dorchadas: (Death Goth)
Definitely Appearance 0. 🎲

Yesterday, I went to go see Nosferatu with [twitter.com profile] liszante at the Davis Theatre with live organ accompaniment by Jay Warren. The theater even had remnant organ pipes still up on the walls from when there was an organ installed in it, though the actual performance was done using samples.

It's been a very long time since I'd seen a silent movie--not since Metropolis back when I was a university student--and I had forgotten how exaggerated the style of acting was. I couldn't help but think of miming, especially with Hutter and Knock's performances. The film is much less horror for modern audiences than it would have been a century ago due to that. Often, when Count Orlok was looming and Hutter would reel back with an expression of horror, frantically looking around the room, the audience laughed. Admittedly, I did too. To modern sensibilities it was ridiculous, but it certainly did an effective job of conveying their emotions, especially accompanied with Warren's music.

People also laughed at the scene of Count Orlok just...casually strolling through the streets with a coffin full of grave earth under one arm. I really want to know how that played to 1920s audiences.

The movie was pretty effective at selling the mood of creeping doom, especially later, with the scenes of the town officials marking the doors of the "plague"-stricken houses and the procession of coffins being carried through the streets. [twitter.com profile] liszante also told me there was a long scene of the ship sailing into Wisborg cut with scenes of Hutter riding back to town but, uh, I was asleep for that. Emoji embarrassed rub head Live music, no matter the context, no matter the genre, makes me sleepy. Even when I went to a Within Temptation concert back in March, I ended up getting sleepy by the end. But I rallied for the final act.

I hadn't realized that Nosferatu was literally Dracula with the serial numbers filed off either. But once Knock the property agent showed up, I figured it out.

And...antisemitism. I don't think it's Nazi propaganda or anything, but I couldn't help but notice that it's the property agent specifically who falls under Count Orlok's sway and, indeed, the way that an Eastern European man who looks ugly and distinctive is literally sucking the blood of good German women. That rendered some of the scenes later on the movie more uncomfortable for me than they might have been for most of the audience, because regardless of Murnau's intentions, the imagery was definitely there.

He was a brilliant director, though. I've seen plenty of stills of Count Orlok's shadow climbing the staircase and the count vanishing when hit by the rays of the sun, but in the theater, accompanied by the organ, they were still effective.

In summary, I'm saddened that Der Totenvogel isn't the name of a metal band. And I can see why Nosferatu survived down through the ages and is regarded as a cinematic classic.
dorchadas: (Kirby Walk)
This isn't the first Kirby game I ever played--that honor goes to Kirby's Dream Land, which I played for a few minutes on a friend's GameBoy--but it is the first Kirby game I ever beat! I played it as a university student, when unlimited high-speed internet opened up the world of games that I had totally missed out due to not paying attention to console gaming past the 16-bit era. I don't even remember why I wanted to play Kirby's Adventure, honestly, nor why I found Kirby Super Star and played that. My days as a Kirby super-fan only came very recently, so it's not like I was seeking out every piece of Kirby-related media before then.

Nonetheless it stuck with me because Kirby's Adventure is a fun game in its own right. Kirby games have a reputation of being easy, and mostly it's deserved, with the difficulty found in the alternate objectives and extra modes. Still, I found Kirby's Adventure pretty tricky at points, especially a couple of the boss battles, and I was glad that the game threw lives at me like crazy. There were times when I needed them.

Kirby's Adventure Whispy Woods boss fight
The ancient enemy returns.

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dorchadas: (Legend of Zelda Arrows of Light)
I have almost no experience with musou (無双, "peerless, unrivaled," referring to the skill of the warriors) games, other than playing Dynasty Warriors 3 with my high school friends. I had a soft spot for Pang Tong and played him in multiplayer a couple times, and the phrase "Humble the rebels!" is a meme among us to this day. But that's about as far as it went. Some of them continued further in the Warriors series, but I never did.

That means that I came into Hyrule Warriors without any preconceptions. I knew that I would be fighting enemy lieutenants and generals, that I'd be running around accomplishing objectives, and that I'd be killing thousands of enemies. And all of that definitely happened! I saw a stream of the game before I bought it and the streamer was complaining that it didn't feel like a Legend of Zelda game, and I can see that. There's no puzzles to solve. There's no dungeons to delve into. But Hyrule Warriors is a Koei game, and thus a musou game first, and it actually had more Zelda in it than I was lead to expect.

I mean, I was constantly throwing bombs at everything. That's quintessential Legend of Zelda. Emoji Link sweating

I had originally planned to play this game in Japanese, but after I bought it on the eShop, I learned that, bizarrely, Koei games often have Western and Eastern versions and I had bought the Western version with only European language support. It's not a mainline Zelda game, so it doesn't really bother me, but it was a bit surprising. Had I played it in Japanese, the title would have been ゼルダ無双 ハイラルオールスターズ DX, "Zelda Unrivaled Hyrule All Stars DX."

Hyrule Warriors - Attack Keep
It's okay. I can take them.

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dorchadas: (Death Goth)
Thank you Rock Paper Shotgun for so frequently informing me of the existence of games like this.

It's inarguable that Doom is one of the most important games ever made, up there with Pong or Minecraft. The mark of a device's technical sophistication--or perhaps the technical expertise of their users--is whether Doom will run on it. And I could probably spend the rest of my life playing Doom mods and never have to play the same thing twice. The sheer variety of maps out there is dizzying, and once I make playing Doom my job and somehow finished all the maps, there's plenty of full conversions out there like Chex QuestSimon's Destiny. I could turn these reviews I write into nothing but reviews of Doom mods and maps and still have plenty of material.

Well, and Zelda games. Don't want to completely give everything else up.

I'm mostly kidding. The Doom engine has a lot of limitations like not being able to handle true 3D spaces--areas can have different Z-levels, but it's not really possible for two things to be on top of each other--and clearly being designed for a game where a space marine runs around confronting the forces of Hell with a shotgun. So how well would a game that's based on slow, deliberate movement mixed with melee combat work as source material?

Better than I expected. Emoji Hell Yeah Shock Cannon

Doom: Castlevania - Simon's Destiny Skybox screenshot
What a horrible night to have a curse.

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dorchadas: (Warcraft Algalon)
My achievements tell me I've beaten this game before, when it was the SD version, but I didn't have any memory of it so I decided to play it again.

Eufloria was the first Art Game I ever bought, back when I lived in Japan, Wrath of the Lich King was getting long in the tooth, and I was looking for something else to occupy my time other than playing World of Warcraft exclusively as my computer entertainment. Eufloria was calm, and relaxing, with a space ambient soundtrack, gameplay that gave you plenty of time to react to what was going on, simple principles, and plenty to do. My achievements tell me that I started playing some time in 2010 but I didn't beat it until 2013, which isn't the longest I've ever gone between starting and finishing a game, but it's in the top 10, I think. Not too long after I finished it, they released an HD version and I always thought that I'd get around to play it.

Well...six years later, I have.

Eufloria Seeds on Asteroids
Look at my garden grow.

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dorchadas: (Azumanga Daioh Chiyo-chan bus gas)
I went to another Anime Chicago Sampler on Saturday and watched more stuff. As is my tradition, here's what I though about the shows, in the order in which I'm likely to watch more of them.

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dorchadas: (Death Goth)
Back in 2015, I learned about the Kickstarter for Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night from people who had watched it and noticed its similarities to my favorite platformer of all time, Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. In the video, Igarashi Kōji promises to make a game in the style of the old Castlevania games now that Konami isn't interested in doing anything with the IP other than making uncomfortably sexual pachinko games, and basically that's it. There's almost nothing about the actual game in there other than that it would be in the style of Castlevania, but that video! Igarashi walks around an old castle lit by torchlight, he sits at the head of a table and takes a swig from a wineglass before hurling it to shatter on the ground, and he walks outside and transforms into a cloud of bats. I fully admit that I was sold entirely on the game based on the pitch video without even really knowing what the game would be like.

Maybe it's a good thing that I didn't follow the development very closely, then. Through reading USGamer I heard about bringing in Inti Creates, who made the excellent Blaster Master Zero, to help work on the game. I saw the video of all the complaints about the art style where Igarashi once again threw down a wine glass and shouted "I will prove them wrong!" This had all the ingredients of a disaster in the making.

Then Curse of the Moon came out and it was great. And now Ritual of the Night came out and it's fantastic. We wanted Symphony of the Night reborn, and by G-d, that's what we got.

Bloodstained Ritual of the Night Zangetsuto Slash
And then the screen split in half and started spraying blood everywhere.

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dorchadas: (Princess Peach Smash Wielding Toad)
Hey, did you know that Super Mario Bros 2 was based on a game called Yume Kōjō: Doki Doki Pan- Emoji stabbing

Super Mario Brothers 2 is another one of the NES games where the sequel was extremely different from the game it followed after, like Castlevania and Simon's Quest, The Legend of Zelda and Zelda II, or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Arcade Game. That meant that when I first played it, on a rental from whatever video store my parents went to, I didn't think it was anything out of place. Sure, none of the enemies or the music was the same, and the most basic gameplay element of the original Super Mario Bros--jump on enemies to kill them--didn't work anymore, but it had Mario in it. That was enough.

Also, I was able to beat it, so that made me very well-disposed toward it.

Super Mario Bros 2 All Stars Luigi Jumping
Luigi finally gets his due.

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Detective Pikachu

2019-Jun-11, Tuesday 11:24
dorchadas: (Not he who tells it)
名探偵ピカチュウ? More like 迷探偵ピカチュウ! Emoji running pikachu

I saw it yesterday with [twitter.com profile] lisekatevans and I thought it was just okay.

ExpandMore within, also spoilers )

The Sonic trailer played before the movie, which caught me by surprise. It's delayed and it was widely panned, so I'm surprised they haven't pulled it. There was no overt mockery in the theatre, because [twitter.com profile] lisekatevans and I were two of five people there, but she was taken aback by how awful it looked. She commented on the usage of "Gangster's Paradise" as the trailer song and I said it was the most Sonic-esque thing about it. I feel like at this point, that trailer is only further hurting marketing.

I was neutral on Detective Pikachu, but it's much better than...that
dorchadas: (JCDenton)
The Eternal Castle first came to my attention at the end of last year when the developers posted a trailer. I watched and thought it was rad as hell with a bitchin' synthwave soundtrack, so I immediately put it up on Facebook with a comment about how excited I was for it. [facebook.com profile] shane.suydam watched it and had a similar opinion, and he immediately bought it. And then he bought a copy for me as well, so full disclosure, I received a copy of this game for free from a friend for the purpose of bathing in the cyan and magenta glow.

The game claims to be a remastered version of an old 1987 game the devs played and half-remember from their childhoods, but that's all marketing copy. The game is supposedly from 1987, but that's the year that VGA was introduced and CGA was long out of fashion by then. I mean, the EGA version of Quest for Glory I is from 1989. So is Prince of Persia, which is clearly one of the major inspirations for The Eternal Castle's gameplay. The opening faked-up "boot screen" is stylized as a DOS sequence but occasionally uses a Linux command. None of that backstory matters to the gameplay, but some people got lost chasing down a bit of cheeky humor from the devs, so I thought I should bring it up.

The Eternal Castle Castle view
So close and yet so far.

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dorchadas: (Legend of Zelda Zelda's Awakening)
This is it. The end of the road. The final step on the journey.

I replayed the original Legend of Zelda on a whim after beating Dracula's Curse, to see if it was a fluke or not and whether I really could play games in Japanese. Once Breath of the Wild was announced at E3 2016, that was when I came up with the plan to play as many Legend of Zelda games as I could on the way up to its release. Originally, I thought I would just play up to Ocarina of Time. Then, I thought I would play up to Twilight Princess. And once I got that far, I figured, why not see it all the way through?

Of course, it meant that it took me until almost a year and a half after the game came out before I got to it, and then seven months playing on and off to beat it, while I beat seven other games in the same time (including Darkest Dungeon, which itself took me 70 hours). All told, one third of the total time I spent playing Legend of Zelda to this point was spent playing Breath of the Wild, which took me 180 hours, compared to 365 for all other Zelda games combined.

But the thing is, I was having fun the whole time. That's a miracle for any game, and especially for a Zelda game after the series had gone in the direction of Skyward Sword and Tri Force Heroes. The games had taken the Ocarina of Time formula about as far as it could be taken and were getting increasingly ossified, and required something drastic to shake them up and provide something new and exciting. And, well. They delivered.

The Japanese is just a transliteration of the English "Breath of the Wild."

Breath of the Wild Opening Screen
It even looks like a Ghibli title piece.

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dorchadas: (Enter the Samurai)
I spent much of this weekend talking about anime. I went to the Yorimoi discussion yesterday and on Saturday I went to the Anime Chicago spring Anime Sampler and saw a nice selection of upcoming shows. As has become my tradition, here's a brief blurb about each of them, ordered by how likely I am to watch them.

ExpandPoetry and Music and Fruits Baskets )
dorchadas: (Thranduil autumn)
I first started playing Dragon Age: Origins a decade ago, shortly after it first came out. Though I was living in Japan at the time and Steam wouldn't let me buy anything due to the conflict between my billing address and my IP, I asked a friend to gift me a copy because I was so excited about the game. Another CRPG by Bioware, which had made Baldur's Gate II and Neverwinter Nights? The promise that your choices, especially your origin story, would deeply affect how the game played out for you? I had been following news of the game for months and I was so excited to play it that I mostly abandoned playing World of Warcraft and dove into Dragon Age, playing twenty hours in a couple weeks even though I was working fifty hour weeks with a two hour commute at the time.

Then, my hard drive crashed and Steam didn't back up my save.

The famed Japanese customer service returned my laptop good as new, including sending a courier to my house to pack it up in a box to my satisfaction and deliver it back to me when it was fixed, and I had fortunately backed up all my music and documents on [personal profile] schoolpsychnerd's new laptop a month or so before the crash, but twenty hours of Dragon Age: Origins was gone. I was discouraged enough that I just went back to World of Warcraft, where my character was preserved on external servers, and didn't touch Dragon Age for a decade. It took the recent Square Roots Podcast series on Dragon Age: Origins to convince me to take a break from Breath of the Wild and pull me back into the game.

It was fun, but I feel like I would have liked it a lot more if I had played it back when it came out.

Dragon Age Origins Map with blood and darkspawn
The map is literally both grim and dark.

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dorchadas: (Sawa-chan headbanging)
It's been eight years since the 東日本大震災 (Higashi Nihon Daishinsai, "The Tōhoku Earthquake"), and Asahi TV released a webpage with cameras showing current and 2011 footage from the same locations. The website is in English, if you want to see the progress they've made.

I wrote about the daishinsai in 2017, specifically about an ad that appeared in Ginza, and today I went back and cleaned up the translation.

The time change hit me pretty hard. I suffered on both ends--I went to bed an hour late and woke up an hour early. I'm okay right now, but if it happens again I'll be a mess tomorrow. At least I got some good coding practice done last night, and more translation on Wild Man Blues done on Saturday.

ExpandWithin Temptation, Curry, Betrayal at House on the Hill, and Oscar Wilde )

My iPad started acting up this morning. I'm really hoping it's a temporary fluke caused by an app update, since I keep all my apps up to date, but the analytics section suggests it's kernel panic, which could be a sign of hardware failure. It's been fine since this morning, and if it acts up again I'll try restoring from backup, and if that fails...well, there's plenty of Apple stores in Chicago.

Hope everyone had a good weekend and isn't wiped out by the time change!
dorchadas: (FFIV Edge vs. Rubicante)
Ereyesterday [twitter.com profile] meowtima invited me to go see Alita: Battle Angel with him and someone else he knows with the same name as me. I went after work, I established dominance over the other me by being one month older than him and unseating his usual place as the oldest in any group, and then we went in to the movie. These are my thoughts.

ExpandThe face of an angel and a body built for battle )
dorchadas: (Green Sky)
I first learned about Azure Striker Gunvolt not from any of his games, but rather from playing Blaster Master Zero. After the game came out, Inti Creates put out a bunch of DLC characters from other franchises they were connected to, and since all of them had a two-week period where they were available for free, I downloaded them all. Shantae, from the Metroidvania games that bear her name; Shovel Knight, from his own eponymous game; Ekoro, from some eroge rail shooter series called Gal*Gun; and Gunvolt. He's actually pretty well-realized for being in a complete different game. I beat the first level with him, back when I thought about playing through BMZ with the DLC characters (it's on the list... Emoji embarrassed rub head), and I was intrigued by the way his weaponry worked. Tagging people with some kind of dart gun and then blasting them with lightning? Slowfalling when the lightning field is on? Who was this "Gunvolt"?

Not too much longer after Gunvolt came out as DLC, a game called Mighty Gunvolt Burst came out and I bought it immediately. And then I read that it was a sequel to Mighty Gunvolt, which was spun off from the original Azure Striker Gunvolt series. I tend to be pretty systematic about this sort of thing, so I waited until Azure Striker Gunvolt was on sale on Steam and now I've finally gotten around to playing it.

It's a good game, but it's not for me.

Azure Striker Gunvolt fighting robot
His real superpower is using lightning in the rain.

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dorchadas: (Great Old Ones)
You would think that Darkest Dungeon would be the perfect game for me. And it is--this isn't a bad review, so don't think I'm tipping my hand early--but while I leaped on the kickstarter the instant I learned about it, I withdrew my pledge when they added in a backer-exclusive class. I'm fine with kickstarter-exclusive cosmetics or silly, non-gameplay-affecting content, but the idea of a mechanical benefit to kickstarter supports sat badly enough with me that I was willing to forgo playing the game entirely. Then I played other games, and it faded from my consciousness.

Until 2016, when [livejournal.com profile] ping816 suddenly bought it as a present for me. And then I learned that the kickstarter had suffered from unclear communication and the backer class was the Musketeer, a cosmetic skin over the top of the Arbalest with all the same mechanics, so I needn't have been so suspicious in the first place. Well, live and learn.

And then I was playing Baldur's Gate II and the Legend of Zelda games, but last November, now that I was finally all the way up to Breath of the Wild, I loaded it up. The screen went black, and then I was greeted with the opening cinematic:
Ruin has come to our family.

You remember our venerable house, opulent and imperial, gazing proudly from its stoic perch above the moor. I lived all my years in that ancient rumor shadowed manor, fattened by decadence and luxury, and yet I began to tire of... conventional extravagance...
Hell. Yes.


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Also, if you want to hear what I sound like / a bit of RP, I did a Facebook thread where I chronicled my progress through this game, and I recorded the last update from the Heir after I beat the game. I'm pretty proud of how it turned out.
dorchadas: (Crystalis Tower Fall)
Crystalis was one of my favorite NES game as a child. I played it through probably a dozen times, searching through every nook and cranny, to the point where I knew all the maps and the story, confusing as it was, by heart. It's the only game I ever wrote a letter to Nintendo Power over, asking the counselors where I could find the Sword of Fire, though as far as I know it was never published and I found the Sword of Fire a few days after I sent the letter anyway. It's the only piece of media I've ever written fanfiction of, when I was nine, for a school assignment to write an original story. It's probably the game I've most wanted a remake or remaster of, and while there's the SNK 40th Anniversary Collection for Switch that has Crystalis as one of the games on it, it's an emulated version of the original, not a real new version. There was a remake for the GBA, but the cramped screen size, inferior music, and massive changes to the story gives it such a bad reputation that I've never tried it.

But I thought...why not play the Japanese version? If I'm confused about the story, and if I think that localization limitations are what made it so confusing, why not go back to the original? I know enough Japanese to understand it now. I can beat the game in a few hours. I'll get even more Japanese practice, and it'll be useful because the whole game is in hiragana and so I'll need to derive meaning from context, exactly as though I were listening to conversational Japanese. So over the long weekend, that's what I did.

The Japanese title means "God Slayer: Sonata of the Far Away Sky," which is an amazing name for a game.

God Slayer Leaf the Village of Wind
A peaceful village, for now.

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dorchadas: (Kirby Spaceship Happy)
I spent a big chunk of yesterday at the Anime Chicago Winter Sampler where we watched the first episode of a few anime coming out this season, so I'm going to write about them again!

Expandアニメ )

2018 in Gaming

2019-Jan-02, Wednesday 09:05
dorchadas: (FFX Tidus and Yuna)
Continuing my tradition from last year, here's a list of all the games I played and beat in 2018, in chronological order.

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dorchadas: (Quest for Glory I Fairy Dance)
Continuing my annual playthrough of a Quest for Glory game, now with the worst one in the series.

Like I wrote in my review of Quest for Glory II: Trial by Fire, most of my playthroughs of the series jumped straight from Quest for Glory I: So You Want to Be a Hero to III. I didn't have all the other games to compare it to, and since a Quest for Glory game is still head and shoulders above most other adventure games, I loved it and played it through multiple times as every class, the same way that I did with every Quest for Glory game. But coming back to it as an adult, with a better understanding of game design and a lot more experience playing video games under my belt, I can see all the shortcomings. Quest for Glory III was never supposed to be part of the original timeline, and it was rushed, and both of these are obvious. It's still a good game, but it suffers greatly from its constraints.

Quest for Glory III Simbani Village
You're not in Spielburg anymore.

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Game Review: Triforce

2018-Dec-19, Wednesday 16:55
dorchadas: (Legend of Zelda Toon Link)
Newbies can't Triforce.

Someone linked to an article on Kotaku about this game, saying that it was a take on the original Hyrule Fantasy, but with puzzles involving warping of space and perspective. I loved Antichamber when I played it, the way that the puzzles all involved changing how you thought and trying actions that would be nonsensical in a normal game. Walking backward through a door led to a different room than walking forwards through it did, A window might look on two separate rooms, neither of which is the one on the other side of it. I grew disenchanted with Antichamber when it turned into more colored goop puzzles than unorthodox thinking, and I was hoping that Triforce would recapture the feeling of the first half-hour of Antichamber.

It was fun, but being another Antichamber isn't what it was trying to do.

Triforce Donut
I don't...I...what? Emoji Link swirly eyes

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dorchadas: (Death Goth)
Capitalization in original.

On Monday I went to my first Deathscribe performance! I've been to two other Wildclaw Theatre productions, their adaptation of The Shadow over Innsmouth five years ago--also, apparently they quoted my post on their website--and one called Future Echoes. I liked Shadow over Innsmouth a lot and was neutral on Future Echoes, but Deathscribe is kind of their headline event. I mean, they've been doing it for eleven years, and it still sells out. I only got tickets because [twitter.com profile] worldbshiny (one of the Foley artists) posted secret tickets for friends of the staff and I snagged one that meant I got a seat. And the only open seat left upstairs when I arrived was right next to where [livejournal.com profile] stephen_poon and [instagram.com profile] abby_the_hairapist were standing, so. Emoji La

After an opening performance entitled "Please Stand By," involving a disaster where unknown radiation spreads around the world and causes psychotic behavior as expressed through someone flipping through radio stations, the actual Deathscribe got underway. There were five short plays and they were as follows:
  1. The Forbidden Room: This was probably my least favorite of the five. Two girls live with their father, who has forbidden them from entering a certain room, after their mother "went away." One day, while playing hide and seek, the younger sister hides in the room and hears a voice speaking to her. Thinking it's her mother, she leads her elder sister into the room, and her elder sister reveals that it's actually their grandmother. The grandmother wants a more suitable host body, as the saying goes, but the sisters fight her off by stealing her necklace and escape. Or do they

    (they don't)

    It wasn't bad, it was just kind of by-the-numbers. The sound design was good, especially the echoing effects and volume, which did a good job of conveying being in a room crowded with dusty relics and also a murderghost. And I liked the performance of the grandmother a lot, but the story wasn't interesting to me and the "twist" was obvious from a mile away. Oh well.

  2. Migraine: A woman suffers from severe migraines and also suffers from having an inconsiderate asshole boyfriend, a condescending asshole boss, and a dismissive asshole doctor. One day, she hears her migraine talking to her, and the migraine urges her to take control of her life. Stand up for herself. Stop being such a doormat. Tell off her boyfriend. Demand her doctor listen to her. Brutally murder her boss. Emoji Axe Rage

    This was [livejournal.com profile] stephen_poon and [instagram.com profile] abby_the_hairapist's favorite of the five, and I liked it too, but I didn't think it was particularly horrific. The tone was more comedic, especially whenever the migraine was talking. It's fridge horror, I guess, since the migraine's characterization was a thrill-seeker who just wants someone to live to their fullest potential with no thought whatsoever to the consequences of anyone else around them. That's fine with the boyfriend, who was an asshole and breaking up with him was great, but cutting the doctor's cheek with a scalpel and murdering the boss with a blunt force trauma after projectile vomiting all over him is perhaps going too far. Very well acted, though, and I really liked the vomit sound effects (done by pouring canned beans into a bucket).

  3. Whisper Trigger: This was my favorite of the selections because it involves ASMR, and I'm actually listening to an ASMR-inducing podcast right now, so.

    One of two roommates has a terrible time sleeping, so his roommate sends him a couple ASMR links to help. Neither of them help, but the third link, of a woman in a mermaid costume talking in low tones about slipping beneath the waves and letting the water take him, helps a lot. His roommate denies sending the third link and when he tries to show it to her there's nothing there, but the other links do nothing for him, so the next night he listens to part two and is told to give in to the water, let the water fill his lungs, and succumb. In the morning he talks about how well he slept and his roommate says she had to yell at him to shut up multiple times because he was coughing and sputtering all night. That night, he listens to part three, and does not wake up again.

    The mermaid's actress and sound effects triggered my ASMR, so obviously I was going to be partial to this one. But I also liked the sound effects of the waves, and the way that the roommate's pounding on the door and pleading for him to wake up got fainter and fainter as the mermaid and the water grew louder and louder. It's the way I'd want to die, slipping slowly into darkness. I mean, minus the water in my lungs and the drowning. But you can't always get what you want.

  4. Floris: This was the most overly horrific selection. It's set as a debriefing of three nurses in an elderly care facility after a fire consumes part of it. They got a transfer from another facility that also suffered a fire, named Floris, who sits in her wheelchair and talks about her son outside and how he's burning. The nurses manage to put her to bed, after which she escapes, terrifies her roommate, and chases the nurses back to the nursing station while bounding down the corridor on her hands and demanding to know where her son is. One of the nurses distracts her and leads her to back to the cafeteria, claiming that her son is outside the heavy iron doors out to the courtyard, and then runs as the heat and light grows behind her.

    My favorite part here was the framing, with cuts between the three nurses giving statements to an investigator and the three of them in the thick of the incident. This is the one I think would most have benefited from being a short film. A lot of the horror was in Floris's movements and behavior, and they did a good job of conveying it through sound effects (hands slapping on tile floor and so on), but seeing it on the screen would be great.

    ...for someone else. I don't do well with visual horror.

  5. Subject #9: This was the most overtly comedic, though only once the twist is revealed. Two scientists are working on an animal experiment, saying that they have a little over three weeks to succeed or the master will kill them for incompetence. They successfully implant a power source without killing the animal, and when they turn it on, the radiance blinds the poor beast. One day they find it hovering in its cell, staring at nothing. But eventually they report their success and show the master the results, and on the final day they turn on the power and the master laughs maniacally at their success: "hahahah...mwahahahahhaha...HO HO HO!"

    And then he rides off into the sky with the jingling of sleigh bells.

    I mean, this involves severe animal cruelty and the actress portraying Rudolph's whimpering was really pitiable, so this would definitely win in the horror category for a lot of people, and it was well-told. [instagram.com profile] abby_the_hairapist figured it out when the scientists talked about the hovering, whereas I figured out when the master appeared but before any of his lines. And then it was pretty obvious at the end.

    It was a great adaptation of an old story about how deviation from the norm will be ruthlessly ground down unless it can be exploited by the rich. Emoji Scrooge Capitalism
I was surprised that it wasn't as horror-inducing (almost said "horrible" but that's not what that means) as I was expecting. I guess it's down to what selections get picked, since there were two hundred submissions and they whittled it down to five. There were also horror-themed sponsor advertisements and some songs, though the only one I remember at all was a parody of "Santa Baby" involving asking Santa to come kill everyone on the singer's hit list. The MC also told perhaps the most horrible tale of the whole night during the moments when he needed to stall for time--the tale of the bedbugs he's dealing with in his apartment. Emoji Face gonk

[twitter.com profile] meowtima was also there, but he had a seat on the main floor, in the lettuce spray zone, so I only got to talk with him at intermission.

It was great! If I'm around I'll go again next year and see what the new offerings are, and this time I'll buy tickets earlier so I don't get the leavings or need to rely on [twitter.com profile] worldbshiny.
dorchadas: (Kirby Spaceship Happy)
I know that November is supposed to be the spooky month, but after Stasis, I wanted something a bit different.

We had a Wii back in 2007, and then when we moved to Japan, we left it behind under the mistaken impression that it wouldn't work with Japanese televisions. That meant that I lost track of basically anything to do with console games, and even series that I liked a lot, like Legend of Zelda or the Kirby games, fell off my radar. Kirby's Return to Dream Land came out at the end of the Wii's lifespan, around the time that Skyward Sword did, but I didn't hear of it until a couple years ago. I heard that it was pretty good, a return to platforming form after Kirby's Epic Yarn had changed up the formula. Sure, it was easy and fluffy, like most Kirby games, but it looked good and was fun to play. And both of those things are true, and those are really exactly what I was looking for.

Or, so I thought.

Kirby's Return to Dream Land Flying Kirby
He's so round and cute.

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Game Review: Stasis

2018-Oct-18, Thursday 21:27
dorchadas: (Grue)
Stasis came onto my radar thanks to this Rock Paper Shotgun review that praised the game in glowing terms. A kickstarted adventure game from a tiny South African studio that nevertheless managed to create a masterpiece of horror that spun its own unique feel out of its component parts. A game that was extremely effective at creating a mood, with a storyline that descends into "stomach-churning darkness." Sure, there were some annoying puzzles that had to be solved, and the characters were a bit one-note villain, but the rest of the game more than made up for those minor flaws through its baroque vistas and its visceral body horror.
The quality of its first three-quarters, from its sumptuously repulsive creature art to its gigantic-yet-claustrophobic industrial environments, and the way its survival-focused puzzles fly you forwards on dark wings of logic, would be impressive if they came from a Double Fine-sized studio, let alone a game whose credits take less time to read than a bus ticket.
That kind of thing.

Well, I disagree.

Stasis Is Anyone There?
The space horror battle cry.

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