A year and a half of creative effort has come to fruition! I now have a Lulu storefront where you can purchase the affordable pre-Gen Con edition of my game, Blazing Rose.
Like tabletop RPGs or collaborative storytelling? Tales of romance, jealousy, and social competition? Dating sims or harem anime? If any of those things perk up your ears, check this game out! I've put a lot of heart into this design, and would love to hear what people think of it. In fact, send some feedback my way, and you'll get your name in the credits for the next edition due to come out this summer!
The creators of the Watchmen movie didn't go far enough.
They made their intentions obvious with their soundtrack choices: this was supposed to be a parody, satirizing the original comics' political commentary by making crucial scenes feel ridiculous and hamfisted via jarring musical selections. Problem is, for long stretches of the movie they forgot to carry through with this, so the audience almost has time to feel engaged! We the fans need to do our part to correct this error of sound direction. Let's come up with a list of the songs that should have been in the movie, match them to scenes, and request their inclusion in the director's cut DVD!
I'm not knowledgeable enough in either music or the Watchmen source material to tackle this monumental task alone, but I can maybe get us started. I'll add to this list as I think of things and as people give me their suggestions.
Come, my musically inclined friends! Don't be commies!
( cut for SPOILARZ )
- Mood:
mischievous
- Music:Leonard Cohen - Hallelujah
From
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zombie_dog and li_zhen. Looked like too much fun to pass up!Step 1: List 10 of your characters.
Step 2: Answer these questions!
These are all characters played in some sort of realtime RP, be it tabletop, VT, LARP, or freeform, not characters from stories or novels. I randomized the list before answering the questions.
1. Caitlin "Seesy" Callahan a.k.a. Moira - Childer Sluagh dancer (Changeling: The Dreaming)
2. Elias Gray - Catholic werewolf (Blazing Rose)
3. Riya Deliani - enslaved race car driver (Burning Empires)
4. Dr. Ethan Barrister - evil, psychic history professor (Heroes Unlimited/Surlyverse)
5. Kathrri - Togorian slicer (Star Wars D6)
6. Christine Thakarr - studious Quarter-Dragon rune mage (BESM/The Age of Corporations)
7. Julius "Crusher" Bonchev - Longtooth Shifter Warlord, recent convert to Pelor (D&D 4e)*
8. Kali-ra - virtuous Feline swordswoman (Furcadia)
9. Adulath Caracai II - suave womanizing Scout (Amtgard)
10. Lyn Hawthorn - Human Rogue and freedom fighter (D&D 4e)
( Hilarious multiversal scenarios ensue )
This is an extraordinarily fun meme, and I highly recommend it to anyone who's RPed enough to have a bank of ten or more characters!
*To
cornerrider et al. familiar with the online Allandria D&D game, this is a different incarnation of the character. He's one of my reusable archetypes, but don't expect his personality as described here to line up with the NPC in that game. ;)When I used to daydream about getting an Xbox 360, prior to those daydreams becoming reality, two games provided the reason for the fantasy: Mirror's Edge, and Mass Effect. The latter, at least, proved deserving of the anticipation!
Premise: Humanity is a recent arrival to the galactic stage, where "element zero" and a phenomenon called the "mass effect" allow all manner of cinematic science-fiction awesomeness, like instantaneous interstellar travel and the power to throw people around with your mind. As the highly player-malleable protagonist Commander Shepard, you'll embark on a meandering quest to save the galaxy and cement Humanity's place in it. The plot unfolds via myriad branching dialogues with a colorful cast of characters, and action takes place in an over-the-shoulder run-and-gun battle system overlaid with RPG character-building elements. Sounds pretty standard, no?
( The whole pile of bog-standard tropes becomes more than the sum of its parts )
The Verdict: Mass Effect lived up to my high expectations. It delivered a compelling story in a well fleshed-out universe, with rock-solid writing and engaging gameplay. It's a 3.5/4, rounded up to a Backloggery "Excellent" for me. If in Mass Effect 2 Bioware manages to swallow its collective "40+ gameplay hours, lolol" pride and cut out the filler, while tweaking some of the first game's engine and artistic decisions, I think this franchise truly will go to the stars.
These reviews' tag line is doubly appropriate here, as not only is this a PS2 game from 2001, but I finished playing it in early November. It's a testament to the game's strengths that I still feel it's fresh enough in my mind to write about it!
Premise: Floppy-eared anthrocat Klonoa is the Dream Traveler, a hero who visits and aids troubled worlds in his dreams. This night's travels take him to Lunatea, a land whose several emotion-themed kingdoms are threatened by the rise of a monstrous Kingdom of Sorrow in the east. Klonoa works his way through a series of platforming and racing levels in "2.5D," i.e., two-dimensional motion through a 3D-rendered environment with puzzles that involve interaction with foreground and background elements. Along the way he teams up with a washed-up priestess in training, battles sky pirates, and more.
( Yes, I have a soft spot for anthrocats, but it's not all about that )
The Verdict: While a few problems with uneven difficulty shouldn't be overlooked, I cannot do otherwise than to give Klonoa 2: Lunatea's Veil a 4/4 score, "Excellent" on the Backloggery. Anything inspiring enough to make me write fan fiction in the midst of the National Novel Writing Month deserves top billing in my ranks of great games, ha. It's imaginative, feel-good, smooth-playing fun I'd recommend to anyone who's ever hopped and bopped!
- Music:Soul Coughing - Casiotone Nation (Live)
This thing is the main reason I haven't updated in nearly a month. It's a genius PS2 title plagued by some really infuriating design choices. Read on!
Premise: Upon transferring to a new school, a high school junior discovers the extraordinary power to summon mythic figures to do battle. He joins a secret school club of people with similar powers, who put their combative abilities to work killing Shadows, beasties that eat people's souls at night. It has trappings of the horror genre, such as predominant death imagery, but the story structure has more of an "underground superhero" motif: the dual life of those who fight evil without reward or acclaim. The gameplay is a dungeon crawl with turn-based battles, interspersed with time-management and dialogue-choice scenes reminiscent of dating sims.
( 100 hours of review! Well, okay, not quite )
The Verdict: Innovative, powerfully emotional, and sharply written, but its repetitive gameplay should have been cut in half or more. If you can stand the thought of taking 100 hours to beat a game, the high points are in fact worth it by game's end. 3 out of 4 stars, "Good".
- Mood:
hungry
- Music:Phil Collins - Another Day in Paradise
( Ignore the crappy box art, this game is a gem ) If you can muster a bit of patience and frustration tolerance, I highly recommend it!
Fiction Cloud: Mirage
[Character] Dantalion
Cunning, leering, with an army at his command.
A Qlipothic demon.
I haven't made a LTTP post in a while, because I haven't finished any games recently. The one I just finished off, Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, took about 70 hours to get through.
( The game is much maligned, but I enjoyed it while conscious of its flaws. Beware: core story spoilers. )
...Hmm. In retrospect, that wasn't the defense of the game I'd set out to write. But the point is, it isn't as bad as FFT diehards would have you believe. If you're willing to take the game on its own terms, you can easily have 60+ hours of lightweight, entertaining tactical RPG fun. And I say this as one for whom the original Final Fantasy Tactics occupies a top-5 spot in favorite games of all time!
Fiction Cloud: Mirage
[Character] Garrit
A shade, half out of phase with reality.
Haunts the slums of Capital City.
Last entry I put up a lengthy ramble about an idea I had for a collaborative fiction thing. The idea wouldn't let me sleep, so now I'm going to put it to work rebuilding my writerly habits!
The idea (slightly refined from the Audiodidact ramble) is thus. I start with a title for a setting, and a single "node". A node is a minimally described fictional entity in that setting, consisting of a name, a tag, and a description. Name is self-explanatory. The tag tells what kind of thing it is: character, location, object, event, concept, quality, whatever. And the description is some phrase, quote, or elaboration--no more than a few sentences--giving a broad but flavorful hint at what it's like.
So to start, this fiction cloud is called Mirage. The first node is
[Character] Anna Destrier
"This world is broken beyond repair. Time to cut our losses."
Kinda like a CCG card or something, eh? Anyway, from here, we add more nodes. Every node beyond the first must have one or more relationships to already established nodes. So if the next node were a character, it'd have "Rival of Anna Destrier" or "Brother of Anna Destrier" or something, a location might have a relationship "Anna Destrier lives here", you get the idea.
Anybody who can read this LJ is welcome to add nodes via comments! And I'll always add at least one node whenever I post an entry. So it could be a slow-building solo project or a rapid collaborative explosion, depending on how much interest it generates, heh. The thought is that in time, we'll have this massive, convoluted, organically created setting for use in whatever way desired--even if that's just to shelve it as-is once it's hit a critical mass.
The main thing I need to figure out is how to compile and represent the node-cloud so people can review it without backtracking through all the entries, preferably by some process that doesn't take more time than inventing a node to begin with. (Suggestions are welcome. There may be software that does this sort of thing?) But that's a difficulty to tackle later. For now, there it be!
Once a month seems like a totally reasonable rate at which to post these media review thingies, given how lazily I tend to work my way through games. So! What long-ago-released hits shall I visit this time? Turn the page!
( Gamecube: Metroid Prime )
( Wii: Super Smash Brothers Brawl )
- Music:Metroid Prime 2: Echoes - Title Theme
I rather enjoy doing these little reviews of games and such, so I'm going to make a "column" out of it. I'll call it "Late to the Party," because the vast majority of stuff I write about on here is months or years old. And the tagline and LJ-cuts will alert the uninterested to skip it without any extra effort, heh.
( PSP: Jeanne D'Arc )
( Wii: Elebits )
( Wii Virtual Console: StarTropics )
With as busy as I've kept myself, lately, I haven't felt like I've been doing justice to the folks on my Friends list. It's beyond the critical point at which I will miss entries due to their scrolling off my page before I get the chance to read. Since I'd like to use LJ as a form of communication, I'm trimming back to those I think will involve some sort of back-and-forth, be it comments, AIM, phone, whatever.
If you notice you've dropped off the list, but would rather keep reading, just let me know and I'll add you back. I'm mostly doing this because I feel bad for Friending lots of people and never commenting on their posts, not to lock people out. (In fact I'm vaguely considering going Public again, but that's probably a while off yet.)
I'm making a rare public entry for the purpose of letting a few more people know: as of this coming Friday, November 3, I'll have relocated to the Madison, WI area for my new job and, hopefully soon enough, some further education. I'll make holiday trips to the St. Louis area from time to time, I expect, but my base of operations will be Up North. This does, however, mean I'll be in easier visiting distance of the various folks who reside in the Chicago area--and I'd be very glad of the chance to catch up with you.
The coming week's full of hectic last-minute preparations, so forgive me if I'm scatterbrained or out of touch. I hope to secure Internet service quickly once moved in, but it could mean several days' downtime on emails, IM, LJ, etc. I will have and use my cell phone with its St. Louis area code until further notice; if you don't have the number, email me (using the address on my profile) and I will gladly supply it.
I'll try to make a similar email announcement shortly, to inform the many people who don't follow my LiveJournal, as well as to provide my new physical address. However, I have lost many email addresses over the last couple of years, due to computer upgrades and mishaps, the closing of my graduating year's Knox email accounts, etc. I'd appreciate any updated contact information you think I might have use for, and where reasonable, for you to pass along the news by word-of-mouth to people who might be interested.
Thanks much, and wish me luck!
- Mood:
careful
Note that avatar descriptions leave a great deal of detail to the imagination--the details spelled out here stay common between manifestations or visions of that deity, but others (such as, for all of the human avatars, skin color) vary by place and occasion.
( A catalog of strange lesser divinities )
And SabreCat? This creature is no god at all, but a sort of prophet who has somehow attracted the attention of this whole divine chorus, much to his consternation. Their conflicting advice confuses him mightily, faithful believer though he'd like to be. He looks something like this. When mercifully less god-touched, he speaks informally under the nickname of Sabe.
With the old FreeOpenDiary incarnation of the Hall of Twisted Mirrors discarded, it seems a good idea to do my handful of readers the service of copying over the Index of Mirrors. LJ's longer allowable post length should be handy! I know I haven't been doing many mirror-based posts for a while, but I'd like to get back in the habit of doing so, and this will be here to help when I do so.
Maybe some people don't know what mirrors are... but if that's the case, I can clear that up in another entry. Anyway, here we are. Even those already familiar with the Mirrors might find some new information--and I welcome new suggestions for mottoes and theme songs, since these are pretty stale.
( SabreCat ) The Narrator, the Introspector
( Tani-ro ) The Poet, the Author, the Philosopher
( Adulath II ) The Lover
( Kali-ra ) Spiritual Advisor, Conscience, the Crusader
( Nirin-khai ) The Skeptic, the Provoker, the Nihilist
( Marc Yves ) The Dreamer
( Kithia ) The Wallflower
( Dmitri ) The Jester
