Category: Uncategorized

Here’s a miscellaneous project that wrapped itself up recently. I did a Let’s Play of one of the first JRPGs I’d ever played, Chrono Cross, with my younger brother playing the game for the first time. The idea was that he’d be experiencing the game for the first time, contrasted against my having played the game as a kid, so his perspective would balance out any nostalgia I have for the game. We wound up losing half the commentary audio, so we wound up ending it halfway through the game at the end of one of the major plot arcs.

It’s…okay. I learned a lot about video editing while making it, but the main thing I learned is that my analytical commentary, which requires long stretches (2+ minutes) of uninterrupted monologue to make a detailed and nuanced point, doesn’t really gel well with my younger brother’s off-the-cuff jokes well at all, since he needs to deliver his punchline immediately after the game gives him a setup to work with. It’s not until later in the game that my analysis tended to get more focused, less rambling, and fast enough to avoid interruption, so the early stuff was pretty heavy on us just joking back and forth to varying amounts of quality and me occasionally starting in on something potentially interesting before losing my train of thought. It doesn’t help that the two plot arcs that we didn’t lose the commentary for pretty much work, and there’s a lot less to talk about when something works, especially off-the-cuff, than when something’s awful. It’s a shame that our best work was lost, because he just moved halfway across the country and we won’t be doing this again for a while.

Hogwarts houses make a certain amount of sense. You sort students into groups based on a degree of compatibility. They were invented by medieval wizards, so if the groups they settled on turn out not to be very conducive to getting pre-teens and teens to get on with one another, that’s fine. Sure, it’s a bit of a design failure in universe, but as a setting element it makes it very easy to establish different cliques in a hurry and it’s appealing to a young audience who are still trying to figure out exactly who they are as individuals because it gives a finite list of options to sort through.

Its major failing is that there was a strong theme of all the houses of Hogwarts needing to unite in the face of Voldemort, but it turns out there was an asterisk on that theme, and the footnote said “except Slytherin, fuck those guys, they’re evil.” This particular theme is supposed to be about bringing together lots of different people in opposition of hatred and terrorism and all the other things Voldemort brings in his wake, but since all the protagonists are Gryffindors, their allies in Hufflepuff and Ravenclaw are quirky sidekicks rather than major characters, and all Slytherins are evil (except for one, who is a defector who turned his back on evil after graduating, not someone who was simultaneously Slytherin and proud and also opposed to Voldemort), what you get is a story about Gryffindor vs. Slytherin in which two other houses are shadow divisions for Gryffindor.

Divergent takes this basic formula and, rather than fixing up the broken bits, instead completely cocks up the whole thing.

Continue reading “Divergent Factions Make Even Less Sense Than Hogwarts Houses” →

Eclipses are amazing. That is all.

Here’s a quickie. The Escapists is a game I’ve tried out recently, a game about breaking out of various prisons. You keep to the prison routine to keep the guards from getting suspicious, and slowly work out what times you can sneak off to work on a daring escape plan without arousing suspicion. Easier prisons have lots of free time to work with, harder ones pretty much require you to make a bed dummy and do all the dangerous work at night. If you get caught, any contraband on your person and in your cell is taken and you’re time-skipped through three days in solitary, but otherwise nothing happens. Since you can hide contraband in cells other than your own, it’s pretty easy to avoid all the consequences except the loss of time. There’s no strict time limit to the escape, but the number of days you take to escape serves as a high score function, so getting caught does have that penalty.

Continue reading “The Escapists: It Turns Out Prison Sucks” →

Mockingjay Part 2 came out nearly two years ago, so it’s not like anyone really cares about the Hunger Games anymore, but it came up in conversation lately so I’ll crank out a post on it. The Hunger Games series is allegedly supposed to be a criticism of TV culture, modern media, and consumerism. There’s an immediate problem here in that TV culture is on the way out and criticizing something that’s bleeding to death is kind of missing the boat, but there’s a bit of a plank in my eye in that regard, so I’m going to focus more on the fact that even if the culture that produced Jersey Shore coterminously with the books’ release hadn’t happened to have entered into atrophy almost immediately afterwards, Hunger Games is an atrocious criticism of that culture.

Continue reading “The Hunger Games Fails As A Criticism Of Anything” →

Two announcements concerning technical issues to do with the blog. Number one, the default timezone for this blog is supposed to be GMT, since it has an international audience and in theory an international authorship, so we go with the international default. In practice, the blog seems to snap to my local timezone sometimes, and I have no idea how to fix that when it does, nor do I think it big enough an issue to bother doing so when that’s time I could be spending writing more blog posts and preventing my buffer from running dry (can you tell this wasn’t supposed to be a one-man job?).

Second, the extremely rare commenters on this blog might have noticed that your comments aren’t showing up immediately. This is because all comments on this blog have to be individually approved by me, and the reason for that is because legit comments are so rare that they are actually outnumbered by spam comments. By which I mean that I’ve had like five spam comments and I think only one legit comment at this point in the blog’s life. Hopefully that second number will improve over time.

Let’s have some more random nonsense. This random nonsense is building on some other random nonsense I wrote. Specifically, back when I talked about it’s only relatively recently that designing a decent Mario timeline became futile, I mentioned that some interpretations of Mario make some non-standard assumptions about the context or plot of the games and are immune to the usual issues. The most famous of these is the “everything after SMB1 is a play” theory, based on the play aesthetics of SMB3, wherein any problems brought about by incessant stagnation can be wiped away by attributing them to an in-world theater company, although this doesn’t really fix the problems so much as just move them to a new layer of the fiction.

During that post, I mentioned that I have a personal Mario meta-plot that is also immune to the issues with stagnation. In fact, not just immune, this plot actually benefits from them to reinforce its themes. I’ll explain below the break.

Continue reading “My Preferred Mario Meta-Plot” →

So here’s a weirdly prevalent thing in RPG design circles: Someone will ask for feedback on their new weird dice system. They won’t provide any context, like what their system is about, or who their PCs are, or what they’ll be doing on an average adventure, or whatever. They’ll just present their dice mechanic and ask if it’s any good. The answer is basically no. Your dice mechanic is never good, because the presentation alone is a huge red flag that you have no idea what a dice mechanic is even for. I’ll explain below the break.

Continue reading “No One Cares About Your Dice Gimmick” →

Reddit was a mistake. Not my specific decision to have a Reddit account. There’s lots of people on Reddit and if this blog is ever going to amount to anything, it’s probably going to be posted there at some point. Nor am I saying that Reddit as a community is terrible, although for the most part it is (Redditors will probably take offense to this, even though the identical statement “subreddits go down in quality as they get larger” is uncontroversial – how would you expect subreddits to become worse as they get bigger if the average Redditor didn’t make communities worse?). I’m also not talking about Reddit’s admins being dicks, although they are.

What I’m talking about is how Reddit’s design as a piece of software systematically encourages certain poor behaviors. If you want to build a community and you make it a subreddit instead of a forum or a Facebook group or whatever, it will be prone to certain problems because it is a subreddit, regardless of whether or not you end up catching the attention of some of the festering cesspools you’ll have as neighbors by virtue of being on Reddit (/r/funny, /r/politics, /r/atheism, if you’re remotely familiar with Reddit you can probably think of at least a few more). Even with the exact same users, the community will be worse by virtue of the fact that the features intended to improve the Reddit experience have backfired.
Continue reading “Reddit Was A Mistake” →

More stuff dredged up from that one setting I worked on that one time.

Continue reading “The Order of the Magi” →