Ta-metru_defender

No it's masochistic and you should feel bad

I would like to say that I friggin' love this set and I own three.

Totally cool. Still a great conversation that helps me mull over my ideas about sidequests. Didja check out Jenkins' article?

Yeah, I actually wasn't being facetious (I'm as surprised as you are). I like the idea of it, I'm more curious if it's LEGO just jumping on the badwagon as opposed to creating their own thing wholesale.

@Xaeraz: That actually sounds really cool. It's a gutsy move. @ShocK: No, I totally agree. I think calling it a 'problem' may be a bit strong, maybe it's more of an inherent tension in game. But to what you're saying, there's a wonderful article by Henry Jenkins, Game Design as Narrative Architecture, that looks at creating spaces for stories that the player can discover. I love sidequests. I'm bummed that the effect they have overall is limited by gaming-as-we-know-it, but there's no denying they're fun. I'm also fascinated by the way gaming works, and how open world / map games navigate that tension.

Kang!? Four players!? Spider-Gwen!? In.

So I have this rash that needs looking at...

Personally, I can't wait for the Willrow Hood buildable figure.

(I haven't played Nier or Xeno) To the first, with linear, the argument goes that why is the story interactive if you don't get to affect it in any meaningful way? I disagree heavily, but that's the point. The other argument in that realm is that sometimes story has to ignore gameplay – Nathan Drake kills, like, two hundred, people in a playthrough, but that's not what's happening narratively. I'm okay with the tension in video games. Some of my favorite games are incredibly linear – Uncharted, for example. Maybe one day digital RPGs will be far more open, like a Mass Effect where you have to stop the Reapers, and these are the missions you go on, but the small choices you make affect the story more. 'cuz in ME one of the fun things you do is define your character through your actions, more of that could yield some dope things.

Essays, Not Rants! 268: The Problem With Narrative Sidequests One of the most striking features of the planet Elaaden is a huge derelict Remnant ship. Sticking out broken over the desert planet, the ship could hold answers for the mystery of the old killer robots that populate Mass Effect: Andromeda. The latest game in the Mass Effect video game series has a strong focus one exploration, namely that titular distant galaxy. There’s so much to see, so much to find out. But I still haven’t gone to the ship, despite having done basically every other sideqeust available on the planet. This isn’t so much a case of saving the best for last, as much as it is putting off what I expect will be a fun-if-pointless mission. Because the Remnant Derelict is not a Priority Mission (that is, a story mission), it’s highly unlikely that any Major Plot Twisting Details will happen. If there is some massive revelation about the Remnant waiting in the wings, whatever’s aboard that ship will either tease it or corroborate it, depending on when I play it in relation to that story mission. Andromeda is an open world RPG. There are Priority Missions I play one after another, these make up the main plot. I complete Mission A, then I can do Mission B, and so on until the game ends. Meanwhile, there are these sidequests, things I can do around the galaxy be it earning my squad’s loyalty or blowing up a Kett tower. Those sidequests can be done in any order and at any point after you’ve unlocked them (usually by completing another sidequest, or progressing to a certain point along the Priority Mission chain). This means that I could have explored that Remnant Derelict when I first found it a couple Priority Missions ago, or I could wait and only explore it after I’ve finished the main story – and the central plot played out. Thus, the mission has to accommodate either timeline. This in turn limits the developments that the sidequest can have, nothing can happen here that would affect a Priority Mission in a big way. Consider, if you will, a hypothetical game based on Firefly and Serenity. Midway through the movie, we find out that the Reavers, a savage group of spacefaring barbarians, were in fact accidentally created by the Alliance (spoiler). In the hypothetical game, you wouldn't find this out in a sidequest, it'd be a paradigm-shifting story quest that would affect the crew through any major plot developments. Thus if there was a sidequest where you could explore an old Reaver ship or an Alliance Databank, this twist wouldn't be there. Anything you found would be cool, but self-contained. This is the hurdle that open games have to deal with. Something more linear, like Uncharted or Halo, progress in one direction like a movie, scene 1 into scene 2; there's no scene 1.5. Every level/chapter/scene will affect the plot in someway. Giving the player a choice means the game's writers and programmers have to have planned whichever path the player takes. In Kingdom Hearts the player can visit a variety of worlds in whatever order they want. They'll pal around with Aladdin, Alice, and Ariel, then have to go to a specific world where More Story happens. This isn't too pressing most of the time, but as the plot picks up, visiting Halloween Town or Monstro’s belly feels like a filler episode in the larger narrative of Sora and Mickey's adventure. They can't impact the plot too much because the player may have another world to complete before the next Big Story Moment. There are game critics, Ian Bogost and Johnathan Blow among them, who argue that games and stories don't mesh well. And in some ways they do have a point. Either you have a linear game (like Uncharted) where the player is given no narrative agency (and so is a glorified interactive movie) or you have the case of Andromeda or Kingdom Hearts where the extent of then player's agency affects the distribution of the game's narrative. Either the narrative ignores you or you strain against it. Digital gaming can't seem to catch up with good old tabletop rpg's, where the game master is making stories on the fly in response to their players' decisions. But video games are still a young genre. The amount of player agency in Andromeda would have been unheard of twenty years ago. It's a bummer that it can't anticipate and account for everything, but who's to say games won't in the future? Exploring a virtual world in Andromeda is a great experience, even if it exposes some of the issues with open world games. Yes, the narrative failings are frustrating, but it's a step forward towards what games could be. Risks propel the medium forward; who knows where we'll be in twenty years. Of course, I could be totally wrong and that derelict ship may have a load of secrets about the Remnant and it turns out Andromeda has untold variations of its Priority Missions prepared in its code with each one voiced and animated ready to go. But the point stands; for all the issues with open ended video games, the potential remains. And that's exciting. Bring on the AI game masters!

It's all in the posing with that guy. Really digging the personality that oozes out of him.

So here's a question: Besides the "It's Lego, duh!" why should I play this and not, say, Minecraft?

I dug it. Soundtrack felt a little more eclectic but I'm enjoying listening to it. Plot wasn't as tight as the first one, which bugs me a little (I like tight plots), and there were a few bibs and bobs that felt like it needed another draft. But as a whole, I thought it came together quite well and was thoroughly enjoyable and surprisingly affecting.

That... Dang, that's a load of bull.

A+ for including the Miru.

Banter banter banter and no sign of more romance. It's like y'all don't even know how to watch Game of Thrones.

Essays, Not Rants! 267: Normalizing The Different It’s easy to dislike folks you don’t know. They’re different. They look weird. You have no horse in their race. They’re those people. The Unknowable Other. But it’s hard to keep up this mindset, that of the Them, the Other, after you’ve met said other. When you take the time to recognize them as a person, put a face to that Other, it’s much harder to not like them. Suddenly, they become an Us, rather than Them. Meeting people, however, is hard. Especially people outside our relatively well-defined social spheres. Small towns are small, countries have borders, there’s a limit to the people you see every day. Enter literature. Books. Movies. Video games. Comics. Anything that tells a story. Stories are about people of some sort. And there’s no reason they have to be about someone like you. Take Ms. Marvel. It's a superhero comic about Kamala Khan, a first generation Pakistani-American immigrant who fights bad guys. Amidst all the crime stopping, we get a peek into Kamala's home life. She's balancing high school, friends, family, and faith. She struggled with heartbreak, talks to her imam for advice, and breaks curfew. Her story is new, but at the same time familiar. But then, when we see stories about her move to the US; and in her first day at school and get a snapshot of her first day of school; I see my own experiences as someone who moved to the US is given weight, acknowledged, and affirmed. It's normal to be different, the book says. I'm not the only oddball, my weirdness is shared. It’s the story of someone moving to the US, maybe it’s your grandparents, maybe it’s you, maybe you were just the weird kid in high school. It may not have been your experience directly, but it’s translatable. We live in a world of narratives, we interpret the world as a story. Normal is a narrative. Weird is a narrative. Us and Them is a narrative. When we have one narrative dominating – the 'all-American hero', who is coincidentally typically white, male, and straight is the default and the most normal – anything that deviates is by default outside of the norm. Kamala is Other. I, a biracial Asian-American immigrant am Other. That is a narrative of import to me, of course. Which is not to discount stories about other people. Yaa Gyasi's Homegoing makes the African Diaspora immediately personal. It’s easy to learn about it from a textbook and think about it in dictionary terms, but when given a face, it becomes more than that. The concept, one that I have the privilege to not have to think about, becomes unavoidable as I read about people – persons with names – who went through this. I hear stories about the people who went through it, who have made their lives in the aftermath. And so the narrative can change; now Those People who I only knew about in the abstract become individuals with their own stories; recognizably human Stories are important. Stories let us explore other people’s experiences. Stories let us see each other as we see ourselves. Stories make the foreign recognizable. Stories take Them, and make them Us. It’s hard to dislike people once you’ve met them, once you’ve walked a mile in their shoes. Good stories let us in to other people’s lives. Ms. Marvel offers a narrative where the Pakistani-American girl is just like everyone else, Homegoing gives a voice to people you hear about. Alongside all this, they lend weight to experiences, say that, hey, your experiences are valid. Your life is worthwhile.

Change your dang username.

Through a series of snafus we ended up looking at a place we had no intention of renting. For a variety reasons, one of which is size. See, in New York, a lot of the time you end up with matchboxes if you don't look hard enough. Matchboxes.

That's about the only reason I need.

BZP anniversaries are the only important Bionicle dates because they make me realize how much of my life I've spent on the internet talking about plastic toys.

Anything can be swooshed if you try hard enough.

Pfft. Early 2000's web-design is totally coming back in style.

Essays, Not Rants! 266: Star Wars’ Newfound Dearth Of White Guys The Star Wars video game Battlefront 2, the follow-up to 2015’s Battlefront, was revealed a couple weeks ago, and the sequel seems to be righting a lot of the mistakes of the first game. It boasts more interesting combat, the return of classes, multiple eras in which you can play, and Jedi Rey as a playable character (which, right there makes me wanna preorder it). Unlike the first, which was basically online multiplayer only, there’s also going to be a proper narrative single-player mode, that follows an Imperial special forces commander from the destruction of the Second Death Star through the rise of the First Order – which sounds cool! What’s interesting both as a shooter game and as part of the Star Wars franchise is that the protagonist is a woman named Iden Versio, as was revealed in the trailer when the commander removes her helmet, thus continuing Lucasfilm’s new trend of creating a character who isn’t a white guy every time they need a new protagonist. We know this from the two new films that relaunched the series, with Rey, Finn, and Poe in The Force Awakens and Jyn and Cassian in Rogue One. But this new emphasis on diversity extends to a lot of the other Star Wars stories in the new canon. The first comic with a protagonist created for the new comics is this year’s Doctor Aphra, where the titular woman Indiana Jones-es around the galaxy. The tv show Rebels, which has been around since 2014, might star the vaguely-caucasian Ezra, but the other humans in the crew are the decidedly Asian-looking Mandalorian Sabine, and Kanan, whose ethnicity is open to interpretation but is played by part-hispanic actor Freddie Prinze, Jr. Point is, over the past couple years, Star Wars has been getting a lot less exclusively white and male. So now we have Iden Versio, commander of Inferno Squadron, the protagonist of the New Big Star Wars Game and a character voiced by – and resembling – an Indian woman. Iden marks the extension of the trend towards diversity from other areas of the franchise into video games. Throughout the dozens of Star Wars video games released throughout the years, the protagonist has, with a handful of exceptions, always been a white guy. Even games like KoToR and Jedi Academy where you can customize character’s gender and skin tone; later books would canonize the protagonist as being a white guy (KOTOR II’s Jedi Exile is the exception to this). So we see Iden as a shift away from this precedent. Furthermore, it’s not only her appearance which sets her apart, but also her role as a military commander, not a Jedi – Star Wars is taking what’s usually seen as a male role (commando) and giving it to a woman. It’s a subversion of expectations, one that also says "Hey, women can be military leaders too!" Like I said, Lucasfilm has clearly taken a really strong line on diversity, promoting women and people of color in just about everything they’ve put out over the past couple years. The trade off is that white guys are being put on the back burner. But if we want more representation in the Star Wars galaxy, that’s the way it has to be. Look, there are forty years of Star Wars stories, especially if you include the old Expanded Universe (I do), and for the vast majority of them, the central main character’s a white guy. Luke Skywalker, Anakin Skywalker, Corran Horn, Kyle Katarn, the list goes on. The spotlight is now being shifted in another direction in what appears to be an attempt on the part of Lucasfilm to even the tally by mandating that all new protagonists not have to be white guys and insisting that other people get featured It means that Rey gets to be the chosen one now. It means that the Imperial commander’s an Indian woman. It means, that the people making Star Wars are looking at characters, asking why not, and putting minorities in the lead. It’s a drastic departure from most of the franchise’s history to be sure, but it’s a strong step forward to bridging the gap — and has clearly not hurt the quality of the stories. 'cuz look, making room at the table sometimes means having to give up a chair. If we want to see a more diverse world in media, it means having to actively curate that world, it means having to have stories that aren’t about white guys for a bit. And at the end of the day those forty years of stories are still there. Making Iden Versio the protagonist of Battlefront II doesn’t undo all those Kyle Katarn stories, Rey doesn’t invalidate Luke. It’s a big, big galaxy a long time ago far far away; there’s room for stories about all sorts of people. Just means that white guys might not be the main characters for a while. Now, there is that Han Solo movie coming out next year. After that, though, I’m game for Star Wars not having a white guy in the lead for another thirty-six years.

The Zero series is one of my favorite game series -ever- and Z3 is one my favorite games period. I love the challenge of them (and have A-ranked all of them, and S-Ranked chunks of them). Ugh. So much love for those games. Z3 especially. I really like Z3. I have my old GBA SP with the cartridges in my apartment (had my parents bring it up for me, years ago) and replayed them a while back. I think Imma do it again soon. Because holy stuff the Zero games are fantastic.