#CD Facility Spoilers
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little update im posting here for anyone who wasnt in the discord, plus the message i put in on that channel. I linked the pdf from the discord but lmk if there's issues
My way of saying I'm sorry for being so out of it lately.
It's just a drabble between TO and Luci. 3rd person and past tense. Nothing too important but it gave me a reason to write them interacting. Nobody's said anything about the piece in the discord so I don't know if anyone actually liked it? but I hope you guys do ><
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Based on chapter 260 (kinda has spoilers?)
Warning: Reader is crossdressing here so I am using a mix of she/her and he/him. It has angst, but also fluff here. Requests are open
⚽️Blue lock belongs to Muneyuki Kaneshiro and Yusuke Nomura⚽️
Pairings: Kaiser x CD!Yn (Ness x CD!Yn, if he squint)
It was one of those days on which (Y/n) didn't feel like doing anything. Ego had cut their training short, and the 5 teams that were occupying the Blue Lock facility had the rest of the day off. (Y/n) yawned as she rolled around in her bed, unable to fall asleep and glanced over at the digital clock on the wall.
'It's only 15:30... I still have some time left till dinner.' She thought and sat up in her bed, looking at the two beds that usually Ness and Kaiser occupied. To her surprise, neither were there, and thinking back, she couldn't remember seeing Kaiser during morning practice. Only Ness was there, who looked gloomy and barely talked to anyone, even the German side couldn't get anything out of him.
'So annoying... What are those two even up to?' (Y/n) hummed, feeling a little worried about both boys and got out of bed, deciding to go look for them.
'It's not like I care about either of them. I just don't want to be told off for not knowing where they are.' She thought to herself as she left the bedroomz deciding to go room by room and see if they were there.
Surprisingly enough, it didn't take (Y/n) too long to find either of them, as they were in the monitoring room Kaiser would use to stalk- rewatch her and Isagi's plays. That wasn't the weirdest part, oddly enough, what was weird was finding Ness sitting on the ground and... crying?
"Ness, are you alright?"
The magenta-eyed boy immediately looked up as (Y/n) approached him. To his surprise, she wasn't looking at him in a condescending manner, but in genuine worry.
"Is everything alright? Did Kaiser say something to you again?" The boy flinched and shook his head. (Y/n) sighed and looked at the closed door, there was a long silence and the girl thought for a moment that nobody was there. Maybe Kaiser and Ness were never in the monitor room to begin with.
"Come on, get up. The floor is cold, you will get sick." (Y/n) said calmly as she grabbed Ness' arm and tried to pull him up, but the boy refused to move.
"I am fine! Why do you even care? Don't you hate me?!" Ness yelled and glared up at her. (Y/n) was surprised by both his yelling and crying. Sure, they did argue, but he never yelled at her.
"I don't hate you-"
Before the girl could finish her sentence, a loud crash and scream were heard from inside the room. (Y/n) let go of Ness' arm and looked at the door in shock and quickly made her way towards it, completely ignoring the boy's protests.
'Wasn't that Kaiser's scream?' She wondered and quickly opening the door, but what she saw inside made her freeze up in her spot. The room looked nothing like she remembered. Glass was all over the place, one of the TVs was shattered, and there were blood splatters in some places.
"Kaiser... Did you injure yourself?" (Y/n) asked in worry, looking at the boy who was kneeling on the ground. The blonde said nothing as he held his bleeding hand, not looking at the girl, just taking deep breaths.
"Kaiser? Can you answer me?" (Y/n) walked over to the boy, avoiding all the shards that were scattered around the place.
'What did he even break?' She wondered when she stood above him. Calmly, she put a hand on his shoulder, trying to shake him out of whatever state he was in.
"Kaiser, let's clean that wound. You will infect it-"
Before she could finish her sentence, Kaiser's head shot up towards her, the dull look causing her to back away a little.
"Kaiser?-"
"Shut up!" The blonde yelled and jumped at her, knocking her to the ground.
"Hey! What's the big deal- ACK!" (Y/n)'s eyes widened in horror when the boy put his hands around her throat, squeezing it a little.
"Are you insane? Let go!" She glared up, but that quickly faltered as the boy started to squeeze her throat tighter.
"You useless piece of garbage!! Why can't you leave me alone!!" Kaiser started yelling while tears streamed down his face. (Y/n) started stretching his wrists, hoping it might snap him out of this state.
'What happened to him?! He will strangle me at this point!' (Y/n) started to panic as she felt the loss of oxygen, but Kaiser's grip didn't falter. By now, Ness ran into the room as well, panicking when he saw what was going on. He started yelling at Kaiser to stop this, even tried to move him off of (Y/n).
"Stupid piece of shit-"
"You are acting just like your dad now!"
The blonde froze at Ness' words and quickly let go of (Y/n)'s throat. The girl immediately took in a few breaths, relief washing over here for a moment.
'Wait! His father?'
(Y/n) thought as she started to cough, which made Kaiser finally step out of his state.
"(Y/n)..." The blonde whispered as he looked down at her, then quickly got off of the girl and moved away as far as possible. Ness helped her sit up while the girl kept her eyes fixated on Kaiser.
"N-Ness... Get me a first aid kit out of the medic room." She said to the boy, who looked at her in confusion.
"Did you cut yourself?"
"No, just go and get it."
The boy decided not to argue for now and quickly ran out. After he left, (Y/n) refocused her attention on Kaiser, who was staring at his hands in horror.
The girl shook her head and got off of the ground, walking over to Kaiser slowly.
'His dad.... Did his dad hurt him? What else could he have done to him?' She thought once her mind was clear, anger bubbling up inside of her.
"Kaiser-"
"Don't come near me." The boy looked up at her in horror,she could see a new set of tears form in his eyes.
"It's-"
"No, stay away."
"Fine. It's fine."
Kaiser's eyes widened as (Y/n) kneeled in front of him and pulled the boy into a hug.
"It's fine... You are fine now. Your dad isn't here. You aren't your dad."
Kaiser's eyes widened, the quickly hugged her back and buried his face into her shoulder.
"It's fine. You can cry here."
It didn't take too long for him to start just doing that.
It took another hour for Kaiser to calm down before (Y/n) could tend to his wounds. She did this in the privacy of the room she shared with the two Germans. Kaiser was quiet the whole time, while Ness was the one who explained to her what had happened, after the blonde gave him the permission. To say (Y/n) was infuriated would be an understatement, but she needed to keep calm, someone had to stay calm in this room. Eventually, her anger turned into sadness as she looked over at Kaiser, who looked more like a shell of his former self.
"I am sorry for-"
"Ness, it's not your fault." (Y/n) looked at the boy, then back at Kaiser, who avoided making eye-contact with her. She then looked down at the bandages around his wrists, guilt hitting her as she remembered that she had scratched him there.
"I am sorry, Kaiser."
The boy's eyes widened as she grabbed his wrists and kissed the bandaged parts.
"Everything will be fine." She smiled weakly, really hoping she was right this time. (Y/n) had no idea if anything will be fine. Kaiser was a broken shell, Ness wasn't doing better either, and she didn't know what to do to make it better.
"I hope so." Kaiser finally said as he pulled her into a hug. (Y/n) smiled sadly and hugged him back.
"And you won't leave me. Got it?"
"Yeah, sure." She said back, not thinking much of her words or his serious tone. Ness bit his lip as he watched them and slowly sat on Kaiser's bed, looking at (Y/n) nervously for a moment.
"Can I have a hug as well, (Y/n)?" She blinked at Ness in confusion for a moment, but eventually nodded her head.
"Sure-"
"But not now. He will be hugging me till I am happy again." Kaiser warned Ness, tightening his arms around her form. The other boy rolled his eyes and nodded his head.
"Yeah, yeah."
Kaiser pouted as (Y/n) started caressing his hair, leaning closer into her touch.
#bllk#blue lock anime#blue lock manga#blue lock x reader#bllk x reader#blue lock scenarios#blue lock#crossdressing#michael kaiser#bllk kaiser#blue lock kaiser#kaiser x reader#alexis ness#bllk ness#ness x reader
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Jurassic Dead (2017) Review
Jurassic Dead
So this movie was one that I bought on a whim. I was at a used CD and DVD place with my dad, and bought this while on vacation. I spent $4.00 and I regret nothing.
A couple nights ago, I watched this movie with @shxxtteredfantasy. This movie.. It was entertaining to say the least. And yes as the polls said, I am going full spoilers with this review because I am pretty sure none of you will watch this.
So the film begins with this professor dude. He's getting this secret green formula that brings dead thing back to life. The guy who gives him said formula is threatening to kill him. The professor guy injects a dinosaur and the dinosaur kills everyone at the scene, but the professor guy.
Skip to one year later, the professor guy is teaching his class about reanimation, and injects a dead cat, with the green formula. This scene bothered me because he said "You need a lot for it to work" HE USED LESS WHEN BRINGING BACK A FRICKEN DINOSAUR... Also where's the dinosaur during this?? Who knows... Well because of this professor being Frankenstein levels of insane, he gets fired, vows to get his revenge, and then gets hit by a truck...
Some time later we meet two groups of characters
the Black ops in which we have Duque (who looks like Duke Nukem... and yes they reference this), Stick, the only person of color in the film and one of the few who survive, some asshole guy with a bandana, and a badass token lady character who... I don't think had one line of dialogue.. At least none that I can remember... oh and one guy that dies in the very begining
The second group we have a stereotypical blonde.. (like so stereotypically stupid I'm surprised she didn't need to be reminded to breathe, by the characters.), a stereotypical jock...( who has a gun for some reason... and brings up the 2nd amendment for some reason when he's asked why he as one...), a nerdy girl playing Game Boy, and a nerdy guy doing weed.
After a meteor causes all the electricity in the area to stop. (phones, cars, gameboy, etc) the gang of high schoolers find themselves in a weird science facility. The same facility that the black ops people are investigating. The facility soon fills with green smoke, one of the black ops guys who had separated from his crew, breathes in the smoke and becomes zombie.
The high schoolers and the Black ops team soon run into each other, and the douche in the bandana (whom a couple scenes ago pointed a gun at them while they were driving, confiscated the nerd girl's and guy's weed.
A TV then comes on. It turns out the professor guy who got hit with a truck is not dead. He is wearing a cloak because he is evil, and a gas mask.. and he sounds like grocery store Darth Vader. He then announces his very evil plan to turn off all the electricity in every major city, and then turn everyone into Zombies. He then of course, announces that no one in the facility is going to survive and releases his dinosaur to kill him.
Duque walks right over to the dinosaur and decks him in the face. The dinosaur is then presumed dead and they walk away. However, of course, the dinosaur is not dead! Now it wants revenge on Duque and the crew!
The groups have now split up for some reason.. It's the jock guy with the bandana guy. The Bandana guy gives the jock some beanie weenies, and then starts smoking weed and talking about chemtrails and other conspiracy theories, but their time of smoking weed and enjoying beanie weenies is cut short as the dinosaur grabs the jock guy. Instead of doing anything to help, Bandana guy books it,
Bandana guy regroups with the rest of the crew. However, the Jock guy is dead, but not completely. he is now a zombie. He arrives at the scene and says to the blonde (his girlfriend) "I love you." The blonde then runs over to hug him, despite him being a zombie. Duque however is on the scene and shoots him before he can bite/ kill her, but not before getting bit himself. The blonde is hysterical, crying about her boyfriend being murdered, despite him being a zombie, and while Stick is trying to convince her that she needs to get going.. The Blonde stupidly does not leave, and then gets eaten by the dinosaur that has shown up yet again.
The crew have two missions now, to stop the villain's evil plot, and get out alive, but.. when ya gotta go, ya gotta go. The nerd girl went quickly, not wanting to take her time while there's zombies on the loose, however, the nerd boy criticizes her on her bathroom hygiene. He then goes to the bathroom, presumably number 2, because he's taking forever... However, Duque isn't doing so hot... While in the stall, he becomes a zombie..
The bandana guy is also using the bathroom, and says that he's suffering from a case of the bubble guys. He then does some more weed... As he's doing his business, Zombie Duque opens the stall and starts strangling bandana man. The nerd guy during all of this... just stays in the stall, instead of doing the logical thing of leaving. Bandana man tries to get his gun out, but accidentally shoots the nerd guy right in the head.
Okay okay what next
Assassin lady kills the now zombie bandana man, the nerd girl somehow knows code and hacks into the system, but the system has a safeguard and now the facility is about to blow up.
The professor realizes he has to leave, but then the dinosaur shows up and eats him.
The remaining crew find a military vehicle equipped with a turret, they kill Zombie Duque and the dinosaur with it. They then escape the facility by somehow crashing the military vehicle through the wall and escaping, but it's too late, the villain won, and all the characters are zombies... but sentient... and they adopted the dinosaurs head as their pet.. They then drive off into the desert sunset.... The end..
This movie was a nonsensical mess, but... I love these type of movies. I was never bored. All in all I give it 6.5/10
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We all heard your least favourite Eggman moments from the games, but what about your favourites?
His creation: Thanks for making him, Ohshima. :>
Wanting Sonic to suffer in SEGA Sonic Arcade: People like to say that Eggman isn't sadistic, but I'd argue that he can be, at least when Sonic and his friends are involved. There can be no other explanation for why he set up an island filled with death traps, with no ulterior motive beyond laughing at Sonic's utter panic and misery.
The Bad Futures in Sonic CD: This is a more indirect one, but it still qualifies. Think Eggman winning would be harmless? Show 'em these. Palmtree Panic becomes polluted beyond repair, Quartz Quadrant has been hollowed out completely, Stardust Speedway has become a garish shadow of its former self… even his own facilities have seen better days, though that's purely because his manchild sensibilities dictate that he moves on to conquer more lands when he's grown bored with what he already has.
The Bad Futures are a high point of Sonic storytelling in general, since they use visuals to convey a darker and deeper narrative without being inappropriately hamfisted about it like the zombot arc. That Eggman is the one responsible for them in-universe just makes them all the more sweeter.
Working hard in S3&K: He really wants to get the Death Egg up and running, and you can't stop him. Eggman has always stood out by being more active than his villainous peers, but no game highlights that better than Sonic 3 & Dante from the Devil May Cry series. He burns down forests, he tears down ruins, he traps ghosts, he reignites volcanos… and he tricks the local guardian. Even after a temporary setback the first time around, he does eventually succeed the second time, with a newly acquired Master Emerald on top of that.
But he didn't stop there, did he? Once Sonic confronts him aboard the Death Egg, the mad scientist threw everything he had at the hedgehog. I believe the finale to S3&K will always be one of the best in the series, and a major reason for that is because it shines a spotlight on the important tidbit that Eggman will never, ever stop… just like Sonic.
Everything in SA1: Well, aside from maybe the end, since that was the moment that kickstarted a certain trend...
But BEFORE that point, Eggman was magnificent in this game. He unleashes Chaos on the world, but continues to throw his own weight via the Egg Carrier and the E-Series. He collects some emeralds on his own, while swiping other emeralds from the heroes at just the right moments. When the Egg Carrier is down, he resorts to the missile, too furious and vengeful to care if he himself is caught in the crossfire. Then he directly threatens a young boy with murder, for good measure.
Chaos may have been the final obstacle of SA1, but Eggman was unquestionably the main driving force of SA1.
The fake emerald scene in SA2: Even someone who isn't all that big on SA2's story can admit this moment is a classic. The doctor has a few badass moments in this game, like his one man raid on Prison Island, and blowing up the moon, but this is arguably the best one. The heroes thought they had him fooled, but NOPE, he turns the tables in an instant, and had Sonic not deus ex machina'd his way out of the capsule with the fake emerald, he'd have been a dead man right then and there.
Just a shame that, like everything else Eggman does in SA2, it's somewhat undermined by him being Shadow's pawn the whole time. (So going back to what I said about not being big on SA2's story…)
Kidnapping Vanilla in Advance 2: This one always makes me laugh with how ridiculously petty it is. There is absolutely no practical reason for it, it doesn't benefit any plan of any sort, he just really hates little rabbit girls and wants to punish them for existing.
Driving Emerl insane in Battle: Yeah, the aftermath is regrettable (spoiler: ANOTHER upstaging), but the sheer cruelty in overwhelming the Gizoid with power for all his friends to witness, after the latter was willing to let bygones be bygones, is a moment of pure unadulterated villainy.
Having a more creepy design than Mephiles in '06: Poor Mephiles tries so hard to act all spooky and menacing, but Realistic Eggman with his golden nipples does a much better job at freaking everyone out without even trying. Eggman: 1, Mephiles: 0.
(This is a joke answer… maybe.)
The intro and Egg Dragoon in Unleashed: Eggman is arguably treated as something of an afterthought for the middle of the game (much like the plot itself actually), but these two moments are undeniably iconic for the doctor. An action-packed beginning is tapped off with Eggman cancelling out Super Sonic and firing his unfortunately shaped cannon, and the glory of Eggmanland being brought to life is rounded out with one of Eggman's absolute best mechs in the series, in a battle that kicks the adrenaline into overdrive.
Even if Dark Gaia comes along to ruin the mood afterwards, it can't dampen the awesomeness of this fight.
The final boss in Colours is… him!: I still remember my absolute shock when I learned that there were no smoke and mirrors, no cruel tricks, that Eggman was indeed the honest-to-god final-final-boss in a 3D game for the very first time. Took over a goddamn decade for it to happen, but y'know... better late than never.
I was already grateful with the Eggman content in Colours thanks to the legendary public announcements throughout the rest of the game, but this was the much deserved icing on the cake. And while the Nega-Wisp Armor might not be the most complex final boss in a 3D Sonic, I still think it's fun in its own right.
Finally securing a monster in Generations: What else is there to say? After having bad luck with previous ones, it was long overdue, and since Time Eater is arguably tied with Solaris as the most powerful of the lot, it couldn't have been a better candidate. The fact that he pilots and controls it directly really seals the deal.
Punching a wall of ice in Lost World: C'mon, that scene was metal. As were the bloodthirsty threats that Eggman muttered to Zavok and Zazz, who appeared to actually be taken aback if their reactions were of any indication. Shame he never did get his hands on them... but I guess he was too busy taking back his final boss role behind the scenes, eh?
Fighting back against Heavy King in Mania: What could have been a groanworthy finale to an otherwise grade-A Sonic experience is wisely averted when Eggman doesn't take that betrayal shit sitting down. And unlike with Chaos, he doesn't get shot down before he can do anything.
What's really interesting is that despite Heavy King having a more impressive transformation in comparison to the withered state of the Klepto Mobile, the game itself seems to treat Eggman as the higher authority between the two, since it's specifically him, NOT King, who Super Sonic rams into one last time for dramatic effect in the post-battle cutscene.
Everything in Forces: He may have had a little help with the Phantom Ruby, but he asserted his world dominance much better than SatAM Robotnik ever did, and he never sat around idly while the heroes tried to stop him either.
That's all great on its own, but his endless backup plans make it even better: Death Egg's destroyed? Send Sonic to Null Space. He gets out of Null Space? Drop an artificial sun on his enemies. The artificial sun is foiled? Overclock the Phantom Ruby and use its powers more extensively than Infinite ever did. The first final boss is defeated? There's a second one lock and loaded. And since Infinite was the one who dropped a Ruby replica during his fight with Silver, Eggman's ultimate downfall isn't even his own fault.
We can talk all day about what else they could have done with the plot of Forces, but anyone who says Eggman doesn't deserve credit for his showing in this game probably hates him and/or writes for an overrated comic.
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tfw have thoughts but are unable to articulate them properly, leading to them just rotating in my brain forever. long post warning by the way, this is me trying to get those thoughts out onto paper.
there will be spoilers but, i don't think i need to worry too much about that?
i've revisited all the main drama CDs with a friend who i got into pararai lately (we started maybe a few days ago and just finished LIVE last night) and going back through it all now with no long breaks inbetween (the first time i listened to them, it was upwards of days between each one), there are a lot of things that i noticed were foreshadowed from the very beginning. and then there are a lot of things i noticed, loose ends, that maybe they could put to an end finally with the new road to legend season. and there are a lot of unanswered questions that could finally have an answer with road to legend too.
like there are a lot of things that could be answered about characters' pasts with the appearance of these new teams and perhaps only because of the appearance of these new teams.
like satsuki's past with ryoga perhaps, that could be delved into with AKYRxgoku luck. satsuki would never want to talk about it himself of course, since that is part of his trauma.
or ryu's mysterious past, finally we could get concrete answers to his past in TCWx1nm8. because of the experimenting and how that basically rewired his brain, ryu is incapable of comprehending his past in a coherent way to other people (which i thought is probably why he doesn't get trap reactions, with the way his brain is now it's too complex for him to consider being trapped in AT facility as 'trauma,' so there's no real negative emotion attached to it, so that means he never has trap reaction) so the fact that rokuta and itsuki knows him will mean we will actually learn about ryu's past in the AT facility.
or even uncovering more about the (horrific) yeon family with BAExAMPRULE. the fact that they ruined hajun like that only for them to also ruin dongha too (after all since he's here he's traumatized too right?) despite hailing the fact that they finally have a son by blood... the faceoff between hajun and dongha will be incredible.
that doesn't even go into the matchups and new things i'm excited for just in general. i'm really excited to see VISTY's character arc since they're idols who just want to be popular again (on the surface at least) and i'm excited to see how they'll grow over the course of the road to legend season. that being said, VISTYx1nm8 is going to be so interesting. the drama of it all. whew.
and of course as the days go by i get more and more curious about BURAIKAN. after all, yasha's dead or something right? how is he manifesting again? is it like kanata in the first season before nayuta came back and shura is manifesting him with his phantometal? so mysterious~
i'm really truly excited for the things that the new season will bring!
#post#paratalks live#meta#i'd be glad if others could talk about what they're excited about too!#i love talking about pararai and talking about it with other people is even more fun!#so discussions are welcome!
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Hatchback cars in Pondicherry
About Volkswagen Polo
• Volkswagen Polo a Hatchback has up to 8 versions present in India. Polo has 4 Petrol Cars and 4 Diesel Cars.
• Volkswagen Polo having six colors likes Candy White, Carbon Steel, Reflex Silver, Flash Red, Lapiz Blue, and Toffee Brown.
Volkswagen Polo Review
The Volkswagen Polo has received a mid-life update with a fresh set of cosmetic and feature upgrades. The new Polo is now available in flash.
Interior
• On top-of-the-line models, the cabin stays (max or min) remain unchanged and you can get dual front airbags, touch screen infotainment system, climate control, ABS with EBD and an all-black color scheme.
• A connectivity suite it gets Volkswagen to engage that with facilities like service malfunction intimation to the dealer even more on driver behavior, trip tracker, trip sharing, statistic tracking, fuel cost monitor.
Exterior
• Exterior changes, which are most significant for the hatchback, comprise a new GTI-like grille, front, and rear bumpers by the way slightly modified alloy wheels as referred to the present car.
• Additionally GT line trim offers cosmetic updates in the way of a blacked-out roof, spoiler, side skirts, and ORVMs.
Engine
• You also get 1.2-litre turbo petrol producing 103bhp/175Nm in the Polo GT TSI. Get a five-speed manual all engines when the GT TSI is offered with a 7 speed DSG.
• The Volkswagen Polo is still offered with a 1.0-liter petrol engine that makes 75bhp/95Nm including a 1.5-liter diesel that creates 108bhp/250Nm in the GT TDI guise and 89bhp/230Nm in stock form.
Specifications Volkswagen Polo
Polo Comfortline 1.0L (P) (Petrol) given
DIMENSIONS, CAPACITIES & DETAILS
Length (mm) 3971
Wheelbase (mm) 2469
Boot Space (L) 295
Width (mm) 1682
Turning Radius (m) 4.97
Fuel Capacity (L) 45
Height (mm) 1469
Ground Clearance (mm) 165
Seating Capacity 5
PERFORMANCE
Displacement (cc) 999
Peak Power 75 BHP@6200 RPM
Peak Torque 95 NM@3000 RPM
KEY FEATURES
CD player
Power steering
Power windows
Air Conditioner
Central locking
Steering Adjustment
Remote Controlled Boot
Rear wiper
Electrically Adjustable Mirrors
#hatchback cars in pondicherry#hatchback cars#volkswagen#polo car#pondicherry#cars#vw polo#volkswagen polo#volkswagen polo gt#polo gt price
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Growing Pains - Zelda, Tony Hawk, The Sims, games and related memories from my formative years
This blog post is about my personal history with video games, how they influenced me growing up, how they sometimes helped me, and more or less an excuse to write about associated memories with them.
This is a very straightforward intro, because I’ve had this post sitting as a draft for ages, trying to glue all of it cohesively, but I’m not a very good writer, so I never really succeeded. Some of these paragraphs date back at least one year.
And I figured I should write about a lot of this as long as I still remember clearly, or not too inaccurately. Because I know that I don’t remember my earliest ever memory. I only remember how I remember it. So I might as well help my future self here, and give myself a good memento.
Anyway, the post is a kilometer long, so it’ll be under this cut.
My family got a Windows 95 computer when I was 3 years old. While I don’t remember this personally, I’m told that one of the first things I ever did with it was mess up with the BIOS settings so badly that dad’s computer-expert friend had to be invited to repair it. (He stayed for dinner as a thank you.)
It was that off-white plastic tower, it had a turbo button, and even a 4X CD reader! Wow! And the CRT monitor must have been... I don’t remember what it was, actually. But I do once remember launching a game at a stupidly high resolution: 1280x1024! And despite being a top-down 2D strategy, it ran VERY slowly. Its video card was an ATI Rage. I had no idea what that really meant that at the time, but I do recall that detail nonetheless.
Along with legitimately purchased games, the list of which I can remember:
Tubular Worlds
Descent II
Alone in the Dark I & III
Lost Eden
Formula One (not sure which game exactly)
Heart of Darkness
(and of course the famous Adibou/Adi series of educational games)
... we also had what I realize today were cracked/pirated games, from the work-friend that had set up the family computer. I remember the following:
Age of Empires I (not sure about that one, I think it might have been from a legitimate “Microsoft Plus!” disc)
Nightmare Creatures (yep, there was a PC port of that game)
Earthworm Jim (but without any music)
The Fifth Element
Moto Racer II
There are a few other memorable games, which were memorable in most aspects, except their name. I just cannot remember their name. And believe me, I have looked. Too bad! Anyway, in this list, I can point out a couple games that made a big mark on me.
First, the Alone in the Dark trilogy. It took me a long time to beat them. I still remember the morning I beat the third game. I think it was in 2001 or 2002.
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There was a specific death in it which gave me nightmares for a week. You shrink yourself to fit through a crack in a wall, but it’s possible to let a timer run out—or fall down a hole—and this terrifying thing happens (16:03). I remember sometimes struggling to run the game for no reason; something about DOS Extended Memory being too small.
I really like the low-poly flat-shaded 3D + hand-drawn 2D style of the game, and it’d be really cool to see something like that pop up again. After the 8-bit/16-bit trend, there’s now more and more games paying tribute to rough PS1-style 3D, so maybe this will happen? Maybe I’ll have to do it myself? Who knows!
Second, Lost Eden gave me a taste for adventure and good music, and outlandish fantasy universes. Here’s the intro to the game:
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A lot of the game is very evocative, especially its gorgeous soundtrack, and you spend a lot of time trekking through somewhat empty renders of landscapes. Despite being very rough early pre-rendered 3D, those places were an incredible journey in my young eyes. If you have some time, I suggest either playing the game (it’s available on Steam) or watching / skimmering through this “longplay” video. Here are some of my personal highlights: 25:35, 38:05, 52:15 (love that landscape), 1:17:20, 1:20:20 (another landscape burned in my neurons), 2:12:10, 2:55:30, 3:01:18. (spoiler warning)
But let’s go a couple years back. Ever since my youngest years, I was very intrigued by creation. I filled entire pocket-sized notebooks with writing—sometimes attempts at fiction, sometimes daily logs like the weather reports from the newspaper, sometimes really bad attempts at drawing. I also filled entire audio tapes over and over and OVER with “fake shows” that my sister and I would act out. The only thing that survived is this picture of 3-year-old me with the tape player/recorder.
It also turns out that the tape recorder AND the shelf have both survived.
(I don’t know if it still works.)
On Wednesday afternoons (school was off) and on the week-ends, I often got to play on the family computer, most of the time with my older brother, who’s the one who introduced me to... well... all of it, really. (Looking back on the games he bought, I can say he had very good tastes.)
Moto Racer II came with a track editor. It was simple but pretty cool to play around with. You just had to make the track path and elevation; all the scenery was generated by the game. You could draw impossible tracks that overlapped themselves, but the editor wouldn’t let you save them. However, I found out there was a way to play/save them no matter what you did, and I got to experiment with crazy glitches. 85 degree inclines that launched the bike so high you couldn’t see the ground anymore? No problem. Tracks that overlapped themselves several times, causing very strange behaviour at the meeting points? You bet. That stuff made me really curious about how video games worked. I think a lot of my initial interest in games can be traced back to that one moment I figured out how to exploit the track editor...
There was also another game—I think it was Tubular Worlds—that came on floppy disks. I don’t remember what exactly lead me to do it, but I managed to edit the text that was displayed by the installer... I think it was the license agreement bit of it. That got me even more curious as to how computers worked.
Up until some time around my 13th or 14th birthday, during summer break (the last days of June to the first days of September for French pupils), my sister and I would always go on vacation at my grandparents’ home.
The very first console game I ever played was The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past on my cousin’s Super Nintendo, who also usually stayed with us. Unlike us, he had quite a few consoles available to him, and brought a couple along. My first time watching and playing this game was absolutely mind-blowing to me. An adventure with a huge game world to explore, so many mysterious things at every corner. “Why are you a pink rabbit now?” “I’m looking for the pearl that will help me not be that.”
Growing up and working in the games industry has taken the magic out of many things in video games... and my curiosity for the medium (and its inner workings) definitely hasn’t helped. I know more obscure technical trivia about older games than I care to admit. But I think this is what is shaping my tastes in video games nowadays... part of it is that I crave story-rich experiences that can bring me back to a, for lack of a better term, “child-like” wonderment. And I know how weird this is going to sound, but I don’t really enjoy “pure gameplay” games as much for that reason. Some of the high-concept ones are great, of course (e.g. Tetris), but I usually can’t enjoy others without a good interwoven narrative. I can’t imagine I would have completed The Talos Principle had it consisted purely of the puzzles without any narrative beats, story bits, and all that. What I’m getting at is, thinking about it, I guess I tend to value the “narrative” side of games pretty highly, because, to me, it’s one of the aspects of the medium that, even if distillable to some formulas, is inherently way more “vague” and “ungraspable”. You can do disassembly on game mechanics and figure out even the most obsure bits of weird technical trivia. You can’t do that to a plot, a universe, characters, etc. or at least nowhere near to the same extent.
You can take a good story and weave it into a number of games, but the opposite is not true. It’s easy to figure out the inner working of gameplay mechanics, and take the magic out of them, but it’s a lot harder to do that for a story, unless it’s fundamentally flawed in some way.
Video games back then seemed a lot bigger than they actually were.
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I got Heart of Darkness as a gift in 1998 or 1999. We used to celebrate Christmas at my grandparents’, so I had to wait a few days to be back home, and to able to put the CD in the computer. But boy was it worth it! Those animated cutscenes! The amazing pixel art animations! The amazing and somewhat disturbing variety of ways in which you can die, most of which gruesome and mildly graphic! And of course, yet again... a strange and outlandish universe that just scratches my itch for it. Well, one of which that forged my taste for them.
I can’t remember exactly when it happened or what it was, but I do remember that at some point we visited some sort of... exposition? Exhibit? Something along those lines. And it had a board games & computer games section. The two that stick out in my mind were Abalone (of which I still have the box somewhere) and what I think was some sort of 2D isometric (MMO?) RPG. I wanna say it was Ultima Online but I recall it looking more primitive than that (it had small maps whose “void” outside them was a single blueish color).
In my last two years of elementary school, there was one big field trip per year. They lasted two weeks, away from family. The first one was to the Alps. The second one was... not too far from where I live now, somewhere on the coast of Brittany! I have tried really hard to find out exactly where it was, as I remember the building and facilities really well, but I was never able to find it again. On a couple occasions, we went on a boat with some kind of... algae harvesters? The smell was extremely strong (burning itself into my memory) and made me sick. The reason I bring them up is because quite a few of my classmates had Game Boy consoles, most of them with, you know, all those accessories, especially the little lights. I remember being amazed at the transparent ones. Play was usually during the off-times, and I watched what my friends were up to, with, of course, a bit of jealousy mixed in. The class traveled by bus, and it took off in the middle of the night; something like 3 or 4 in the morning? It seemed like such a huge deal at the time! Now here I am, writing THESE WORDS at 03:00. Anyway, most of my classmates didn’t fall back asleep and those that had a Game Boy just started playing on them. One of my classmates, however, handed me his whole kit and I got to do pretty much what I wanted with it, with the express condition that I would not overwrite any of his save files. I remember getting reasonably far in Pokémon before I had to give it back to him and my progress was wiped.
During the trip to the Alps, I remember seeing older kids paying for computer time; there was a row of five computers in a small room... and they played Counter-Strike. I had absolutely no idea what it was, and I would forget about it until the moment I’m writing these words, but I was watching with much curiosity.
The first time I had my own access to console games was in 2001. The first Harry Potter film had just come out, and at Christmas, I was gifted a Game Boy Advance with the first official game. I just looked it up again and good god, it’s rougher than I remember. The three most memorable GBA games which I then got to play were both Golden Sun(s) and Sword of Mana... especially the latter, with its gorgeous art direction. My dad had a cellphone back then, and I remember sneakily going on there to look up a walkthrough for a tricky part of Golden Sun’s desert bit. Cellphones had access to something called “WAP” internet... very basic stuff, but of course still incredible to me back then.
I eventually got to play another Zelda game on my GBA: Link’s Awakening DX. I have very fond memories of that one because I was bed-ridden with a terrible flu. My fever ran so high that I started having some really funky dreams, delirious half-awake hallucinations/feelings, and one night, I got so hot that I stumbled out of bed and just laid down against the cold tile of the hallway. At 3 in the morning! A crazy time! (Crazy for 11-year-old me.)
(The fever hallucinations were crazy. My bedroom felt like it was three times at big, and I was convinced that a pack of elephants were charging at me from the opposite corner. The “night grain” of my vision felt sharper, amplified. Every touch, my sore body rubbing against the bed covers felt like it was happening twice as much. You know that “Heavy Rain with 300% facial animation” video? Imagine that, but as a feverish feeling. The dreams were on another level entirely. I could spend pages on them, but suffice to say that’s when I had my first dream where I dreamed of dying. There were at least two, actually. The first one was by walking down a strange, blueish metal corridor, then getting in an elevator, and then feeling that intimate convinction that it was leading me to passing over. The second one was in some Myst-like world, straight out of a Roger Dean cover, with some sort of mini-habitat pods floating on a completely undisturbed lake. We were just trapped in them. It just felt like some kind of weird afterlife.)
I also eventually got to play the GBA port of A Link To The Past. My uncle was pretty amused by seeing me play it, as he’d also played the original on SNES before I’d even been born. I asked him for help with a boss (the first Dark World one), but unfortunately, he admitted he didn’t remember much of the game.
We had a skiing holiday around this time. I don’t remember the resort’s or the town’s name, but its sights are burned in my memory. Maybe it’s because, shortly after we arrived, and we went to the ski rental place, I almost fainted and puked on myself, supposedly from the low oxygen. It also turned out that the bedroom my parents had rented unexpectedly came with a SNES in the drawer under the tiny TV. The game: Super Mario World. I got sick at one point and got to stay in and play it. This was also the holiday where I developed a fondness for iced tea, although back then the most common brand left an awful aftertaste in your mouth that just made you even more thirsty.
We got a new PC in December of 2004. Ditching the old Windows 98 SE (yep, the OS had been upgraded in... 2002, I think?). Look at how old-school this looks. The computer office room was in the basement. Even with the blur job that I applied to the monitor for privacy reasons, you can still tell that this is the XP file explorer:
A look at what the old DSLR managed to capture on the shelf reveals some more of the games that were available to me back then: a bunch of educational software, The Sims 2, and SpellForce Gold.
I might be misremembering but I think they were our Christmas gifts for that year; we both got to pick one game. I had no idea what I wanted, really, but out of all the boxes at (what I think was) the local Fnac store, it was SpellForce that stood out to me the most. Having watched Lord of the Rings the year prior might have been a factor. I somewhat understood Age of Empires years before that, but SpellForce? Man, I loved the hell out of SpellForce. Imagine a top-down RPG that can also be played from a third-person perspective. And with the concept of... hero units... wait a second... now that reminds me of Dota.
Imagine playing a Dota hero with lots of micro-management and being able to build a whole base on new maps. And sometimes visiting very RPG-ish sections (my favorites!) with very little top-down strategy bits, towns, etc. like Siltbreaker. I guess this game was somewhat like an alternate, single-player Dota if you look at it from the right angle. (Not the third-person one.)
I do remember being very excited when I found out that it, too, came with a level editor. I never figured it out, though. I only ever got as far as making a nice landscape for my island, and that was it!
A couple weeks after, it was Christmas; my sister and I got our first modern PC game: The Sims 2. It didn’t run super well—most games didn’t, because the nVidia GeForce FX 5200 wasn’t very good. But that didn’t stop me or my sister from going absolutely nuts with the game. This video has the timestamp of 09 January 2005, and it is the first video I’ve ever made with a computer. Less than two weeks after we got the game, I was already neck-deep in creating stuff.
Not that it was particularly good, of course. This is a video that meets all of the “early YouTube Windows Movie Maker clichés”.
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Speaking of YouTube, I did register an account there pretty early on, in August of 2006. I’ve been through all of it. I remember every single layout change. I also started using Sony Vegas around that time. It felt so complex and advanced back then! And I’m still using it today. Besides Windows, Vegas Pro is very likely to be the piece of software that I’ve been using for the longest time.
I don’t have a video on YouTube from before 2009, because I decided to delete all of them out of embarassment. They were mostly Super Mario 64 machinima. It’s as bad as it sounds. The reason I bring that up right now, though, is that it makes the “first” video of my account the last one I made with the Sims 2.
But before I get too far ahead with my early YouTube days, let me go backwards a bit. We got hooked up to the Internet some time in late 2005. It was RTC (dialup), 56 kbps. my first steps into the Internet led me to the Cube engine. Mostly because back then my dad would purchase computer magazines (which were genuinely helpful back then), and came with CDs of common downloadable software for those without Internet connections. One of them linked to Cube. I think it was using either this very same screenshot, or a very similar one, on the same map.
The amazing thing about Cube is not only that it was open-source and moddable, but had map editing built-in the game. The mode was toggled on with a single key press. You could even edit maps cooperatively with other people. Multiplayer mapping! How cool is that?! And the idea of a game that enabled so much creation was amazing to me, so I downloaded it right away. (Over the course of several hours, 30 MiB being large for dialup.)
I made lots of bad maps that never fulfilled the definition of “good level” or “good gameplay”, not having any idea how “game design” meant, or what it even was. But I made places. Places that I could call my own. “Virtual homes”. I still distinctively remember the first map I ever made, even though no trace of it survives to this day. In the second smallest map size possible, I’d made a tower surrounded by a moat and a few smaller cozy towers, with lots of nice colored lighting. This, along with the distinctive skyboxes and intriguing music, made me feel like I’d made my home in a strange new world.
At some point later down the line, I made a kinda-decent singleplayer level. It was very linear, but one of the two lead developers of the game played it and told me he liked it a lot! Of course, half of that statement was probably “to be nice”, but it was really validating and encouraging. And I’m glad they were like that. Because I remember being annoying to some other mappers in the Sauerbraten community (the follow-up to Cube, more advanced technically), who couldn’t wrap their heads around my absolutely god awful texturing work and complete lack of level “design”. Honestly, sometimes, I actually kinda feel like trying to track a couple of them down and being like, “yeah, remember that annoying kid? That was me. Sorry you had to deal with 14-year-old me.”
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At some point, I stumbled upon a mod called Cube Legends. It was a heavily Zelda-inspired “total conversion”; a term reserved for mods that are the moddiest mods and try to take away as much of the original foundation as possible. It featured lots of evocative MIDI music by the Norwegian composer Bjørn Lynne. Fun fact: the .mid files are still available officially from his website!
This was at the crossroad of many of my interests. It was yet another piece of the puzzle. As a quick side note, this is why Zelda is the first series that I name in the title of this post, even though I... never really thought of myself as a Zelda fan. It’s not that it’s one of the game series that I like the most, it’s just that, before I started writing this, I’d never realized how far-reaching its influence had been in my life, both in overt and subtle ways, especially during my formative years.
And despite how clearly unfinished, how much of a “draft” Cube Legends was, I could see what it was trying to do. I could see the author’s intent. And I’m still listening to Bjørn Lynne’s music today.
The Cube Engine and its forums were a big part of why I started speaking English so well. Compared to most French people, I mean. We’re notoriously bad with the English language, and so was I up until then. But having this much hands-on practice proved to be immensely valuable. And so, I can say that the game and its community have therefore had long-lasting impacts in my life.
I also tried out a bunch of N64 games via emulation, bringing me right back in that bedroom at my grandparents’ house, with my cousin. Though he did not have either N64 Zelda game back then.
The first online forum I ever joined was a Zelda fan site’s. There are two noteworthy things to say here:
It was managed by a woman who, during my stay in the community, graduated from her animation degree. At this stage I had absolutely no idea that this was going to be the line of work I would eventually pursue!
I recently ran into the former head moderator of the forums. (I don’t know when the community died.) One of the Dota players on my friends list invited him because I was like “hmm, I wanna go as 3, not as 2 players today”. His nickname very vaguely reminded me of something, a weird hunch I couldn’t place. Half an hour into the game, he said “hey Max... this might be a long shot, but did you ever visit [forum]?” and then I immediately yelled “OH MY GOD—IT IS YOU.” The world is a small place.
Access to the computer was sometimes tricky. I didn’t always have good grades, and of course, “punishment” (not sure the word is appropriate, hence the quotes, but you get the idea) often involved locking me out of the computer room. Of course, most times, I ended up trying to find the key instead. I needed my escape from the real world. (You better believe it’s Tangent Time.)
I was always told I was the “smart kid”, because I “understood things faster” than my classmates. So they made me skip two grades ahead. This made me enter high school at nine years old. The consequences were awful (I was even more of the typical nerdy kid that wouldn’t fit in), and I wish it had never happened. Over the years, I finally understood: I wasn’t more intelligent. I merely had the chance to have been able to grow up with an older brother who’d instilled a sense of curiosity, critical thinking, and taste in books that were ahead of my age and reading level. This situation—and its opposite—is what I believe accounts for the difference in how well kids get to learn. It’s not innate talent, it’s not genetics (as some racists would like you to believe). It’s parenting and privilege.
And that’s why I’ll always be an outspoken proponent for any piece of media that tries to instill critical thinking and curiosity in its viewer, reader, or player.
But I digress.
Well, I’ve been digressing a lot, really, but games aren’t everything and after all, this post is about the context in which I played those games. Otherwise I reckon I would’ve just made a simple list.
I eventually got a Nintendo DS for Christmas, along with Mario Kart DS. My sister had gotten her own just around the time when it released... she had the Nintendogs bundle. We had also upgraded to proper ADSL, what I think was about a ~5 megabits download speed. The Nintendo DS supported wi-fi, which was still relatively rare compared to today. In fact, Nintendo sold a USB wireless adapter to help with that issue—our ISP-supplied modem-router did not have any wireless capabilities. I couldn’t get it the adapter work and I remember I got help from a really kind stranger who knew a lot about networking—to a point that it seemed like wizardry to me.
I remember I got a “discman” as a gift some time around that point. In fact, I still have it. Check out the stickers I put on it! I think those came from the Sims 2 DVD box and/or one of its add-ons.
I burned a lot of discs. In fact, in the stack of burned CDs/DVDs that I found (with the really bad Sims movies somewhere in there), I found at least three discs that had the Zelda album Hyrule Symphony burned in, each with different additional tracks. Some were straight-up MIDI files from vgmusic.com...! And speaking (again) of Zelda, when the Wii came out, Twilight Princess utterly blew my mind. I never got the game or the console, but damn did I yearn badly for it. I listened to the main theme of the game a lot, which didn’t help. I eventually got to play the first few hours at a friend’s place.
At some point, we’d upgraded the family computer to something with a bit more horsepower. It had a GeForce 8500 GT inside, which was eventually upgraded to a 9600 GT after the card failed for some reason. It could also dual-boot between XP and Vista. I stuck with that computer until 2011.
We moved to where I currently live in 2007. I’ve been here over a decade! And before we’d even fully finished unpacking, I was on the floor of the room that is now my office, with the computer on the ground and the monitor on a cardboard box, playing a pirated copy of... Half-Life! It was given to me by my cousin. It took me that long to find out about the series. It’s the first Valve game I played. I also later heard about the Orange Box, but mostly about Portal. Which I also pirated and played. I distinctly remember being very puzzled by the options menu: I thought it was glitched or broken, as changing settings froze the game. Turns out the Source engine had to chug for a little while, like a city car in countryside mud, as it reloaded a bunch of stuff. Patience is a virtue...
But then, something serious happened.
In the afternoon of 25 December 2007, I started having a bit of a dull stomach pain. I didn’t think much of it. Figured maybe I’d eaten too many Christmas chocolates and it’d go away. It didn’t. It progressively deteriorated into a high fever where I had trouble walking and my tummy really hurt; especially if you pressed on it. My parents tried to gently get me to eat something nice on New Year’s Eve, but it didn’t stay in very long. I could only feed myself with lemonade and painkiller. Eventually, the doctor decided I should get blood tests done as soon as possible. And I remember that day very clearly.
I was already up at 6:30 in the morning. Back then, The Daily Show aired on the French TV channel Canal+, so I was watching that, lying in the couch while waiting for my mom to get up and drive me to my appointment, at 7:00. It was just two streets away, but there was no way I could walk there. At around noon, the doctor called and told my mom: “get your son to the emergency room now.”
Long story short, part of my intestines nuked themselves into oblivion, causing acute peritonitis. To give you an idea, that’s something with a double-digit fatality rate. Had we waited maybe a day or two more, I would not be here writing this. They kind of blew up. I had an enormous abcess attached to a bunch of my organs. I had to be operated on with only weak local anaesthetics as they tried to start draining the abscess. It is, to date, by far the most painful thing that has ever happened to me. It was bad enough that the hospital doctor that was on my case told me that I was pretty much a case worthy to be in textbooks. I even had medical students come into my hospital room about it! They were very nice.
This whole affair lasted over a month. I became intimately familiar with TV schedules. And thankfully, I had my DS to keep me company. At the time, I was pretty big into the Tony Hawk DS games. They were genuinely good. They had extensive customization, really great replayability, etc. you get the idea. I think I even got pretty high on the online leaderboards at some point. I didn’t have much to do on some days besides lying down in pain while perfecting my scoring and combo strategies. I think Downhill Jam might’ve been my favorite.
My case was bad enough that they were unable to do something due to the sad state of my insides during the last surgery of my stay. I was told that I could come back in a few months for a checkup, and potentially a “cleanup” operation that would fix me up for good. I came back in late June of 2008, got the operation, and... woke up in my hospital room surrounded by, like, nine doctors, and hooked up to a morphine machine that I could trigger on command. Apparently something had gone wrong during the operation, but they never told me what. I wasn’t legally an adult, so they didn’t have to tell me. I suspect it’s somewhere in some medical files, but I never bothered to dig up through my parents’ archives, or ask the hospital. And I think I would rather not know. But anyway, that was almost three more weeks in the hospital. And it sucked even more that time because, you see, hospital beds do not “breathe” like regular beds do. The air can’t go through. Let’s say I’m intimately familiar with the smell of back sweat forever.
When I got out, my mom stopped by a supermarket on the way home. And that is when I bought The Orange Box, completely on a whim, and made my Steam account. Why? Because it was orange and stood out on the shelf.
(As a side note, that was the whole bit I started writing first, and that made me initially title this post “growing pains”. First, because I’m bad at titles. Second, because not that I didn’t have them otherwise (ow oof ouch my knees), but that was literally the most painful episode of my entire life thus far and it ended in a comically-unrelated, high-impact, life-changing decision. Just me picking up The Orange Box after two awful hospital stays... led me to where I am today.)
While I was recovering, I also started playing EarthBound! Another bit of a life-changer, that one. To a lesser extent, but still. I was immediately enamored by its unique tone. Giygas really really really creeped me out for a while afterwards though. I still get unsettled if I hear its noises sometimes.
I later bought Garry’s Mod (after convincing my mom that it was a “great creative toolbox that only cost ten bucks!”), and, well, the rest is history. By which I mean, a lot of my work and gaming activity since 2009 is still up and browsable. But there are still a few things to talk about.
In 2009, I bought my first computer with YouTube ad money: the Asus eee PC 1005HA-H. By modern standards, it’s... not very powerful. The processor in my current desktop machine is nearly 50 times as fast as its Atom N280. It had only one gigabyte of RAM, Windows 7 Basic Edition, and an integrated GPU barely worthy of the name; Intel didn’t care much for 3D in their chips back then. The GMA 945 didn’t even have hardware support for Transform & Lighting.
But I made it work, damn it. I made that machine run so much stuff. I played countless Half-Life and Half-Life 2 mods on it—though, due to the CPU overhead on geometry, some of those were trickier. I think one of the most memorable ones I played was Mistake of Pythagoras; very surreal, very rough, but I still remember it so clearly. I later played The Longest Journey on it, in the middle of winter. It was a very cozy and memorable experience. (And another one that’s an adventure wonderful outlandish alien universe. LOVE THOSE.)
I did more than playing games on it, though...
This is me sitting, sunburned on the nose, in an apartment room, on 06 August 2010. This was in the Pyrénées, at the border between France and Spain. We had a vacation with daily hiking. Some of the landscapes we visited reminded me very strongly of those from Lost Eden, way up the page...
So, you see, I had 3ds Max running on that machine. The Source SDK as well. Sony Vegas. All of it was slow; you bet I had to use some workarounds to squeeze performance out of software, and that I had to keep a close, watchful eye on RAM usage. But I worked on this thing. I really did! I animated this video’s facial animation bits (warning: this is old & bad) on the eee PC, during the evenings of the trip, when we were back at our accomodation. The Faceposer tool in the Source SDK really worked well on that machine.
I also animated an entire video solely on the machine (warning: also old and bad). It had to be rendered on the desktop computer... but every single bit of the animation was crafted on the eee PC.
I made it work.
Speaking of software that did not run well: around that time, I also played the original Crysis. The “but can it run Crysis?” joke was very much justified back then. I had to edit configuration files by hand so that I could run the game in 640x480... because I wanted to keep most of the high-end settings enabled. The motion blur was delicious, and it blew my mind that the effect made the game feel this smooth, despite wobbling around in the 20 to 30 fps range.
Alright. It’s time to finish writing this damn post and publish it at last, so I’m going to close it out by listing some more memories and games that I couldn’t work in up there.
Advance Wars. Strategy game on GBA with a top-down level editor. You better believe I was all over the editor right away.
BioShock. When we got the 2007 desktop computer, it was one of the first games I tried. Well, its demo, to be precise. Its tech and graphics blew my mind, enough that I saved up to buy the full game. This was before I had a Steam account; I got a boxed copy! I think it might have been the last boxed game I ever bought? It had a really nice metal case. The themes and political messages of the game flew way over my head, though.
Mirror’s Edge. The art direction was completely fascinating to me, and it introduced me to Solar Fields’ music; my most listened artist this decade, by a long shot.
L.A. Noire. I lost myself in its stories and investigations, and then, I did it all again, with my sister at the helm. I very rarely play games twice (directly or indirectly), which I figure is worth mentioning.
Zeno Clash. It was weird and full of soul, had cool music, and cool cutscenes. It inspired me a lot in my early animation days.
Skyward Sword. Yep, going back to Zelda on that one. The whole game was pretty good, and I’m still thinking about how amazing its art direction was. Look up screenshots of it running in HD on an emulator... it’s outstanding. But there’s a portion of the game that stands tall above the rest: the Lanayru Sand Sea. It managed to create a really striking atmosphere in many aspects, through and through. I still think about it from time to time, especially when its music comes on in shuffle mode.
Wandersong. A very recent pick, but it was absolutely a life-changing one. That game is an anti-depressant, a vaccine against cynicism, a lone bright and optimist voice.
I realize now this is basically a “flawed but interesting and impactful games” list. With “can establish its atmosphere very well” as a big criteria. (A segment of video games that is absolutely worth exploring.)
I don’t know if I’ll ever make my own video game. I have a few ideas floating around and I tried prototyping some stuff, though my limited programming abilities stood in my way. But either way, if it happens one day, I hope I’ll manage to channel all those years of games into the CULMINATION OF WHAT I LIKE. Something along those lines, I reckon.
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Goldeneye - Jan 1998
With the long Christmas break behind me I returned to university in the January of 1998 with three new editions to add to my student dorm room. Firstly I had a brand new Sony hi-if system which I had received from my parents. At long last I could listen to my mix tapes, CD collection and the radio at the flick of a switch.
Next a copy of Tomb Raider 2 for the PlayStation which had been a gift from my gran. Having enjoyed but not owned the first game in the series I thought the sequel was a good point to jump in. Regardless of the clunky control mechanics this was an enjoyable game which I would eventually see through to the end but it was the third item which I was the most excited for.
During a drunken night out over the Christmas season I had been chatting to my mate Rob who had purchased an N64 console at launch. Turns out he was already bored of the system and was thinking of getting rid. Of course being a big Nintendo fan and very drunk that night I jumped at the change of owning this new console. The next day there was a knock on my parents front door and in walked Rob with the boxed console. I think I paid around £150 for the system with one controller which was a steal in December of 1997. Finally I had my very own N64, now I just needed a game to play.
Using leftover Christmas money I managed to scrape just enough cash together to purchase one game, after all you were still looking at £50+ per title back then. Even though I was still a massive Mario fan after enjoying Super Mario World on the SNES there was one title I had to buy, Goldeneye.
Released in August the previous year Goldeneye was the must have title to own. It received outstanding reviews for both its single player and multiplayer modes and brought the first person shooter genre to the forefront of the console industry. Having throughly enjoyed both Donkey Kong Country and Killer Instinct on my SNES the latest release by Rare was a no brainer in my opinion. I had never really been a fan of the Bond movies but I loved the concept of this game, sneaking around taking down enemies secret agent style or running in guns blazing sounded awesome. I would pick up my copy of Goldeneye just before starting my new term at university so I hardly had time to make a dent in the game whilst staying at my parents house.
I remember being dropped off by my parents at my student accommodation and seeing the envious faces of my fellow flatmates as I walked by holding my new N64. I had literally just unpacked my suitcase when there came a knock on my dorm door, it was my mate George who lived in the room next to mine. Having heard the rumour that I’d just turned up with a new games console he was intrigued to check out the system. Together we set up the N64 on my fourteen inch CRT television and powered up Goldeneye.
As previously mentioned I had only played the first couple of levels so not wanting any spoilers I allowed George to select a new save game and start from the beginning. That evening I was due to go out with a few mates to a student club so I left George to it. Not being a big gaming fan I expected George to play for an hour or so before becoming bored. Turns out this wasn’t the case as when I returned to my room around midnight he was still beavering away having got all the way through to the Military Archives on Mission 6!
The following day I finally got the chance to delve into Goldeneye properly. Starting a fresh I must have invested hundreds of hours into this classic game over time. I’d previously played Doom on the Playstation which was a good blasting experience but Goldeneye really captured my interest. The choice of weapons, it’s diverse set pieces and mission objectives plus the open 3D environments made this game so much better than the competition. I would play and replay certain levels many times over just for the fun of it. Some of my favourites included Mission 1: the Facility and Mission 5: the Bunker.
Nothing could beat the feeling of dual wielding two DD44 Dostovei pistols whilst shooting out the windows and leaving hundreds of fresh bullet holes strewn across the in-game scenery. Just as exciting was hiding a number of remote mines throughout the levels and watching the carnage unfold upon detonation or watching the enemy drop to their knees after a well placed head shot from a far. The whole experience of this game was simply wonderful and that’s before you even get into the addictive multi-player modes.
It would be a few months down the line when my mate Ste purchased his own copy of Goldeneye with a spare joypad. It wasn’t long before the four player split screen death matches were in full swing at Ste’s house. Well stocked up with beer and spirits we spent many happy evenings playing this game to the max. Trying every weapon combination possible ranging from rocket launchers to remote mines, sniper rifles to the infamous Golden Gun. We couldn’t get enough of Rare’s multi-player masterpiece.
Even once I had competed all seven missions (plus the two secret stages) Goldeneye was always my go-to game whenever I had a spare half hour. Jumping straight into one of my favourite levels and causing havoc was extremely satisfying. Plus there were three difficulty settings, hidden easter eggs and many many secrets to unlock which only helped prolong the lifespan of this great game in further. I would continue to play Goldeneye well into 1998 and beyond.
Goldeneye truly was the king of first person shooters back in the late 90’s and even today I believe the single player campaign still holds up well. Sure the controls can be cumbersome at first and the 3D graphics haven’t aged particularly well but the fundamental gameplay and overall fun experience is still there. Goldeneye would remain my favourite first person shooter up until the release of Perfect Dark three years later.
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LES ÉPISODES INTERACTIFS : RÉEL CHOIX OU MANIPULATION DÉGUISÉE ?
Avant de s’interroger là dessus, définissons ce qu’est un épisode interactif. L’interactivité, selon le dictionnaire Larousse, définit un support de communication favorisant un échange avec le public, lorsque on l’utilise comme un adjectif. On en déduit donc facilement qu’un épisode interactif est une plateforme de communication entre nous, les utilisateurs, et l’histoire où se déroule la série ( ou le film ) que l’on regarde. Si l’on s’en tient à cette définition nous sommes alors les principaux acteurs et décideurs de l’épisode car nos choix influent directement sur le déroulement de la série ou du film.
Cependant on peut se poser la question de notre véritable influence et de notre pouvoir de décision sur les péripéties de l’épisode. Sommes nous réellement maître de nos choix si la trame est définie à l’avance ?
Afin d’illustrer mes propos je vais me pencher sur un épisode interactif en particulier. Récemment Netflix proposait un épisode interactif de sa série phare « Black Mirror » intitulé : Bandersnatch. Ce dernier, dont le titre s’inspire du “livre dont vous êtes le héros”, est présenté aux abonnés Netflix comme étant interactif car durant l’épisode le spectateur est régulièrement invité à choisir entre deux propositions permettant de faire avancer dans le bon sens, ou non, le cours de l’histoire. Sur la façon dont l’épisode est vendu par Netflix on s’attend alors à être, en tant que spectateur, le principal acteur de cet épisode.
La complexité des choix augmente progressivement. Si au début de l’épisode on choisit avec amusement, et on l’avoue un peu au pif, la marque de céréales que Stefan ( Fionn Whitehead ) va manger le matin, on se retrouve rapidement avec des choix beaucoup plus graves qui vont jusqu’à remettre le personnage de Stefan en questions.
Le but n’étant pas de vous spoiler, je vous laisse la surprise de tous les choix proposés durant le film, du plus insignifiant au plus influent.
Cependant un problème demeure persistant, cet épisode spécial nous est vendu comme étant interactif, nous sommes donc censés influer à 100% sur le déroulement de ce film. Nos choix devraient donc nous amener à toutes les fins possibles, comptabilisés au nombre de 5, et inimaginables. Pourtant certains choix nous amènent à des culs-de-sac qui nous ramènent au choix précédent. On se rend alors compte que la trame initial ne peut quasiment pas être modifié par nos choix, l’histoire nous amène donc là où elle veut nous amener en nous miroitant un contrôle, finalement illusoire, sur les modifications amenées au déroulement de l’épisode.
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Pour ma part, j’ai trouvé cet épisode particulièrement ennuyant comparé à tous les excellents épisodes de la série. Cet épisode interactif était tombé comme un cadeau de Noel qu’on aurait oublié sous le sapin, un peu en retard certes ( sortie le 28 décembre ), mais n’a pas eu l’effet escompté. Je déteste me faire manipuler donc lorsque j’ai constaté que certains choix menaient à des culs-de-sacs cela m’a vite découragé et donc au fil de l’épisode j’ai pris beaucoup moins de plaisirs.
sources :
https://www.larousse.fr/dictionnaires/francais/interactif_interactive/43594
https://www.telerama.fr/series-tv/bandersnatch-sur-netflix,-un-episode-interactif-de-black-mirror-qui-laisse-sur-sa-faim,n6069015.php
http://www.premiere.fr/Series/News-Series/Que-vaut-Bandersnatch-l-episode-interactif-de-Black-Mirror---critique?&tb_cb=1
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6-HaZ0zK6U
https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&source=images&cd=&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=2ahUKEwjL166BvcbhAhXE1eAKHcBvAfQQjRx6BAgBEAU&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.leparisien.fr%2Fculture-loisirs%2Fseries%2Fnetflix-un-episode-interactif-pour-black-mirror-28-12-2018-7977459.php&psig=AOvVaw0mS8Bkarkkw_MnnrgxsKic&ust=1555018375607797
GHAZOUANI Bilal, L2 INFORMATIQUE
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How much is left of the story? R we gonna have a chilling plot twist?? After the facility do u plan on writing more fics
We're getting into the final stretch but we're not quite there if that makes sense. There's still quite a few chapters I have planned but it's not gonna be like another 50 or something.
I do plan on having epilogue-ish chapters that aren't from Ten's perspective. Two sets, one that goes into the Numbers' lives before being taken, and then the other about all the doctors. Mostly just snippets of interactions we didn't get to see because of the limited perspective of the main story. Plus more insight on The Overseer's life.
I'm not sure what I want to do after the story. I would like to try revamping an old vampire story of mine from middle school and maybe see where that goes but I don't know. I also have other ideas for smutty one-offs but I have no idea what will happen ><
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Pokemon XD: A Modern Review
Something I see somewhat often is people wishing there were more games like Pokemon Colosseum and XD. Up until recently, I was really confused by this: the main draw of these games were POKEMON IN 3D! and we have that in the main series now, so what’s the point?
Well, I got to wanting a Lucky Egg in Gen III, and decided out of playing the entirety of the copy of XD I never got to, and going on a frustrating Chansey hunt in FireRed, XD would be the more enjoyable course of action.
I’ve just recently finally obtained my prize after a long and harsh game, and I now understand why people miss it. It’s not the 3D (but it certainly doesn’t hurt), it’s the battles. It provides a fundamentally different experience to the main series, even now, and now I join those wishing for something else like it.
But as great as it is, it has its flaws. I’m going to review it now in the context of now, and see how it holds up to GameFreak’s latest games.
Graphics
I’ll start off the review by looking at the graphics. Simply stated: they don’t compare with the Alola games.
The polygon count is low, especially for Gen I Pokemon. Their models were not updated from the Stadium series, and it shows. Trainers appear in battles, always behind the Pokemon, and they just look ugly. Although there are a couple of interesting designs (notably Lovrina, who looks a lot like a certain Team Skull Admin), for the most part they’re dull and unremarkable.
The environments are also not very interesting-looking in comparison. Alola is vibrant and has a few different landscapes. XD takes place in a desert, and mainly indoors in places that look made of tin. There’s a couple pretty places, but you don’t spend that much time in them in comparison to the ugly places.
One plus though, is the animations of the Pokemon. They take a long time, but they are filled with personality that the main series never matches. Especially the more cartoony animations of the Gen I and II Pokemon from the Stadium games, such as Misdreavus disappearing into its necklace and Vileplume melting when fainting.
Story
It’s probably unfair to compare XD to Alola, but I’m going to anyway. XD’s story is almost non-existent. Spoilers follow for XD if you care, so skip this section if you do.
It starts off with your friendly professor being kidnapped after he has designed a Snag Machine for the remote possibility that Cipher will be back. Surprise surprise, they are back. After rescuing him, you just go to various places where they’re stated to be in hopes to stop their clearly evil plans and snag their Shadow Pokemon. They’re also talking about this amazing un-purifyable Pokemon that they’re trying to make.
They do all sorts of evil things, like turning Pokemon from the destroyed SS Libra Shadow (where are their trainers?), having two bases, and attempting to replace everyone in a town with imposters. I seriously don’t know what the last has to do with anything other than giving you another place to go.
You annoy them enough and eventually they reveal that their main base is on this place called Citadark Isle. You go there, snagging every Shadow Pokemon you can, find out that their unpurifiable Shadow Pokemon is Lugia, Snag it and all of their leader Greevil’s team, and Cipher is stopped for good.
Also, after you defeat Greevil, it turns out his bodyguards are his sons and one didn’t really want to be evil. There’s a touching moment that was never foreshadowed, and the credits play. Like, I didn’t care about these guys at all.
Compare this to Sun and Moon where I care deeply about nearly everyone involved, especially those on the evil teams, and it’s a no-brainer which is better. Cinematics in Sun and Moon also are far superior, as characters other than the protagonist emote during cutscenes, and there are actual camera tricks used. Say what you want about your ability to skip them, but since I don’t play the same game in a row too often, and I always read the dialogue, Sun and Moon do way better.
Gameplay - Shadow Pokemon
I’m actually going to cut Gameplay into a few sections because there’s many aspects to it. The first is Shadow Pokemon.
In main series, including Sun and Moon, when you enter a battle, you have a single goal. If it’s a wild battle, it might be to gain experience or it may be to capture the opposing Pokemon. If it’s a trainer battle, you want to win.
In XD (and Colosseum), you do both in the same battle. And that is one thing that makes these battles much more intense. It’s often easy to win. It’s not so easy to have your attention divided between defeating certain Pokemon and not defeating others. Surviving against Pokemon who hit you with Super Effective attacks 100% of the time while not trying to defeat them, relying on luck that they’ll stay in the ball.
And here’s where one of the mechanics from Gen III that was changed in Gen IV really messes with you: if a Pokemon is defeated, the next is immediately sent out, and if you have both Pokemon targeting a single slot, your second Pokemon will attack the next Pokemon to come out. Which may be a Shadow Pokemon with extremely low defensive stats.
That combined with some battles which must be fought in a row, and you get a pretty naturally difficult game.
Gameplay - Double Battles
This one isn’t better or worse - just different. And different is good! After you catch your first Shadow Pokemon, every battle in the game (aside from some Battle CDs) is a Double Battle. Double Battles have different tactics to Singles, and thus different Pokemon are good in them.
It also really helps with multitasking when capturing Shadow Pokemon. Throw a ball and see if it works, and if it doesn’t, have an attack aimed at it. Or throw balls trying to get the Shadow Pokemon out of the fight while you aim attacks at the non-Shadow.
Double battles also leave your opponents able to take advantage of Double Battle strategies. Some as simple as using Rain Dance when they have a Water-type also on the field, while others include using Earthquake when all their other Pokemon have Levitate or are Flying-type.
Gameplay - Pokemon Variety
For a game where you can nearly only obtain Pokemon by stealing them from others, there’s a pretty hefty list of unique species available, even before the final dungeon.
This includes 46 unique Shadow Pokemon, 9 Pokemon from Poke Spots, and 4 Pokemon from in-game trades all before the final dungeon.
For comparison, Kanto has 79 unique Pokemon families in the entire Pokedex, including Legendaries and Pokemon only available late-game. Add in all 36 endgame Shadow Pokemon, and we have ourselves a Pokedex of considerable size!
Obviously, that’s not anywhere near how many are available in Alola, but considering how many Pokemon total there were then, it was a pretty impressive number!
Gameplay - Difficulty
The AI is idiotic. I found that most of the time, when an opponent has a move that’s Super Effective on one of my Pokemon, and Not Very Effective on the other, they’ll use it on the Pokemon it’s Not Very Effective against.
Which is great because of all the other things stacked against you. I used a team of purified Pokemon after the beginning, which meant I had no defense against Shadow Pokemon. The fact that the non-Shadows were being idiots made my survivability easier.
What’s not fun is the level curve, especially on Citadark Isle. It starts out in the low 30s and ends at six Shadow Pokemon around level 50. There are not enough trainers to make up this difference, so unless you’re using the Shadow Pokemon you’re snagging along the way, you’ll need to take extensive trips to Mt. Battle to get your level up, and that isn’t fun.
Sun and Moon do way better in this regard, with the dynamic experience system. Simply having that would have made XD a lot more doable without extensive grinding sections.
In general, though, Shadow Pokemon fights make XD hard. Totem Pokemon fights make Sun and Moon hard. There’s more Shadow Pokemon fights in XD than Totem Pokemon fights in Sun and Moon, so XD is in general harder. Perhaps not in individual fights, however.
Gameplay - Tutorial
XD has a tutorial, but it’s completely optional and kinda out-of-the-way. You can do some Battle Sims in the first area that teach the basics, but they’re kinda tedious to do.
I’d say it’s better for veterans than Sun and Moon, but definitely worse for newcomers. But the Stadium series (which XD is a successor to) was never for newcomers anyways, so it’s not really needed. It’s a good bone to throw at newcomers so they aren’t completely lost, though.
Gameplay - Progress
Definitely one of XD’s weaknesses is how difficult it is to gauge how far you are into the game. The main series has a definite amount of badges (or Trials), so you know, depending on how many badges you currently have, relatively how far into the game you are. Similarly, in Alola, you know there are four islands and seven/eight trials. You can tell how far you are by how many trials you have done.
There is no gauge like that in XD. You can kinda tell when you’re getting far into the game because your map starts looking full, but still more locations are added beyond that. The closest gauge is the Shadow Monitor, but you only get the data for the Shadow Pokemon you haven’t found yet right before you enter the final level. And it’s pretty obvious that it’s the final level.
Now, not every game has this sort of progress gauge, so it’s not a bad thing to lack. Still, I found myself seeking out guides not because I didn’t know what to do, but because I wanted to know how much I had left. The game sends you on so many quests that seem irrelevant that it was hard to tell if it was ramping up, or if I still had a long ways to go.
Gameplay - The Lucky Egg
I’m just going to mention that in order to get the Lucky Egg, you not only have to complete the story, but also finish a round in a facility that matches your level, and your opponents have EV trained and IV bred Pokemon. They also have actual strategy (luck-based ones in this round) and AI that doesn’t hold back.
Also, there’s nothing between the end and it, and the lowest level the opponents can be is 10 levels higher than Lugia.
I imported an in-game team that I made that abuses Sandstorm and I feel like I earned that Lucky Egg. It took a few, extremely frustrating, tries. And that was after an extended visit to Mt. Battle because they were only level 54-56.
Conclusion
XD, while it doesn’t look as great as Sun and Moon, is a unique experience which doesn’t disappoint. It even gets frustratingly difficult at times. I was shouting “Oh, come on!” at my screen so many times, when I really only did that twice in Ultra Moon (both times against Necrozma).
What stands out the most, though, is that it isn’t a game for beginners. GameFreak has said that the 2019 titles will be aimed at veterans, so I wonder how those will compare.
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The Dance-Horror Film Climax Is the Best Thing Gaspar Noé Has Made In Ages
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The Dance-Horror Film Climax Is the Best Thing Gaspar Noé Has Made In Ages
Twenty minutes into Gaspar Noé’s Climax, I leaned over to my colleague, giddy with joy, and whispered, “He has to do so much at this point for me to hate this movie.” There was reason for my trepidation: This was Gaspar Noé, after all, noted dick of French Extremity, whose has announced his latest Cannes Film Festival entry with a brattily bombastic middle finger. There were many, many ways the film could go awry, and I wondered when the punishment was going to begin.
But to my delight, Noé had given us a surprisingly exhilarating, physical, and breezily humorous opening act. After a first shot that gives us a hint at the bloody direction all this is going, we see a series of video interviews with dancers auditioning for what appears to be a touring troupe. They’re a diverse mix of young people from multiple walks of life and styles of dance, heavily queer, who talk about their passion for dance, for partying, for drugs and sex, as well as their apprehensions about all of the above. There’s the girl from Berlin who left because the scene was too crazy, a pair of guys giggling nervously at the prospect of working with gay men for the first time, and the brother-and-sister duo who seem to be arriving with a bit of baggage, to say the least. Flanking the television on either side is a stack of VHS tapes and CDs — among them Suspiria and Possession — saving you the self-satisfaction of identifying Noé’s influence points and letting you just enjoy the ride.
Which you should. Climax is the best Noé has been in ages, and perhaps the most humane film he’s ever done. Try not to keep from grinning ear to ear once the interviews give way to a smashingly choreographed dance sequence, all the faces we’ve just met now putting their bodies in motion together in front of a huge, disco-spangled French flag. There is real joy in the sequence, all done in one shot, which is achingly optimistic in hindsight if only for its vision of best-case-scenario human harmony.
Once the convulsions and cutting and chaos take over, the word “humane” may seem like a stretch. (Spoiler alert/possible trigger warning: once an adorable young child is introduced into the debaucherous mix, you know it’s not going to end well.) But for once, it doesn’t seem like the director is coming from a place of disdain for his characters. Noé has brought together a collectively vital and vibrant ensemble of dancers (none of which had ever acted on screen before) loosely led by Sofia Boutella as their choreographer, and he seems to truly respect them. After the choreographed dance, we again make the rounds among them for a chat; snippets of discussions are presented in straight-on two-shots, flipped through like a slideshow, that slowly brings the web of relationships — crushes, hookups, grudges — into light. The dancers’ dialogue is mostly improvised, and the gossipy camaraderie and physical ease they have among each other becomes all the more delicious when it turns into psychedelic sex and violence.
That’s because someone has spiked the sangria, and pretty soon everyone’s feeling it. The group begins a collective, well-choreographed descent through stages of hallucinatory terror, orgiastic rage, and alienation. The action never leaves the dorm-like facility in which the dancers have been rehearsing, and Noé’s camera roves it, ghost-like, picking a new subject to follow behind every few minutes in long, impressively coordinated takes. The space is more than a little creepy, all cinderblocks and dingy curtains and shadowy hallways. Two of the guys laugh early on that the place feels haunted, like some kind of ritual sacrifice has happened there.
I won’t pretend to know enough about the intricacies of French social issues and politics to make a reading into this, but the fishbowl dynamic of the film carries a subtle feeling of allegory. Maybe the building isn’t haunted, but the ghost of something makes the self-destruction of the group feel inevitable. At the height of the misery and chaos, a bold-faced title card reads, “Life Is A Collective Impossibility,” in case you missed the point. It’s a card that could be slapped in the middle of any number of horror films, and here, it’s wildly cathartic — even a little funny.
And despite its supposed impossibility, there is a real celebration of life and the body in Climax, gothically extreme though it is. In a moment ripped right from Possession, Boutella writhes, screaming as the drug-induced convulsive terror takes over. Soundtracked by Aphex Twin’s “Windowlicker” — the film is meant to take place in 1996, for reasons that may be rather specifically French — it becomes a kind of solo dance of its own, athletic and gymnastic in its contortions and agony. As the film goes on, not everyone meets a cruel fate; some members of the ensemble even find a moment of tenderness together in the wake of the brutality. I was shocked to discover that I was actually … touched. Climax is a small miracle, and if this is Noé going soft (for him, of course), that might actually be a very good thing for the movies.
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2017 Hyundai Santa Fe Sport 2.4l - $17,999.00
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Cyberpunk 2077’s UI coordinator talks about gangs, romance, difficulty & more
Alvin Liu, UI coordinator of Cyberpunk 2077, has spoken to wccftech about their upcoming role playing game. First of all some bad news; no Lady Gaga folks. I hope Liu is toying with us, even if it sounds definite. I would love to see Lady Gaga and Keanu Reeves together in the game.
Liu claimed that each individual gang will have different characteristics and goals, meaning each encounter will most likely feel unique and decisions will probably have more weight for the player. Now that’s something I really like.
Romancing in video-games was never intriguing to me, until I played The Witcher 3 as its characters were extremely well made and fleshed out. Take Yen and Triss for example. Those two had completely different personalities and choosing between them was a very hard decision mainly because of who they were rather than simply choosing between a black-haired and a red-haired. As such, it makes me very happy reading that CD Projekt RED is following the same romancing example for this title.
Moreover, it seems that the game’s world will be… open, meaning there will be no restrictions of where you can go. Of course there will be areas with powerful enemies but the UI will help guide you. Chances are you will die painfully when you visit higher level territories, however the option will be available to players.
There will be multiple difficulty settings and the game will even have a hardcore mode which sounds similar to Metro’s ranger difficulty, where the UI is disabled for maximum immersion. I really like the sound of that.
Of course if you are not keen with shooters and you just want to enjoy the story, there will be a setting or settings for you; you can even use the smart gun we saw last year and make firefights even easier. To be honest I wouldn’t recommend it since the firefights looked awesome but I understand we all have our personal preferences here. Who knows, if the shooting mechanics are terrible (fingers crossed it won’t) maybe everyone will end up using the smart gun.
Of course, the big reveal at E3 was Keanu. Can you talk a bit about how that happened?
Absolutely. What we wanted to do is to find the right celebrity match. It couldn’t just be someone from a romantic comedy movie or something.
Yes. I mean, there were rumors about Lady Gaga!
She’s pretty cyberpunk, so she could fit in! But um, yeah, no Lady Gaga. A lot of people in studio love The Matrix, Johnny Mnemonic, Speed and all that stuff and he was just a really good match for our game genre and what we’re trying to do. When we approached him he was like ‘Yeah, I understand the artistic vision behind this, I can get behind it.’ He was just on board with it, which was great.
I’m wondering whether this is something you have been planning for quite some time, or is it more recent?
We’ve been keeping it a secret for definitely many months. I don’t recall exactly when, it’s hard to pick an exact time when it first started. But everything was very smooth. And it was great. I think keeping it a secret was super hard. I remember the first time I heard someone told me and I was like ‘Really?!?’
Keanu’s character, Johnny Silverhand, is also deeply rooted in Cyberpunk lore, correct?
Yes. Johnny Silverhand, he was like a super rebellious Rockerboy who is very against mega-corporations, he would happily run in and torch the lobby of a mega building, just throw the torch in the grounds and go ‘Screw you guys!’. He’s very different than real life Keanu Reeves.
He actually represents what we call Rockerboy from the tabletop Cyberpunk game. That was one of the classes, basically a rockstar. That’s a lot harder for us to do in the game we’re trying to make, you know, you can’t spend eight hours talking about preparing for a tour and going across, but we wanted to keep the spirit of the lore, so that’s what he represents.
He’s also supposed to be long dead in Cyberpunk 2077, right? So he’s kind of a digital ghost.
Exactly. So this is like 50 years from when he disappeared. I don’t want to spoil it, but being a digital ghost allows him to not be you know, like 80 or 90 years old. But there’s a lot more for you to discover about what’s happened to him.
I noticed that in the E3 2019 demo, the dominant theme was attempting to upload human consciousness into machines to attain immortality. Is this going to be prevalent throughout the whole Cyberpunk 2077?
There’s a lot of things we’re trying to do. The Voodoo Boys specifically are very obsessed with that, but other gangs such as the Maelstrom gang we showed last year, they want to be like, the ‘perfect humans’. So their theme is like making them solve this, you know, like replacing an eyeball or something, because, you know, it’s better to see the doctor. And they’re the most the best in the Superman realm. And it really depends on which gang you talk to. But we explore it all, it’s going to be a very big game, we’re going to go to look at different storylines, different characters, and we’ll talk about, you know, transhumanism, we’ll talk about what it means for a company to come in and be very greedy. And you can have romances in the Night City, for example.
Since you mentioned it, can you talk a bit about how romances are going to work in Cyberpunk 2077?
I don’t want to do spoilers, but we want to write very strong characters. We want to have personalities that you can interact with. If you remember from The Witcher 3 where Yennefer and Triss had very different personalities, it was interesting navigating how you would talk to one or the other. So to that effect, we’ve selected some NPCs who’ll have very rich relationships. But we also have, since it’s a modern world, you know, one-night stands exist, so something like that is also possible. And also like in the real world, you can also just exchange money for sex.
Earlier we were talking about corporations. Can you tell me how many will be in the final game?
That’s a good question. I don’t think anyone stopped to count because we have both big and small corporations. We have Militech, they’re kind of like the American military kind of corporation because the government military doesn’t really exist anymore. But people sell them, you know, name, tags and security. So this company kind of represents that. We also have Arasaka and in our history, those companies had a huge fight and that resulted in someone setting up a nuclear bomb in the city. That’s a large Japanese company, very secretive, they do a lot of secret projects. There’s also Orbital Air, they handle space, airplanes and stuff like that. There are so many companies in Cyberpunk 2077.
Right. And of course, beyond the corporations, you also have the gangs in Cyberpunk 2077. Are there any other factions in the game, though, beyond the corporations and gangs?
Yeah, we also have, obviously, the people just trying to live and you know, stay alive in Night City. We also have what we call the Nomads. Outside the city, we have people who just don’t want to live in the city for whatever reason. Maybe they have some very strong family ties in their community, or maybe they hate the idea of, you know, being a corporate slave, working for gangs, and they want to be strong and independent instead.
Does that mean we’ll get to explore the outskirts of Night City, too?
Absolutely. You’ll be able to go out in the desert of California and view things like power plants, abandoned highways and stuff like that. So you’re not just limited to Night City. It’s a really cool place to use our cars and drive them fast, as it’s hard to go super fast in the city. We do have street racing, though.
If you commit crimes, is the police coming after you? How does your ‘outlaw system’ work?
The way that works is that they are basically up for hire, basically, the laws exist to take bribes from corporations. So a corporation might pass a law that you can’t sell medicine anymore, and they’re going to enforce it. The only reason they got that law passed was that they bribed the government and they’re only using it as a proxy. So it’s not a place where you want to trust the government necessarily. There probably are some good people out there also, but it’s a city of people trying to constantly get one up on each other.
We have a system that we’re still iterating upon. People will, you know, not be nice to you if you start killing many people. There are some people you can’t kill because that might have blocked a quest and that’s just by design, but it’s not what our game is based upon. So I would compare it to The Witcher 3 where if you chopped off the head of a villager in the middle of nowhere the guards wouldn’t show up out of nowhere. But if you’re in a big town and someone from the guard sees you and the people nearby run away screaming for help, people will come and try to stop you and they’re going to be usually pretty powerful. We also have what we call the Trauma Team.
Oh yes, I recall them from that memorable trailer.
Yes, they are a sort of police/medic ambulance. They come in and help save you as long as you have their coverage plan, then you’re taken to a medical facility.
Is it possible to get arrested and go to jail after committing enough crimes?
Sorry, I can’t spoil anything about that.
Okay, sure. I assume you’ll have dynamic weather in Cyberpunk 2077, right?
Yeah, we’ve got acid rain as well. Night City is a very polluted city and we’re also exploring that kind of stuff, pollution and global warming and everything.
The NPCs will scatter around when that happens, I reckon…
Yep, that was happening in The Witcher 3 too. When the rain came, people would seek shelter. Generally, we’re trying to make the NPCs very believable, we want it to feel like this is a world where people actually live in, which would make players want to spend time in the world as well.
I imagine the NPCs have daily routines, too.
Indeed. Of course, if you followed someone for fifteen hours, you might see the same thing repeated a few times. But we’re trying to make them do interesting stuff. Again, I think the best comparison would be Novigrad from The Witcher 3.
In terms of the overall scope of Cyberpunk 2077, what are the main tenets you laid out for yourselves during development?
Three things, we’re going to do a really awesome open world that players just want to live in and we’re going to do a very strong story. In Cyberpunk 2077 we’re going to add this new layer of how you make your character and how you want to play the game. So you can play as a hacker person from the outskirts and you learned how to hack you know, from like, scavenged devices. And they really want to hack with a vengeance because they want to, you know, avenge someone or something. Or you can play as like a someone who loves swords and just loves running in and chopping people off with swords. That, I think, will add a whole other layer of how you experience the game yourself. Right? You’re going to be able to live in this world, play how you want with your character but also be involved in this really deep and engaging story.
Sounds great. Is the whole of Night City open from the start? Or is it like unlocked over time?
We’re not going to have this locked, invisible wall where you can’t go past it because we show a message on the screen saying you must go back. It doesn’t make sense, right? It’s like I just crossed the street, what’s the issue? So we won’t have anything like that.
But you might venture into some places where enemies are way tougher than you can handle.
Yep. We have UI to help lead players. Actually, in the demo, you can see the NPCs levels and that will give you a quick gauge of how to make sure that you want to engage. We are an RPG after all and that’s one of the implications of an RPG, you want to do progression. But like in The Witcher 3, you could always just run to Novigrad, you could have skipped the Baron quest, you could even go to Skellige if you managed to get enough money to pay for the boat. That freedom in an open world is pretty awesome and I think Cyberpunk 2077 is going to be very similar. But of course, you know, in The Witcher 3 when you were like level one and went to Novigrad you didn’t have a very fun time. You might expect something similar here, but you can still go if you want to.
Will there be multiple difficulty settings as in The Witcher 3?
Yes, of course, of course. The most fun one I think will be the Hardcore setting where we turn off the UI you live as well. And that will be a real challenge for a lot of players. Also, at the same time, if you want to play more casually for the story and maybe you’re not experienced with shooters, which was a real big concern for us. We want to tell a story and maybe you’re a big fan of The Witcher and you’re not comfortable playing a shooter, we have settings available for that. We even have weapons for that. If you recall from last year’s demo, we had a weapon called the smart gun, which helps you aim. The bullets were much slower and usually a bit weaker. But if your aiming isn’t your forte, you can always pick up the smart gun.
There was a bit of negative feedback regarding your choice to go with a first-person view only for Cyberpunk 2077. Some people also have issues with nausea and similar medical conditions.
We’re going to have many settings for that, starting with a Field-of-View (FoV) slider. We’re also considering accessibility at a very strong level, including stuff like subtitles for people who might have trouble reading some of the text in our game. That’s very important for us. But with the first-person perspective, we are able to do a lot of new stuff, we can do much more immersive dialogue for example compared to the last game (The Witcher 3) where it was kind of obvious when you were going into combat because you saw the black bars, the camera would move… But in this game, since it’s first-person, literally you can shoot someone within a second. You pull the gun and you’re immediately shooting people. That to us is really important and really immersive because it feels like danger. It was one of the big reasons why we actually switched from third-person.
There are still times when you see your character though, right?
Yeah. Even in the demo we saw today, a lot of people might have missed it, but driving was in third-person and the transition was very seamless.
Of course you can look in the mirror and see yourself through reflections, right?
Yeah, yeah, that’ll be really cool. I think the character customization is going to be really well received. When you go unlock the super rare outfits you get because you have super high street grad and you have a high reputation with a local gang, we want to make sure that you can see that. Since you can customize and create your character you will see that as well, if you take a different skin tone you’ll see that on your hand.
Our items have RPG stats, you can craft them and feel rewarded for that. You’ll also be able to modify the weapons a lot, be able to attach things like a suppressor or a scope and also craft and modify those as you wish. You can change a gun’s type to maybe start shooting thermal bullets, which can actually light on fire because they’ve just built up so much heat. But you can also shop for strictly cosmetic items, such as shirts and jackets.
We can justify that because you look super cool, so you get more street cred game. It’s like, hey, you get more street cred experience because you looked cool killing someone. And that to us is a cool balance for items that might make no sense combat wise but because of that, you earn more reputation doing it, which actually makes sense gameplay-wise.
Cool indeed. What can you tell us about the implementation of real-time ray tracing on PC? Also, can you reveal the hardware that ran this E3 2019 demo?
Ray Tracing was on [in the demo]. We were showing off Ray Traced Emissives, Sky Light, and Ambient Occlusion. However, I’ve seen super impressive screenshots internally about raytracing (they get sent out in a digest e-mail), so we’re clearly still working on it as they looked more impressive than what I remember seeing in the demo. Especially at night and with neon reflections. NVIDIA also has representatives and work with our studio to continue to improve and utilize this technology, similar to The Witcher 3 and Hairworks.
The game was running on Ultra, but we are continuing to improve our visuals.
The game demo was running at 1080p, but our trailers and publically released assets are at 4K. The UI is designed mostly at 4K (eventually it will entirely be at 4K native), but we have the technology to swap assets and do intelligent scaling to handle 1080p, widescreen, 720p, 1440p, and so on. We can also design specific UI at 1080p and other resolutions, on a need by need basis, such as on a screen or graphics with heavy icons that might look bad otherwise.
A lot of people, after seeing last year’s debut gameplay demo and the hardware it was running on, have become a bit wary of how Cyberpunk 2077 could look and run on consoles and low-end PCs. Is that a challenge in terms of optimization for lower-end hardware?
Actually no, we have a very custom engine, the RED Engine. And actually, we’re targeting consoles as first-class platforms and it looks amazing there. So obviously, if you spent, you know, $2,000 building your PC rig, it’s going to look better on that. But the graphics are quite amazing for what you’re going to get from Cyberpunk 2077 on consoles and low-end PCs.
Cyberpunk 2077 will be released on April 16th, 2020.
Thanx wccftech
Cyberpunk 2077’s UI coordinator talks about gangs, romance, difficulty & more published first on https://touchgen.tumblr.com/
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