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.

Superheroes After All

   Comic Books continue to develop and mature as a medium each year.
If not for the talents of an incredibly skilled and diverse group of creators, we could never have reached where we're at right now. Even so, it's kind of been the giant elephant with a spitcurl in the room that for better or worse, Superheroes are here to stay.

   To avoid namedropping stuff this early into a Saturday Article, let me just state:
Even today, over 75 years after the dawn of the first Superman comic, there is still a fascination with Superheroes in every part of the world. Japan has its super-popular Henshin heroes, America has the classic icons still present today and everywhere else in the world lends its take on the concept.

   Yeah, there are people ardently opposed to the idea of Superhero comics, too. Oddly enough, those sorts of people (especially creators) also help the fascination with Superheroes continue, because they're usually the ones willing to think critically about them first.

   What is it, specifically, about the idea of costumed heroes that has then lasted for generations?
When that question was asked in the infancy of Comic Books as a medium, I think the answer might have been a desire to see heroes who were heroic and villains that were evil.

   Yet today that answer wouldn't hold up; that kind of black-and-white worldview died around the same time Jason Todd did, end of an age so to speak. We’re in a time now when most Superhero comics – especially creator owned books have started going through some great lengths to make their heroes more fallible and some of their villains more pious and noble.

   Batman is the good guy and The Joker is the badguy. We know that by way of how both characters operate in relation to each other. In earlier comics, that relationship had commonly been enough.
The question that writers are willing to pose now are things like whether or not a hero creates his own circumstances, his own villains. Could the continued existence of one or the other even be considered a good thing for Gotham City?

   More common, creators are starting to examine what the effect of people with superpowers existing in the ‘real world’ actually might be. Works like this can be placed all over the scale of cynicism versus optimism. That concept is also fairly new - outside of outright parody or pastiche, it wasn't something that commonly came up in Silver and Golden Age comics.

    As we've allowed our heroes to age, we're more willing to question them and question what they represent. Just as some characters hold up poorly to scrutiny, some are just as strong as others; a testament to the strength of the Superhero in the minds of pop culture aficionados.

   While they've in turn aged and yet stayed eternally young (besides some Elseworlds stories!)
The concept has changed as the same happened to the world and our culture.
At this point, it doesn't really matter what kind of perosn you are, there’s probably a story about folks in tights punching each other that suits your personality and worldview.

   Some people take to The Boys as if it were the only valid critique of Superheroes, depicting them all as deranged and sex crazed psychopaths above the law. Other people might see The Watchmen as the sort of ur-example of a Superhero deconstruction, so powerful that it's tone affected comics for almost twenty years after its release.

   On the opposite end towards the optimistic side, you have people willing to accept that
a story like Kurt Busiek's Astro City or All-Star Superman can not only exist in the same market that spawned The Boys but that all of those takes on the concept might be just as valid as the others.

   Superheroes have now been around almost as long as the, if nothing else, admirable works of J.R.R. Tolkien and have decidedly the same cultural impact. People are as used to the concept
of Superheroes as they are the kind of journey and mythology that Tolkien created in The Hobbit.

   Perhaps our costumed crimefighters are even stronger still than the works of Western Epic Fantasy.
See - might main problem with J.R.R. Tolkien is that every work that followed was beholden to the 'rules' he laid out. Sure, some stories have gone in different directions but the most popular examples and what most people tout as inspiration always follow that groundwork he laid out.
 
   Superhero stories aren't set to anything resembling that, people are as used to the concept now as any of the worlds in Tolkiens writings. When a creator wants to do something new with that, they don't have to waste time introducing or explaining things that people already understand.

   The reason for that strength - and another reason for our fascination might be the absense of any particular Superhero 'canon'. It's not just understood - it's accepted that not all Superhero stories are going to follow a mythos similar to Superman or any other existing characters.
When your cultural icon is as easy to identify and understand as Superman is, anyone is free to put their own spin on things.

  I'd never discount the his contributions to the medium, but even Alan Moore is a quite famous detractor of the Superhero. Very recently he was quoted as essentially saying the genre is for emotionally stunted adults, but he's also not reading any of the genre-comics that have been released in the last decade.

   So even when old-wizard-grandpa Alan Moore says it, I can't agree with it. Dozens of other writers have sense weighed in on his quote, some of them even agreed. My take away from it isn't so much about the statement, but more of what it implies. Even negatively, Alan Moore is still fascinated with Superheroes as a concept. I don't doubt for a minute he wants to know how they continue to persist even though by all rights pop-culture should have outgrown them decades ago.

Kamala Khan

   Maybe it's because a Superhero can be anyone - no one is told they can't be a Superhero based on the color of their skin, their religion, their gender identity or anything else. Comics now are becoming more diverse every year and it's a very welcome change. Just like anyone can be a Superhero, so can any story be written as a Superhero story.

   This is a bit of a double edged sword. Even as strong as the concept is, it's led to a lot of alternate stories getting pushed out of the comic market before they could really make their mark.
Writers like Alan Moore are disgruntled and continue to stew about it not because the medium itself, but how the industry has affected that medium. Fortunately, alternate publishing companies are starting to spring up almost every week, offering a wider variety of titles than there ever has been.

  In other words, there’s starting to be competition. Writers, artists, readers have finally discovered that while Superheroes aren’t going anywhere anytime soon, other types of stories can be supported strongly by the medium.

  Some of the most popular comics in recent years have had nothing to do with bastions of truth, justice and the American way and that’s an absolutely fantastic thing.
When the medium is allowed to grow more, like fiction and film before it, the stories people create with Comic Books can only in turn become more complex.

   Recently, there’s even been a trend of ‘the big two’ (Marvel/DC) to branch out their types of stories more. I’ve been on a bit of a Matt Fraction kick lately so I’ll go ahead and mention that he’s one of the most notable creators for doing publisher-owned books as well as independent comics.
While he wrote Hawkeye, which itself is incredibly notable for having a massive effect on comics lately, he's also a bit of an independent comic giant.

   His comic Casanova is a good example of comics being able to tell spectacular adventure stories that aren’t about Superheroes. If you haven’t read it, Casanova plays out like some sort of intergalactic James Bond story only if the author was inspired by psychedelics.

   Matt Fraction had tied the book closer to spy fiction stories like The Man From U.N.C.L.E. and sci-fi from the 60’s and 70’s than he did Superheroes, while still managing to fill the book with larger than life characters and events.

  Yet those very same tropes and elements Matt Fraction uses in Casanova have also been sort of co-opted by Superhero comics as well. Marvel has their ubiquitous super-spy organization S.H.I.E.L.D. which has itself recently become the subject of a TV series. DC has Cadmus and Checkmate and dozens of these, all borrowing elements from popular spy fiction and espionage tales that were written in the last several decades.

  DC has even been willing to take it further lately with the announcement that one of their most popular characters, Dick Grayson (Nightwing/The original Robin) is going to be going all shaken-not-stirred on readers when he goes from Superhero to Super-Spy in his new series.

  Superheroes have maintained for the last seventy-five years in part to their ability to permeate almost all avenues of not only genre fiction, but the entirety of fiction itself.
Different authors have been giving us new takes on the same established concepts for years, each other twisting it or looking at it from a wholly separate angle than the ones before.
Just like a comic fan might prefer one book over the other, so too is each creators take on the concept just as valid as any other.

 There’s no established Superhero ‘canon’ between companies on what makes an acceptable story like with what people expect from something like Epic Fantasy.
As an example, J.R.R. Tolkien wrote The Hobbit in the thirties, in a way it’s a contemporary work of the Siegel and Shusters earliest Superman comics.

   Yet despite the time frame they’ve both been allowed with, The Hobbit almost codified the entire genre of Western Fantasy. When someone picks up a book with the most lointclothed and armored motherfucker on the cover with a sword above his head and maybe the grimmest title they’ve ever heard of plastered across it, they still expect a formula similar to The Hobbit just from the title alone.

   Being able to defy the readers expectations; that right there is what I think the fascination with Superheroes is really all about. That the next time I pick up a new series, it could be absolutely perfect and tailored specifically to me; or that it could use devices I am familiar with to set up something new or deconstruct what already exists.

  This isn’t about individual characters or adventures, but how Superhero comics – and if you were to look at it, the medium entirely, is participated  At some point writers start thinking they know and understand what the genre can offer, once things start becoming stale and old someone who’s unafraid of deconstructing things comes along.

   Sure, Superhero comics could be juvenile; in some cases they are. That doesn’t mean that there’s not a better future for the genre waiting for the day it can break out of juvenile fascination and the tired boys club mentality that’s seemingly grasped hold of the entire industry.
We’re fascinated by Superheroes, because as our society changes, so do they.