ok i need to continue doing ace attorney research so that i can have more life affirming moments of being like "i think phoenix was a theater major. focusing on shakespeare :)" and reading shu takumi say phoenix was specifically a shakespeare major. like we are on the same wavelength. nothing made me feel as good as things like this

This was originally just going to be what Sho has been/is planning, but it turned into a huge (like 11-paragraph) analysis of his actions in NEO as well as potential post-NEO verses, so uhhhhhhhh:

WHAT’S SHO BEEN UP TO? When Sho comes back after the events of TWEWY, he feels an even greater burden to set things right in Shibuya. During the Long Game, he believed that the Composer was the top dog in the UG, and that assuming that role would allow him to run things as he saw fit.

However, the Shibuya he returns to is different; the Composer is gone, as is Hanekoma. He does some digging (maybe even finds a few Secret Reports) and learns about the Higher Plane and their influence over every part of the UG, even the Composer. Suddenly, it’s not just one person he has to take down, but a cadre of literal Angels.

He lays low and stays in the 2-Year Game as a player, keeping above the threshold for erasure while staying solo and gathering more information about the Angels and the overall hierarchy of the Higher Plane, and also learns about Shiba’s gambit. After a while, the number of players starts to slow to a trickle, and the teams get harder and harder to keep up with. Sho puts together that the Game is searching for stronger and stronger players, and decides to align himself with the next group of players that wind up in the UG to prevent Shibuya’s erasure. That’s where Fret and Rindo (and later, Nagi) come in.

SO WHY DOES SHO TURN ON THE TWISTERS? Once Sho catches wind that Neku is back, he immediately ditches the Twisters to go looking for him, but finds nothing. He realizes that his time to act is running out; Shibuya is on its way to the same fate as Shinjuku, and the Replay pin is playing right into their plan. In a final act of desperation, he attacks the Twisters and tries to steal the pin to throw off whatever plan Shiba and the angels have, as well as to use the power of the pin to stop Shibuya’s destruction himself. We all know how well that goes.

As he recovers from this fight, he sees what the Twisters are capable of as a team, and for the first time in his stupid life, realizes that there’s strength in numbers (ironic). He aids in the battle for Shibuya (I could write a whole other text post about this, the fact that no individual person saves Shibuya but that the entire city both RG and UG contributes is beautiful and I cried) and his current plan for taking on the Higher Plane begins to form.

OKAY ZANDER WHAT’S THE PLAN ALREADY Sho is making sure that everyone in a high-ranking position in the UG is someone who cares deeply about Shibuya and its people. This includes the Conductor, the Game Master, the Composer, and the Producer. He believes (and will try to convince these positions) that the Higher Plane has turned its back on Shibuya and will try to destroy it again before long.

The solution, according to Sho, is to break all ties with the Higher Plane and fail to comply with their rules. A new game begins, with only one goal: defend Shibuya at all costs. Fail, and face purification. All new arrivals to the UG are recruited to fight for the city they love and live in; much like the Reaper’s Game, those with exceptional Imagination and devotion to Shibuya are given Reaper status and abilities.

Now, the one thing Sho has been unable to learn at this point is exactly how strong the Higher Plane actually is, which is why he’s recruiting everyone he can to defend Shibuya once they go AWOL. The way he sees it, the worst case scenario is they “purify” Shibuya, which he believes they are going to try to do anyways. His hope is that an army of Players, Reapers, and a few fallen Angels will be more trouble than they’re worth, and the Higher Plane will eventually come to an armistice with the newly liberated city.

FUTURE PLOT STUFF The way I personally see this going down plays out in a few different ways, each of which could probably be their own verse to play in. One is that Sho’s plan goes exactly as he expects, and the Reaper’s Game becomes one of defending Shibuya from the Higher Plane. Reapers lead teams of Players, research weapons/methods of defeating the Angels, and refine Noise for various battle purposes. Sho would remain a Reaper, becoming a decent tactician and always leading from the front.

Another is that Sho cannot convince the Composer to choose Shibuya over their duties to the Higher Plane, and he once again has to fight for the role to enact his plan. This is, admittedly, an incredibly selfish timeline, because what Sho RPer doesn’t want to do a Composer Sho verse where he realizes what a bummer the position actually is. In this timeline, I don’t think the city has a chance of succeeding, due to Sho’s insecurities and other negative traits trickling down into Shibuya’s inhabitants.

There is a third option, which is that everyone calls Sho out on how crazy his plan is and tells him to kick rocks. He decides that if he must, he will take on the Higher Plane himself, because damn my boy is stupid. He obviously fails, but hmmmmm say the Angels, what a shame it would be to waste such zeal and power, what if he just had a more righteous direction? You’re probably ahead of me already so I’ll just say it: Executor Sho. If you can’t beat em, join em, and if Shibuya’s going to fall, let it be the first domino of many, and let that be its legacy. Darkest timeline, I’d probably hate writing for it, but it’s there as a possibility.

Princess, part 11

      [This story is a prequel, set several years before The Fall of Doc Future, when Flicker is 16.  Links to some of my other work are here.  Updates are theoretically biweekly. Next chapter is mostly done so I’m going to try to get it out later in August.]

Previous: Part 10

     Five days after Speedtest.  Three days after the isotope exchanger had worked enough for Flicker to restart her body chemistry.  Then a scramble of pain, healing, and memory triage before, finally, sleep.  She'd awakened, mentally fogged, to start a messy program of biological recovery and physical therapy, complicated by the need to spend more time in the isotope exchanger to reduce her not-immediately-lethal-but-still-a-problem radioactivity.  For her minds, a fuzzy time of finding and patching connections, habits, and memories that were temporarily broken, misplaced, distorted, or newly intrusive.  For respite, ghosting to Antarctica, gliding in the low sun over ice and cold air, never near anything living.  Sleep remained fitful.       Evening.  The last really needed isotope exchanger session done.  Body and mind were now holding together, even if neither were yet anywhere Flicker was particularly happy with.       Talking to Doc in his lab.  He frowned at a brain scan, some graphs, and a schematic of a cybernetic inductor.       "I checked in on your medibots, because you mentioned your start routine this morning was still rough.  Looks like your mind work was okay despite that, though?"       "Caffeine helped," said Flicker.       "And you can drink it again, and eat.  Progress.  I'm concerned at this scan though.  It still shows signs of cybernetic interface withdrawal.  I don't know how long that will last, given everything else.  How bad is the ennui and poor appetite?"       "Caffeine helped.  A little."       "Hm.  Not much we can do other than wait.  I had the Database forward the medibot scans and other information to Dr. Reinhart's partition."       "Thanks.  But I have a question."       "Yes?"       "You agreed to all of Dr. Reinhart's terms, including Database access, even though she's got a really questionable background, and doesn't want to meet or talk to you.  Her last message mentioned it wasn't an encouraging sign, because it meant I needed help pretty bad."       "Well, you do.  Frankly, I'd be more worried if she was cheerily optimistic.  And the Database picked her as the best choice.  Fortunately Jumping Spider knew a bit about her, and was willing to do that interview.  So I'm satisfied for now."       "I guess I don't get how you're okay with the uncertainty about a mind control expert."       "I did verify that she wasn't gaming the Database threat index.  The correlations are suggestive of a mission-oriented vigilante targeting actively harmful individuals with power that have little or no likelihood of being stopped or removed by other means.  Plus a few covert operations agents trying to kill her.  The threat index understates her effect, because she operates in realms where data is sparse and of poor quality.  As for the alleged mind control, it may just be a combination of psychological manipulation and some kind of hidden influence.  But there is no question she uses her reputation as an effective tool."       Doc waved a hand.  "And I have a reputation for being paranoid about mind control, which isn't going to make her more eager to meet me, is it?  Our security protocols may not be compatible, and I can think of several other potential good reasons for her to stay away.  But ultimately it doesn't matter.  She doesn't want to talk, so that's that.  She owes me nothing.  I wouldn't mind discussing mind control defense with her, and I don't like uncertainty any more than you do.  But I've had a couple more decades to get used to it.  I know I can't solve all the world's problems myself.  Priorities."       A crooked smile.  "Now, none of this means that you should accept everything she says uncritically, or that you should strive to emulate her, morally or otherwise.  And I'm sure she'll drop some unpleasant surprises on you.  But she agreed to help, and she certainly understands the stakes.  Are you having trouble with social boundaries again?"       "When did this become about me?"       Doc just looked at her.       "Okay, yeah."       "Boundaries are a difficult problem for you.  So I hope your work with Dr. Reinhart is productive, and that you eventually have an opportunity to discuss them with her."       *****       The next morning had certainly started off productive.  And difficult.  Flicker had been very much looking forward to finally recovering enough to talk--physically talk, with real air, vocal cords, sound, and hearing--to Dr. Stella Reinhart.       Flicker faced Dr. Reinhart in her office.  Stella.  She said to call her Stella.  She was in her late twenties, about 170 centimeters tall, with dark hair and green eyes, and wore jeans, boots, a leather jacket, and a work shirt.  She looked dangerous because she was dangerous, and had the sort of intent, purposeful expression Flicker had learned to watch for when evaluating an emergency site at high speed--if someone like that was running, it was a very good idea to find out why.       The office was bland, more often used by the assistant who handled paperwork for Stella's consulting business.  But there were comfortable chairs.  Stella sat in one, not behind the desk, after saying a few words about subconscious framing and symbolic barriers.  A cable ran from her laptop to the now thoroughly guarded office net connection and from there to the Database.  DASI was on duty, capital S for Security duty, with subtle and wide-ranging countermeasures.  Excessive?  DASI didn't think so, nor did Stella.  One less thing for Flicker to worry about, which helped.       The office was in a half empty building in a not particularly prosperous location, but it did have sliding doors opening onto a patio.  Dr. Reinhart had left them open to accommodate Flicker's claustrophobia.  Flicker had set up a portable force screen to keep out weather and complete the veil of security.       Flicker's speed mind idled, handling just alerts and safety.  She was talking with her physical body and brain only, entirely at human speed, about something stressful, with no help from speed mind.  Holding back was hard.  More so in the aftermath of Speedtest--her old problems with self-interrupting and awkward blurting had returned.  She chased thoughts and sentences faster than her mouth could complete them, as clumsily as when she was thirteen.       Embarrassment intruded as she veered and rambled, but Stella had suggested this starting test, after initial introductions.  Every verbal issue, every bit of awkwardness that she normally compensated for, everything she smoothed over, eliminated, or hid with speed, visor and Database--all that was data, that told Stella how the human half of Flicker's mind worked.  And Stella could use that as a baseline to probe how the high speed half of Flicker's mind worked, and how she coordinated.  So she endured.       Flicker stumbled to a stopping point.  She'd managed a partial, excessively wordy, and not entirely coherent description of her problems and goals.  She had digressed from and mangled her text summary, but talking out loud, in her own words, from her own mind, without notes, had been the point.       She took a calming breath and tried to untense.  This was the only part where talking was essential.  I can switch to text now if I really have to.       Stella smiled and thanked her, then turned to type at her computer.  Her exact words escaped as Flicker's speed mind started a flurry of mental replays and second-guessing, but the Database flashed 'Break time' on her visor.  Relief.  Out through the doors, speeding past land and human complication to the Pacific.       Slow coasting, well under 0.01c, while the two parts of her mind reintegrated.  A wordless reckoning that normally went one way--slow mind to fast on waking up, and back before sleep.  Tides flowing predictably over the sands of short term memory.  Now the flow went both ways, boats loading and unloading as both minds took turns at 'Let me put that in a better place...'       Still less stressful than the talking had been.  Even deciding when to breathe had been awkward--speed mind had smoothed that for so long she'd almost forgotten.       Fifteen minutes of waves and sunlight and motion.  Coasting along crests and troughs.  Manta rays breaching, sudden unexpected joy, a reminder that the world held marvels still happening.  It helped.  When she got the message to return, she was much calmer.       Back at the office, a quick smile from Stella.  "I have good data, and some preliminary assessments.  I'm afraid we're unlikely to complete your priority list any time soon.  One thing is clear; mind isolation during treatment is not a viable option.  Your 'speed mind' is essential to your functioning and current identity, even at normal speed.  So we'll work towards better coordination.  But I have some serious concerns."       A glance at her screen.  "I should emphasize my disclaimer:  This is a compassionate personal intervention in the absence of a qualified specialist.  I am not a clinician, my research methods would give an IRB heart attacks, et cetera.  And I have some reservations about the process by which I was selected.  I sent the full text to your Database earlier.  Did you read it?"       "Yes," said Flicker.  "I understand why you might need it for legal protection.  Also if you're, like, a serial killer who eats souls, I have Officially Been Warned."       "That works.  I still go to conferences, and I create enough controversy on my own.  It would be inconvenient to be widely banned from international travel.  But I imagine you still have some questions."       Flicker shrugged.  "I'm curious about a few things.  But if you weren't already doing weird superhero-adjacent and spyworld stuff,  I don't think you'd have the experience to help without researching me for a year first.  Anyway, go ahead."       Speed mind shifted and reversed, back in her normal mental dance, speeding up and slowing down to aid stability and coherence.  The desire to clarify and add to her awkward presentation to reduce social embarrassment was strong.  But it was time to listen.       "For your difficulty speaking," said Stella, "I agree with your Database AI that most of your returned problems should fade with social practice.  You appear to have optimized your verbal coordination in order to present as a neurotypical human, so any change would cause temporary issues."       "Because squishy brain is autistic.  And yeah I did.  It's a real pain to get strangers to listen if you don't talk 'normal human'."       "Your distress is understandable.  You do have traits in common with individuals with Asperger's and ADHD, but given your unique mind, it's probably best to view them as suggestive analogies--you have similar problems with similar coping mechanisms.  'Non-neurotypical' is as far as I'd go, and much of the cause may be consequences of the connection to your speed mind.  Other issues are clearer."       Stella leaned back in her chair.  "Such as PTSD.  You have layered coping mechanisms, but your Database stress history indicates that you tend to overwork or otherwise push yourself back to a ragged edge whenever you manage to achieve progress in reducing its effects."       Stella clasped her hands in front of her face.  "I doubt that dealing with the underlying issues will be an easy or quick task, but this is something you need to mitigate.  I'll try to help you set realistic expectations when I understand more.  One particular note.  I can't speak to Doc's own mental health.  But the elements of his work and life habits available for study indicate someone rather unhealthy for a PTSD sufferer to emulate.  And whatever he might say, you took early cues from what he did."       Stella frowned.  "Your memory problems...  I'm going to defer judgement on some of them until you've had more time to recover from your recent incident.  And there are a number of other potentially serious long-term conditions that I now consider less likely, but can't yet rule out.  But I am concerned that your Database AI already warned you about everything I've brought up so far, and some other issues that are more recent.  I'd recommend revisiting your heuristics."       Flicker spread her hands.  "I didn't ignore the Database.  I just couldn't do anything useful.  I patched what I could and kept going."       "That invites trouble when a new problem disturbs your patches."       "Well, yeah.  I get angry at things I can't fix.  So I put them out of my mind to stay sane."  Flicker looked away.  "At least out of my conscious, human mind.  Part of me remembers.  And stays angry."       She looked back and tried to smile.  "I sometimes joke that I haven't lost my mind; I keep backups.  Doc always retorted with how arduous it could be to try to restore from one.  And that a mental backup doesn't bring things back the same, because the world has moved on.  He was right.  I had to try to restore a few things I misplaced during Speedtest and it was a pain.  It stirs everything up, and I kept running across crap I'd stashed away because I couldn't deal, and I still couldn't deal because it was hitting all at once during a restore."       The smile probably looked more like a fixed grimace.  "So don't tell me about trouble and patches right now.  I know."       "Good," said Stella.  "I will be going over things that seem obvious.  People make tradeoffs, and mistakes, and I'd rather annoy you than miss any.  But I also understand that this session has been stressful for you, and you aren't fully recovered.  I can give you some initial recommendations and we can be done for the day, if you would like."       Flicker took a deep breath, then let it out.  "I'd like to keep going, now that I have my minds working together again.  It's just... I should have reworked my priority list after you told me how you wanted to start, and put my anger issues higher on it.  And there's this book I read, called Practical Power Dynamics..."       An alert flashed on Flicker's visor and she sped up.  The Database needed her override approval to resolve a convoluted permissions problem, which she granted.  Stella's base permission level was only equivalent to a trusted outside academic researcher, so approval requests were going to be common for a while.  Flicker slowed back down again to listen.       "Where did you get the edition you read?" asked Stella.  "It doesn't look like it was from the Database."       "No.  There was a version, but the Database didn't let me read that one.  There were a bunch of hazards and warnings.  The version I read is there now, I scanned it then locked it down.  Doc doesn't know about it.  I got it from Journeyman.  He said he traded a bibliomancer to reconstruct an original text copy.  Then let me read it, because he was worried and thought it might help me."       Stella put a hand to her forehead and studied her computer display.  "I see.  What that alleged bibliomancer did should not be possible.  But never mind that now.  Was your visor recording when you discussed it, and if so, would you be willing to share a transcript?"       "Sure."  Another bit of access granted.       Stella spoke slowly while scanning her screen.  "I'd like to ask a favor of you.  Please do not reread Practical Power Dynamics, or try to use any of the techniques, before I've had a chance to make some annotations for you.  And assume it's more dangerous to you than the author intended.  You read what appears to be an early draft that was never distributed."       Flicker frowned.  "How do you know that?"       "I wrote it."       "Oh, that's great!  I had a lot of questions, but I couldn't--I mean it was still dangerous.  But you can tell me what to watch out for.  I loved the humor, the way you made pieces fit that everyone just seems to assume or ignore.  And the parts about anger were..." Flicker trailed off.  "You don't look happy.  What's wrong?"       "Well, at least you weren't completely blind to the danger," said Stella.  "I started writing what became Practical Power Dynamics when I was about your age, at a time when I was not managing anger well.  I would not write that way today.  I need to see what I can do to defuse some hazards to you.  I wrote it as a vector for social engineering, and I didn't devote enough attention to second-order side effects in atypical individuals.  Even after I toned it down."       Flicker thought about that at speed for a while.  It made sense that Stella was worried.  Doc spent a lot of time worrying about extending methods to new domains, and the false sense of security you could feel because you were doing familiar things you'd done many times before.  The methods might only be safe because most of the unexpected failure modes had already been found--but a new domain could bring new ways to make horrible mistakes.  You just couldn't be sure.  That had been one of the main points of Speedtest.  There were a lot of things going on in Practical Power Dynamics, and Flicker's mind was a new domain for many of them.       "It didn't feel like it caused damage," she said.  "I didn't try any of the active techniques because I was warned about traps, but the insights helped."       "I can certainly understand why you liked it.  I wrote it to resonate, but that doesn't mean it helped."  Stella smiled wryly.  "The text you read has the potential to magnify a number of problems.  And even the distributed version was never intended for someone like you--I did not consider the psychological impact of absorbing the whole thing in under a minute.  Not to pry into restricted details, but have you by any chance experienced an episode of unjustified arrogance or megalomania recently?"       A sudden chill.       "...I know that feeling, it's Now I Am Invincible, it's incredibly dangerous for a superhero..."       "...maybe."  No, be clear. This is safety information.  "Yes."       "The book definitely didn't help with that."       "My partner thought it would help with something.  He wouldn't just..."       Stella frowned.  "It might have seemed appropriate as a form of disaster aversion.  A 'break glass in case of emergency' psychological reset to forestall something worse.  But not as a long term solution, and he'd know that."       Flicker closed her eyes.  "It wasn't and he did.  He's gone.  We aren't patrolling together anymore."       Flicker had been managing to compartmentalize up to that point.  Journeyman hadn't returned to Doc's HQ while she'd been recovering, or sent any message other than a brief note wishing her well.  She'd set aside awareness of that, and their last conversation, pretending he was just temporarily away again.       But their load-bearing social fiction had collapsed, leaving nothing but rubble.       Speed up.  Shift focus in speed mind.  Ignore her human emulation, it was working all too well.  Try a different perspective.       Consider the positive.  She'd learned too much during her time with him for reflexive avoidance of memory to be appropriate.  She had her own strength, her own self, her own plans, where he was but memory and data.  That could be a placeholder, a way to consider him as Flicker adjusted.  It was definitely less disruptive than an emotional shutdown.       Now slow down and return.  Emotion and context flooded back, but she had a reference point.       Her visor was beeping at her.  She opened her eyes, and saw the alerts--the reason for the beeping.       Warning: Situational awareness lost, Alert: Emotional crisis reaction signs, Alert: Potential dissociation trigger, Alert: Database permission upgrade request for Dr. Stella Reinhart--crisis context information.       She virtual typed to grant the permission.  Then straightened, her face under control.  This was her problem, not his.       The book dedication had been perfectly clear.  For Doc Future.  It's a trap.  She'd read it anyway.       So had Journeyman, but at least he hadn't ignored three blocks, eleven warnings, and 47 advisories, like she had.       Tap.  Tap.  Tap.  Stella was glaring intently at her laptop display and speedreading--a page for each tap.       Flicker took the opportunity to do breathing exercises and calm herself.       "What a mess," muttered Stella, as she continued to read.  "Flicker?"       "Yes?"       Tap.  Tap.  "I'm sorry, clinical detachment and academic objectivity aren't going to be sufficient for everything.  How do you feel about 'Angry woman on your side'?"       "That sounds nice, actually."       Tap.  Tap.  Tap.  "Good to know.  Also, do not ever underestimate your Database security AI.  She was on the phone with me for all but five seconds of the time between when you started to read Practical Power Dynamics and when she interrupted your fight with Journeyman to announce my tentative willingness to help.  And she called Jumping Spider to secure an emergency override in there, too.  I have a theory about that, but it's probably not something she's allowed to admit.  I'll see if I can sort through it.  Along with everything else.  This is going to take a while.  But..."       She paused in her paging.  "I'm curious about the last few months before you became partners with Journeyman.  The Database records are somewhat opaque.  You were patrolling sporadically, and it's clear you weren't very happy, but I'm wondering to what extent that was due to PTSD."       "I don't think about those months very much anymore," said Flicker.  "Doc tried a couple of things to try to get me to cheer up, like asking if I wanted to partner with Jetgirl.  I said no.  I mean, she's a good friend, and we have an arrangement where she can call me for support when she needs it, but she usually doesn't, so it would have been more like being a sidekick.  And I didn't want that.  Journeyman actually needed my help, so I could accept his as an equal."       She looked down.  "I wasn't feeling very connected during that time--not continuously, anyway.  I remember specific events, but I'd have to check the Database for a lot of the dates and chronology.  Everything after the Japan quake.  That was just before I turned fifteen, and... I didn't do too well."       Stella raised an eyebrow.  "The Database evaluates your actions as saving more lives than anyone else.  And it's not close."       "Well, but you should really account for speed.  I mean, if you scored a flower-picking contest just by numbers, I could win with speed, but that doesn't mean I'm good at it.  And... I don't like to talk about the quake.  There were some media bits trying to turn me into a hero of the response and... No.  Just no.  Not respectful.  They're still rebuilding and recovering and it's not my story to tell.  I usually keep it compartmentalized.  Mostly what I remember is to be wary of arrogance."       "Mm.  Would you be willing to tell me your viewpoint?  Your personal experience is most definitely yours to share."       "I suppose."  Flicker took a deep breath and looked back up.  "It wasn't bad for me personally.  I didn't get hurt.  It was just...  There'd been some warnings, but it was confusing because of foreshocks, so no one could really tell how bad it was going to be.  I got the alert from Breakpoint before the main quake hit--his Danger Sense went off and he wasn't even in Japan, so I knew it was going to be bad.  I didn't know where the epicenter was going to be exactly, so I just went off the Database's best estimate, and went up and down the coast writing giant kanji for 'Earthquake' in the air so people would know.  My plasma flash and shockwave boom actually helped there, because it got people to look out windows and see.       "Then the quake hit, and went on and on, and the estimates kept going up: it's 8.4; no, it's 8.6; no, it's 8.7; no, it's 8.8; no, it's fucking 9; it eventually turned out to be 9.1.  And then my Database com started dropping signal because my visor couldn't synchronize my position for tight beams any more.  I was used to really accurate position data, and everything had moved.  Everything was still moving.  Ground level wasn't ground level, and everything had literally gone sideways.  GPS was messed up, and the Database kept trying to correct for shit and it wasn't enough.  There was one error that caused trouble for a while that was from the Earth not rotating on the same axis any more.       "So, I'm running around with intermittent comms, stopping external debris and ripping the roofs off of buildings that were collapsing on people, then making the choices for intermediate floors for the big ones--do I rip it out?  Will that hurt the people who might ride it down more than having it fall will hurt the people below?  And can I get the debris out of the way fast enough without blinding and deafening everyone?  What kind of building is it?  I knew very little Japanese, and my visor translator was shit without Database support.  The hospitals were solid enough that I let them take their chances, because there just wasn't much I could usefully do, but a few of the nursing homes and big apartments with lots of old people were pretty bad.  I'd pulled collapsing buildings apart before, and it was like that, except... two thousand buildings at once.  And seeing all those scared people.       "And finally Doc got a message through, telling me I needed to punch a hole through to the ionosphere with rocks, because the Volunteer was on suborbital coming in as fast as he ever had and needed me to get the air out of way so he didn't kill anyone with his shockwave on arrival.  So I went up to a place called Fukushima and made a pathway for him, so he could keep a bunch of nuclear reactors from melting down, then went back to ripping apart buildings.  Until I got another message from Doc telling me I needed to let them go and start taking the edge off the tsunami."       Flicker looked out the doors.       "I thought, fuck that, I'll stop the tsunami.  It's just a wave, right?  Moving water, way offshore, no humans near, I could use all my speed and power.  Energy and momentum.  None greater than mine."       She shook her head.  "It wasn't just a wave.  A whole huge section of seabed had been stuck bent over like a big flat sheet of wood, then released.  One end went up like seven meters.  All the water above it went up too, and the surface was now above sea level.  And all that water had to go somewhere.       "It wasn't just a wave.  Water flows downhill.  Doc knew.       "I started with the lateral plasma sweeps and the shockwave hammer loops and the entrainment runs while I had the Database figure out just how much damage I'd do if I vaporized enough of the excess water to stop the tsunami.  Database took a long time."       She looked back at Stella.  "I could vaporize enough to stop it.  But--best case--it would kill five million people with a shockwave of plasma and superheated steam.  More likely fifty.  And fuck up the weather over the whole Northern hemisphere for months.  The floods from the rain alone would... anyway.  Stopping it was way worse.  So I just had to take the edge off as best I could.       "It was enough to let the Volunteer stabilize the reactors.  And I thought it would be enough for almost all the people, I really did.  And then the Database had enough data finally to tell me it wasn't."       "Why not?" asked Stella.       "The other end of the board.  A big stretch of the coast of Honshu dropped when the seabed rose.  What had been sea level--was now a meter below sea level.  And the ground above it, and the people on that ground, were now a meter lower.  So what looked safe--wasn't."       "I went back one last time to write more Kanji.  'Run.'  But not everyone could run.  And not everybody who could would leave behind the ones who couldn't."       "I did as much as I could," she said.  "Maybe too much, some places--reflections and a change in the shape of the seabed meant I likely made things worse in one spot.  But 'only' about two thousand people died in the tsunami.  Plus maybe fifty or so I killed trying to stop it.  Most of them in boats in really bad places, but they might have lived, except my shockwaves meant they didn't.  I couldn't... it was just 'Sorry, it's not your day, ever again'.       "Even after it started hitting I kept running around, clearing debris, trying to give people a little more time.  And then, finally, it was over, ebbing back, and Hideki and the Japanese superheroes were arriving, and Golden Valkyrie's Choosers, and all the emergency responders.  And all the ordinary people who helped.  If anyone was heroes it was them.       "I went on autopilot for a while, just followed Database instructions after my com was back, not trying to process, because I couldn't.  There was a weird voice yelling on my com whenever I saw bodies for a bit until I figured out it was me and stopped.  And... Well, I don't really remember much after that.  You can read about it in the Database if you want."       She waved a hand.  "You know what?  You want a hero?  K'Krowl the Younger.  Kaiju from the Deep Kingdoms.  Big lizard.  Lived up near the Aleutians.  He was headed south along the coast, on his way to attack Tokyo, when the quake hit.  He was underwater, I didn't know he was there.  And there was this boat.  Just... in the wrong place.  K'Krowl felt the quake and knew what it meant.  He headed inshore and surfaced, and just before the biggest wave hit he picked up the boat.  And held it in his arms.  Except I was coming down on a lateral plasma run, chopping away at the wave.  I'd seen the boat, and they were just... I mean, they weren't gonna live.  I had a massive entrained stream of plasma, steam, and seawater behind me.       "K'Krowl crouched over, and tucked that boat under his chin, and took the wave on his chest and my plasma on his back--I burned him bad, his upper back was just cooked.  But he kept his footing, and protected the people on the boat.  From the tsunami, and from me.  And when it was all over, he put the boat down at the shore, and waved to them, and went back into the water.  He decided he didn't want to attack Tokyo that day after all, and went home to heal.  Hardly anyone saw him except me and the people on the boat.  And with everything going on, no one else knew until the people he saved contacted the Deep Kingdoms embassy, and they ended up with a ceremony, and gave him a medal, and if anyone ever finally resolves the Tokyo Compromise, and turns the attacks into, like, ceremonial visits or something, it'll probably be him."       Flicker shook her head.  "K'Krowl the Younger.  That's a hero.  Not me.  I didn't get hurt, and mostly ran around a lot.  Nothing bad happened to me.  Not bad bad.  Just memories."       *****       Eventually, Flicker realized she'd been staring at the 'Low Situational Awareness' advisory on her visor for a long time, and came back to the present.  There was a text from Stella:  Let me know if and when you're ready to speak aloud.       Flicker focused on the room again.  Stella was frowning thoughtfully, tapping at her computer.       "I'm ready," said Flicker.  "Did you have questions?"       Stella looked up.  "I was a little curious where you got those death numbers.  They don't match the Database, and that's very unusual for you.  The death toll from the tsunami appears to be closer to 1,500, and you can only get close to 2,000 if you also include everyone in the area who was killed by the quake, went missing, or died for any other reason for the next week.  Or use one early, inaccurate media estimate."       She tapped her chin with a finger, still frowning.  "And I don't see any clear evidence to indicate that you were responsible for any excess deaths while mitigating the tsunami.  There were people you didn't save, but that's not remotely the same.  The only way I can get to your estimate of 50 is to take everyone dead or missing who started on a boat in the tsunami region, and everyone missing in the region who started on shore, but who had a boat that also went missing, and assume they were all alive before your intervention, all dead afterwards, and all would have survived if you'd done nothing."       She locked eyes with Flicker.  "There was exactly one boat that definitely had live people on it, was in your path, and could have been destroyed by you while they still had a possibility of surviving.  That was the boat K'Krowl picked up."       "Does it really matter?" said Flicker.       "Yes.  You're guilt-maximizing, and you need to stop.  It's not healthy.  Don't want to be a hero for this?  Fine.  But you helped."       Stella waved a hand.  "I'm not a hero.  I've done far worse things than you.  But I still try to help.  You really didn't want to talk about this and you want to stop, so we'll stop.  Perhaps sometime we can come back and get you a little better perspective.  But not now.  You're in worse shape than I thought."       "Well, I was technically dead for two days last week, so I suppose--"       "Not short term.  Long term.  You're better at compartmentalization, coping, and masking than I expected.  That means you've been better at hiding worse problems.  But it just means more work, for a longer time.  One thing I strongly recommend--no patrols for a while.  No going 'on duty'.  You can intervene in events classified by the Database as 'major disaster' or higher, or a serious threat to someone you know personally.  Otherwise find something else to do.  You need to recover, and not just from being dead."       "But--"       Softly:  "No.  Patrols."       Stella sighed.  "Are you familiar with boiling liquid expanding vapor explosions?"       Flicker blinked at the change of subject, then got the analogy.  "Yeah.  Can't always stop them so sometimes I just rip the tank to control the direction and shape of the explosion.  But I'm not close to blowing up.  I know how to reduce the pressure."       "I understand.  But we need to do some work the slow way--reduce the temperature first.  There are other things that might increase the pressure."       "You want more of a safety margin?"       "Yes.  I am reasonably good at giving advice, but bad at providing comfort," said Stella dryly.  "I'm not neurotypical either, and certain choices and events in my personal development shape my approach.  I have no desire for it to increase your difficulties."       "You seem pretty functional to me.  And--"       Stella shook her head.  "If I weren't able to convincingly project normalcy, I'd already be dead.  But I do have a talent for constructive distractions.  So, why don't we leave off diagnostics and recommendations for a little while and have something to eat instead--I took the precaution of preordering takeout.  Perhaps we can discuss a few things you might find interesting and less stressful."       "I'm not..."  Think, don't just react.  "Okay, that does sound good."       They ate, and talked, and it helped a little.  It was a start.

Next:  Part 12

So, I got this request a while ago but for some reason couldn’t answer it but have done a screen shot so I can reply. I hope you can find this Alice : ) To be honest my NFL knowledge is extremely low but I tried to incorporate some of the things you suggested. And by the way, great idea! Caroline would be an absolute boss in the NFL (she’d be an absolute boss anywhere though, right?) 

Playing to Win

Monday - Philadelphia, PA

Klaus Mikaelson hated a lot of things but nothing more than this ridiculous ‘sport’ he was witnessing from the stands. Obviously the sold out crowd at Lincoln Financial Field didn’t agree with his assessment of ‘football.’ Klaus may have been thinking it but the air quotes were still relevant. But they were Americans after all. 

Klaus wasn’t a huge sport fan, he did however appreciate real football (sans air quotes). Those Americans who called it soccer obviously did not. 

Klaus reminded himself, albeit grudgingly, he was only here for work and after he completed this one, tedious interview for Marcel he’d have his exclusive with famed artist Bonnie Bennett at her anticipated exhibition opening the following night. 

“Please tell me I’m not stuck with another Bears fan,” the older woman to his immediate right, who had been wildly cheering only moments earlier, drawled. 

“The Bears?” He asked, his lips moving before his brain could catch up. 

“You know the opposing team from Chicago?” She shot back, pointing towards the huge scoreboard across the field. “Not the brown, furry kind.”

“Oh,” he conceded, consulting it properly for the first time. “No, I’m not from Chicago.”

“I’m not sure whether to be relieved that you’re not a Bears supporter or alarmed that you seem to have no football knowledge whatsoever.”

“No need to be alarmed, it’s not the end of the world,” he quipped, flashing her his best smile and hoping to end the awkward conversation sooner rather than later. 

“You’re not the one who’s going to be hit with a barrage of questions about how the game works.”

“I’m fine, I assure you, Ma’am,” he replied politely. 

“So, what exactly is an English, clearly non-football fan doing here at a game in Philadelphia?” 

“Who exactly was going to be asking that barrage of questions?” He teased.

“Well, it’s half time. I’m bored and peckish to be honest,” she explained, before snatching his left over popcorn. “And I’m also extremely nosy when I want to be, just ask my daughter. She also happens to be single, you know in case you were wondering.”

Klaus shook his head wondering how this conversation he hadn’t entertained had turned from football to a possible blind date.

“Oh well, if she’s like you then I don’t think we’d have too much in common,” he observed. 

“For once, I think you’re right,” she chuckled before adding. “But they do say opposites attract.” Klaus mentally rolled his eyes thinking this woman was extremely persistent. 

And he was right.

She proceeded to coach him on the rules from the sidelines even though he never asked. The Eagles were triumphant and Klaus couldn’t help but feel a little buoyed by the fact as the excited crowd cheered around him. Not that he’d admit that to his insistent, but friendly, neighbour. 

1 hour later....

Caroline Forbes hated interviews.

With a passion.

So much so that her palms were sweaty and no matter how many times she ran them over her jeans it made no difference. In public she oozed confidence and professionalism but unexpected questions seemed to make her incredibly nervous.  

When she’d made her way up to the professional coaching level for the Philadelphia Eagles last year, Caroline wasn’t quite sure how she’d be perceived. 

She wasn’t the first ever female coach in the NFL. Jen Welter from the Atlanta Cardinals had become one of her inspirations in 2015 after her promotion and it had given Caroline the confidence to try and emulate her journey in the male dominated NFL. 

Of course it wasn’t an easy road. She had cheered at High School and through College, something idiotic males liked to remind her about at every opportunity. But it had been her mom, the local town Sheriff and huge football fan, who’d made Caroline believe anything was possible. 

Being named as coach was one of the best days of her professional career but for some reason the fact she was blonde and pretty was more interesting than her actual experience and CV.  

When the New York Times had approached Caroline for an interview on the eve of the finals she’d been dubious. But she had eventually relented, mainly because her publicist, and best friend since kindergarten, Katherine had threatened to reveal her innermost sexual fantasies to the press. She realised then that you should never mix business with pleasure. 

After all the jokes, Katherine had told her that Marcel Gerard was a good guy she could trust even if his wife Rebekah had some icy tendencies. 

“Miss Forbes?” Caroline had to admit the low, almost sexual rumble he emitted was messing with her concentration and she hadn’t even seen him yet. She decided to blame it on nerves.

Although upon turning around, Caroline realised her first instincts were correct. Not only did he sound delicious he looked it too. Dressed in a navy henley and dark jeans with deep, crimson lips and a set of disarming dimples this guy was not what she was expecting. 

At all.

“That’s me, who are you?” 

“Well, last time I checked, I was interviewing you for the Times,” he offered gingerly. “I’m Klaus Mikaelson.” 

“I was expecting the Sports Editor, Marcel Gerard.” Marcel was the most well-known reporter in the game and probably why she’d been so nervous to meet him. But instead she had this gorgeous replacement. 

Caroline couldn’t decide which was more nerve wracking. 

“He had to cancel due to personal issues,” he responded. By his expression and tone, Caroline knew there was more to the story.  

“Fine,” she exhaled, moving towards the couch. “Let’s get this over and done with then.”

“Charming,” he joked sarcastically, taking his place on the couch and removing his equipment. It was difficult to miss the way his henley moved up and exposed his the pale but smooth skin of his lower back. 

Caroline shook her head, wondering if being flustered was better than being nervous. “So, which team do you follow?” It was usually a safe, opening question that invited discussion and the right amount of banter. 

“Team? In the NFL?” He paused momentarily, Caroline slightly intrigued by his eventual response.

“No, the English Premier League,” she chuckled. “You know that other football.”

“There’s only one...” he shot back before stopping and intriguing Caroline more. “If you must know I’m a big Chicago Bears fan.”

“Wow, this isn’t going to be an awkward interview at all, sorry about that whole losing thing tonight.”

“I’m okay with losing,” he offered. “But how do you deal with it?”

“Well, I suppose I just take it in my stride,” she bristled. “Nobody likes a sore loser.”

“Yet, your body language is telling me something else entirely,” he observed. “You hate to lose.”

“If that’s your angle Mr Mikaelson then it’s not very original from a football standpoint. There’s nothing wrong with a healthy, competitive streak. I’m sure you feel the same way when Mitch Trubisky is making his way to the goal line.”

“Well...”

“Mitch Trubisky you say? The Quarterback from the Bears,” a voice interrupted. Caroline’s eyes diverted to the doorway noticing her familiar visitor.

“Just invite yourself in mom,” she drawled sarcastically. 

“Mum?” The curious journalist inquired, his attention now firmly focused on the door too. Caroline had no idea what was happening but it was never a good idea for her mom to be present during interviews because she liked to share each and every childhood memory no matter how mortifyingly embarrassing. 

“Liz Forbes, nice to meet you,” she greeted, making her way into the room and sitting by his side.  If Caroline was being honest, they seemed almost comfortable with each other.  “I thought I’d sit in on the interview.”

Caroline obviously had no choice and it seemed that given his confused expression Klaus felt the same way. 

Tuesday - Philadelphia, PA  

Klaus was still trying to work out when things went wrong. His only job was to interview Eagles Coach Caroline Forbes for Marcel and then move on to his real assignment.

But for some reason, rather than feeling excited for his exclusive with Bonnie Bennett at her gallery, Klaus could only replay last night’s events on a continual loop in his head.  

It had started well enough, even though he knew nothing about American Football. He’d been rattled from the outset because Caroline Forbes wasn’t what he was expecting. Sure he’d seen photos before and she was beautiful but the passionate, forthright and intelligent woman he met only made him want to know more. 

Much more.

Until her mother, who just happened to be his neighbour during the game, appeared mid interview. His mind played back to their conversation and her daughter’s single status and the fact she wanted to play matchmaker.

The interview went south very quickly and the fact he knew nothing about football was the least of his worries. It ended with Caroline annoyed that he hadn’t bothered to do his research or take her seriously. If Klaus was being honest she was right but it also had a lot to do with her mother’s presence and obvious intentions to matchmake. 

His cell buzzed indicating a call from his brother-in-law. He’d already let the last three go to voicemail so figured he should just answer. 

“What in the hell did you do?” 

“No hello, how are you, mate?”

“Don’t mate me,” he growled. “What did you do to Caroline Forbes? You do realise that her publicist has the ability to emasculate someone over the phone, right?”

“And did she?”

“No comment,” he muttered like a true journalist, telling Klaus that she most definitely had. He didn’t know the woman but his respect for her had skyrocketed in that moment. 

Although he and Marcel were brothers and now colleagues at the Times, Klaus loved to tease him incessantly. If someone had told him years ago that they’d all be working together as a family he would have laughed. They were all billionaires and the Mikaelson Publishing empire boasted a multitude of newspapers across the globe but Esther’s last wish in her will was that they’d work together on the New York Times in all capacities. 

For a family that had spent so much time apart, Esther was determined to do what she could to bring them together. Sure they fought, a lot, but Klaus had decided it wasn’t half bad. He loved the arts scene and was happy to be the editor of that section. In New York, especially, it was one of the most read, no doubt due to his knowledge and passion for the subject.   

“You realise I’m not into NFL at all, right?”

“That’s why I gave you all that information to study on the airplane, genius,” he drawled. “It is called research.” 

“I started but then fell asleep it was that boring.”

“Of course you did,” he shot back. “But I know you are the king of pretence, so what actually happened?”

“Nothing,” Klaus lied. 

“So convincing,” he growled. “What happened? Otherwise I call Bonnie’s publicist, who by the way happens to be the emasculating one, and cancel the interview.”

“You wouldn’t.”

“Then obviously you don’t know me very well after all these years,” he goaded. 

“Turns out I was seated next to her mother during the game who was hellbent on matchmaking us,” he explained. “Then she appeared during the interview and given my brief knowledge of the NFL and that added surprise things kind of became awkward and fell apart.”

“So you were attracted to her?”

“Excuse me?”

“Klaus Mikaelson can pretend in any situation, I’ve witnessed it. Seems like you really like this one. I’m sure Rebekah will be happy to know that you have a heart buried under all that hostility.” 

“You have every right to question my professionalism Marcellus but this conversation is entering into something resembling the twilight zone. And I have an interview to do.”

“This isn’t over,” he warned before disconnecting. Klaus knew he had other more pressing concerns and felt bad that his behaviour had interrupted that.

Removing his coat and scarf on entry to the gallery, Klaus looked around curiously. The artwork adorning the walls was stunning as expected but the best view was at 3 o’clock. 

He wasn’t expecting her but it seemed as if the universe was giving him a second chance. She looked beautiful, obviously it was her default setting, and was standing by the artist in question sipping champagne.

Klaus was a confident person for the most part but he felt rooted to the spot, unsure of what to do or say. This was most definitely a first.

“So, you’re the arrogant reporter Marcel sent?” She deduced. Klaus hadn’t even realised her presence until then. 

“I’m assuming you’re the woman who can emasculate without any warning? Kudos to you, I’ve always wanted that power over my brother-in-law just to mess with him.”

“I see my reputation precedes me,” she chuckled. “Marcel likes to pretend he’s the man but...”

“He’s really not,” Klaus finished. “To be fair he’s been dealing with a few issues on the home front. So, sending me wasn’t his fault.”

“I only emasculate for fun,” she murmured, a new sincerity creeping into her voice. “Marcel is a good guy and I’m sure whatever he’s dealing with will turn out okay.” 

Klaus wasn’t quite so sure but plastered the same brave face he’d mastered recently. “I’m sure. Although I’m curious why you’d let me interview Bonnie after what happened with...”

“Caroline? I’ll admit it was a concern but I’m going to put it out there and say other forces were at work last night.”

“Other forces?”

“Well, Liz for one thing. As much as I love her like a mother she can be extremely intense and nothing gets in the way of finding a suitable partner for Caroline.”

“I can concur,” he replied from experience. 

“Plus, Caroline hasn’t stopped verbally abusing you since the interview and we all know what that means.”

“Means?”

“Look, your expertise and reach in the art world is amazing so interviewing Bonnie was a no brainer. But if it leads to something else with my other stubborn client, I’m not going to be upset.”

“Something else?” She breezed past him to avoid responding. Maybe he didn’t like her that much. His eyes found Carolines and suddenly Klaus felt stuck without much hope of moving. This was most definitely a first.

10 minutes later...

Why was he here, of all places? 

Caroline wasn’t one to obsess over much but seeing Klaus here after last night was messing with her composure. After he fumbled through the interview, Caroline decided he was just like the others. For some reason it hurt more than she’d expected. 

“I can see you thinking,” she quipped. 

“I was thinking how amazing your work is, Bon,” she smiled, squeezing her hand and hoping her innermost thoughts weren’t really on display.  

“Liar,” she joked. “Not about my art. Seems like someone else has gotten under your skin.”

“Just a lazy journalist who has now turned up to interview you, I hope he treats you better than he did me.”

“Have you spoken to Liz?”

“What does she have to do with this?” Caroline murmured, suddenly perplexed. 

“Kat tells me she sat herself next to your ‘lazy’ journalist in hopes of matchmaking the two of you at the game from the outset, then turned up at the interview...”

“Oh god, no,” she hissed, head in hands. “Tell me it’s not true.” A few moments passed telling Caroline it was in fact the opposite. “If she wasn’t my mom...”

“It will be a cute story to tell your kids,” she joked. 

“Kids?” She knew it was him before he arrived at such an awkward moment. 

“An age you can relate to,” she bit out, unable to help herself. 

“Ouch,” he acknowledged. “I get it, I was a bad interviewer for so many reasons but just know it was never personal. I happen to think what you’ve achieved is amazing.”

“Oh really?”

“Yes and the fact I know nothing about football probably wasn’t the best way to meet. I’m an arts editor and was filling in but I should have made more of an effort.”    

“So, you’re not a Bear’s fan then?”

“I’m not a fan of any team,” he admitted sheepishly. “In America that is. Your mum was a really good coach when it came to it, well except for the whole matchmaking scheme.”

“And for that I am extremely sorry,” she smiled, glad that things between them had softened somewhat. She’d always been protective over her heart and it seemed easy to write Klaus off as just another ass but it turns out he had persisted. “Liz can be extremely intense.”

“I kind of liked her, even if she did steal my popcorn at half time. Plus she did coach me about everything NFL.”

“Explains a lot,” she offered. “I’d be happy to redo the interview tomorrow if you’re free and have of course studied up on the team?”

“I need to be back in New York unfortunately,” Klaus winced. “Not many people know this but my sister is unwell and expecting some test results tomorrow and it’s vital we all be there.”

Caroline didn’t need any more information, it was obvious this guy was loyal to his family. He also seemed to like her mom which was a big tick in her book. Maybe she’d misjudged him after all. 

“Of course.”

“But I’d be more than happy to reschedule when you’re free?” Caroline paused for a moment, trying to hide her excitement. 

“In the interest of full disclosure I thought you should know that I’m a Liverpool fan,” she said, her lips finding their way to his ear given the noise reverberating throughout the room. 

“Then I’m not sure you and this Manchester United fan can be friends, love,” his knowing tone telling Caroline he was smirking. “But surely we can work something out?”

“Maybe we can.”

Turns out opposites did attract and Liz Forbes was a great match maker, not that Klaus or Caroline would admit it aloud. 

Be Greater

Spider-Man PS4 is a great game. The webswinging and combat were as fluid, frantic and polished as I would expect from the developers of Ratchet and Clank and Sunset Overdrive. I didn’t know what to expect going into the game’s story, though. Since story was never Insomniac Games’s strong suit and the IP they were adapting couldn’t be more..hit or miss in that regard. I came away pleasantly surprised, though. 

The story begins with Peter Parker in a different point in his life than most recent Spider-Man media, and it’s a little more interesting for it. Peter is fresh out of college with many of his iconic stories behind him. He’s entering the adult world now and struggling the way through with that typical Parker Luck biting at his heels. This place in the timeline isn't just a novelty and turns out to be key to the story’s. For Peter and his peers the last few training wheels are coming off and with that transition brings ugly truths. Solid ground and stability becomes harder to find and idols are taken off of their pedestals as people with all of their vulnerabilities and vices exposed. Spider-Man has always preached themes of responsibility and this game embodies that better than any book, show, and comic I've seen in a long time. Peter Parker’s personal life is constantly strained by the vigilantism, but he can’t resist the pull of helping others. His ideology of sacrificing himself for others is instilled in him, and it’s this core ideology that defines his entire character. It also undoes him, as the various mentors in his life he thought embodied that reveal their selfish natures.

The first thing I want to give this game credit for is how it handles Peter’s origin. Uncle Ben’s death isn't drawn out and replayed for players because of the reasonable assumption that we’ve all at least seen a Spider-Man movie. His presence, impact, and the hole he leaves in his absence are all tangible and felt throughout the game. From wistful conversations with Aunt May to Peter’s musings when you come across certain collectables that paint a picture of this take on the character’s history, the absence of Uncle Ben’s guidance is felt. Peter is entering a new stage of his life just a bit aimless, and it becomes key in his eagerness to embrace a new mentor figure in the form of Dr Octavius. Their relationship forms the backbone of the game’s story.

Despite the shakey payment, Peter ultimately takes a job with Octavius because he looks up to him. Otto has dedicated himself to fully functional prosthetics for people who've lost their limbs. It's a perfect marriage of Peter’s love of science and devotion to helping others. A dream job. Of course, the job itself turns out to be pretty thankless as Otto struggles to maintain funding for his work and Peter struggles to keep the landlord off his back. The classic relatable struggle to stay afloat that rung more true to me now than ever. Peter continues to reaffirm that it's all worth it, though. The two’s devotion to eachother is rife with tension to anyone who knows these characters though. It was hard to say whether this partnership was just one of many changes made to the universe that would stick or if the game was just waiting to drop the other shoe.

Otto eventually embraces his role in the Spider-Man universe, though. The catalyst wasn’t as simple as “he’s crazy” either. Peter learns partway through that his mentor is affected with a sickness that will destroy his motor functions. His obsession with mechanical limbs has gained a tragic edge: he’s ultimately doing it all to save himself, despite how justified his feelings are. This one little detail makes his spiral just a little more interesting: How long did he know about his disease? How much was his research into his field driven by survivor instinct versus selflessness? Dr. Octavius ends up being one of the most complex characters in the game. He is driven by a mix of a desire to prove his ambitions that have gotten him to nowhere but dead ends are worthwhile before he dies and getting revenge on the man who ruined him: Norman Osborne.

Martin Li has a similar arc. A recent character in comparison to the others in this game, there’s a lot more freedom when there’s less of a legacy to uphold. The team ends up positioning him as another higher authority figure Peter respects with his work running a homeless shelter that Aunt May works for with Peter frequently volunteering. He is essentially a selfless, hardworking man, but he carries a deep darkness inside of him that manifests itself as literal destructive energy that has the power to corrupt others around him. It’s a bit on the nose, but it works as far as the theme of upholding your responsibilities to others. Martin Li genuinely loves the work he does for the city, but the temptation of revenge over tragedy of his parents death consumes him. Martin Li and Otto Octavius are very different characters, but the thing they have in common is that they let the people who look up to them down hard when they give into their hubris and rage.

This is all for revenge against Norman Osborn, and while it may seem like with the trail of blood and rage he’s left in his wake seeking “Devil’s Breath” that he might be a bit of a bastard, one of the game’s most satisfying reveals turns out to paint him in a different light. The “trip” to europe that has kept frequent Spider-Man mainstay Harry Osborn out of the game outside of a series of voice messages seems a bit suspicious from the jump, but most might write it off as a sequel hook and keep playing with it burned far in back of their mind. Harry turns out to be lethally ill, and his “Europe” trip turns out to be a lengthy and so far unsuccessful series of treatments Norman is conducting to save his son’s life. “Devil’s Breath” is so saught after by Norman because it is a failed attempt at a cure he has yet to perfect. For his many, many faults Norman Osborn may ironically be one of the only mentor like figures in this story who is doing his best for his charge. This doesn’t even get into how much of a predominant force Oscorp’s technology is in the city. Ultimate monetary goal or not, Oscorp’s technology redefined several key aspect of New York’s systematic structure in this city. It’s essential, so Norman and Li’s attempts to undercut his influence only really end up harming civilians in the long run. What could be considered Spider-Man’s greatest nemesis comes out of this game pretty clean.

Some of this game’s emotional highs come from the heartbreak Peter experiences when he finds out Osborn and Li’s true natures. One of the hardest hitting moments in the game comes from the rage Peter feels when Octavius knew he was Spider-Man all along. The lethal battles that defined the entire game’s second half all get recontextualized as Peter realizes that even he was disposable if it meant Octavius could achieve his goals. Octavius’s mind is supposedly being manipulated by the tentacles at this point but his plan has been so far reaching and so well thought out that it’d had to have been at least formulating before that point. To put it simply: Otto was always a bit of a bastard. The arms just exaggerated what was ultimately already there.

This is why Aunt May’s place in the game is so important, and her death even more significant to the game’s themes. She remains Peter’s rock: a remarkable, near flawless influence of a good, hardworking person who helps others no matter the cost. When Peter loses his apartment, Aunt May immediately gives him space in her office, and her generosity doesn’t just end at family. She takes full control of the homeless shelter and continues to help others even as things become grim in New York. FEAST becomes a safe haven for not just Peter, but many of the lost and injured in the wake of the destructive egoes of the game’s antagonists. That’s why it’s all the more impactful and important that she ultimately dies as a result of her actions. She gets infected with Devil’s Breath while helping to treat those inflicted. In the most painful moments of the game’s surprisingly dark story, Peter must choose the rest of New York over her. It’s what Aunt May would want, and what she was doing all along, but Peter having to make that sacrifice in such a brutal way outlines one of the classic Spider-Man morals perfectly. To take some choice words from Peter himself here: “Doing the right thing, even when it hurts like hell.”

With Aunt May gone and his other mentors fallen Peter has completed his transition to adulthood. There’s simply no one left for him to look up to for guidance. He can only move forward with what they’ve given him and try to be the best person he can be. The whole point of the subplot with Miles is to set up Peter with his own charge: someone lost that looks up to him for guidance. Even Peter notices how similar their situations are and offers to take him under his wing himself. The credits sequence where the two find kindred spirits in eachother over their Spider-Powers is heartwarming, and I’m guessing the sequel will explore this game’s themes further through this dynamics. Peter Parker isn’t above falling short or making the wrong choices, so it’ll be interesting to see how those decisions influence Miles in later parts of the story. Time will tell if Peter can help Miles turn his pain into empathy. The future looks bright for now, but things never go quite so smoothly in the world of the wall-crawler

It goes without saying at this point, but Spider-Man PS4’s story is about being good not just for it’s own sake, but for the sake of others that need that guidance or even just a shoulder to lean on. It’s about sharing your strengths with others. It’s about resisting the temptation to lash your pain out on the world. It’s the time old “With great power, comes great responsibility” personified. Most importantly though, it’s about how instilling this lesson into the next generation is important. Superheroes, at their core, were about entertaining young, impressionable audiences. It also doesn’t hurt to have some words of wisdom for them. Be greater.

This post is way too long so ignore it and just keep scrolling

Alright. Having played both Sonic Mania and Sonic Forces, I can now say, based on my own experiences... that Sonic Forces is a smoldering garbage heap.

First off, let me get this out of the way: the character creation system is... okay. In the screenshot above, you can see My Original Character,  Blonic  Eiko the Cat. You have several different anthropomorphic animal species to choose from, each of which has their own species-specific ability. Birds can double-jump, cats hold on to a few rings even after taking heavy damage, that kind of thing. There’s a selection of three head types for each species, about a dozen eyes, and can set two skin/fur/scale/feather colors. Not bad.

For the game’s main selling point, though, it feels a little weak... especially in comparison to the last game I played, South Park: The Fractured But Whole. In addition to your character’s physical appearance, which meshes perfectly with the South Park style, you can set your character’s gender (male/female/non-binary/multi-gender), whether they’re cis or trans, both their race and ethnicity, their sexual preferences, religion, all sorts of stuff that are pointless in the context of the game but let you make your character whatever you want them to be. I’m not saying that all games should have this, but I did just play that game, so I can’t help but compare Sonic Forces to it since the character creator is meant to be one of the game’s big gimmick.

Anyway. In addition to your character’s body, you also get to dress them up with outfits you unlock as you play. I guess this is a cool concept, with you getting between three and twelve costume pieces every level depending on how well you do and whether anything you did in a level completed a special objective... but it’s annoying constantly being pelted with costumes you’ll never wear. I was a mixture of fortunate and unfortunate in the fact that clothes I like (a tactical outfit in black and olive green) were unlocked within the first couple levels, so I could wear an outfit I like throughout the game... but it also meant that I never had any reason to change out for new gear or experiment with costumes that would only be less appealing to me.

There’s also the jarring fact that with clothing on, your character looks completely out of place. Most of the other characters in the game wear nothing but white gloves and sneakers, and seeing you alongside them just makes them look naked. I’ve spent way too long talking about customization. Moving on...

...You can also customize your avatar’s weapon, which I guess is the power of the Wisp aliens from Sonic Colors stored in a gun? There are probably advantages to all of them, but you spend less than half of the game playing as your avatar, every enemy in the game dies in one hit, and the fire weapon I started with can clear a screen of enemies in literally two seconds... so I never really bothered with them. You also occasionally find Wisps locked in capsules, but the game never actually gives you a real tutorial for them. It’s possible that it was explained in a hint marker, but it’s possible to take a route through a level or jump at just the wrong moment that you miss the marker and can’t go back to see what it said. I eventually figured it out in level twenty-five, which is right at the end of the game... and that level also happens to be a great example of why I don’t like this game.

I know that as a still frame this is kinda incomprehensible, but what you’re looking at is a little vertical shaft kind of thing. There have been shafts like this elsewhere in the game, but they’ve always been things you either just dropped down through or rode an elevator in or had platforms to jump on. Here?

This game apparently has a wall-jumping mechanic, which only appears here, in the twenty-fifth of thirty levels. I’m completely fine with video games using mechanics sparingly or even basing levels around a gimmick that never appears again... but this is the only time in the game that this happens, and the mechanic isn’t even implemented very well. If you’re too close to the wall it will sometimes fail to activate, if you press the jump button again too soon you won’t cling to the wall, and sometimes your series of jumps will have you end up jumping over the wall to the left instead of going right... which is an issue considering that for the second half of the level, you have to do this while trying to outrun a giant instant death laser. Assuming you can even get to that point.

I can’t tell you how long I was stuck here. To the left is a checkpoint, and all you can do is collect what looks like an electric Wisp in a capsule, then... wait to the blue death laser to kill you and put you back at the check point. The dark red boxes are breakable, and you’re clearly meant to either get down through this shaft to continue... but there’s no obvious way to do this. I thought that you were supposed to use the electric Wisp somehow, but I guess you can only do that if you have the right Wisp weapon equipped, as the game only seems to care when I collect capsules with fire Wisps in them.

I was eventually forced to watch a video of someone playing this level, and they just kind of... broke through all the boxes at once. After further research, I discovered that if you press the Crouch button (which I’ve never pressed up to this point and forgot existed) while in the air, you’ll do a stomp move that the game never bothered to teach me.

Once you’re past that, the next section is incredibly difficult... I figured out how to use the encapsulated fire Wisps (it’s the “Wisp Special” button that I’d previously been unable to figure out the function of) to skip over the obstacles, but if you don’t time/aim it properly, you’re back down in the area where you have to deal with the wall jumps that occasionally send you careening backwards.

I know that I’m just complaining about one difficult end-game level, but the entire game is like this. It’s all either gameplay mechanics the game doesn’t explain properly that are prone to failing, or levels that are way too short and simplistic. I haven’t even touched on the jumping mechanics... Want to know how many times I died replaying that level to get those screenshots?

A couple of those are from the laser section, but it’s mostly falling into bottomless pits because you’re pretty strongly locked into your jump trajectory when playing as Your Own Character, and the platform placement in that level sucks. It’s not as big of a deal when playing as Sonic; I think Classic Sonic has free control in the air, and you only play as him in two or three levels, while Modern Sonic’s levels are so completely filled with enemies and jump pads that you can just spam the jump button to string homing attacks through anything that isn’t a speed section. Places where the gameplay becomes frustrating aren’t as common as in other games I’ve played recently (L.A. Noire comes to mind), but that’s because the majority of the levels are ridiculously simplistic and easy, and when you reach the end without anything really happening you’re just like...

Which brings me, finally, to the worst part of the game: the story. This is among the worst video game writing I have ever seen... and as someone who does a lot of art for indie, amateur, and fan games, I’ve seen a lot of scripts from “idea guys” who’ve never taken any kind of literature or creative writing classes.

The basic premise of the story sounds interesting, and seems like a huge departure from the normal Sonic formula: Dr. Eggman and his new associate Infinite use the powers of all the major antagonists from past games to kill Sonic and take over the world. The remaining characters of the Sonic universe form a resistance movement (the forces in Sonic Forces) to fight back, and half a year later Your Own Character joins up after their home city is destroyed.

Damn, man! That’s pretty dark! Unfortunately, it completely fails to deliver. Unsurprisingly, Sonic isn’t dead... but he HAS been held prisoner and tortured for the last six months. Despite that, he’s in high spirits and joking with his captors... yeah I dunno, just bad writing ...and manages to escape when the resistance attacks the base and temporarily disables the power grid. Why Sonic was in a Laser Prison and wearing Laser Handcuffs that require uninterrupted power to operate is just more bad writing, as is the fact that he was being held on a space station and you’re never shown how the resistance got up there.

More importantly, it’s never explained how the resistance discovered that Sonic was still alive. There are other captives in the same area, so THEY would know he’s alive, but there’s never any indication that one of them managed to escape. Speaking of which, they’re all still imprisoned after Sonic breaks free, and I think the space station ends up destroyed... so those guys are probably all dead. That reminds me of another point: most of the levels just end at a random arbitrary point. You ostensibly have a goal that you’re trying to reach, but the goal markers are always, like, in the middle of a hallway, which looks no different from anywhere else, and there’s no cutscene showing what happens what the characters do after reaching their goal... the level just kinda ends.

Most of the game’s dialogue and exposition is in the form of radio conversations that occur on the map screen, which I can’t help but admit makes sense: media too often forces characters to be in the same place for scenes to occur, when logically they would’ve just spoken on the phone. The issue I have with this is that it really does make up the bulk of the game’s dialogue, and none of the conversations are ever that interesting. Honestly, more than anything it reminds me of the kind of story you’d see in a free-to-play mobile game... except there isn’t really any kind of story being told, just information being relayed. There isn’t any kind of character development, since the game expects you to already know who everyone is and what their paper-thin personalities are.

After Eggman spends six months taking over Literally The Entire World, and the resistance apparently does very little to stop this, Your Own Character joins up and things start happening instantly. They rescue Sonic, then Classic Sonic appears out of nowhere to save Tails from Chaos, the creature from Sonic Adventure. I guess they included him (Classic Sonic, that is; after this cutscene, Chaos is never seen again) to trick people into thinking that this game would be similar to the much more popular Sonic Generations. I think the plot of that game involved time travel, accounting for the two Sonics, but here they’ve retconned him as “the Sonic from another universe”.

Speaking of time travel and alternate dimensions, Silver and Blaze are in this game... I’m no big Sonic fan (in fact, Sonic Mania and Sonic Forces, both of which I played this week, were the first Sonic games I’ve ever beaten), but them being part of the resistance is kinda inexplicable. To my knowledge, Blaze is from an alternate dimension, but in Sonic ‘06 was somehow Silver’s partner or something in the post-apocalyptic future. In the end, I think Sonic saving the day included the elimination of the timeline in which Silver existed... so I’m not really sure what’s up with Silver and Blaze being in this game. Are they now retconned to just being normal people who live in the same place as everyone else?

I’m also really confused on how this game fits in with the rest of the series. Infinite’s power is to create autonomous physical virtual reality projections, and he uses it to create his own versions of the Chaos, Zavok, Metal Sonic, and Shadow... so in addition to being in continuity with Sonic Generations and Sonic Colors (the game the Wisps are from), you also have to include the Sonic Adventure games and Sonic Lost World. Again, I’m no expert on Sonic, but... I’m pretty sure at least a few of these games feature planets populated with humans, and not the hordes of bipedal animals that make up the only characters in this game. Is there just no official continuity at this point?

As an aside... every character you see in scenes like this are made with the character creator, but for some reason they’ve limited themselves to a very small number of models instead of just using a bunch of different random colors and other features. See that bluish-purple dog at the front? If you look closely, you can see five or six identical dogs in the background, all doing the same animation where they raise their guns up in the air.

I’ve gotten REALLY off-topic, which is basically a war crime with how long this post is already. Anyway, as I was saying before I derailed myself, once Your Own Character joins the resistance things happen super fast. Sonic is alive, Classic Sonic appears out of nowhere and punches the Chaos clone (which is subsequently never seen again, despite Infinite being able to create an infinite number of them), and Eggman for whatever reason reveals that his ultimate plan will be complete in just three days. I’m not really clear on what this plan is, but it involves a virtual reality projection of the sun... I don’t know, Majora’s Mask-ing the planet and killing everyone, maybe? Again, bad writing.

Sonic faces off against Infinite and, despite the player winning the boss fight, gets his $#!+ kicked in... and that’s when Infinite says, and this is an actual, verbatim quote, “You’re not even worth the effort to finish off”. I think I might actively hate the writers of this game. I feel like I should probably also mention that the boss fight takes place on the back of a giant snake that’s just kinda floating there, suspended in mid-air, above a forest that is also a casino?

It’s at this point that Infinite drops a prototype version of the Phantom Ruby, which is what gives him his powers. How did he fail to notice that he’d dropped something the size of a softball? How was he even carrying it? WHY was he carrying it, when the finished perfected ruby was already embedded in his chest and he’d been using it for over six months? If you expect these questions to have answers, well, that bold text in the last paragraph must’ve caught your eye and you’re just now at this point starting to read the post. Hello, welcome! The writing in this game is absolutely abysmal!

Your Own Character picks up the prototype ruby and holds onto it for the next three days... well, except for when they drop it while Infinite is looking right at them after a boss fight, and he doesn’t notice ...and at the end of the game, uses it to somehow get rid of the virtual reality sun. How do they know that the ruby is and how to use it? No idea. How do they get rid of the sun? Happens off-screen. Then, further confusing matters vis-a-vis whether the prototype ruby is invisible to bad guys, Eggman acts as if he saw it... despite it breaking and disappearing before he arrives. Weird.

Alright, backtracking a bit, I need to touch on the stupidest plot point in the game: the Phantom Zone. Well, I think it’s called Null Space or something, Eggman calls it “a little something the Phantom Ruby cooked up”, whatever that means... but it’s basically the Phantom Zone. A pocket dimension that supposedly contains literally nothing. Eggman opens up a portal into it, Your Own Character tries to save Sonic from it, and they’re both pulled in... man, that’s a scary concept, isn’t it? Being trapped in an empty void?

If a regular prison held Sonic for six months, and he only got out with help from the outside, then I can’t even imagine how long this will-- haha just kidding it’s twenty seconds this game was written by chimps.

Apparently “completely empty” means “filled with blocks you can run on”, and Sonic manages to get out... by double-boosting. There are a handful of levels where you play as both Sonic and Your Own Character at the same time (the “you’re next to me and I’m next to you” in the Hoobastank song you hear in that video), allowing you to use the Wisp weapons while also using Sonic’s super speed. You’ll also be prompted to “double boost” at set points, which consists of the characters jumping in the air, fist-bumping, and then... holding hands and somehow running even faster, I guess? I’m not at all clear on how this works, or how it broke them out of Null Space.

I’d be totally okay (bored, but okay) with the prototype ruby being responsible for them escaping, but that’s not how it’s presented: they’re meant to have escaped through the power of friendship and running really, really fast. I mean, I can come up with a reason it works, gimme a minute... uh... virtual reality... pocket dimension... gotta go fast.... gotta go faster faster faster faster faster... aha! Maybe it’s an empty, infinite void because it’s being created as you move through it, but the double boost allows them to move faster than it can be created, allowing them to break free? Yeah, that’s dumb but plausible in-universe. Too bad the writers made literally no attempt to explain it.

After that, it’s time for the big showdown with Infinite, the game’s hot new antagonist. Who is he, why does he hate Sonic, why is he working with Eggman? What kind of awesome boss battle will you have against him? Not explained, not explained, not explained, and it’s just a slight variation of the boss fight you have with Metal Sonic earlier in the game. You DO get an explanation of who he is if you play Episode Shadow, free DLC consisting of three levels that you played in the base game that serves as a kind of prequel. All of your juicy Infinite-related questions are answered: he’s a nameless mercenary who went all emo because Sonic beat him up. Oh. Well. That’s... lame.

This post is already over three thousand words, so I’ll wrap it up. After your boring rehashed boss battle with Infinite, he just kinda... runs away, never to be seen again, and you have to contend with Eggman and his giant robots. It’s not very interesting. Once the day is saved, you get this completely inane exchange between the characters, which in most games would be the worst bit of writing... here, it might be in the top five. Knuckles says that the fight is over, everyone can go home, there’s no longer a need for the resistance... but then Amy (or someone) says, “no, we’re just getting started!”, and Knuckles nods in agreement as if she didn’t just directly contradict him. As if two characters doing this isn’t bad enough, Tails then does the exact same thing all by himself, saying something like, “we won, the resistance is done, now we have to come together to save the world!” I think he also says something about just one person not being able to change the world, which I’m pretty sure runs contrary to a “one person CAN make a difference!” message the game had been going for earlier.

And... that’s about it. I have nothing more to say. This game is bad, anyone who defends it is lying to themselves, and it’s entirely possible that I’ve spent more time writing this unfocused rambling post than I did actually playing the game. I’m not a Sonic hater; the playground politics surrounding video games in the early nineties didn’t exist where I grew up, so to me Sonic has always just kinda been that series with the interesting music that I had no particular interest in playing. As I mentioned, I played through Sonic Mania at the same time as I was playing Forces, and loved it. It’s a bit on the hard side for someone who’s never played a Sonic game, but aside from a few annoying bits in Hydrocity and Oil Ocean, it’s a blast all the way through. That’s a great game... and Sonic Forces, in my opinion, is decidedly not.

Back in 2017 I made a post about the Metascore for Sonic Forces, and received backlash for it. I decided to wait until as many critics as possible had reviewed the game, and... never really felt like doing the update, so didn’t get around to it until now. So, how much of a difference does a year make in the review score?

Oh wow, it’s like I knew what I was talking about or something. Well, kinda. At the time I said that Sonic Forces didn’t seem like a bad game, based on what I’d seen of it. Having played the game for myself... I think my opinion is known.

[Week 2] Summary Research Game Design: The Art & Business of Creating Games

PART 1 : CHAPTER 2: PRINCIPLE OF GAME DESIGN

Recognized problems in a game after created it. But how do avoid errors ahead of time? This chapter is dealing with design principles that are broadly applicable to all game genres.

Player Empathy

Understanding how the players will think while playing in the moment.

Able to unfold the game by ourselves

At the given points we are able to think:

No designers have completely accurate foresight

Here is the situation the player faces and here is the range of choices he can make

Now what will he likely to do?

The Importance of Testers

Testers gives the insight to the designer how the game would feel like

But remember to shut designer mouth when they are testing.

Else, never discover what thousands of actual gamers will encountered when they go another way.

Feedback

The basic interactions of game and player: I do something, the computer does something in response.

The feedback is what distinguishes a game from every other form of entertainment

Interactivity, is what makes our games specials, without it = watching a movie.

Every input should give him a discernible response. No input should go unanswered.

Many form of "answers" *must have some feedback

Control feedback must exist to tell the players

visual feedback

aural feedback

tactile feedback, if controller is so equipped

can be positive feedback or negative feedback

Grounding the Player

The player should always know where he is in the game and why/what he is doing.

Any given point, he should have a immediate goal, medium range goal, long term range goal

Game is huge can easily to cause player to feel lost

No game are played start-to-finish in one setting.

Medium Range Goal: Good sized steps towards the overall goal Example: Strategy game → Build a home base ⇒ Embodied in the levels

Immediate Goal: A problem that right in front of the player. Example: Strategy game → which units to build to fend off an impending attack

Throughout the game, he should always be doing it with some idea of how this single step fits into the longer path that will eventually lead to success.

The Moment to Moment Experience

Holding the player attention consistency in the game

Player should have interesting thing to do while he is in the game

Positive: Give him a constant stream of interesting choices that have significant outcomes

Negative: Not saddling him with tedious activities

Tips on avoiding dead spots:

Don't let player perform a complex actions twice

Render transitions have an option to bypass including cut scenes, audio and dialogs

Bypass the repeat transitions

Avoid text or dialog dumps

Automatic tasks that are boring

Immersion

compelling moment to moment experience design

bathe the players with a constant stream of image

Avoid gaffes

from typos to bad voice acting

stupid AI

changes of graphical style

Writing

Good writing can enhance the immersion of game

Design Within Limits

Consideration of :

budget and time

technical features that works that without crashing the player's machine

Removing Impediments 移除障碍

Technical problems (excessive disc swapping, long load time, game interruptions, bugs etc.) that need to solve in order to improve the moment to moment experience.

Disc Swapping

Not so much worries in current days, but we should keep in mind to reduce the amount of disc and swapping disc while produce the CD video games.

Load Time

Achieving Shorter loading time. Tech lead should encounter this problem to reduce the load time. Method to solve:

Reduce the size of level

Designate points along the way where to pause the game for short seconds for loading (ref. Half-Life)

Game Interruption

Not bringing back the player to the starting point while hitting the failures. Reduce the chance of him giving up.

Saving the Game

Horrible to not have a saving game method. Find a way for player to save his game or auto-save if possible. Autosave + Manual save is always a good choice

Housekeeping

Activities that the player should be able to perform at any point of game.

Pause

Quit, but reduce the chance he wanted to quit

Save/Load

Option Screen, easy accessible

Help

Bugs

Bug free on several ways:

Clear on Design Document

Be flexible in creating your design

Stay involve through the whole development cycle

Keep a level ahead

Interface Design

Creating a good looking, yet functional, interface is one of the most underrated tasks of game design — but it is vital to make it right.

Screen Layout should be aesthetically pleasing

Vital Information must be easier to get. Player should understand what is going on at a glance. (example: HUD)

Controls must be clear

Hone the input at the minimum number of non-awkward clicks, key presses or button pushes

Do not RELY on instinct to build Interface Design

Required to be tested by team → users.

Pay attention to the conventions in the genre

Elegance and ease of use are more important than increased functionality

Prototype the interface early and keep noodling with it

Keep come back to this over and over again throughout the development process

Not to confuse player

Game should be easy to play and the interface is help to do things quickly and simply

The Start-up Screen

A start-up screen that accommodate to all these users:

first time playing video games?

Expertise and need to go through game ASAP etc.

More different users

Start-up screen should give the player the option to:

"NEW GAME"

Loading a Saved Game

Going to Tutorial and Practice Area

Opening the options menu to tweak features

Replaying the opening movie (just in case people missed it, but the movie should be have option to bypass it)

Customizable Controls

Give the player as much controls over the interface as possible

Make everything adjustable:

Game controls, monitor settings, graphics settings, volume etc.

Provide best default settings we can arrives

Different people have different feeling, so customizable controls are very important

Clear option screen is important

Tutorial / Practice Mode

Some people want to directly jump into games, others might not.

Tutorial gives the player hand-on experience without endangering him.

A way to introduce mechanism

Cannot assume the player will actually play the tutorial

If the mechanism is important, then it is important to introduce it that he hasn't learned those yet which return to tutorial

Any opportunity that we could introduce the tutorial directly into the storytelling?

Structure and Progression

A game should be easy to learn but difficult to master.

Different genre have different meaning for the progression leap.

For puzzle game;

It is important to make the first level easy

"Let the game begin" should be my motto

First 15 minutes of the game should attract the player into the game

Balancing the difficulty of the level of the game.

First level easy, and not too hard

Intermediate level should not be too easy, if so the player will lose interest.

Final level should be hardest of all, and should balance between challenging and impossible

A game is too hard is no fun

Intuitive leap puzzle;

scatter examples of that kind of leap elsewhere prior to the player's encountering the puzzle

Sense of mastering and progression

Must listen to the testers' feedbacks of the level difficulties

Taking Care of the Player

You are not the player's opponents or enemy

Our job is to help the player to enjoy the game we created

My goal is not to beat the player

A good designer tries to help players get through the game.

Dead Man Walking

Do not put the player in the position that he cannot win and does not know it.

Bring the important tools on the player sights and get his notice about it for further use

Do not hide them away and cause them frustrated

Protect Newbies

Game start and make it easy for the player.

Ease him till he get his confidence.

Make the first puzzle easy

Play it Again, Sam

As read, the author wanted to share that designers should not make the game that which hits players badly while they make a single mistake. 

Ways to solve this is to have a save point in the middle of the level.

Checkpoints to the progression

Avoid to design one of these

But recently, the game market began different, they have ridiculous game like Getting Over it, which the player would fail and fall back to the points.

Give the Player the Information He needs

All the knowledge a player needs in order to play the game should be included within the game

Cannot rely on strategy guide, web sites, word of mouth to supply the critical information

In the game rather than in the manual

Many games have undocumented features — special move or tricks that aren't mentioned on the manual

can be fun, but make sure it is not essential for finish the game

Tricky question on dealing with, "everyone knows"

if the game rely on specific knowledge, make sure it is within the game

Reduce Player Paranoia

Give some small, incremental rewards to the player to reduce their paranoia

Gently steer the player in the right direction

HOW TO DESIGN

Create an Integrated Whole

When we have the high concept, it is just the time to build it with multiple questions to ourselves

Thus, lastly and longer the world will build itself

Economy of Design

In game development, economy of design also helps us to schedule and budget.

If we know what to build, we will not waste time and money to create materials that are not important

High concept also important in this regard, the features keep poping and we cannot do it all

Thus can help us to decide what to keep and what to ignore

Where Do You Get Your Ideas?

If we create something interested to us, then the ideas comes out naturally.

Balance the idea and those with the team.

A visionary guys is needed to central the idea and all proposals and suggestion against it

Game Design is a collaborative art, and you need contributions from multiple discipline

such as story, art, programming, gameplay, sound, music and even sales and marketing.

Cabal approach.

set up a highly focus SWAT teams, each of them have one specific mission

Brainstorming approach

gather members to open discussion

small in group, make more focus

game designer can mull around the ideas, either accept or decline the ideas

Butterfly Soup Asks #17

The squad playing Overwatch, yaoi hands, and more! man I still have a lot left in my inbox after this... 

I’ve spent an obscene amount of time playing Overwatch so I have many thoughts on this Neither Diya nor Noelle have ever played a first person shooter before, but Noelle studies many strategy guides and videos to prepare beforehand.

Following her research, Noelle chooses Symmetra after memorizing the optimal turret and teleporter/shield matrix placements for each map. Symmetra is a good hero for inexperienced players because she doesn’t require aiming skills, but secretly, Noelle likes her because she is focused and serious. She’s scandalized by her default outfit, but can’t afford to get the Vishkar/Architect skins

Diya sees the dog helmet on Pharah’s Anubis skin and instantly unlocks it, automatically setting her as a Pharah main. Diya is the type to happily choose Pokemon based on cuteness instead of practicality, so this is typical Diya

Min ONLY plays these 4 attack heroes, in this order of preference: 

Reaper (cool and edgy)

Genji (sword is a long knife. only chosen if the above is taken)

McCree (cool. only chosen if the above is taken)

Soldier 76 (a soldier, cool. only chosen if the above is taken)

She’s mechanically very skilled, but in her 100+ hours in game she’s never even ONCE selected a tank, defense, or support hero, not even in skirmish or training, not even when she’s the last one to choose and there’s no healer. Literally 0 minutes on her career stats. 

Akarsha is an ironic Torb main and also a useless Sombra. During their first game together:

Akarsha, selecting Sombra: (affectionately) it's me

Noelle: How is that one you?

In spawn, Noelle can see Akarsha as Sombra with the Battletag “RedFart”

Sombra: (smugly) Hack the PLANET. 

Sombra: (annoyingly) Miss me? 

Noelle: .......... (the game hasn’t even begun yet and she’s already seething)  

Diya manages to get a triple kill with concussion blast through sheer luck before accidentally killing herself with her own rocket. Min constantly spams “I need healing!” in impossible to heal locations, or when she's already being healed but doesn't notice. Whenever she dies she goes “res me”. Akarsha is nowhere to be found. In the kill feed, Diya has managed to accidentally kill herself again with Rocket Barrage. Noelle switches to Mercy and Min blames her for “not healing fast enough”. Eventually, infuriated, Noelle just screams into the voice chat “FINE! DIE ALONE, YOU FOOLS!!!!” and lets her teammates at critical health perish at her feet 

the match ends in defeat but Diya got POTG for her triple kill

Noelle: Akarsha, what were you doing this last match?

Akarsha: Turned invisible

Noelle: YOU'RE NOT ACCOMPLISHING ANYTHING WHILE INVISIBLE

Akarsha: There should be a card for “time spent invisible”

Only Min and Akarsha consider themselves gamers. Diya and Noelle will play Mario Kart at other people’s houses but don’t regularly play games Akarsha: besides DS games like Ace Attorney, she’s particularly addicted to MapleStory

Min: plays more console+pc games, likes CoD and Team Fortress 2

Sakura, Yuki, and Akarsha have all watched magical girl shows at some point. Akarsha’s favorite one is Madoka Magica.

Akarsha likes a lot of Ace Attorney characters and her favorite is Phoenix, she finds him relatable. However, if you ask her, she will answer “Spark Bruschel” (below) 

She dreads it starting from the night before the presentation and have trouble falling asleep from anxiety. As the time to present approaches she’ll get more and more nervous and sweaty to the point that she won't have an appetite and her stomach hurts

As she's presenting, if she has note cards or a powerpoint to read off of, she stares at that the whole time and reads at lightning speed. Diya has to write down what she's going to say word for word, she can't just put chunks and phrases on note cards because she wont be able to construct a coherent sentence. her life flashes before her eyes whenever she stutters or messes up a sentence

If she doesn't have anything to read off of, she stares at inanimate objects instead of the audience, completely blanks out, and sometimes when she can't recover from that she panics and tries to end the presentation prematurely by suddenly going back to her desk. just bad all around 

Noelle has good posture, the others are all pretty eh and slouch sometimes. In particular, Diya slouches a lot when she’s with Noelle because Noelle was taller than her in elementary school and Diya still isn’t used to the fact that she outgrew her. 

It’s similar to how Min’s brain actually can’t fully process that she’s way shorter than Diya. When confronted directly with the fact Min will acknowledge it, but it hasn’t really sunk in, at all. Diya was only a little bit taller when they were kids, so in her gut that’s how it’ll always be.  I experience this with my childhood friends too LOL I still instinctively feel like I’m taller than my friend who’s now like 5′8″ (I’m 5′2″) 

THIS IS INCREDIBLY SPECIFIC ASJKDHFA

I feel like Diya and Hayden have long-ish hands because they’re big, but not yaoi hands level i dont know what to say 

--Tumblr wouldn’t save my post after this, so I copied it into Word and pasted them back in. It worked, but now some of the asks ARE THE WRONG SHADE OF BLUE.....

(For those who don’t know, the song lyrics say “Her name is Noelle”)  Yes, and this also reminded me that whenever Christmas songs say “Noel”, Akarsha annoyingly points it out like “it’s you Noelle” 

It came from leftover dinner from the night before, which Noelle’s mom cooked

I have, I also love seeing all the different ways everyone writes the characters! Thank you fanfic writers!! ;u;

Hayden: 5′11″

Jun: 5′8″

adding this to the FAQ, thanks!

It’s not mentioned why she has a bandaid as a teenager. I have something specific in mind but it may come up in the sequel so I won’t say anything else about it

Here’s their birthdays from oldest to youngest:

Noelle: January 18

Akarsha: April 20

Min: July 4

Diya: November 26 I haven’t come up with the birthdays of other characters yet (except Jun, whose birthday is the same as Min’s haha)

Yes, stay tuned :>

Yup, that pose was reffed off of Trucy’s surprised sprite! I love how over-the-top it looks 

OMG...I hate miscommunication as a cause of conflict in stories so don’t worry, there’ll never be a choice with disastrous consequences like that in any of my games! 

I’m really glad to hear this, I sometimes wonder “should I have made them older?” but this is ultimately why I made them the age they are! I think a lot of people in their 20s instinctively feel 14 is too young because they’ve forgotten what they themselves were like at 14. I kept journals so I have evidence haha 

You’re welcome, I’m really glad she was relatable!! Noelle has a Chinese name and goes to Saturday Chinese school, but I haven’t decided on what it is :( Maybe someday...

I REALLY want to sell Butterfly Soup merch like charms/prints/diya’s hoodie but bc I’m busy I haven’t had a chance to set it up yet >_> It’s my goal to accomplish this by the end of the year

It’s currently only available for the computer, sorry! There’s nothing questionable in this for 14 year olds -- there’s profanity, but there isn’t any explicit sexual content or nudity in it!

I’m glad that detail resonated with you!! I’m also self conscious of my hair (opposite problem, it’s EXTREMELY coarse) so I added it ^^;

A few were drawn from scratch, but most of them are at least partially drawn over photos I took

You can download it here, it’s a creative commons free song! 

Yep this was fixed! I was so appalled this wasn’t caught before the game was released haha

Aw thank you!!

You’re welcome!!! The game hasn’t even been out for 2 months yet, I can’t believe people love it enough to replay it already ;u;

The Great Decoupling

Washington is pressing for a post-pandemic decoupling from China. But the last big economic split brought on two world wars and a depression. What’s in store this time?

U.S. and Chinese economic ties are fraying at the seams. But decoupling could have far-reaching geopolitical consequences, FP's Robbie Gramer and Keith Johnson write.

— By Keith Johnson, Robbie Gramer, May 14, 2020, Foreign Policy

The U.S. ambassador on the spot in an Asian economic powerhouse put it bluntly in a cable to the secretary of state in Washington: Don’t cut them off. Give them some “economic elbow-room,” or they’ll be forced to carve out an economic empire of their own by force. But Washington was in the grip of economic nationalists battling a historic economic downturn. The White House, consequently, was deaf to the Ambassador Joseph Grew’s pleas from Tokyo in 1935.

Within a few years, the United States ramped up economic pressure on Japan, culminating in a trade and oil embargo. Six years after Grew wrote his dispatch, the two countries were engaged in total war.

Today, American policymakers are consumed by the economic and geopolitical confrontation with another Asian heavyweight. And, as in the 1930s, economic decoupling is all the rage.

For the more hawkish members of the Trump administration, undoing 40 years of ever-closer economic relations with China and rolling back U.S. reliance on Chinese factories, firms, and investment was always the end game of the endless trade war—even before the coronavirus pandemic turbocharged Washington’s desire to disentangle itself from what many view as a dangerous economic bear hug. Now, lawmakers and administration officials are mulling a raft of measures to cleave parts of the two largest economies in the world: Bans on a wide variety of sensitive exports, additional tariffs on Chinese goods, forced reshoring of U.S. companies, even pulling out of the World Trade Organization altogether, which is seen by some as facilitating China’s so-called economic imperialism.

It’s not just economic ties between China and the United States that are in danger. Europe, too, is increasingly talking of rolling back the deep trade and investment ties it has developed with Beijing in recent decades (even as it is cutting trade ties with itself, as the United Kingdom leaves the European Union). Other countries are also pulling up the drawbridges—all leery that today’s unprecedented level of economic integration has gone too far, bringing more pain and less gain.

The threat of a great decoupling is a potentially historic break, an interruption perhaps only comparable to the sudden sundering of the first huge wave of globalization in 1914, when deeply intertwined economies such as Britain and Germany, and later the United States, threw themselves into a barrage of self-destruction and economic nationalism that didn’t stop for 30 years. This time, though, decoupling is driven not by war but by peacetime populist urges, exacerbated by a global coronavirus pandemic that has shaken decades of faith in the wisdom of international supply chains and the virtues of a global economy.

Other countries are also pulling up the drawbridges—all leery that today’s unprecedented level of economic integration has gone too far.

The only real question is how far the decoupling will go. U.S. President Donald Trump made one of his sharpest threats to date amid growing tensions with China in an interview with Fox News on Thursday. “We could cut off the whole relationship,” he said—a prospect that, while unlikely if not practically impossible, would send historic shockwaves through the global economy.

Undoubtedly, most experts and officials agree, brewing trade tensions between Washington and Beijing—amplified by the coronavirus pandemic—will force some multinational companies to alter their business models, reorienting their supply chains closer to U.S. shores. Across the fractious political spectrum in Washington, Republicans and Democrats alike agree the United States should alter its business relationship with China to varying degrees. But if the fallout from the pandemic passes quickly, and especially if Trump and his protectionist “America first” agenda are defeated in the November election, the clamor to decouple from China could begin to ebb as politicians confront just how complex it is to untangle parts of the world’s two largest economies. Not least of the problems Washington would have to confront is that China is the second-largest U.S. creditor, holding more than $1 trillion in U.S. debt.

Either way, the looming reshaping of the sinews of the world economy will have untold implications, from tearing up business models to remaking entire industries. But it could also have unforeseeable geopolitical consequences, especially regarding China, which over the course of four decades has grown from minnow to whale under the auspices of a tight-knit global economic system, led by deepening trade and investment ties with the West. What happens if that gets torn apart?

“There’s enough there by way of trend lines to suggest we’re entering into a new period that turns on its head the widely-held assumptions about the U.S.-China relationship from the time that Deng Xiaoping returned to leadership in the late 1970s and rebooted China for the subsequent 40 years,” Kevin Rudd, a former Australian prime minister and well-known China scholar, told Foreign Policy.

He worries about, if not a straight replay of the first Cold War, which featured bigger nuclear arsenals and proxy wars around the globe, at least Cold War 1.5. “It’s at that sort of inflection point,” he said.

That could spell the reemergence of competing blocs, as during the Cold War. China is already well into the creation of its own economic sphere with its ambitious Belt and Road Initiative, which seeks to link economies across Asia, Africa, and parts of Europe to Beijing. China and the United States are on track to develop dual, and dueling, technology to drive the next big economic transformations, especially in mobile phones.

Now, Trump administration officials talk of rolling out a concept called the “Economic Prosperity Network” of like-minded countries, organizations, and businesses. The aim is in part to convince U.S. firms to extricate themselves from China and instead partner with members of the so-called network to reduce U.S. economic dependence on Beijing—seen as a key national security vulnerability. If a U.S. manufacturing company can’t move jobs from China back to the United States, for example, it could at least move those jobs to another more U.S.-friendly country, such as Vietnam or India.

“Safeguarding America’s assets is one of the core pillars, supply chains are a big part of that,” Keith Krach, Trump’s undersecretary of state for economic growth, energy, and the environment, told Foreign Policy. “Supply chains are super complex. Sometimes they go down 10, 20 levels and I think it’s essential to understand where those critical areas are, where the critical bottlenecks are,” he added.

How will Beijing respond? China, in some ways, has been pursuing its own form of decoupling for more than a decade, since it launched a campaign to develop more advanced technologies at home and rely less on U.S. and other Western suppliers, noted Ashley Feng of the Center for a New American Security. And many Chinese firms have proved adept at surviving a rupture with the United States—Huawei, for example, once relied on U.S. firms for many of the components of its smartphones but now does without. Still, China’s quest to bolster its own capacity for innovation and to become a leader in advanced technologies relies on easy access to firms and researchers around the world, and it doesn’t want to see those connections severed entirely. At the same time, with an already-slowing economy hammered by the pandemic this year, China will likely do what it can to ease the economic tensions with the United States—like trying to appease Trump by adhering to the goals of the phase-one trade deal reached in January, for example.

“The economy has been deeply damaged by the coronavirus crisis and, prior to that, damaged somewhat by the trade war,” Rudd said. “So I think the predisposition of Beijing at present to try to restabilize that economic relationship because China is still not strong enough to sail alone.”

Decoupling refers to the deliberate dismantling—and eventual re-creation elsewhere—of some of the sprawling cross-border supply chains that have defined globalization and especially the U.S.-China relationship in recent decades. The modern version of the concept traces back, ironically, to Chinese policymakers in the 1990s who were themselves worried about overdependence on the U.S. dollar and high-end American technology.

Trump has long contended that China has exploited the U.S. economy for its own enrichment at the expense of the American worker, and there is some economic data to back that up. As a result, since taking office, the Trump administration has sought to partially decouple economically from China, first by reducing U.S. imports through higher tariffs, later by more restrictive screening of Chinese investment in critical sectors.

More recently, the administration has expanded controls on exports to China of potentially sensitive technologies, and this week it banned a federal retirement fund from investing in Chinese stocks. Administration officials even briefly flirted with the idea of defaulting on government debt held by China. These days, efforts to tear up and rebuild supply chains are gaining momentum, whether in semiconductors, rare-earth elements, or medicines and personal protective equipment needed to deal with the ravages of the coronavirus pandemic.

“What the pandemic has done is expose our very significant dependence on Chinese production, and overseas production generally, but particularly in key areas on Chinese manufacturing production and Chinese supply chains,” said Sen. Josh Hawley, a Missouri Republican, who is leading the legislative charge to repatriate U.S. supply chains and withdraw from the WTO. “I’d like to see as much production brought back to our shores as we can.”

“What the pandemic has done is expose our very significant dependence on Chinese production.”

Other U.S. allies around the world are eyeing ways to follow suit. Australia, bristling at Chinese trade threats, is also looking to diversify its own export markets and supply chains away from China. Europeans are having second thoughts about ever-closer trade and investment ties with Beijing. Some European policymakers in recent years have been spooked by an aggressive wave of Chinese takeovers of critical infrastructure from ports to power grids, fearing it could give Beijing undue leverage over their countries. Chinese diplomats have taken on an aggressive stance against some Western countries, including the Netherlands, with vague threats of sanctions or other forms of coercion as relations sour amid the pandemic.

“Many countries are waking up to this aggressive tactic and they don’t like it. The damage to China’s reputation is irreparable,” said the State Department’s Krach.

The CEO of Axel Springer, a major German media company, recently made the case for Europe to “draw a clear line in the sand” and follow the U.S. lead in rolling back economic relations with China. “If we do not manage to assert ourselves, then Europe could suffer a similar fate to Africa, on a gradual descent towards becoming a Chinese colony,” Mathias Döpfner wrote.

The trend also transcends politics, meaning decoupling could outlast the Trump administration. His presumptive Democratic presidential rival, Joe Biden, is a trade and foreign-policy centrist. But he is increasingly pressured by progressive populists, including supporters of Sen. Bernie Sanders, to move his trade and economic policies further to the left. Biden this week announced joint “unity” task forces of his top aides and Sanders supporters to develop a unified Democratic platform. Sanders has called for renegotiating trade deals with China aimed at bringing manufacturing jobs back to the United States and labeling Beijing as a currency manipulator. At the same time, Republicans are hammering the former vice president for being soft on China to lay the groundwork for a contentious election cycle, where China and the coronavirus pandemic will be central issues.

To a large extent, the current race to decouple is the fruit of two decades of steadily growing Chinese economic might, which many, like Trump, see as responsible for the hollowing out of important industries such as manufacturing in the West. Chinese state-owned companies, often powered by government subsidies and greased by a free hand with others’ intellectual property, have unfairly competed with companies in the United States and other developed economies since China joined the WTO in 2001, those critics say.

“The status quo ante was unsustainable because it presumed that China would eventually change the way it manages its economy, to bring it more in line with U.S. and European expectations,” said Dani Rodrik, a professor of international economy at Harvard University’s Kennedy School. “I think that was probably an implausible expectation even at the beginning, and clearly has been proven wrong.”

“The United States and Europe have genuine concerns,” he said. “It’s entirely legitimate, just as China wants to protect its own policy space, for us to say, I want to ensure I adequately protect my labor market and my innovation and technologies.”

While many point to China’s accession to the WTO as the original sin in the developed world’s economic relationship with Beijing, others maintain that it has been broadly positive for U.S. interests.

“What many critics overlook is that China already had access to U.S. markets. The United States didn’t give up anything—China made concessions to join” the WTO, said Robert Zoellick, U.S. trade representative in the George W. Bush administration at the time China joined the WTO.

“This is a theme, a new piece of the conventional wisdom, that cooperation has failed—and that assumption is flat wrong,” he said. “On proliferation, the global financial crisis, the environment, security—there are a lot of areas where cooperation has served U.S. interests.”

“This is a theme, a new piece of the conventional wisdom, that cooperation has failed—and that assumption is flat wrong.”

Those arguments never swayed Trump, however, who hasn’t strayed from his long-held gut beliefs that liberalized trade with China would ultimately come back to bite the United States—which he developed well before he became president in 2017 or before the coronavirus pandemic arrived. “Because China’s going bad it’s going to bring us down, too, because we’re so heavily coupled with China,” Trump told Fox News in an interview in 2015. “I’m the one that says you better start uncoupling from China, because China’s got problems.”

If skepticism of the merits of deeper economic relations with China was already rampant, the outbreak in China of the novel coronavirus has pushed that desire to decouple from Beijing into overdrive. China’s central place in many global supply chains came back to haunt the global economy when the world’s workshop shut down earlier this year, sending ripple effects throughout Asia, Europe, and North America.

Robert Lighthizer, the current U.S. trade representative, argued this week in the New York Times that offshoring of U.S. jobs was a “misguided experiment,” one whose vulnerabilities the pandemic has left in sharp relief.

“The pandemic has vindicated the Trump trade policy in another way: It has revealed our overreliance on other countries as sources of critical medicines, medical devices and personal protective equipment,” he wrote.

But the aftershocks of the outbreak affected more than just medical supplies Automakers, electronics-makers, and factories of all sorts struggled to keep operating after parts of China went into economic hibernation earlier this year.

“One province of China went on lockdown, and suddenly factories all over the world don’t have supplies,” said Beata Javorcik, the chief economist at the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. “That drove home the point of how reliant we are on China, and how little redundancy we have” built into global supply chains.

Beyond that, persistent questions about Chinese President Xi Jinping’s alleged efforts to disguise the origins and outbreak of the new coronavirus have only deepened convictions of Sinophobes that the United States is too cozy with what is, and will remain, an opaque and undemocratic political system.

So Trump administration officials are seizing on the pandemic to ramp up their existing efforts to decouple economic relations between the world’s two largest economies. Before the pandemic struck, the Trump administration was in the midst of drafting a first-ever Economic National Security Strategy, reflecting the administration’s increasingly blurred lines between economics and national security. The pandemic has added new urgency to the task, several officials say, as it laid bare U.S. interdependence with its geopolitical rival, from technology in critical infrastructure to the supply chains for life-saving medical equipment.

One reason that the pandemic is creating such an opening for a fundamental reshaping of the global economy is because most of the economy, in the United States and elsewhere, has been shut down for the first part of the year. That creates a rare, if traumatic, opportunity to start with something like a clean slate.

“When you’re at a high level of economic activity, when unemployment is low, you’d see the pain if you pull all that apart,” said Douglas Irwin, an expert on trade history and policy at Dartmouth College. “But now that everything is scrambled, it’s easier in some sense to pull back. This artificial contraction makes it easier not to go back to how things were before.”

Global supply chains came about in the first place because they offered lower costs and greater efficiencies for manufacturers—to the benefit of consumers nearly everywhere, if not to certain displaced manufacturing workers. And many companies continue to invest in China not as a source of global production, but to serve one of the world’s biggest consumer markets—witness Tesla’s mammoth factory in Shanghai to churn out electric cars for the Chinese market.

To reverse that underlying business logic, governments can turn to policy that encourages or even forces businesses in certain sectors to relocate their manufacturing facilities, or investors to reconsider pouring money into China. The Trump administration has used national security arguments to levy tariffs on foreign goods, including Chinese goods, in a bid to force suppliers to relocate their factories. It can also reach for more powerful tools, such as the Defense Production Act and the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, which would allow the government to mandate some production decisions for the private sector. At the same time, the Trump administration has intensified the screening of inbound Chinese investment to keep Beijing from snapping up valuable advanced technologies.

Lawmakers and administration officials, however, still hope that a combination of factors will help drive companies to overhaul the way they’ve done business in years past: firms waking up to the political and reputational risks of doing business in China, bottom-line calculations about economic harms caused by China’s cover-up of the outbreak, and old-fashioned patriotism. (Several administration officials said they spoke to leaders of some companies who expressed a willingness to take short-term financial hits to divest from China, but they declined to name the companies.)

“The experts guffaw when you talk about manufacturing. They say, ‘Oh, that’ll never come back.’ Manufacturing is not monolithic.”

There are some signs of cooperation from other companies already: Big semiconductor-makers such as Intel are warming up to the idea of rebuilding high-end manufacturing capacity in the United States to serve government and private-sector customers. Other companies, stung by interruptions even with close neighbors such as Mexico during the shutdown, are also accelerating their efforts to reshore production.

“You’ve got producers, manufacturers, folks who produce things who are tired of having too much of their other inputs … tied up with Chinese and other supply chains,” Hawley, the Missouri senator, said. “They’d like to have more control over that.”

But if governments are getting ready to push, they are leaning in many cases on an open door. It’s not just populism or the pandemic that is rewriting the business logic behind global supply chains and rampant globalization. What once seemed like one-off external shocks that disrupted global production, such as the 2011 tsunami in Japan and flooding in Malaysia, are becoming increasingly frequent, thanks to climate change and extreme weather events. The pandemic and its disruptions just brought home the value of having a robust, not simply cheap, supply chain, Javorcik said.

“My point is that going forward, companies will be judged by rating agencies, by their shareholders, based on resilience. So there will be this powerful incentive for firms to change their supply chains, to build in redundancy, to build in some geographic diversification,” she said.

The first wave of decoupling will likely take place in medical supply chains, a vulnerability highlighted by difficulties getting masks, gloves, and even ventilators during the pandemic. And supply chains in many advanced technologies, from telecommunications to semiconductors, are also being reshaped for security reasons. Advocates of decoupling like Hawley hope the trend will expand to include broader swaths of manufacturing.

“The experts guffaw when you talk about manufacturing. They say, ‘Oh, that’ll never come back.’ Manufacturing is not monolithic,” Hawley said. “There’s lots of precision tooling, high-tech manufacturing going on around the world. We design many, perhaps most of the products that require that type of manufacturing, but we don’t make any of the tools or the finished goods here, and I’d like to see us do both.”

Companies are indeed starting to bail out of China, moving production both to other Asian countries such as Vietnam and back to the United States. The consultancy Kearney found in its latest Reshoring Index that manufacturers are increasingly diversifying their supply chains away from China, leery of the risks of the trade war—and now the pandemic. And large investors and money managers are increasingly starting to judge companies by the resilience and diversification of their supply chains.

Of course, the great decoupling on the horizon won’t be cost-free. Some firms that reshore production to higher-cost countries, such as the United States, will lose some of the efficiency gains they’ve racked up in recent decades. For many industries, the protectionist push could hit a very thick wall of opposition from corporate boardrooms very quickly, even with a raft of new incentives and warnings coming from Washington.

“There are going to be other industries that, while kicking and screaming, may ultimately move away from China and move business to another country.”

“Broadly speaking, I think companies are going to be incredibly resistant to anything that hurts their share price,” said Shehzad H. Qazi, the managing director of the China Beige Book, a platform that analyzes data on China’s economy for investors. “We’re not going to see, for example, Nike move all its production back to the United States and have their shoes and athletic wear being produced here, just because from a cost standpoint that makes absolutely no sense,” he said. “I don’t think there is any amount of tax incentives that could be provided that would be palatable enough to make that shift happen.”

Still, decoupling could be easier, or at least less painful, on a small scale for some industries than for others. “There are going to be some industries where it’s going to be virtually impossible no matter what,” Qazi said. “There are going to be other industries that, while kicking and screaming, may ultimately move away from China and move business to another country.”

At the same time, a race to bolster economic self-sufficiency in one country will almost certainly lead other countries to do the same, which could choke off export opportunities and lead to less trade in the future.

“Some of the lessons of the 1980s about just-in-time manufacturing will be adjusted—that is natural and appropriate,” Zoellick, the former U.S. trade representative, said. “We just have to decide where we want to pay the cost—because there will be costs. If we develop it all at home, it will have costs, and it will have costs for U.S. exporters” who stand to lose overseas access in a world of rising trade barriers, he said.

If the idea of a wholesale decoupling is so jarring, that’s because much of the last 80 years has been a deliberate, often U.S.-led effort to deepen, not weaken, economic integration around the world.

Washington made an open and increasingly interconnected world economy a key building block of the postwar architecture, in large part to explicitly stave off future global conflicts. With the creation of the Bretton Woods system in 1944, before World War II even finished, or the later creation of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade—forerunner to the WTO—it set out to link economic interdependence with peace. So did others: The European Coal and Steel Community, created just a few years after the end of the war, cemented both closer economic and security ties in a war-ravaged continent and lay the foundation for the eventual creation of the European Union. Those trends continued, decade after decade, with only the odd hiccup or retreat, from the creation of the North American Free Trade Agreement and the WTO to the expansion and ever-closer economic integration between EU member states.

That whole process was itself a reaction to the last great decoupling: the upheaval of World War I, which ended the first age of globalization, followed a decade later by the Great Depression, trade barriers, economic nationalism, and a full-scale retreat from globalization.

And the end result of all that was to turn international economic rivalry into a zero-sum, beggar-thy-neighbor contest where economic concerns became security threats. Japan’s need for raw materials led to its occupation of Manchuria, and later the creation of the “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere” that so worried Ambassador Grew during the 1930s. It eventually led to an attack on resource-rich Southeast Asia and a preemptive strike on the U.S. fleet at Pearl Harbor. Nazi Germany, largely cut off from global markets, sought, eventually by force, to create a European Großwirtschaftsraum, or greater economic area, the economic equivalent of the German expansionist concept of Lebensraum.

“The key lesson drawn from the inter-war experience was that international political cooperation—and an enduring peace—depended fundamentally on international economic cooperation,” noted the WTO. “No country absorbed this lesson more than the United States.”

That’s what makes today’s deliberate retreat alarming to contemplate for some economists. “The importance of decoupling, it seems to me, is something that goes beyond” the modest retrenchment in global trade and global supply chains in the decade following the 2008-2009 financial crisis, said Rodrik, the Harvard economist. “It’s an approach to trade that is much more mercantilist and zero-sum, rather than positive-sum.”

When it comes to China, “What we need to worry about when we talk about decoupling is kind of using economics as a stick,” Rodrik said, “making the economic relationship hostage to the geopolitical competition.”

“You won’t have the globalization you had in the past. How far you down the road in reversing that is to be determine.”

Does that mean, as trade barriers rise and decoupling accelerates, that the world is headed for a repeat of the 1930s?

“I think there are some quarters in the United States that really do want to go that far, and I think other countries have to adopt a defensive posture,” said Irwin, of Dartmouth. “When some countries go down this road, it forces other countries to go down this road as well, and give up some of the gains they might have from being open and integrated. So these things can spiral—that’s certainly the story of the 1930s.”

But in some ways, such a repeat seems nearly impossible, because globalization, trade, and cross-border investment have advanced so much further today than when the Great Depression hit.

“I think the argument against is that today we have such a high degree of integration, there’s no way that Australia and Canada and the EU would go as far as the United States would, or no desire to go as far as the United States could,” he said. The upshot would be a retrenchment—not another dark valley.

“You won’t have the globalization you had in the past. How far you down the road in reversing that is to be determined,” he said.

Zoellick, for his part, ticks off the impacts already attributable to the pandemic and national lockdowns: rejiggered supply chains, export restrictions, constricted trade finance, and a resurgence of classical protectionism.

“I’m not sure anyone can say how they will all add up, but the direction isn’t good,” he said.

“I’m not trying to say we’ll return to the 1930s, but if you have an economic downturn exacerbated by pandemic risks and moves toward economic autarky, it can get pretty nasty,” Zoellick said. “So don’t take things for granted.”

Now that the Trump administration is using the coronavirus pandemic to more aggressively push its economic decoupling agenda, the big question is what happens to U.S.-China relations.

The United States has already thrown out the idea of strategic engagement with China and openly treats Beijing as its major geopolitical rival. China has taken advantage of the pandemic to ramp up pressure on Taiwan, which it regards as a renegade territory. Weakening the economic ties that bind—through more than $650 billion in annual two-way trade, tens of billions more in investment, and China’s trillion-dollar holding of U.S. government debt—will simply sharpen that confrontation.

“What we have now through the beginnings of economic decoupling is the removal of that economic ballast in the U.S.-China relationship, which has historically differentiated it from the characteristics of the U.S.-Soviet relationship in the Cold War,” said Rudd, the former Australian prime minister.

“If we have another pandemic, or environmental issues, or financial-sector issues, or Iran, or North Korea, how effective are you going to be if you don’t have a working relationship with China?”

In concrete terms, that will likely make it harder for the United States to nudge China to make any of the reforms Washington has pushed for years, let alone to moderate its increasingly belligerent and aggressive foreign policy. “If the question is whether breaking economic ties will lead to increased friction, the answer has to be yes,” Zoellick said. “The nature of decoupling doesn’t mean the Chinese will stop” their disruptive behavior, “they will just be less concerned with norms that the United States would otherwise push.”

In other words, after almost two decades of urging, sometimes successfully, China to become a “responsible stakeholder” in the global system, as then-Deputy Secretary of State Zoellick famously urged in a 2005 speech, the United States would essentially be throwing in the towel. And, on a host of global challenges, giving up influence and engagement with the world’s largest population, second-largest economy, and a permanent member of the U.N. Security Council could undermine U.S. interests across the board, he warned.

“If we have another pandemic, or environmental issues, or financial-sector issues, or Iran, or North Korea, how effective are you going to be if you don’t have a working relationship with China?”

And unlike other U.S. foreign-policy challenges in the Trump administration—from Iran to Saudi Arabia to Venezuela—any change to a Democratic White House next year would likely do little to dial down the confrontation with China.

Strategic engagement, which guided successive U.S. administrations since practically the first secret Richard Nixon-era trips to China, has been declared dead even by former Obama administration officials. With unemployment at record levels and the economy slumping, nobody—and especially not presumptive Democratic nominee Biden—wants to go easy on China. And many of the Trump administration’s economic policies toward China, from the reform of foreign investment to export controls to the remaining tariffs on Chinese imports, would be politically tough to undo with the stroke of a pen, noted Feng of the Center for a New American Security.

“There’s a bipartisan hardening—that tendency to be more hawkish on China, it has only been exacerbated by the pandemic,” she said.

In the end, U.S. efforts to roll back the one part of globalization that it can somewhat control—global supply chains and trade—will be at best a partial and imperfect solution that will only aggravate the other challenges. Choosing economic decoupling as the answer to today’s problems, said Zoellick, is simply inviting future headaches.

“If you try to stymie the system in one area, the forces of globalization—whether pandemics or migration—they are not going to go away,” he said. Gum up the global trading system, and you dampen growth prospects for the developing world. Lower growth leads to more migration. More migration leads to more political stresses in the developed world. “It’s like squeezing a balloon,” he said.

— Keith Johnson is a senior staff writer at Foreign Policy. Twitter: @KFJ_FP

— Robbie Gramer is a diplomacy and national security reporter at Foreign Policy. Twitter: @RobbieGramer

Heavy eyelids open and the stench of antiseptic nearly chokes you. Although you are bone-tired, exhaustion weighing down every part of your body, you wake with the thought that you want to get up and leave. No hospital staff is around, so it's clear for you to make a break for it.

Wandering through the barren halls of the hospital is how you spend a lot of your time. You're not supposed to even leave the hospital bed, you were told on a number of occasions, but you stopped listening to nurses years ago.

You feel shaky and weak and just a bit nauseated as you stand up, but you grab your IV pole and begin your aimless trek.

You spend a while walking down the halls, your own personal labyrinth complete with the rhythmic beeps of hospital machinery and indistinct murmurs carried by gentle, soothing voices. If you unfocus your eyes while looking ahead on your walk, then all you see is white stretching on endlessly and you can imagine yourself fading away into oblivion.

It is not something you do often.

Several other patients call out to you as you walk by and you return the greetings softly, feeling warmed by their kind voices. For all the things you dislike about the hospital, there are enough good people and good things to make it home. You don't mind the noises made by the machines, even when they wake you up at night. Their tones are a comfort in this cold place.

You wander until you get out of breath (which doesn't take as long as it used to, much to your chagrin) but you decide you want to keep going until your limbs shake and your poor heart threatens to pound so fast against your prominent ribcage that you fear it might stop. You want to waste the day away outside of your bed for once. This is not much, but it is your own form of escapism.

The not-twins are planning on visiting you later, a voice in the back of your mind supplies. Only the more reason to go AWOL. The strange vibe you get from them is enough to make you feel even more nauseous than you did before.

They're like you -- they grew up in this hospital, terrified and alone, and had to learn to navigate the world in their own way before it ate them alive.

One of them seems to have always followed the other around, melding himself to match and copy the other one without thinking too much about anything. You once found his hulking presence comforting, but there's something in the way his cold, lifeless eyes stare for miles, blank and unseeing, that unsettles you. You pointedly ignore the voice in your head reminding you that you probably have that same look on your own face most days.

The thousand-yard-stare pales in comparison to the level of creepy that the sickly-sweet smile the other one constantly plasters on his face is on. It's always fake, you're sure, and all it does is remind you of a snake in the grass. How truly venomous he must be when hidden away from prying eyes.

You look around as your footsteps take you forward. You hate these expressionless white walls. Life is full of color, messy and overlapping, all the colors running together like it's no big deal. Here, everything is white and blank and put into its own separate designated place, and never shall two spaces cross. All the white walls do is remind you of what you're missing out on, what you could have had if not for him. He's the one who brought you into this world. In your head, you call him Tyrant.

You can't bring yourself to hate him outright. that would require caring about him, you suppose. He's the closest thing you have to a father figure, so you suppose you should try to love him, or even like him. 

It's difficult, though. The man you call Tyrant is a ruthless mastermind who uses you as a pawn in his chess game. You realized long ago that his pride was reserved not for you but for your abilities and the technology his company develops.

It's difficult because your existence is a product of his goals and accomplishments and that's all. It's difficult because you're tired of him and his experiments and the fact that the only reason you exist is to breathe life into his monstrosities.

It's difficult because all you want is to find your brother.

You know he's out there. You know you were born together and by some stroke of luck, he escaped this wretched place even though you couldn't. You don't feel bitter about this because you love him -- although you two have never met and he doesn't even know you exist -- and you would never want him to experience the same hell you grew up in.

Through the hacking prowess you've managed to build up over the years, you've learned a lot of things you were never supposed to learn. You used to sneak in to the computer lab and spend time dodging Tyrant's employees, who would send you back to the hospital if they were to catch you.

Thanks to your illicit access to personnel files, you've learned that the one who took your brother out of Oval Tower used to be a researcher here. The not-twins have told you that she now works as a nurse and looks after your brother. You have no idea where they get their information, but since they're saying it, it must be true.

You're not supposed to have access to those files. That is a privilege held by the highest levels of employee in the tower. People that Tyrant can trust, people that are corrupt beyond belief or reason. Humans who gave up their humanity.

And then there is you, who was never fully human to begin with.

"Designer babies" is the proper term for what you and your twin are. You were made in a lab, as false and artificial as your surroundings. As much as you long for a natural environment, full of life and warmth, this hospital is where an artificial being like you belongs.

Despite this thought burrowing deep into your bones, a part of you crescendos with rebellious energy, a frantic, primitive part of you that wants nothing more than to find a way out, nearly panicking in its need for freedom.

More and more, you find your mind wandering to the possibility of making an actual escape yourself. A tiny hope inside your chest lights up at the idea of finding your family and staying with them, where you belong, never to return to the tower you're being held captive in.

Your brother’s files don't tell you anything about his life or how happy he is, but you like to imagine it sometimes. On the days when you're too sick to get out of bed and all you can do to pass the time is replay an old video game in your collection, you wonder if he would enjoy playing it with you if given the chance.

On the very bad days, the ones where you need to be cheered up the most, you allow yourself to imagine a different life. One where you get to be a normal person with normal worries. You imagine that the hands inserting needles into your veins and monitoring your vitals belong to your brother's caretaker and she's nursing you back to health. Gentle, familial hands healing you instead of hurting. That's what your tired soul wants.

You will have to wait, though. For now, you are still the captive princess, locked away in the oval tower. You will provide the keys to the castle, and the knight will be guided along his path. There are many levels he will have to make his way through, but a knight's journey comes to an end eventually. The knight always meets the princess at the end of the game.

All she must do is wait.

OpenAI Releases Algorithm That Helps Robots Learn from Hindsight

It’s not a failure if you just pretend that you meant to do it all along

Image: OpenAI

Being able to learn from mistakes is a powerful ability that humans (being mistake-prone) take advantage of all the time. Even if we screw something up that we’re trying to do, we probably got parts of it at least a little bit correct, and we can build off of the things that we did not to do better next time. Eventually, we succeed.

Robots can use similar trial-and-error techniques to learn new tasks. With reinforcement learning, a robot tries different ways of doing a thing, and gets rewarded whenever an attempt helps it to get closer to the goal. Based on the reinforcement provided by that reward, the robot tries more of those same sorts of things until it succeeds.

Where humans differ is in how we’re able to learn from our failures as well as our successes. It’s not just that we learn what doesn’t work relative to our original goal; we also collect information about how we fail that we may later be able to apply to a goal that’s slightly different, making us much more effective at generalizing what we learn than robots tend to be.

Today, San Francisco-based AI research company OpenAI is releasing an open source algorithm called Hindsight Experience Replay, or HER, which reframes failures as successes in order to help robots learn more like humans.

The key insight that HER formalizes is what humans do intuitively: Even though you have not succeeded at a specific goal, you have at least achieved a different one. So why not just pretend that you wanted to achieve this goal to begin with, instead of the one that you set out to achieve originally? 

To understand how HER works, imagine that you’re up to bat in a game of baseball. Your goal is to hit a home run. On the first pitch, you hit a ball that goes foul. It’s a failure to hit a home run, which sucks, but you’ve actually learned two things in the process: You’ve learned one way of not hitting a home run, and you’ve also learned exactly how to hit a foul ball. Of course, you didn’t know beforehand that you were going to hit a foul ball, but who cares? With hindsight experience replay, you decide to learn from what you just did anyway, essentially by saying, “You know, if I’d wanted to hit a foul ball, that would have been perfect!” You might not have achieved your original goal, but you’ve still made progress.

The other nice thing about HER is that it uses what researchers call “sparse rewards” to guide learning. Rewards are how we tell robots whether what they’re doing is a good thing or a bad thing as part of the reinforcement learning process—they’re just numbers in an algorithm, but you can think of them like cookies. Most reinforcement learning algorithms use “dense rewards,” where the robot gets cookies of different sizes depending on how close it gets to completing a task. These cookies encourage the robot as it goes, rewarding individual aspects of a task separately and helping, in some sense, to direct the robot to learn the way you want it to.

Just imagine the robot not succeeding and saying, “Yeah, I totally meant to do that.” With OpenAI’s HER reinforcement learning algorithm, you’d say, “Oh, well, in that case, great, have a cookie!”

Dense rewards are effective, but engineering them can be tricky, and they’re not always realistic in real-world applications. Most applications are very results-focused, and for practical purposes, you can either succeed at them, or not. Sparse rewards mean that the robot gets just one cookie only if it succeeds, and that’s it: Easier to measure, easier to program, and easier to implement. The trade-off, though, is that it makes learning slower, because the robot isn’t getting incremental feedback, it’s just being told over and over “no cookie for you” unless it gets very lucky and manages to succeed by accident.

This is where HER comes in: It lets robots learn with sparse rewards, by treating every attempt as a success at something, changing the goal so that the robot can learn a little bit. Just imagine the robot not succeeding and then being like, “Yeah I totally meant to do that.” With HER, you’d say, “Oh, well, in that case, great, have a cookie!”

By doing this substitution, the reinforcement learning algorithm can obtain a learning signal since it has achieved some goal; even if it wasn’t the one that you meant to achieve originally. If you repeat this process, you will eventually learn how to achieve arbitrary goals, including the goals that you really want to achieve.

Here’s how well it works in practice, compared to an unmodified deep reinforcement learning approach:

To learn more about what makes HER more effective than other reinforcement learning algorithms, we spoke via email with  Matthias Plappert, a member of the technical staff at OpenAI:

IEEE Spectrum:  Can you explain what the difference is between sparse and dense rewards, and why you recommend sparse rewards as being more realistic in robotics applications?

Matthias Plappert: Traditionally, in the AI field of reinforcement learning (RL), the AI agent essentially plays a guessing game to learn a new task. Let’s take the arm pushing the puck as an example (which you can view in the video). It tries to do some motion randomly, like just hitting the puck from the side. In the traditional RL setting, an oracle would give the agent a reward based on how close to the goal the puck ends up. The closer puck to the goal, the bigger the reward. So, in a way, the oracle tells the agent, “You’re getting warmer”—this is a dense reward.

Sparse rewards essentially pushes this paradigm to the limit: The oracle only gives a reward if the goal is reached. The oracle doesn’t say, “You’re getting warmer” anymore. It only says: “You succeeded” or “You failed.” This is a much harder setting to learn in, since you’re not getting any intermediate clues. It also better corresponds to reality, which has fewer moments where you obtain a specific reward for doing a specific thing.

To what extent do you think these techniques will be practically useful on real robots?

Learning with HER on real robots is still hard since it still requires a significant amount of samples. However, if the reward is sparse, it would potentially be much simpler to do some form of fine-tuning on the real robot since figuring out if an attempt was successful vs. not successful is much simpler than computing the correct dense reward in every timestep.

We also found that learning with HER in simulation is often much simpler since it does not require extensive tuning of the reward function (it is typically much easier to detect if an outcome was successful) and due to the fact that the critic (a neural network that tries to predict how well the agent will do in the future) has a much simpler job as well (since it does not need to learn a very complex function but instead also only has to differentiate between successful vs. non-successful).

OpenAI has made an open source version of HER available, and they’re releasing a set of simulated robot environments based on real robot platforms, including a Shadow hand and a Fetch research robot. If you’re an ambitious sort, OpenAI has also posted a set of requests for HER-related research. All this good stuff is available in the blog post linked below, and you can read the 2017 NIPS paper introducing HER here.

[ OpenAI ]

OpenAI Releases Algorithm That Helps Robots Learn from Hindsight syndicated from https://jiohowweb.blogspot.com

Genesis Alpha One Review: Lifeless as the Vacuum of Space

There was once a time when I dreamed of designing video games; I think most gamers do as kids. While this dream ultimately evolved into working in IT, it still left me with a soft spot for indie games/studios. I am usually a bit more forgiving when independent titles lack a little polish, so long as the core framework is there. Genesis Alpha One both captivated me and tried my patience at the same time. Genesis Alpha One is a Resource Management/ FPS game where your one goal is to find a Genesis candidate and start life anew. You are the last hope for humanity, but after the journey… are we even still human?

Open the Dropship doors, these alien wastes await.

Oh Captain My Captian

You are the captain of your vessel, a human clone who has been assigned to the task and if you die, you take your ship with you (unless you have a re-spawn chamber). As captain you must gather resources, clone additional crew members, and research the necessary technology to colonize a new world. You’ll navigate the stars looking for floating chunks of space garbage and dead planets to mine out until you are ready or until the machinists kill you.

When visiting Alien Planets you can scan sites for new technologies.

It’s Unreal Alright

You can always tell when a game is made in Unreal Engine by inexperienced developers…. everything is reflective and light sources are placed in locations that just seem to constantly blind the player. Fortunately this title is one of the better ones, but there is nothing that truly sets it apart visually from any other space shooters. It isn’t terrible by any means, just boring.

Your ship can harvest resources from the depths of space for easy refined material.

So Much To Be Done

One of the redeeming factors of the game (in a way) is that you can seamlessly switch between an FPS view and a ship overview. That way you can easily make additions to your ship without going to a terminal just to make those changes; HOWEVER you cannot do that with any other action that must be taken on your ship. This means that if you want to start a new expedition or manufacture more ammo, you’ll have to run to the room in order to execute that action. This gets incredibly tedious the more you play the game. While there is lots to research and discover, these actions play such a crucial role in your day to day that it takes a lot away from your ability to enjoy the game.

Add and remove rooms on the fly, but that’s the only thing quick about this game.

Rouge-Lite Does Not Mean Inconsistent

I expect any game with perma-death to be inherently difficult. Developers who advertise perma-death as a selling point typically scale the game to be difficult, but usually this is a gradual change with the occasional “bad luck” situation. This was not the case for Genesis Alpha One. In each of my 8 playthroughs I found myself growing bored as I played the roll of exterminator, crawling through the vents of my ship to kill vermin, only to suddenly be boarded by a faction of space pirates resulting in my untimely demise. Once the machinists find you, it is almost impossible to shake them unless you have some serious firepower. This makes progression near impossible if you don’t spawn in a resource rich parts of space, because if you venture out far the machinists are guaranteed to find you.

I’m feeling an awful lot like Captain Dallas.

A fruitless goal

The ultimate goal of Genesis Alpha One is to eventually find a suitable planet to colonize and prepare your crew and biosphere, but after you land, that’s it, game over. Then, you can just do it all again while running a different scenario, which is the case with a lot of games in this category. The major difference here is that there is no real variety between the scenarios other than your starting equipment. This greatly reduces the enjoyment of replaying the game.

The planets you visit are randomly generated, but lack variety.

A Valiant Attempt That Falls Short

While Genesis Alpha One was a bit tedious at times and the worlds that you embark upon often run together, it is definitely a breath of fresh air when it comes to resource management games.  It is a different take that I definitely enjoyed running through, even if it falls a bit short.

A Fresh Take on Resource Management

Well Optimized

Intuitive Controls

Great Atmosphereic Sounds

Tutorial Holds your hand on common sense stuff and not advanced features

Often Feels like a reskin of Unreal Tournament

Chaotic Difficulty

Lack of depth

Playtime: 26 hours total. Matt has completed numerous playthroughs in 20 hours.

Computer Specs: Windows 10 64-bit computer using an Intel i7-4790K CPU, 32GB of memory, and a NVIDIA GeForce GTX1070 OC graphics card.

Genesis Alpha One Review: Lifeless as the Vacuum of Space published first on https://touchgen.tumblr.com/

Review - Monster Hunter World (PC)

This review contains spoilers. The benefit of playing a port months after the game initially hits consoles is that there are a host of guides available, which I recommend if you want to take this game moderately seriously (bit of an oxymoron there but bear with me). I don’t typically like games that require you to have extra study material to understand but to its credit, all I had to do was watch one video guide about the mechanics of my favored weapon, the Light Bowgun. After which I was probably fifty percent better every hunt after that. So I certainly recommend looking into that.

The story begins with your highly customize-able character on a ship to a ‘new world’, previously undiscovered in other games of the franchise. Your ship gets waylaid by a mountainous “Elder Dragon” who came up from sea. His back is full of magma and volcanic spouts and you climb his back in order to escape. Once you’re in safety, you find out he’s one of many that have migrated to this place for mysterious reasons. Typically one every few hundred years, now it’s one every decade and that has caused some turmoil in the ecosystem. Your job is essentially research. Kill monsters, stabilize the ecosystem, and arm yourself while doing so.

Eventually there is an extended epilogue. Once you discover that Elder’s goal and what it might mean, you enter a “High rank” hunt mechanic because the ecosystem has changed and you react accordingly. Monsters in these quests are tougher and more aggressive, and you continually work your way up.

This review may maintain some comparisons to Dauntless. As I mentioned in that very review, my only experience with MH as a franchise was during a brief road trip with my friend back in the PSP days. I have little memory of it and I doubt I was any good or understand any of the minutiae of mechanics. As such, a majority of my experience in this genre comes from Dauntless, the free-to-play variant with more dumbed down mechanics than you couldn’t shake a stick at. Veterans of MH are calling World dumbed down, ha. If only they knew how far that could actually go. My immediate first impression of MHW was actually quite positive. There’s something I can do here that I never really could at Dauntless; actually solo monsters. Dauntless was fairly unforgiving, only giving you five (count them: five) potions per hunt. You burn through those without burning the monster down properly, and you were done. Mercifully here, you not only get dozens of varying degrees of usefulness, you can also craft more on the fly or withdraw some from your loot in various camps set up around the impressively large zones. While some monsters give me more trouble than others (most flying types can do a one-two knockout by rushing me, putting me in a twelve hour stun animation, then merely swipe at me for an instant death), I’ve been in awe at what I’ve actually been able to accomplish on my own. ...And unfortunately, I am forced to do a handful of things on my own. Let me tap into some of the problems I have before diving back into the meat and mechanics of the game. Steam reviews are mixed for a couple of reasons. Bad controls and connectivity issues. The bad controls are a remnant of the fact that it was originally a PS4 game and the menus really show that. The UI itself is very controller friendly while the M/K is barely given a second thought. I had to rebind my weapon draw to left click like it is with melee because I’d find myself engaged in too many fights, frantically clicking only to find out I was actually just using my slinger and tossing useless rocks at the monster. In addition, the radial menu might as well not exist, as it is bound to your various F1-F4 keys. It’s very clunky and not at all the “quick” menu that it’s supposed to be. Frankly, I’m tired of hearing “just get a controller” from my friends. I don’t think I’ve touched a controller since 2008. Next is a problem that Capcom and Steam are already looking into. While I’ve been able to progress, just last night I lost out on three high ranked hunts because it kept dropping me from the group. From what I’ve read, the monster’s hitpoints balance towards groups (instantly doubling when a second person joins your hunt) but doesn’t at all go back down if anyone leaves. At the time I was replaying what was basically the main story’s ending, fighting the last boss over and over. Thankfully his mission doesn’t have a lot of open combat and is mostly just firing cannons and ballistae at him over and over. Still, it dropped me three times and had little to show for it overall.

There’s no direct party system, just player listings and hubs. You have to find a convoluted “Session ID” in the menus for your friends to copy and eventually join together. Someone posts a quest and everyone joins it. You won’t physically see anyone outside of a hunt unless you visit the gathering hub on top of the main town. The whole Session ID is just a pointless extra step that the likes of Capcom just love throwing in there. I am reminded of Black Desert Online. Despite being a different country, it still has the same idea behind its mechanics. One does not simply just craft or buy potions. First you have to press thirteen buttons just to get a stack of them. Then they might be put in your storage box, not personal pouch so you have to remember to take them out before your hunt. Then there’s the canteen mechanic, where you’re encourages you to eat to gain decent buffs before every hunt. Why not make that a single item you can use midhunt? Like Dauntless, pretty much every important thing in town is far apart and forces you into miniature loading screens. After every hunt you’re plopped on the bottom level but you still have to run up to the Blacksmith to fetch some upgrades. One does not simply make armor, too. In the higher levels you have to micromanage “decorations” to socket into your arms and armor to increase various passive skills. Why not just make those skills up-gradable like the armor itself? Indeed, one does not simply upgrade their armor! You have to collect “spheres” that you get from bounties and hunts in order to do so. Everything just has a pointless extra step, but I admit these are all nitpicks in what I do believe is a pretty damn good game. I have adjusted to the controls (even though it takes twelve clicks to get anywhere in the menu, but the combat is fine) and I can stomach the connectivity problems... for a time. Everything else is just a niggling annoyance that I have to deal with before I get to the real heart of the game: Expeditions and hunts. To its credit there’s a lot to do. Expeditions are the closest thing this game has to an “open world” setting. You will keep everything you acquire, gather materials and hunt the local monsters at your own leisure (though once you attack, they enter a sort of timer where they will flee the area if you fool around too much, but the mode itself will never kick you out). You can pick up quests on-site and continually remain in the zone you’ve chosen. Admittedly I haven’t explored expedition mode to a severe degree, as doing the various optional quests and bounties give me more than enough gameplay on their own. I never really need to piddle around the same zone for that long.

I mentioned earlier that I was happy that I can actually solo a handful of monsters in this game as opposed to Dauntless. There’s a lot more to that, the “simplest of MH’s” claim be damned, I embrace convenience if it comes hand in hand with actual fun. You can farm the same monster a few times but I found that the game offers you a handful of armor sets that can be crafted from bones and minerals alone. You can pick up bones from piles around every map and mine at little alcoves and continually gain materials to sets that will be perfectly passable for a time. I wore the basic “bone” armor for a while before getting into the more specialized stuff. Revered is the Anjarath, the game’s T-Rex who has a fire breath attack that will absolutely one-shot you and serves as the game’s first difficulty wall. His armor, however, gives fire resistance so if you can stomach fighting him a couple times (ideally in multiplayer), then you can likely build yourself up to handle him properly. Fun fact; I’ve yet to solo him myself. Other monsters have given players trouble that have instead given me more fun. The Radobaan for example, a sort of mid-game encounter in a zone called the Rotten Vale. It is a place where many monsters go to die and their essence feeds the Coral Highlands above it. The Radobaan covers itself in the bones of dead creatures and is thus highly armored, and you must burn through that in order to do some raw damage. I know of players who find this armor annoying but his movements are highly telegraphed and he’s a fan of stumbling himself which gives me a lot of free shots at him. So far he’s honestly been one of my favorite monsters to fight.

I did not realize this was the franchise’s first foray into big name consoles and even PC, the rest were evidently all handheld games. The intro into this hardware allows for a lot more powerful mechanics to come into play. New to the franchise, as far as I’m aware, is animal behavior. I can’t speak for the other games but I noticed a few things. There’s a turf war mechanic where two big bad monsters will encounter each other and start their own duel regardless of your presence. Each monster has its own “rating”, and I doubt a Great Jagras (the first and easiest monster) ever wins any of those.

In addition to that, I’ve found that docile animal mechanics can occasionally tip me off. You see it in a cutscene a time or two but even before my scoutflies (the game’s justification for a “go this way” mechanic) start tracking the monster, I’d be going down a path and find herbivores running the opposite direction. Sure enough, down that path was a large monster. Part of the hunt or no, animals do react accordingly. Sometimes they’ll take defensive positions as you initiate combat, or sometimes they’ll fly down and knock you over in a moment of monster camaraderie that I wish they hadn’t bothered with. Still, its moments like this that help the world feel like an actual world, appropriate for the game’s namesake. I know I droned on a bit about the problems the game had but some of them (the controls) can be mitigated. I’m enjoying myself, spending a good majority of my time responding to SOS flares or pushing myself in the high rank hunts to see what exactly I might be able to handle. I rarely push myself to see what exactly I’m capable of in gaming, but MHW pays that off so well. Maybe I can’t handle that flying Rathian on my own, but managing to take down a tunnel dwelling Diablos was a thing of beauty. The hunts can be long and exhausting but finally watching a beast get taken down after a couple of deaths can be very exciting. The genre may not be for everyone. If you’re story driven, you’ll find the one here is short and weak and mostly just serves as a framework for the gameplay. If you like content, then there’s plenty to do that should be varied enough to keep you around, and I’m sure they’ll update more monsters in as time goes on. Even after I get my fill, I’m sure I’ll keep an eye on this one.

New idea for a neat God game

I call it DWEYW: The God Game No-one Asked for.

The game is chock-full of references to other games or genres, such as Spore and Rimworld. The game itself has a simplistic artsytle, with pawns looking something like this: https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0118/5972/products/Wood_Man_Peg_20_2_grande.JPG?v=1478631803. You start off by selecting a planet to host your civilization. You can either randomize or personalize the world using an editor, or chose pre-made worlds such as Earth, along with other places that reference various real-world or fantasy locations (Mars, Westeros, etc). You raise your civilization from stone-age throughout the course of societal evolution all the way up to the “Technological Singularity”. This meaning they become a space-faring civilization with the capability to explore and colonize distant worlds throughout space, each with randomized conditions, wildlife (which also is randomized itself), etc.

But what sets it apart?

Now, this may seem like your average everyday God-game, but while the game lacks in originality, it will certainly make up for in game-play and mechanics. In your society, your will have to deal with all the societal problems we have faced throughout our history. You will need to deal with including but not limited to:

-Materials

-Wealth

-Food/Water

-Diplomacy with other rival nations

-War

-Worldwide war (at the later stages if things really go south, earlier  if everyone is really that bad at being nice or there are too many warmongers)

-Warmongers

-Famine

-Death and Destruction, such as plagues and the such.

-Racial bias and tension

-Corruption

-Peoples overall happiness

-Government type and how well it functions or if it can even sustain itself.

-Distrust of the people

-Rebellion

-Uprising

-Global Uprising

-Anarchy

-Tyranny (or Democracy, depending on your government type)

-Advancement

-Apocalyptic scenarios and local or even worldwide setbacks, such as economical depression.

-Environmental factors

-ETC

Everything is randomized for replay value. You could have a utopian run, where everyone lives in harmony and you unify your species by year 400. On the contrary, you could have a run where the world turns into a nearly inhospitable, Orwellian landscape where war rages between tyrannical governments for thousands of years and your still in the iron age by year 3900. Asteroids could set your civilization back to the stone age if you don't prepare. Plagues could ravage your civilizations and collapse a highly advanced society because you lacked in medical research. Your decisions directly affect how things can turn out, and everything is in some way preventable. Maybe next time try to plant some crops underground and build bunkers before the next cosmic disaster strikes you?

How does progression work?

Your civilization will progress through stages depending on its technological level. As you research more and more, you advanced along stages and can upgrade or directly replace certain elements, buildings, etc. At the beginning, almost everything will have to be micromanaged. However, as you become more and more advanced, you are rewarded by both power and less tedious workloads. Somethings will still have to be interacted with somewhat, such as war or disasters. That robot was never programmed to kill space parasites from XN-73-KZQ that your colonists brought back. You did quarantine them... right?

How does War and Diplomacy work?

Every nation will usually have city's, towns, or at least buildings. As you destroy more and more of a nations territory, it's Capital City will become more and more vulnerable. If you wish for a military victory, rather than a surrender, you must destroy a nations capital. A nations capital will be the most guarded place in their territory for obvious reasons, so you must plan carefully. There are, however, ways to win a war without even directly destroying a building (such as cyber war, which can destabilize a country). Also, a nation will increase defenses of territory as it becomes more and more alert. What may be a cakewalk in one game, may be a fight through hell in another because the nation you are attacking has been placed on high-alert. Onto Diplomacy. You can give nations weapons, money, territory, etc. You can hold conferences where your decisions and the topics can vary greatly, and your performance predicts the outcome. There are many other diplomatic things and stuff, but the list would be monumental. Along with all this, one leg thing will also be prevalent.

Fear.

Specifically, how afraid other nations are of you. If you are a squishy, snuggally, cutesy-woosty pumpkin nation who would never hurt a fly, then the Tyrannical dictatorship next door would probably jump at the opportunity to gain more land. However, if you are that tyrannical nation (or a bad-ass Democracy with the military might 600 Spartan Empires), and your actions include but are not limited to voluntary civilian manslaughter, discretionary nuclear bombing, etc... you can strike fear into the hearts of weaker nations who might wish to ally you to protect themselves and wont make too much of a fuss when you bomb Treschuland because they said mean things about you. However, war-crimes like these also anger equal and stronger nations, along with somewhat weaker nations that think they are hot shit.

Also, as a quick reminder, other nations can do and use anything that a player nation can. This means they can use nukes, cyber warfare, diplomatic actions, etc and etc and etc.

Space colonization?

Space colonization will work similar to how it works in Spore. If you have every played Spore, you know what I mean. Every planet has everything randomized. From land-masses to hazards to wildlife. Wildlife itself is also randomized using parts that the game will use to create more random stuff, similar to how Starbound does it. Unlike Spore and Starbound, however, the galaxy in this game does not adopt the Mediocrity Principle. Instead, finding intelligent alien life will be an extremely rare occurrence. Intelligent life can be randomized using alien creature parts, but the computer will use mostly intelligent-only alien parts when randomizing the species. The player can research terraforming and creature creation tools, which allows them to plant their own ecosystems. Similar to Spore, they can also use tools that allow them to uplift a certain species of a planet. Alien civilizations will go through the same problems as the player civilization, meaning they can also be easily destroyed. 

What is the ultimate goal of the game?

There isn't, really. However, if you really want an ending, you can reach the center of the galaxy and become enlightened. This grants you infinite power of creation and destruction throughout the galaxy (basically makes all of your stuff have infinite ammo). Now you may be saying “That sounds way to much like spore!” and to that I say:

Yes. Yes it is. But you try coming up with something better.

SPECIAL MODE: Infection

This mode is unlocked after reaching the space era for the first time. Until then, it is hidden from the player.

Spread a zombie virus similar to Infectinator! Spread a virus throughout worlds you create or others create (or use savefile worlds. Be warned- they will use their advanced technology. No harm will actually come to them if you destroy them in infection though! Savefiles will be left untouched.). As you destroy and infect more people, the area will become more and more fortified by police and eventually military personnel! There are 7 stages of destruction:

Civility: Everything as usual. Nothing to see here.

Disturbance: People are confused. Minor police presence.

Unrest: People are starting to get scared. More are starting to get into buildings. Larger police presence, along with some SWAT. Builds start being fortified, albeit minor.

Riot: People have lost their wits. They are either barricaded inside buildings, scavenging, or have taken up refuge in safe-houses. Large SWAT presence and some Military personnel. Buildings start getting more fortified. Safe-houses start 

Anarchy: The location is almost up in flames. Military have drastically increased their presence and have called special forces. Tanks, ATTK Helicopters, and other offensive vehicles begin to roll into the streets. Some buildings become extremely fortified, including artillery.

Aftermath: Military has abandoned the location. The area is largely destroyed, and very few people remain. Area is considered destroyed.

(Extra) Devastation: Very few, if any, buildings are still standing. Area is completely uninhabited by living beings.

As more and more of the world becomes destroyed, other unaffected areas being to buff up as-well, simulating a real worldwide zombie crisis! There are 3 control modes for zombies:

Horde: You mass control zombies. They pile up into a crowd that you direct with your mouse.

Group: You can select a group of zombie to direct, to a limit of 20. The ones unselected do what they want (which is mainly to C O N S U M E).

Spectator: You can simply sit back and watch the chaos. You have the ability to select and control a single zombie to direct, but no more.

Just extra mechanics stuff

Buildings go through stages of destruction, progressively looking more beat-up. Buildings are considered destroyed at <30% of their health. Buildings are reduced to ruble at 0 health points.

When a pawn dies, a small blood splat will emanate from them, and they will fall over. They then sink into the ground and are removed. In infection, they are not removed but instead turn into zombies.

The world does not end as soon as the worlds climate reaches an inhospitable state, but it will eventually.

The destruction states in infection mode are also used in the base game.

There is a sandbox mode where the player can use commands, debug things, and summon most if not all game events objects. It is unlocked after reaching the games end, but requires a new save game. achievements are disabled when Sandbox is active.

Burning fossil fuels, detonating nuclear bombs, and any more things obviously affect the planet. Mid-space stage empires can research environmental shielding technology, which allows habitation of otherwise inhospitable worlds with city's rather than just colony buildings.

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