| deadline monkey in a cowboy hat |
[Jul. 2nd, 2009|03:21 pm] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| | heh | ] |
| [ | Current Music |
| | Zebrahead, "His World" | ] |
Damnation is presently getting worked like a speed bag by gaming reviewers, and for the most part, it's justified. It's not the product of talented people; it's incoherent, glitchy, and utterly without challenge. There are a couple of ideas in it that are worth exploring, or so I thought until I realized that everything I liked is more or less taken straight from Uncharted, then dropped into Gears of War. Sort of.
(I fucking hate reviewers or writers who describe a game or movie in terms of what other products it most closely resembles; it does a disservice to the original work by portraying it as shamelessly derivative. That said, when something clearly is shamelessly derivative, like Dante's Inferno, there's no reason not to call it on that.)
Plus, this shit is officially ridiculous. I mean, look at this character design.
( boobs )
I'm a man who enjoys breasts, even fictional ones, but this is supposed to be a hard-bitten guerilla fighter, trapped behind enemy lines in a nation gripped by steampunk civil war. Even better, if you see her in-game, they took the time to adjust her model so it looks like she's realistically sweating, which is about twice the effort they put into the gameplay.
Enemies in Damnation behave sort of like mobs in WoW, where they don't realize you're there unless you get close or you shoot one of them. Their "patrol pattern" is about five feet wide.
Why am I bringing this up?
Because Damnation is the comedy hit of the year.
I don't know who wrote this game, but they're going for inadvertent comic genius with every line, aided by some really wooden voice acting and a completely batshit plot. I'm only on the first level and I've already heard lines like:
"Make his death painful. I want him to remember it."
I'm going to update this post as I go, but seriously: this is just getting funnier. At this point, I'm in this for the chuckles.
( quote dump ) |
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| the contents of my brain |
[Jul. 1st, 2009|10:35 pm] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| | deadline monkey rides again | ] |
| [ | Current Music |
| | Atmosphere, "Shrapnel" | ] |
Last week, I was in Seattle proper for a job interview. It was over by 2:30 and I didn't want to go back to my apartment just yet, where soul-crushing deadlines awaited me, so I explored for a while.
It turned out that unless I wanted to go clothes-shopping there wasn't a goddamned thing to do in that part of Seattle, but I did see something I wish I'd had a camera for. (A real camera, not the pretense thereof mounted on my 'phone.)
This might've been on Pike Street. On a bank of newspaper machines, most of them empty, someone had posted a long letter, handwritten on typewriter paper, in block capitals. It wasn't very well-written, the editor in me noticed; it might've been the work of someone not quite fluent, or someone with an incomplete education.
It appeared to be a diatribe by a young woman (presumably, from the handwriting; it could've been a man, discussing a man; the twenty-first century is hell on gender assumption) to her parents, concerning her black significant other. He wasn't a bad man, she wrote, just beaten down by the world. He'd had more than his share of bad luck, and there was no reason for them to hate him.
If it was some kind of viral ad, then it failed for that purpose; it didn't even hint at what it might've been advertising, and it was handwritten; had it been mass-produced, I might've figured it for some kind of theatrical ad.
I'm not sure what made her post the letter on a random street corner in Seattle, but I've been thinking about it ever since. |
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| it didn't fit anywhere else |
[Jun. 13th, 2009|12:55 am] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| |  sleepy | ] |
| [ | Current Music |
| | Juno Reactor, "Navras" | ] |
One of the reasons I read the Something Awful forums is that it's one of the linchpins of the Internet. Sooner or later, everyone seems to show up there somehow.
On their thread about Silent Hill: Shattered Memories, a poster purporting to be a former employee of Climax talks about making Silent Hill: Origins.
It was a fun development though, we were all big Silent Hill fans and very keen to work on the game (especially after Ghost Rider). We had great tools and a fantastic engine coder who did the full shadowing torch and other SFX. It was rushed towards the end however, and there was literally no time for balance, which is why you end up with 50 portable TVs by the end of the game. Oh yeah and the game timer code is bust, so it stops updating when you are looking at your map, the inventory or any game objects. This means most people's playthrough times displayed on the end screen were as little as half the actual time spent playing, giving rise to a lot of reviews saying 'This is only a 3 hour game', when it's more like 5-6 hours. That hurt us I think. Also that awful sound bug where all music and sound stops playing sometimes... doh.
Of course, it could be somebody lying to feel important, but it's not ridiculous enough to immediately disbelieve. It does make sense, though; Origins very much felt like a rushed fan production, and in the end, what do you know; it was. |
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| overspecialization |
[Jun. 10th, 2009|03:37 pm] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| | hurrr | ] |
| [ | Current Music |
| | Jimmy Eat World, "The Middle" | ] |
In what may wind up being a slightly overconfident move, I have joined the staff at the Seattle Examiner. I am writing about MMORPGs, a genre that I am by no means expert in.
I guess we'll see how this goes, huh? |
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| tag team, back again |
[Jun. 6th, 2009|04:37 pm] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| | ow ow ow ow | ] |
| [ | Current Music |
| | Kings of Leon, "Sex on Fire" | ] |
I wasn't initially planning to go to E3 this year. It was a month earlier than it was last year, for one thing, and for another, I'm hip-deep in deadlines for two separate strategy guides, particularly Phantom Brave: We Meet Again.
Then Rainier called me up and told me he needed another person on the ground at E3 this year. I told him I'd do my best to be free if I could, but didn't know if it'd be an option. I immediately threw myself into PB for about five days, burning through the new scenario. Fortunately, it's not that long and doesn't have its own unique postgame.
On the Friday before E3, NIS America sent out a press release - at eight-thirty on Friday night - saying they'd pushed Phantom Brave back two months so they could add a Japanese voiceover. That rather authoritatively cleared me for takeoff, so I spent the week in Los Angeles.
E3 2009 wasn't quite the madhouse of the 2006 show, but the same feel was there. I came back from 2006 feeling like I'd been mugged, as every Gamestop clerk in the country descended upon the Staples Center like a locust swarm, prying up anything they could to auction it off on eBay. There were less people at E3 2009, but there was almost as much activity on the show floor; there were plenty of booth babes, giveaways, contests, guest appearances (want to meet Eliza Dushku? Great. Don't fuckin' blink), and playable demos, complete with EA's twelve-foot Doom Speakers.
We're now comfortably in the middle of three major consoles' life cycles, so there wasn't anything that set the world on fire; of course, Team Ninja's Metroid, the new Castlevania, Bethesda picking up Wet, and Brutal Legend all look pretty phenomenal, and I enjoy being an utter cock to the other players in New Super Mario Bros. Wii. I also wound up keeping most of ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) lynxara's appointments for her, and because she's weird, I got to talk to quite a few people about their free-to-play Korean/Chinese-style MMOs.
I also got seriously creeped out by David Cage as he discussed Heavy Rain (the first game I've seen where you get to fool a guard into going away by opting to loudly fake an orgasm), and managed to get in to see Star Wars: The Old Republic. |
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| the sun also sets on deadline monkey |
[Mar. 17th, 2009|06:13 pm] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| | sleepless | ] |
| [ | Current Music |
| | Modest Mouse, "Dashboard" | ] |
I've been busting my balls for two weeks on a guide for Rune Factory Frontier, which should go live at some point in the very near future. This is sort of an experiment; instead of taking a flat fee for a printed book, I'm taking a chunk of the gross for an e-book. Feel free to buy it if you've ever wanted to indirectly throw money at me.
The weekend was otherwise full of hilarity, as embodied by the discussion of Resident Evil 5. I've tried to summarize my feelings on it as best I can. |
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| the waking nightmare of deadline monkey |
[Mar. 10th, 2009|08:41 am] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| | deeply annoyed | ] |
| [ | Current Music |
| | Supernova Syndicate, "Dope" | ] |
A few days before the final deadline on a strategy guide project, I sometimes have a slight nightmare. I find myself with eight hours or so to go before the text deadline, and suddenly, I stumble upon a vast portion of gameplay, hours and hours worth, that I didn't know existed before. Pretending it isn't there is not an option, but I have so little time left that covering it won't work.
The first time I remember this happening was when I wrote up Kingdom Hearts for a British tips magazine. The night before deadline, I dreamed I'd found some kind of incredibly deep minigame that had something to do with the gummi ships, and woke up frantic.
On sufficiently important projects, I sometimes have a variant on that dream. Now that I'm closing in on the finish line on Rune Factory Frontier, I had a couple of minor takes on the same concept. I want to say it involved feeding items to monsters.
This morning, finishing up the main scenario, I had some time to kill and decided to go back to an earlier point in the game. There's a dungeon you only have to enter to further the main scenario, and don't actually have to finish, so I headed back that way to find out what was on the other end. Given its utter lack of importance, I assumed it'd be a few treasure chests or a rare monster or something.
It turned out to be five more maps full of endgame enemies.
I am going to shoot somebody. |
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| i am apparently a monster |
[Mar. 7th, 2009|08:22 pm] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| |  hungry | ] |
| [ | Current Music |
| | Lyrics Born, "I Changed My Mind" | ] |
Sometimes, the best horror is the completely inadvertent kind.
I'm working on a review of Resident Evil 5 at the moment as a break from another project (yes, I've gotten to the point where I'm using work as a break from work), and something that's grown to fascinate me about the game is that it is, sort of, accidentally, horror.
In RE5, you're a white guy murdering Africans en masse, although a couple of them are white. Nobody in the game ever claims that the Africans are anything other than victims of a new plague; somebody else killed them before you ever got there and you're just knocking the body down.
In practice, RE5 is horror only in that it uses horrific themes. It isn't meant to scare you in anything other than the most abstract sense, where yes, being trapped in a village with three hundred people who all want to gut you like a trout is generally somewhat frightening, but they all have machetes and you have a shotgun. It doesn't even try for terror, really.
The horror comes into play, really, when every so often you realize what just happened onscreen. I don't for a moment believe this is the actual intention of the design team, but I found myself able to relax into shooter mode with RE5 with remarkable ease, not seeing people but hostile targets.
Every so often, though, my sense of detachment would break when I did something truly vicious to a guy. In my case, it was one of the context-sensitive moves, where you run up to a prone enemy and hit X to stomp on his chest. This does a fair bit of damage, but more importantly, I just ran up to a guy and stomped him to death. Every time I did it, my detachment broke and I found myself realizing again what the hell I was looking at, and that I'd managed to detach myself from it. In turn, I found myself wondering just what the fuck was wrong with me as a person.
So yeah. Neat narrative trick on that one, Capcom. I'd be more appreciative if I thought for one second that was what you were going for. |
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| on a completely different subject altogether |
[Mar. 2nd, 2009|06:26 pm] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| | caffeinated | ] |
| [ | Current Music |
| | Asian Dub Foundation, "Fortress Europe" | ] |
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif) scans_daily died over the weekend, abruptly.
In some ways, it was a mercy killing. More than one friend of mine has asked me why I bothered to follow and post in the community, and mostly, I didn't have an answer beyond my own trainwreck syndrome.
The s_d audience was oddly shrill and frequently ridiculous, capable of embodying most of the most negative stereotypes of comics readers ("This new comic sucks because this character wasn't like that in 1973!") when they weren't being strange in other ways ("These two male characters are occupying the same panel! I am receiving brain transmissions from Martian love gods through the plate in my head that inform me the writer intended to indicate these two characters are in true homosexual self-lubricating man love!").
(Slash fiction and those who are fanatical about it used to be among my bigger Internet pet peeves, with s_d as one of the major contributing factors; it used to really bug the shit out of me that a comments thread there would often detail into the insane brainleakings of this one chick from Poland, who could turn fucking anything into an eighteen-hundred-page thesis on how Spider-Man and Venom bang.)
That said, the regulars were a different group of people from those you find on most comic boards, what with being predominantly female and all, so their perspective was often interesting in one way or another. It was a good community to throw the occasional pages into just to see what would happen.
They were going to get taken down sooner or later, though. On Wednesday evenings, you could almost rely on being able to see up to half of a new comic posted on s_d, with annotations filling in the gaps and the ending on prominent display. The mods would crack down pretty hard on one person posting more than half of a given comic, but that was enough to host entire stories, spoil endings, and generally render it unnecessary to actually buy the book. About the only surprising thing about s_d being suspended is how sudden it was. |
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| geek war II |
[Mar. 2nd, 2009|06:09 pm] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| | truthy | ] |
| [ | Current Music |
| | U2, "Until the End of the World" | ] |
First things first: I'm slowly getting back into the groove on writing things after taking a big chunk of last year off. I've done previews on the Halo 3 Mythic Map Pack and perhaps more relevantly, Resident Evil 5, and I reviewed Street Fighter IV.
Honestly, I don't have it in me to give SFIV any kind of flak. When the worst thing you can say about a game is that it's trying really hard to deliberately evoke the same feel as one of the greatest games of all time, that's not really a point-dockin' offense. I'm slightly annoyed about the complete lack of forward momentum, but then, I'm one of those people who cares about the plot of a fighting game. I actually want to see a Street Fighter game with Sakura and Karin as adults in the Ryu and Ken roles.
A lot of people on the Internet are tying themselves into rhetorical knots, because they're finally playing SFIV and it didn't immediately launch them dick first into Orgasm Land, and because notorious one-button tournament champion and HD Remix guru Dave Sirlin has a list of complaints.
Read that. It's interesting. One of the remarkable things about HD Remix is that Sirlin put a lot of work into making it the perfect tournament game, which is why you have blind character select in online matches, among other things. He took an old game that he'd played to death and fixed everything he could about it, and in the end, was largely successful.
Sirlin's issues SFIV, conversely, are all the kinds of things that a motherfucker doesn't even notice until he's occupying a bracket at Evo; you need some serious SF chops before you even know what the fuck he's talking about, let alone agree with it.
A lot of forum-dwelling backlash trolls are fastening onto his list to retroactively justify their own vague dissatisfaction. Ninety percent of the people on the planet who will ever play SFIV will never notice this crap, or will hear half of it, understand half of that, and get flamed to hell for trying to explain that Vega is broken because somebody on Live served them a piping-hot dish of claw murder.
I had a discussion with lynxara a while ago about games criticism where she made an interesting point; in order for games criticism to emerge from its current embryonic state, the games audience needs to expand to a point where it's willing to accept a higher level of discussion. Right now, the biggest problem with games writing is that the better you are at it, the less accessible you are to your target audience, and the fan reaction to SFIV is exhibit A. |
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| important life lessons from deadline monkey |
[Feb. 14th, 2009|04:59 am] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| | insomniac | ] |
| [ | Current Music |
| | Massive Attack, "Angel" | ] |
- If you are going to a game company's offices to play their new game, or the expansion for their old game, it is a good idea to reacquaint yourself with the series first.
- If you are going to a game company's offices to play their new game, you should assume you will be playing with or against a number of people who happen to be very good at their new game.
- If you do not do the first and fail to realize the second, you should not be surprised when your ass gets kicked clear off your body.
I'm working on a guide again but I'm not sure I can tell you about it. Further bulletins as events warrant. |
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| boo |
[Feb. 11th, 2009|03:10 pm] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| | sleepy | ] |
| [ | Current Music |
| | the Rolling Stones, "Heartbreaker" | ] |
I've reviewed Lit for the Wii over at OMG Nintendo.
Tomorrow I get to go to Bungie's studios for some reason or another. It promises to thrill. |
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| world stillbirth |
[Feb. 2nd, 2009|06:41 am] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| | why am I awake | ] |
| [ | Current Music |
| | the Stone Roses, "Breaking into Heaven" | ] |
I've been thinking about MMOs a bit this weekend.
This, of course, is hardly news. I'm the GM of a World of Warcraft guild, an experience roughly comparable to juggling angry cats, so a little bit of MMO thought goes into a lot of my days. What's different here is largely down to Tom Chick, who wrote an article about five ways in which MMOs are broken.
The article's pretty lame, all told, which wouldn't be a big deal except that it's Tom Chick, who I've disagreed with before, but who generally has his head on pretty straight. If you head by Quarter to Three, there's a long thread about the article's major flaw: Chick's writing like all MMOs are WoW, and there are a good half-dozen games including WoW itself that have addressed one or more of his flaws. Granted, some of these people are EVE Online players, who I've noticed tend to act like Jesus lives in their game, but some of them have good points: WoW's phasing and refer-a-friend, City of Heroes's sidekicking, Age of Conan having a combo-based combat system, and yes, EVE.
My mind wandered away from the discussion pretty early on, though, mostly because of Chick's mention of aggro.
The concept of the meatshield/tank is pretty old at this point. It's in the original Dungeons & Dragons, which means it snuck into Wizardry, which means it's informed just about every computer RPG there is. Some players are wearing heavy armor and have more hit points than God, some players have healing spells (although a lot of games downplay the old plate-armored cleric of D&D infamy), and some players are remarkably squishy but hit like trucks. In D&D-style combat, the meatshield's job is generally to stand between the monster and the rest of the party.
In an MMO, where there's almost never any kind of collision detection, so anyone can walk through anyone, the meatshield is allowed to do his job via a mechanic called "threat." The tank has a bunch of moves that generate lots of threat, keeping a monster good and pissed off at him specifically, which forces the monster to ignore the threat being generated by the cloth-wearing guy behind the tank who's throwing fire at his ass. The same general strengths and weaknesses tend to apply: fighters have tons of armor and hit points, whereas mages are made of paper and dreams but can blast an entire room of monsters to fuckery. Without the tank, an average enemy in an appropriate-level dungeon would destroy the mage.
What interests me about this is that it's so omnipresent at this point. There are almost no class-based systems at this point, in any kind of role-playing game, that don't rely heavily on this old D&D mechanic: armor up front, spellcasters behind. It's a pretty sensible way to balance multiple classes with differing specializations against one another, where you trade raw survivability for firepower, and for the life of me, I can't come up with a way to break out of that mold that doesn't involve either scrapping a class system altogether or homogenizing the characters.
Chick's article has a good point sort of buried in the margins: an MMO takes an enormous amount of time and money to develop, and every new MMO that's come out in recent memory gets kicked to death by WoW's market dominance. Anyone who genuinely wants to try something new when they make an MMORPG is doomed to failure. It's the bizarre catch-22 of WoW's success: it may wind up making its own genre into a creative dead end. |
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| too long; didn't read |
[Jan. 20th, 2009|03:01 pm] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| |  thoughtful | ] |
| [ | Current Music |
| | Jurassic 5, "Future Sound" | ] |
One of the things that makes me a unique snowflake is that, for some reason, I read very fast. It's probably because I learned to read at an extraordinarily early age. (In turn, it's why I often have a hard time with pronunciation.)
As such, I tend to burn through reading material at a fast pace, which is probably part of the reason why I read Warren Ellis's stuff. He churns out fiction at a pretty epic rate--he's a pretty reliable supplier for a word junkie like me--and there's generally something he's doing that interests me.
Like Harlan Ellison, though, Ellis is almost a more interesting essayist than a writer of fiction at the moment. (He and Garth Ennis are both in a period of their career right now where their most compulsively readable work is that which they don't have full creative control over; when they're given somebody else's characters or somebody else's mission statement, they seem to get more flexible.) One of the best parts of Ellis's Doktor Sleepless--which is sort of the dark flip side of Global Frequency, flash mobs as the social engineering tool of a mad scientist rather than the method by which the world gets saved--is the back matter, the essay in the final pages of the book where Ellis just goes off on whatever.
Of course, Ellis just going off on whatever is not hard to come by. He's probably the single most accessible writer of his generation, with a bizarre Internet omnipresence that borders on frightening, and for all I know, this was all over every part of the web that he has his nicotine-stained fingers in three weeks ago. That said, with current developments in my current vocation, he says something very valid in Doktor Sleepless #11 that I'd as yet failed to consciously articulate:
The five rules of journalism--who, what, where, when and why--aren't there because people like pissing you off with rules. They're there because that's how you learn things and that's how you explain things and that, eventually, is how you see that events and people are connected... and that's how we build up a picture of the world and begin to understand where we are today and what it really looks like.
The bit I keep coming back to is "...because people like pissing you off with rules." I see a lot of that about right now; the up-and-coming writers are all bloggers, with no more formal training than time spent on Usenet or Livejournal or somebody's phpBB or whatever. I've edited a lot of people who came up in that environment, where the only barometer of progress was that somebody was reading your shit. It might've been a vicious linguistic abortion that makes English teachers spontaneously combust, but fuck you, I've got twenty thousand unique hits.
Ellis is useful like this, probably because he isn't actually a journalist. Most journalists who are paying attention to this are either half-assed "citizen journalists" who have a vested interest in this being the future, or old media journalists who're following this to either point out its many and varied flaws or give themselves a reason to drink in the morning. Ellis is coming into this new media cold with no real agenda, besides the stories it makes possible, and so he can make trenchant observations with no element of despair of self-righteousness.
The moral of the story, moving forward: print may be dead, but the rules it was supposed to abide by still matter. The five rules still matter. You have to stay curious. |
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| day one |
[Jan. 20th, 2009|12:17 pm] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| | tentatively hopeful | ] |
| [ | Current Music |
| | Modest Mouse, "Dashboard" | ] |
Well.
Here goes nothing. |
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| sometimes i still write |
[Jan. 6th, 2009|07:58 pm] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| | vaguely melancholic | ] |
| [ | Current Music |
| | Unkle, "Eye for an Eye" | ] |
I haven't made a big deal out of it, but I've been doing Virtual Console reviews at omgnintendo.com. Most recently, I went off on a long tangent about Kirby's Dream Land 3.
Man, what a depressing day to write about video games. |
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| i'm going to scrub this virus from the face of the earth |
[Dec. 15th, 2008|02:00 pm] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| | disappointed | ] |
| [ | Current Music |
| | the Black-Eyed Peas, "Bebot" | ] |
I think my affection for the Resident Evil series has officially hit the point where I look at it like a really slow child. I'm a fan of potential rather than actuality; I'm so used to it doing things ass-backwards that I'm pleased and surprised when it does something right.
Resident Evil 4 played phenomenally well, naturally, and I haven't a doubt in my mind that I'm going to lose two weeks to RE5. What endlessly surprises me, though, is the quality of the writing, or the lack thereof.
(The series's plotting's occasionally tighter than you'd expect in a roundabout way; one of the things I noticed over the course of working on the old plot analysis was that the overall plot makes sense as long as you lay out all the data on the table in front of you. The finer details are immensely questionable, but many of the answers are actually there.)
Resident Evil: Degeneration came out this week, and I just finished watching it. I'd watched the first eight minutes or so on IGN, and I was interested in seeing how it'd basically set up the game world's new status quo: the Raccoon City incident, the setting of RE2, RE3, and Outbreak has become the opening shot in a series of viral incidents worldwide, and weaponized viruses are now the terrorist weapon of choice. The T-virus is available on the black market, and world authorities scramble to mass-produce a vaccine.
This is cool. This is a weird blend of horror and espionage that is actually a fairly smart setting; you can blow up just about anywhere and clean it up afterwards. There's a lot you can do with this, beyond "oops, dropped a vial" ten thousand times in rapid succession; it explodes the setting and makes it immensely useful.
I'm actually impressed with this; it's a very quiet, imminent apocalypse that's constantly and barely being held back. I could run a tabletop game in this setting. I could see using it for an RTS. They've managed to neatly sidestep the series's main problem, which is that you can only use the same plot so many times before it gets utterly ridiculous, and set the stage for a lot of stories to come.
Degeneration itself, unfortunately, is pretty terrible. There are a few ways you could go with a movie like this one; it could be a fanservice production with lots of cameos, a balls-out action movie, a balls-out horror movie, or it could be Advent Children, where it's completely goddamn incoherent but at least it's shiny. Degeneration tries to split the difference between the first three and just winds up being ass at all of them, with the added bonus of a completely useless quasi-romantic subplot. There's even "Evangelion" lingering and lots of long looks filled with meaning.
As a fan of the series, I'm equally annoyed at how the characters are treated. Leon goes through the entire movie with one facial expression and spends entire scenes at a time standing stock-still with his arms held straight down; he looks like he's got that stiff neutral position from RE2 going on. His dialogue sucks, too, but not in the endearing RE4 way where he sounded like he was trying way too hard to sound badass. Claire has all the good dialogue, what there is of it, but might as well not be in the movie.
This could have been good, but Capcom's production team really needs to start hiring people to write scripts for them. They keep brushing up against really cool things, then completely blowing the opportunity. |
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| a public service announcement |
[Nov. 14th, 2008|01:58 am] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| | serious | ] |
| [ | Current Music |
| | Atmosphere, "You" | ] |
An Open Letter to Anyone Who Does Now or Will Someday Write Mainstream Superhero Books for DC Comics
Recently, Dan Didio announced the cancellation of the most recent Blue Beetle comic book, starring Jaime Reyes.
It may occur to you, cherished writer, that one way of adding pathos or consequence to a future story would be to take Jaime, or one or more members of his supporting cast, and kill them.
Perhaps it would be at the hands of a new villain that you truly wish to put over as a real threat, or to underscore the very real danger being posed by a universe-wide event. Maybe you will do this because you are a Ted Kord fan, and signing Jaime off in a heroic way clears the deck for Ted's resurrection. Either way, you may be thinking of killing Jaime off.
Do not do this.
Seriously. Don't.
If you disregard this warning, then I will find you.
Run. I will find you faster.
And I will nail your head to a coffee table.
Perhaps this is an inappropriate use of violence, but frankly, if this idea has occurred to you, you are probably one to stomp butterflies, kick puppies, and steal things from children. You will need to be stopped. |
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| as above, so below |
[Nov. 4th, 2008|01:34 pm] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| | apprehensive | ] |
| [ | Current Music |
| | Atmosphere, "Saves the Day" | ] |
It was raining pretty hard last night. This is, of course, no great shocker.
When I walked out of my apartment this morning, the storm was finally pulling back and the sun, inexplicably, was coming out.
I'm hoping that's a sign of things to come. |
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