter on the G1 than on the CX according to my light meter but without measuring it was tough to see the difference by eye, even when compared side by side. Highlights on the Vizio appeared visibly dimmer than either one, for less HDR pop, but the differences were much narrower between the two LGs.

Color was likewise pretty much equally spectacular on the LGs and a step behind on the Vizio, which looked a bit duller in Bilbo’s garden and the blue sky for example (13:25). Any color improvement afforded by the G1’s new panel tech over the CX was less visible with HDR than with SDR.

I also checked out some of the most revealing HDR content around: the montage of images from the Spears and Munsil 4K HDR benchmark. Again the G1 was superb and better by a slight margin than the CX, but the G1 failed to really distance itself. Most scenes looked very similar between all three, from the crashing waves to the sunsets to the flowers to the objects on black backgrounds, and in most cases when I saw a difference it was the Vizio lagging a bit behind the other two. Spot measurements revealed mildly brighter highlights on the G1 but I couldn’t tell the difference without measuring.

The benchmark also has a 4,000 nit montage to test content mastered at that level and; again, both LGs looked very similar. They outclassed the Vizio, which looked somewhat flat in some scenes in comparison.

Picture settings, HDR notes and charts

CNET is no longer publishing advanced picture settings for any TVs we review. Instead, we’ll give more general recommendations to get the best picture without listing the detailed white balance or color management system (CMS) settings we may have used to calibrate the TV. As always, the settings provided are a guidepost, and if you want the most accurate picture you should get a professional calibration.

Before my calibration for this review the Cinema and preset was the most accurate, excellent in terms of grayscale and gamma with just a slight reddish cast (but still within my error target of delta 3). Since I now target a 2.2 gamma for my reviews dark rooms it was closer than ISF Expert Dark or the new Filmmaker modes, which both target gamma 2.4/BT 1886. ISF Bright was basically identical to Cinema, but I reserved that for brighter rooms.

For my calibration I tweaked the two-point grayscale to remove the red cast, reduced light output to my target of 137 nits and increased brightness two pips to help with shadow detail (while still keeping perfect black levels), but otherwise I left well enough alone. The grayscale and color were already so accurate on my LG-provided review sample that I didn’t need to touch the multipoint system or the color management system.

SDR dark room settings:

Picture menu:

Select Mode: Cinema (User)

Aspect Ratio Settings: 16:9 (Just Scan: On)

Additional Settings menu:

Brightness submenu:

OLED Pixel Brightness: 48

Contrast: 85

Screen Brightness: 52

Auto Dynamic Contrast: Off

Peak Brightness: Off

Gamma (Adjust Brightness): 2.2

Black Level: Auto

Motion Eye Care: Off

Color submenu:

Color Depth: 50

Tint: 0

Color Gamut: Auto Detect

Fine Tune menu:

Color Upgrade: Off (no other adjustments)

White Balance menu:

Color Temperature: Warm 49 (no other adjustments)

Clarity submenu:

Sharpness: 0

Color: 50

Tint: 0

Super Resolution: Off

Noise Reduction, MPEG Noise Reduction: Off [for low-quality sources, some users may prefer to enable noise reduction]

Smooth gradation: Off [for low-quality sources, some users may prefer to enable]

Cinema Screen: On [may be grayed out depending on source]

TruMotion: Cinematic Movement

Reduce Blue Light: Off

SDR bright room setting [all default except for below]:

Picture Mode Settings: ISF Bright Room

Brightness menu:

OLED light: 100

Peak Brightness: High

HDR Notes: HDR Cinema and Filmmaker mode were very similar, following the electro-optical transfer function — how the TV converts data to a specific brightness — quite closely and better than Cinema Home, but Cinema was about 70 nits brighter so it’s my favorite of the three. Game Optimizer is best for gaming thanks to its processing but quite blue; for the best color accuracy for gaming you should adjust the color temperature control (Color > White Balance > Color temperatureW45).

Color checker was slightly more accurate than on the CX from last year but not great, and HDR Color Checker was worse. As usual with OLED the set covered P3 HDR gamut very well. The G1 measured brighter than the CX or the B9 from 2019, but the C9 from 2019 actually measured brighter in its least accurate and basically the same in its most-accurate settings. Once again the TV automatically detected and engaged the “HDMI Ultra HD Deep Color” setting designed for HDR sources.

TV software/firmware version tested: 3.10.29

Geek box

Test Result Score Black luminance (0%) 0.000 Good Peak white luminance (SDR) 377 Average Avg. gamma (10-100%) 2.18 Good Avg. grayscale error (10-100%) 0.40 Good Dark gray error (30%) 0.42 Good Bright gray error (80%) 0.33 Good Avg. color checker error 0.80 Good Avg. saturation sweeps error 0.79 Good Avg. color error 0.94 Good Red error 2.22 Good Green error 0.64 Good Blue error 0.46 Good Cyan error 0.97 Good Magenta error 0.98 Good Yellow error 0.36 Good 1080p/24 Cadence (IAL) Pass Good Motion resolution (max) 1200 Good Motion resolution (dejudder off) 600 Average Input lag (Game mode) 13.10 Good HDR10 Black luminance (0%) 0.000 Good Peak white luminance (10% win) 769 Average Gamut % UHDA/P3 (CIE 1976) 98.91 Good ColorMatch HDR error 5.25 Poor Avg. color checker error 3.29 Average Input lag (Game mode, 4K HDR) 13.10 Good

LG G1 OLED TV CNET review c… by David Katzmaier

Portrait Displays Calman calibration software was used in this review.

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