SELLERS REMORSE

"I have too many videogames." In an age of programs like Steam and Origin, I see that phrase parroted around by my friends particularly often (and particularly around summer sale season) these days. A common observation is that Steam as a platform has enabled people to buy more videogames than ever before, and with an easy to use digital-only platform the observation definitely rings true.
Could that be taken as a critique, though? That in changing the way we purchase and in the quantity that we're maybe missing out on part of the experience of owning a title?

People are buying more games now - or maybe more people are buying games. Either one of those is probably an apt take on the matter. My personal stance on it isn't that people are buying more. Rather, I think it'd be fair to say everyone has so many titles in our backlogs because we can no longer get rid of our older titles. There is no "Bargain Bin" that appears when a user has discarded a Steam title because there's no way to discard them.

So I have thirty games I never intend to play again. There's really no 'easy' way I could give those titles to another person that wouldn't result in my entire library being completely invalidated by being banned. Otherwise, I can 'hide' them and they vanish from my Steam library and are relegated to being a cold nagging that tugs at the back of my mind.

confronting your own habits in a videogame - PC/PS3/Xbox360

My guarantee is that if we, as players, had every game we had ever bought on any system we would all have massive and possibly literal libraries of games. With so many different ways of purchasing games online - and lately fewer and fewer ways of getting rid of them outright or simply letting someone else have them has essentially meant there is no "letting go." Did you buy DMC? Too bad, because now that game is going to haunt you into your grave.

Of course consoles still depend on physical media, but that line is getting more blurred with each iterative generation of hardware. Even just little over a year ago there was the possibility that software for the Xbox One would be 'locked in' when it was loaded on the system for the first time, prohibiting people from trading or borrowing games.

 Microsoft fortunately made the wise decision to scrap that feature (I love it when negative components of design are still referred to as features) before release. It was only awhile before that, and hardly a long while to boot, that a digital-only console would have been considered a novelty. Let's not mention the Xperia play here.

Stores still widely featured PC games on shelves (in actual boxes!) and if you had a ton of games on your system it was probably because you went out and bought them. Which was of course accompanied by the sight of a lot more looming towers of jewel cases (if you're a retro collector like me) or the black-box clam shell packages.

Of course it's not like those things went away, but companies have gone a long way to make it even easier to purchase titles digitally. When I first started collecting videogames I made it a point to collect anything "interesting" that either went against established industry norms, or had something to offer besides bland storytelling and flashy instant-reward gameplay. The first victims of my rush to get rid of things were anything that had to deal with God of War, a decision I still don't (and never will) regret. If anything, getting rid of anything remotely associated with that franchise was probably the closest experience I will ever have to a Zen awakening. "Finally, no more bad videogames" I say, my chakra aligning.

Anyway.

One of the first franchises I took an interest in was Legacy of Kain. It's Vampires for Videogames, written through the language of Shakespearean play for an audience that grew up rolling their eyes any time someone mentioned that Anne Rice was like, totally cool.

From a mechanical standpoint, in the entire series, Legacy of Kain always skewed more "interesting" than "good". In an entire series that remains sadly unfinished, there's probably one game that's wholly enjoyable to play from start to finish. Legacy of Kain is however, one of those series' that set out to do something interesting and tells an incredible (and incredibly convoluted) story from beginning to end.

It was for that reason that I set out to collect the entire series, at a time when I enjoyed videogames as a medium but didn't necessarily understand them. My obsession started with Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver, a depressing and somewhat nihilistic open world action game for the original Playstation.

Soul Reaver was an easy pick because it was in the ballpark of games that have A) never been re-released and are B) still regarded as cheap to acquire. No need to pay hundreds of dollars for a factory sealed copy, when you can find them on eBay for  just a couple of dollars.

Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver 2 (PS2)

Eventually I'd acquired almost the entire series, save the original PlayStation title and genesis of the series.
I even made an effort to play the entire series that I owned up until that point.
Now, this isn't meant to be a critical condemnation of the series, but at the time these games were made before 3D action was the norm for titles. With no Devil May Cry to base themselves off of, the series had a relatively simple and frustrating approach to combat, with more focus on exploration and "puzzle solving" (because this was also the days when dragging cubes was a puzzle) with little regard to how the rest of the game worked.

Why I wanted to collect the Legacy of Kain series more than anything, even the writing, was the fact that it was one of the few contemporary series to evolve fully with trends that the rest of the industry worked under. The series progressed from an overhead dungeon crawler at a time when they were vogue to becoming a Devil May Cry style action game.

I was, at the time, misguided. For all of the interesting design choices the series showcased, that inherent 'gameplay' was never the focus the developers intended. It was always about the story they were trying to tell of two characters struggles against causality

Legacy of Kain was always trying to stay relevant at a time when there was generally several gaps in years of production. It had to effectively grow with the changes the industry made to whats popular, but I don't think the core team of developers strong point was ever mechanical refinement.

Maybe in an alternate universe, the creative team hired someone like Shinji Mikami to give directorial input on the franchise. Alas, Legacy of Kain had the misfortunate in being developed in a time when there was seldom cross-polination of Japanese developers in Western studios.

Oh well, I decided it wasn't worth it. Bad investment, why did I buy these games? So even though it took me an incredibly long time to track down Blood Omen 2 in a presentable manner, I traded them out for fuckin' Radiata Stories or some other basic PS2

Why do I beat myself up about Legacy of Kain and its all of the hella weird design choices it exhibited over the years?

Legacy of Kain: Blood Omen

 It's that sinking feeling of sellers remorse calling after me. It was one of the first - and last- opportunities I'd get to experience the feeling.


If you're a lucky one who's never let go of anything under the pretenses of a fair sale, Sellers Remorse is the strange regret you feel when you think the sale you just made was a bad decision. Maybe the thought crosses your mind that the person you've sold it to isn't going to appreciate it (the person who bought Defiance from me said "So it's like God of War with vampires right?) or even you're simply upset that it no longer belongs to you.

When I was "Building My Collection" (I still kind of am) I ran into this all the time. I would trade one game for another one that I absolutely had to have. I absolutely hate the sellers mindset. I've only ever bought a videogame I wanted so that I could enjoy it, not so it could sit on a shelf. Yes, I own Parasite Eve II because I thoroughly enjoy it. That's just my bad taste overriding rationale.

But I handed almost all of the Legacy of Kain series to a guy who wanted to buy them because he needed to fill a space on his shelf marked with the name of the series. I remember the schlub so well because I tried to hold and interesting conversation with him about where videogames were going as an art form and he was convinced that Infinity Ward was going to be the future and that videogames needed to draw from cinema.

Why did I do that? I'm a terrible judge of character and I hate collectors but not enough to not trade with them, that's why. Yet with every time a game like Suikoden II is re-released on Playstation Network, it drives the cost of the original games  down and people that actually want to play them in their original format can finally enjoy them.

Videogames second hand market is collector driven. As an industry (art form?) videogames have no "criterion collection" unless the original publisher themselves decides to re-release a title. Sometimes this is even impossible because of how content rights in the world of videogames work, as in the case of Mega Man Legends 2. A game which can probably never be re-released unless Capcom is willing to re-record every bit of dialogue.

Legacy of Kain: Defiance

So, in an example I use all the time: If you want to play it be willing to pay hundreds of dollars.
Or emulate it, which is a crime.

Now, with Steam we're seeing a different kind of market play out. I own dozens of games and I know people that sometimes own hundreds. Not only are we purchasing different, but there's really no way for us to "get rid" of games by trading them to someone else.

The market for PC titles now is being consumer driven. We're really driving it with our dollars - through things like Kickstarter and Steam Greenlight. Both of those models do have huge problems with them, but there really needs to be an equivalent for classic games.

Sellers remorse isn't some 'big deal' but it does highlight an outlaying problem with archiving of videogames. At one point it is possible there might not be a way to re-visit older titles. With the way the ESA cracks down on emulation sites and these days, and how few titles are actually being re-released we're facing an absolute loss of history.

So my sellers remorse isn't because the dweeb that I traded games with wont appreciate them. It's because I'm worried that I wont get to experience them again, despite the impact they actually had on the rest of the medium. The videogame industry isn't respecting the medium enough to have people actively engaged in it enough to worry about this kind of stuff, either.

If the most popular videogames are all some God of War / Uncharted level monstrosities, I wouldn't exactly consider them a "serious medium" either and would have no interest in thinking them being cataloged and retained could have any artistic merit.

What kind of future am I looking for? an entirely digital one, or one that still heavily relied on physical media? That's a question that isn't going to be answered if just one person is asking it. Sellers remorse itself isn't a thing I have to deal with very often and is quickly becoming the kind of problem only collectors run into.

I can never get rid of the Magicka franchise, bought on a whim once during a summer sale, and that's almost as bad as giving away something I really enjoyed.

AUTHENTIC console EXPERIENCE

   I don't remember exactly how old I was when my brother was showing off one of the first things he'd ever downloaded on our old dial-up connection. I was about eight, maybe ten - I dunno, but I remember the little severed hand mouse pointer fondly.

  The program was NESticle, and I remember it because it was my first foray into emulation. I had no idea how it worked and my oldest brother was loath to explain it to me. Maybe he considered being able to work out how a computer program functioned to be my rite of passage.

(One of the first NES emulators)

   I grew up with an NES, but videogames hadn't been something that was readily available when I was a kid. Even when my brothers had convinced my parents to buy a Playstation, most of the stuff we afforded was all second hand or purchased when the local video-store stopped renting older games. There was the occasional trip to Software Etc, but by the time that was happening the Playstation was an old fad to my brothers.

   We never had a whole lot of cash when I was a kid, so in many ways being able to trade games and especially being able to trade PC games contributed a lot to me playing videogames as a kid. I grew out of Zelda and into games like Anachronox, which is still one of my favorite games.

   I was absolutely starstruck, sitting there watching my brother play Castlevania on our incredibly old PC. I was enamored with Quake III Arena when he brought it home - but there was just something utterly amazing at finally having acces to all of the games I had only ever gotten to read about.

(Anachronox)

   Sometimes I get asked the question what games I "grew" up with. I mostly tell people Zelda, but what I generally leave out is that I grew up only playing Zelda. It was one of the few games my parents had for the Nintendo they had bought. Sometimes I would even watch my dad - who is a through and through cowboy, sit and navigate the caverns and forests of Hyrule.

   By the time our first computer rolled around, we didn't have a working NES anymore. My brothers had moved onto the Playstation. As far as older consoles go we'd had a Sega Genesis but there wasn't anything about it that interested me. Telling, I also had never owned a single Sonic The Hedgehog game for our Sega.

   When my brother had finally drug me to the computer the day he showed me NESticle I probably sat for a good six or seven hours after he relinquished control of it. I spent time with Zelda and Mario, Megaman and all of the games I'd only ever gotten a chance to read about.

It was a weird validating experience of my childhood, that at that time was starting to give way to being worried about acting old enough. By the time I learned enough about computers to surf on the waves of the net and metaphorically "hang ten" with data, I mostly wasted afternoons trying to download Metal Slug X off of Edge Emulation.


   Yes: emulation was kind of a big deal. I was "that" little kid that was super into videogames. I bought Tips & Tricks monthly, Playstation magazine. It gave me a chance to have a dialogue with my older brothers, and I felt included. One day I went from sitting on the floor watching my oldest brother beat Castlevania to trying to do it myself while he watched. He did quite a lot of laughing, too.

  Eventually I got more interested in emulation than any of my brothers were. If I could experience the NES, what was next? I never had an Super Nintendo as a kid, instead I had to make do with occasionally renting it, or playing Secret of Mana with my cousin. Either way, it mean a whole lot of sitting on the floor in peoples living rooms.

(Secret of Mana)

   It would also be my oldest brother who would help my personal foray into the world of emulation. Help me sign up for my first forum, too - though I doubt he remembers it (The forum was Edge Emulation!). It was weird, thinking about it now, how much my life on the internet as a kid and a younger teenager kind of mirrored his. He'd signed up for internet comedy megastars Something Awful, I settled for Arch-Nacho and Tortilla Godzilla's Quality Roms (second forum, after Edge shut down)

   It was through that website, that I started to see that emulation was more than just a way to play old games. Emulation, the argument became, was a legitimate way to archive and support the proliferation of older titles. It's an easy argument to make, too.

   As an example, Megaman Legends 2 is basically considered one of the mega classic videogames, but if you want to play it now it's going to cost you upward of two-hundred dollars. Closer to a hundred if you're just gonna buy the disc by itself. Videogames are a collector controlled second hand market. What that means is that prices for second hand games aren't controlled by actual demand, but artificially made desirable by collectors offering titles at ridiculous prices.

   Megaman Legends 2 is ascribed that value because it's particularly rare - losing it for cheap would be considered a bad investment. I doubt most of the people that think it's a particularly mega cool game have even ever played it - but it had a limited print run and it wont ever get released. So if you want to play it, you're going to pay for it.

   Unless there were some magical workaround that meant someone could just allegedly acquire it and play it for free. Oh wait that's emulation, no big deal. I played Megaman Legends 2 through an emulator, and countless other games. The ESA - who does very little to archive or allow copies of videogames to proliferate, considers me a criminal.

(Megaman Legends 2)

   If you're not familiar, ESA stands for Entertainment Software Association. They've existed for quite awhile, but it was only during the 2000's that they really started to have an effect on emulation: Telling hazily legal websites which titles they could offer and which they couldn't. This is weird, to me, as a person who doesn't work in the industry, that it would happen.

   Videogames are not "film". For various reasons, videogames in the past were hardly ever re-released. If you wanted to play Super Metroid legally before the Virtual Console existed, you needed to buy an SNES and find someone selling a copy of the game, hopefully for an affordable price.

   Even though we now do have resources that allow players to legally experience some games, and not just experience them but do so in a way that supports the original developer, there are still titles that will never be offered through these avenues.

   Developer incompetence, or licensing issues? (If involving Capcom, the former).
Either way, emulation continues to be a bit of a hot button issue. It's getting harder and harder every day to find roms that are quality like you used to. To say nothing of losing SnesOrama's incredibly valuable trade forum - which had titles that are literally impossible to find physical copies of.

   When was the last time you heard somebody get excited about fuckin' The Granstream Saga?
It doesn't really matter, but there's an argument to be made that just like film, every videogame is important to discussion and understanding of the medium. Less so to groups like the ESA, who consider the very cataloging and archiving of these titles a heinous affront to nature and culture (probably).

(Twinkle Star Sprites)

  I could seriously go to jail for wanting to play the NEO-GEO version of Twinkle Star Sprites. That's a very real thing that could happen. That doesn't seem weird to anyone else? I understand the argument against film piracy, because a lot of the time the original creators are still profiting from re-releases. That's not something that's true about videogames, though. I doubt Takashi Takebe saw a dollar of the Playstation Network re-release of Grandia II.

   Irrespective of it's legality, emulation has affected an entire age group of people who play videogames. Fitted somewhere in the "generation y" aspect of our society are the people like me who might've grown up playing an SNES or Sega CD on their computer, rather than the authentic console experience. Some of these people might even be the age where they could buy a gamepad meant to work with their controller, at least recreating part of that classic experience. Some of them might even have played them sitting on their carpet.

   I doubt I'd have the interest I do in videogames - artistically or even in terms of the enjoyment I get out of them without emulation. It was EPSXE, which I spent days and days trying to get to work, that I was finally able to play Vagrant Story through. This was before it was offered on Playstation Network for 4.99.

(Vagrant Story)

   I could have bought Vagrant Story no doubt! Just who's hands would I have been putting my hard earned dollar in though? In the hands of another player, no doubt, but how much I wanted to experience Vagrant Story far outshined how willing I was to pay some collector more money than I felt comfortable with.

  Today, Vagrant Story is still on my list of favorite videogames. It's a mess of half-imagined game mechanics that don't always work the way they need to. Vagrant Story's real charm is right there in the title: There's not a better example of a well crafted narrative on the original Playstation.
I played it through emulation and it influenced the kind of games I'd like to go on to make, it also influenced the stories I write about and what kind of quality I want to see more games aspire to.

(Vagrant Story)

   My interface with EPSXE was an old digital keyboard on my parents computer that didn't quite work all of the way. Mapping out the original Playstation's controls to it was a nightmare, and finding a way that the game ran comfortably even more so. I was also running a plugin pack that made the game seem a little sharper and eliminated the original Playstation's fuzziness.

   There was no "authentic console experience" with Vagrant Story. I played a game independent of slowdown issues, stuttering sound being played back through crusty hardware or jagged edges from a stressed graphics chip. I played a version independent of the real one, and to be honest, I would take it 100% of the time.

  Now, at 22, I've had plenty of time to go back and play some of these games in their original forms. What I've discovered is that there's really no "more valid" way to experience older videogames. You can tell someone that the best way to experience Casablanca is in an old dusty theatre somewhere, but you can't discount their opinion and relationship to the film because they didn't see it that way.

   Even in spite of events like the shutdown of SnesOrama's popular trade board, people continue to collect, share and archive older videogames. Maybe some of them do it just so they can play them, maybe some of them have a full hard-drive waiting for the day the old discs and cartridges stop working so they can say "Hah! I told you!" either way, I owe a love of videogames as a medium to a lot of those people, and to my brother for helping me take those first steps.

-SKELETONS

Open Worlds, (Pt 1)

   Can you think of the biggest design trend in the last ten years?
If you’re a fan of Assassins Creed, Grand Theft Auto or Saints Row; you probably know already.
Aside from Call Of Duty (so far, anyway) just about every major AAA release has been some kind of open world game, or at the very least, had open world elements.

  As hardware capability increased, players started demanding larger play areas, and more things to do in them. Game developers have continually had to straddle a difficult line, designing a world that’s believably open but has restrictions isn’t an easy thing to do.

   We can look at Dead Island as an example. On top of being pretty shallow,
The game’s open world doesn’t even hardly exist to serve the mechanics that do work.
In Dead Island the player is given a tropical paradise that’s been razed by the existence of the undead,
yet despite having survival mechanics The World was hardly designed around them.

   Zombies, even in large groups, are hardly a threat because the player doesn’t take lasting damage and heals by drinking energy drinks. Eventually, combat far outpaces survival because the player can reach a point where making even some of the most dangerous weapons in the game isn't even difficult because every resource is eternally respawning.

That 'paints the walls' so to speak. The player (you) becomes cognizant of the walls that hold him in place, and suddenly the open world seems limiting.

   As the second example I'll give, Saints Row has always managed to hide the limitations of the world by distracting the player: It gives you enough things to do in a few different categories that by the time you get fatigued of something you can always move to the next mini-game or set of stunts. Each game in the Saints Row series has upped the amount of distractions to new levels. Saints Row IV is practically unprecedented in how little the game takes itself seriously; yet in not in trying to set itself as a believable reality the player never notices how limited the game world is.

   That's not the only way to make an open world game work; but generally the more ridiculous and videogame-y, the better. Even Grand Theft Auto has the elements of each title that exist as satire, either of our culture at large or of other videogames. The saying goes that if you try to make a world too real, players will see the seams easier - so you deliberately involve elements that are fantastical.

  
Out of the gate, I chose Sleeping Dogs because it tries to represent a fictional version of Hong Kong in a cinema-inspired open world, stripping out the usual elements of parody and satire that run through these games and going for a more down-to-earth approach.

We arrive, finally, at Sleeping Dogs, which I've decided as a new series of SATURDAY SKELETONS (we're gonna call it that now) is going to be my focus for the next few weeks.

Legacy + Bloodspell Review Crosspost

   Just a heads up! This post is coming in super late and I know I missed last one, I apologize. I'm debating whether a different day a week would be better for this, maybe Sunday or Monday I'm not entirely sure yet. It's been super busy here, as you all know I now work for DC COMICS NEWS
I also want to leave a brief that I'll try as best as I can to blog through the upcoming PHOENIX COMIC CON in addition to hopefully some interviews for both here and DC COMICS NEWS.

   So any way the most important part of this review is that I kind of neglected that the book is pretty much an even split between younger Zatanna and Black Canary. I overlooked that in my initial readings, so the fact that I state the crux is about the current team is only half true.

   Other stuff that got left on the cutting room floor: A lot more about Zatanna and Black Canary's characterization in The New 52. Ever since the 'new universe' (i'd honestly rather have The New Universe)

   Generally, just like when I write about videogames or even just do straight up blogging, which isn't very often, there's still a lot I have to eventually decide to cut. I know I have a huge tendency to ramble and I sometimes have to reign some of my articles in. I could write entire pages (or more!) on some of the stuff I've cut out of just that review.

  What I had to cut most of is a ton of paragraphs about my first exposures to Zatanna and Black Canary as characters. It wasn't actually until that series Paul Dini did a few years ago that I'd ever picked up a solo Zatanna book.

Zatanna's one of my favorite characters in the DC Universe, because she's so outwardly fun-loving. It's hard to take her serious as a brooder because she so clearly loves what she does as a superhero.
I think in The New 52, Zatanna being disconnected as a 'legacy' character hurts her.

If you're not familiar with her, in the pre New 52 universe, Zatanna's father is a famous magician superhero, and a member of the original Justice Society. That meant she had something to live up to - an important legacy and role to play in the history of the Justice League.

Legacy isn't as important in The New 52, and there's a host of characters that hurts.

Bloodspell Review

Observations

   I haven’t actually been playing a lot of videogames lately, which is a pretty normal thing.
I’m still waiting to get a copy of Dark Souls II, and patiently waiting for next Tuesday’s release of
Drakengard 3 (the latter is a weird title to be anticipating so heavily)
   Recently, I’ve just moved to a new writing position at http://dccomicsnews.com
Where I’ll be (for now!) reviewing a handful of different titles every month.

Like this one! (Worlds Finest #23)

In writing about comics, I try to bring over what little I know about writing about videogames.
   Like anyone else who’s ever wanted to make their mark doing this, I got my start by just
noticing things about videogames. The whole critique of more than just concept like game mechanics
and graphical style hems from seeing that a lot of people consider reviews to be the most boring way to write about videogames.
   In a lot of ways, I agree that the straight up review format is mostly over-
utilized and there’s probably a better example of deciding whether or not a certain game is worth the
hours that you’d have to put into it.
   Nobody needs to be told that Comics, being a different medium, require a different type of criticism. In videogames, your enjoyment comes from the mechanics – the way the player interfaces with the game world, whatever thing you want to call what pushing a button and making someone reload a gun or vault over cover
   Comic Books are largely more cohesive than videogames (at least big budget games) appear as, becauseyour enjoyment is tied to the whole book. Clever dialogue and pacing can be ruined by an artist who can’t keep characters on model – or even worse doesn’t understand how to effectively structure a layout. So in focusing more on comics lately, I’ve been trying to figure out if there’s a line where critique of videogames and comic books can cross over. In a lot of ways, it’s a line I see as kind of needed – comic books are way, way older than videogames.
   Even the most genre based stories have roots in stories that go far deeper than any videogames do. Yet if you were to compare the cultures of criticism about the two – more interesting things have been said by creators and critics in positions where people can hear them in reference to videogames than a
medium that’s existed for over eighty years. Comics and Videogames aren’t really similar in other ways, too.
   Where there’s a burgeoning indie scene– and dozens of very vocal indie developers in the videogame world, it doesn’t seem like many wheelhouses have give independent creators a position to talk about how they feel about the market and be heard.
   Even some of the larger websites like Comic Book Resources are still dominated by a discourse that focuses on Superheroes and “The Big Two” even if they offer a small sliver of their website being dedicated to places like Image and Dynamite.

   This is in a contrast to videogame journalism where even the largest websites started to cover the “indie phenomenon” pretty early, coinciding with the release of games like Cave Story that were initially just free to play curiosities.
   When Koji Igarashi decided to leave Konami just a few months ago, almost every major news outlet covered it or had an interview with him. Likewise, when someone leaves a comic company like DC to launch something creator owned – you don’t often find out until the release of the first issue. Sometimes I wonder if this is because larger comic companies, especially now that Marvel is backed by the media giant Disney, have a lot more image control going on.
   “Image Control” is of course something game companies – luckily for players and consumers, don’t seem to have a lot of. Even when they do attempt to do any kind of image control, using the recent Sim City disaster as an example, it works out poorly in their favor. I say players benefit from that because a lack of image control lets consumers actually know what
they’re dealing with when they make a purchase, and that’s actually a good thing.
   If I was a corporate manager, I probably wouldn’t think so.
There’s also the bit where some of the heaviest hitters in the realm of comics journalism have very close ties to the industry.
   A lot of the contributors are comic writers or artist themselves and many of them work very close with the companies they follow. The criticism seems a lot more lax in that vein, when you look to amateur comics journalists, those traditionally outside of the market, the criticism is a lot more intellectual and more cynical too.
   What I’m kind of stumbling on here is that as much as Videogames can learn from the Comics industry, Comics can learn from Videogame Journalism.
In a perfect world I’d be able to handpick a group of game journalists to write about Comic Books.
Instead, I’ll have to continue to try and write about these things myself, because we don’t live in a
perfect world.

Tonight....someone close to me will die!

[There are spoilers in this article for The Amazing Spider-Man 2 ]

    One of the most well established tropes of comic book writing is to have secondary characters that are women exist for the express purpose of at best being a love interest or at worst to be a tragic fatality. It doesn’t matter if it’s an indie book, a superhero comic, or even a 60’s tale of romance.
    In the most extreme cases, these characters move beyond tragedy and are ‘fridged’
referencing Kyle Rayners one-time love interest who was literally disarmed and stuffed into a refrigerator. That’s a plot point you’d expect in a Frank Miller Batman and Joker comic, not for the story of the pluckiest of Green Lanterns. Beyond brutality against women, what fridging most represents is the idea that women are best put to use to drive male characters to action.

pictured: a good depiction of women in comics

   I’m not the type to say comics have made anything close to great strides since then; what has happened is a series of small steps towards being more inclusive and better depictions of marginalized groups. While it’s likely that Comics are treating women better than they ever have (especially indie comics) there’s still a lot of room to be covered. Even while comics are making great lengths, other representations of the medium still lag far behind.
    In the original issue of The Amazing Spider-Man that the events of the last movie are based on,
Peter Parker is forced to make an impossible choice, between the life of Gwen Stacy and stopping a villain. What should have been a normal rescue doesn't go as planned.
The result creates one of the most famous deaths in comic books: Gwen Stacy falls from the Brooklyn bridge and as Spider-Man rushes to save her, he inadvertently causes her death.
    Outside of clones and ill-advised plotlines, Gwen’s one of the few characters who’s ever stayed dead permanently. Even now, writers lacking a clever device to make Peter Parker’s life miserable can always fall back on the fact that Peter Parker essentially murdered one of his ex girlfriends.
    We can see this in the plot trends of the newest Spider-Man films directed by Marc Webb and starring Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone.  In The Amazing Spider-Man 2, we’re given a Gwen Stacy that’s much more than she ever was in the comics. In the storylines that follow her death in the various Amazing and Spectacular Spider-Man series, Gwen Stacy is almost an object of nostalgia as she was an object of comic readers’ infatuation.
   Gwen Stacy represented the often sought ‘girl next door’ archetype, who was demure without being too aggressive. There’s nothing about her character that was meant to be abrasive at all: Peter Parker’s failings with her were always dictated to be because of his own lack of experience in dealing with partners.
   This is of course a common point of derision for women in comic books, and the traditional comic book love-story. The easiest finger to point is the use of women purely as visual and emotional titillation: Peter Parker is meant to be a hopeless nerd (or that’s what people know about the character) yet he dates Mary Jane Watson, a redheaded model/actress/object of teenage dudes’ fixation.
   In one of her most famous appearances, Mary Jane faces the camera and utters what’s also her most famous line: “You just hit the jackpot, tiger.” She then proceeds to talk in incomprehensible slang for the rest of her early appearances as Mary Jane Watson, model and rebound.

   Throughout her existence as a character, that seems to be what most writers design her character around where the decision to include her in the Spider-Man mythos was purely “Peter Parker needs a new girlfriend!” Instead of the thirty plus years she’s had to grow and develop as a character, becoming much more than she ever was in the comics she was introduced in.
   That’s an easy mark to hit, too – if you don’t read comics and want to cover their depictions of women from a negative standpoint it’s easier to latch onto characters like Mary Jane
that seem shallow at a glance.
   Mary Jane’s been criticized before as a weak entry into the canon of Superhero love interests, especially compared to someone like Lois Lane. Superman’s famous intrepid reporter catch from the city of Metropolis. Lois Lane and Mary Jane aren’t bad comparisons to make, either. Both Superman and Spider-Man are often seen (in and out of universe) as the respective “hearts” of the fictional worlds they inhabit.
   Where we have Lois Lane as the tough reporter who has to constantly be pursued by the shy, small-town Clark Kent, we contrast Mary Jane’s depictions as primarily a pursuer. Her sole “Face it tiger.” Somehow being the apex of her and Peter Parker’s relationship; the mythical “This is it, I have indeed hit the jackpot,” every desperate guy with a crush has ever hoped for from the object of his desire.
   It cemented her most as the ultimate nerd-bate fantasy woman. Peter appears to have a stable relationship despite his reluctance to ever ‘pursue’ her. She falls for his shy personality and chiseled body that he never has to work for.
   Where Lois Lane had eyes for Superman and Clark Kent, Mary Jane had no interest in Spider-Man.
I think the message the comparison sends the most is that for women, being an active pursuer and deciding the value of your own existence isn’t as valid an expression of womanhood as it is to be pursued and defined by the men around you, which is awful any way you look at it.
    Yet what seldom is mentioned about her “Face it tiger.” Is that in one single line of dialogue, Mary Jane managed to cement herself as a woman who’s in touch with her own self-worth. She might depend on Spider-Man to be saved, but she never depend son Peter Parker to support her or validate her existence.

   If it were any other kind of story, Mary Jane would be the example of a stereotypical ‘trouble’ woman who’s too aware of her own purpose and value to be held down by a man, the standard subconscious reinforcement that women should be strong and empowered, but not too strong and empowered if they still want to be desirable.

    In the film, Gwen Stacy exhibits most of these character traits without ever openly stating them, taking advantage of the fact that a movie has more time and ability to impart character details than  the standard 30 pages that a comic book has to do it in.
   Yet even still, there’s deeply rooted sexism (if not outright misogyny) in both of these characterizations. Because of how we function as a society, we’re less inclined to notice it. Where women like Lois Lane are concerned, people have been constantly reinforced by the same tropes used by popular media.

   We see the same examples of the Strong Female Protagonist archetype that there are somehow more valid examples of womanhood than others. A woman who knows and understands her own self worth is still viewed as dangerous. That is, unless that person’s self image can only be validated by someone else, usually a man.
   The reason Lois Lane and Mary Jane make such a good comparison is primarily their relationship with their suitors. Even at her most aggressive, Lois Lane’s existence was still dependent on Superman – whether she was getting saved or sharing a byline with Clark Kent.
   Arguably, Mary Jane’s character started off the exact same way. I mention earlier that she was introduced because the comics needed a stronger relationship dynamic again, and she was created to fill that void after several other love interests came and went.

   Somewhere down the line, even after both characters had married their long-time partners, they diverged significantly. If you examine the character of Mary Jane for the last thirty years, you see that she was given steady ways to grow beyond her initial characterizations.
   She’s been trained in hand-to-hand combat by Captain America. She’s a successful actress and model and she constantly refuses to ever be put down or held back by Peter Parker. Their relationship in the comics has been more or less defined by her insistence that Peter Parker needs to be more than just a smart guy and a superhero to stay together

   Much more than Sam Raimi’s trilogy did, it’s easy to tell that Marc Webb’s definitely drawn off of modern Mary Jane’s characterization much more than he does Gwen Stacy’s.
The way both characters have kind of ‘switched’ who they are at their core isn’t really a problem when it comes to storytelling, for comic book fans though, it’s been a classic point of derision aimed at both sets of films.
   My argument is that it’s not much of a problem: The goal of a storyteller is self explanatory: to tell the best story they can. Compared to Kirsten Dunst’s performance as Mary Jane, Emma Stone managed to turn a pretty flat one note love interest into a fully realized character. Of course it helps that as an actress, she was able to embody a journey of growth that took Mary Jane years in the comics.
   Gwen Stacy in the movies is probably one of the best ‘love interest’ characters ever used in a kind of good vs. evil pulp movie. I can’t name many other characters that establish themselves as so dominant -- The movies kind of build it up to be as much about Gwen’s journey as it was Peter’s. It’s just…unfortunate in the face of the ending they ultimately give her character.
   In The Amazing Spider-Man 2 we see a Gwen Stacy who’s neither relegated to the role of manic pixie dream girl or protagonist stabilizer. Some of the opinions of Comic Book fans I’ve seen so far in light of the movie have been pretty hate-filled. What kind of hero is Peter Parker for deliberately putting Gwen Stacy in danger against her father’s wishes, etc.
   Most of the arguments (if not all of them) I’ve seen tend to favor Peter as a victim of Gwen’s selfishness, when only the opposite is true. At the end of the first movie it’s true that her father makes Peter promise to keep Gwen out of his life, but even as her father that’s not a decision he can make for her.
   If anything, the whole second movie is meant to practically be about that issue. Gwen’s constantly refusing to be answered for by anyone but herself , and it’s ultimately her decision to be involved in Peter’s affairs that he’s even able to defeat one of the villains.
    Yet the reactions by primarily comic book fans to the movie still paint Peter’s insistence on making and trying to control her decisions as heroic or noble. An easy way to sum up the critique is that people are upset Gwen won’t bend to the wills of the males around her.
   Her insistence that yes, Peter’s life as Spider-Man is a dangerous one but that it should be her decision to acknowledge she might be put in danger and is prepared for that eventuality is hers, not Peters forms the driving force behind a lot of the drama in the movie.

   Gwen still has to die though, ultimately because of canon that was determined in the 70’s as somehow essential to the mythos of the character. That’s hella odd too, because most of what Marc Webb draws from for inspiration is the Ultimate Universe in terms of characterizations – one of the established takes on Spider-Man where the way Gwen Stacy dies isn't just wholly different - but she actually comes back (and the story is no worse for it).
   Even then, that can most likely be excused after enough rhetoric in its favor – this isn’t by any mean an attempt to create the ‘definitive’ Spider-Man story, yet its’ most dated by its adherence to things like assuming the only way for a hero to lose the person they love most is by having them die.    
   That it is somehow inexorable for a heroic character to be a victim of romance and not another person’s murder. That somehow, despite making our representations of women better and giving them more opportunities to shine as characters and actresses that their existence is still ultimately defined in pop culture as either objects of love and obsession or to be used as a catalyst to spur a heroic  character back into action – usually through their death.
    Mary Jane Watson was originally going to be in the original version of The Amazing Spider-Man 2, which makes me question how bloated the movie was even before it hit the cutting room floor. Ultimately, Marc Webb decided that it was just too much to add her into a movie where the romance was already so well cemented and focused on two characters, so all of the scenes involving her were cut after almost all of them had been filmed.
    From the way her character seemed to be depicted, her portrayal would have matched Kirsten Dunst’s more down-to-earth portrayal of the character from Sam Raimi’s trilogy.
I don’t think her removal is something that can be seen as detracting from the quality of the movie. If anything, it reinforces the point that Gwen Stacy isn’t just doomed by canon, but that she has to die because she doesn’t need her existence to be validated by the male protagonist:
She’s willing to put herself into danger selflessly, and could be seen as a result as being ‘too dangerous’ compared to a shy and awkward Mary Jane.
   Though her removal doesn’t detract from the quality of the movie, it does detract from the impact of the argument here. Had she been left in the movie – It’d be even easier to argue that Gwen Stacy has to die because she’s too ‘dangerous’ compared to the down-to earth and understanding Mary Jane.
   While comic books are in no means perfect, movies tend to recreate trends cribbed from stories that are now decades old, re-purposing events and creating a kind of faux-nostalgia for a particular zeitgeist that can never be experienced again.
   Marc Webb attempts to translate Spider-Man as an almost pulp romance comic to the big screen, bringing the accompanying baggage that saddles the medium with it.
It's been more than fifty years since Spider-Man was introduced in an issue Amazing Fantasy. Maybe it's time someone realized that next time they bring the character into another medium.

-skeletons

(P.S. Special thanks to Brad and Hayden for the input.)

Cave Story thoughts + Memories.

The piece of fiction I was working on ended up becoming quite long by the end of the week!
I've decided that instead of uploading it all as one piece of content, I'm going to continue to chip away at it and transform it into a short story rather than something simple like five pages of Things Happening.

   Cave Story, or “Doukutsu Monogatari” was released in 2004, and translated some time later into english.
My relationship with Cave Story is a pretty important one – maybe more than Super Metroid and at least as much as a vidoegame can be responsible, it's probably the most influental game that relates to me I can name.
If you aren't familiar with Cave Story (how does the underside of that rock look) it's arguably the game that started the “Colorful 2D platformer” trend when it comes to independent games.
   Cave Story has influenced me as an artist and kind of an aspiring developer. (Keep a look out for that!)
Under the surface of an explorative platformer is a game that's not just a loving homage to retro titles, but also an example of how limitations – self imposed or technological, can strengthen development.
If you want an example of an incredibly famous game doing it, this is Fumito Ueda's entire design philosophy.
   Fumito Ueda was the Director of Shadow of the Colossus, which underwent massive changes during development until it was restrained to its most basic necessary elements.
Cave Story may not appear like this initially, but everything in Cave Story is essential.
   Even if we examine it simply, just looking at one element a time, this observation holds up.

Cave Story looks like a retro game but every pixel that, well, Pixel, the Director uses in the game is entirely essential. Nothing is spared on superfluous animation or characterization. Characters have portraits with few expressions but those expressions are always well used to reinforce simple dialogue.
   In a way, it's the exact opposite of the most recent Metroid game, despite being structured like the best entries in the series. Cave Story imparted a pretty important lesson the first time I played it that has everything to do with games I like and even games I’ve planned or helped design over the years.
Less is more, and even if something seems absolutely wonderful and cool, it's always important to examine your work from a position of imagining it missing what might make it 'whole' Cave Story is an awesome rad game, even if it's been remade several times over the last few years, each remake kind of...distracting from what made the original game so wonderful.
   The Wii release has “SUPER HD GRAPHICS” which still look absolutely wonderful, but jar with the revamped sounds and music. The 3DS release is maybe the most pointless at all. Cave Story is inherently a game that works for any portable system and any length of play, but the game was completely remade to have 3D graphics that look pretty sub-par to the pixel art of the original release.
   Even though Pixel directed this remake – I think it's misguided and sort of misses the point of the original. Maybe we're just, as people who enjoy videogames, infatuated with remakes. I don't think there's a game that's necessarily undeserving of one , but c'mon, Cave Story? The game is meticulously planned out. Every detail is completely necessary and thought for.
   This all might seem kind of glowing and it really is, but Cave Story is still a pretty important game and I don't think developers have learned as much as they can from Pixel.
   That's the problem with it, too. The game isn't labyrinthine by any means yet what I see other developers take away from it can be simplified as “Metroid-style games can be popular.” and “Pixel art can be cute.” My first time playing the game was shortly after the initial translation and I remember it pretty well - at the time I was at a place that was once a stellar community for amateur pixelartists but is now more of a trainwreck and echo chamber for the few talented artists left.
   Cave Story was a lot of things to young developers when it started, I think. Tons of us overestimated the talent required to make it and saw the game as an example of what one person could do.
At the time, 'making a game in five years' probably didn't seem like that much of a chore. A lot of projects that were massive in size started popping up, not a single one of them ever came to fruition. I even worked on a couple of them.
   The majority of the failures were just from overreaching, too. We were all completely amateur with nothing under our belt, and every project that got started had to be the 'next' Cave Story. Some people were so discouraged that after multiple failures they completely abandoned the community. I'm sure some of them don't even do art anymore, let alone pixel-art. Striking out on your own as a developer will do that to you.
   Now it's ten years gone, and few of my friends have made their own titles - almost none of them are people that I knew back then. Cave Story imparted maybe it's most important lesson: No matter how simple the graphics or game seems, developing something 'good' is a challenge. Cave Story's true labriynth isn't the island, it's development itself.