Some of you will be happy to note that if you have no interest in the world of the WWE then you can skip this article. But if that sounds like the kind of thing that might tickle your fancy, I encourage you to read on. WWE’s No Mercy event will be airing live this Sunday on the WWE Network and through various pay-per-view means. More importantly though, as of this Tuesday, October 4th, we’ve officially hit twelve weeks, three months, since the WWE’s brand extension draft which gave us separate rosters for each of the company’s weekly shows. Given that we’ve reached arguably the first major time milestone following the brand extension draft I thought it might be nice to take stock of where we were, where we are, and where it appears we might be going in regards to each title. With that said, let’s get started. Also! Since the WWE’s various shows are technically fictional network television, here is your spoiler warning. Okay.
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Hey everyone. Due to some shenanigans there won’t be a Broken Wing update this week. Instead, as a compromise, I’ve included the first part of a short story I’ve been working on that’s set in the Broken Wing universe, except instead of in Western Europe and North Africa, it’s set in what’s left of the southern United States. I hope you don’t mind, and I promise that this story will kick off a little more in the next part. — S
Alright, here we go. It’s topical reference time:
Earlier this year television watchers reacted to the season finale of AMC’s The Walking Dead with, and I’m putting this lightly, scorn. (Nailed it.) Without steering this car deep into spoiler country, the negative press stemmed largely from the fact that season 6 ended on a blatant and rather poorly executed cliffhanger. It got me thinking about the cliffhanger as a narrative device and whether or not it still holds a place in storytelling in 2016. Alright guys, this doesn’t happen very often, so strap yourselves in and grab some popcorn. Mark your calendars. I was wrong about a thing.There, I said it. I was wrong about a thing, and even when you’re me sometimes that happens. Greg has been pestering me for like two years to watch Log Horizon and I never bothered. You know how when someone tells you about something enough times sometimes there’s like this buildup of inertia that makes it even harder to consume the thing? That happened. And then I forgot. So some of you might have noticed that there’s been no Broken Wing updates lately, and there’s a really good reason for that: Our boy James Pantuso has been trying to balance between going to school and finishing up a handful of other artist gigs that can go into his portfolio without making him seem like a crazy person. (“Why do you have so many pictures of robots punching each other in the face?!”)
But recently James received an assignment in class to produce a stand-alone eight page graphic novel, and he asked me if we could do it Broken Wing-related, and further asked me to write it. Given that it’s a short subject, I figured I’d write down my process in case anybody else happened to find that sort of thing interesting. So because this is a school project, I told James that I wanted to take a relative backseat in terms of the general story arc and whatnot. My plan was that James could plot the whole thing out and I would just throw the dialogue and composition in to make it look a little more interesting on paper. James, on the other hand, gave me the go ahead to do whatever I felt was best, however not before adding this suggestion: “we could do like.. a prototype frame, blasting a bunch of shit and it could be the pilot describing and relishing in the power of it”
A number of you may have noticed that I haven’t been posting for the last couple weeks. An astute few of you might also notice that my absence coincides with the release of Fire Emblem: Fates. I don’t know why you would jump immediately to that connection but in this particular instance you’re correct. My free time has been basically dominated by the new installment(s) of one of my favorite video game series.
I’m currently working my way through Conquest, the so-called “darker half” of a two part story that’s sold as separate games, Conquest and Birthright. And honestly? I don’t know how I feel. Conquest is a good game, and I don’t want to dissuade anyone from playing it or buying it. And I would say in the grand scheme of things that I like it, but for the sake of argument, I’m going to list some of the things about it that have begun, after 19 hours of gameplay, to annoy me. Some people get off on hard video games. The joy for them comes from the challenge of overcoming obstacles. There are entire genres of video games that appeal to people who want to be kicked in the balls 99 times so that on the hundredth time they can do it back. But what makes a game difficult? How do developers define and create difficulty?
For the purposes of this article, I want to look at parallel examples of games, one of which I think is hard and one of which I think is unfair. Again, for the purposes of this article, these are the definitions we’ll be using for these terms: A hard game is a game that you lose frequently because of a lack of skill on your part as a player. An unfair game possesses in its gameplay one or more mechanics that are designed to kill the player in a way that is generally unexpected or otherwise difficult, through the skills that you have been taught up until that point, to respond to. This definition sounds a little awkward, I admit, but it will make more sense as we get into examples. I recently got into another rant with fellow Low Fiver Billy about how to write characters that are smarter than you. The reason I harp on this issue lately is twofold:
First, I recently watched an anime called No Game No Life that’s been widely regarded as one of the best anime of the last say five years or so. And I was kind of into it until in retrospect I realized that the characters, more specifically their level of intelligence, were poorly written. Superhuman intelligence is a thing in fiction that I’m entirely okay with. I’m also perfectly okay with omniscience, that is, arbitrarily knowing everything (Everything). What I dislike is getting the two confused. (Note: I like Captain America. I like his shield. And I know “it’s just a comic,” this is as much a critique as it is a joke. Breathe. You’ll be fine.) So I was sitting around thinking about Captain America today (as I often do) and I found myself kinda fixating on his shield. Now, I’m an English major and even when I was exposed to physics on a semi-regular basis my grasp of it was spotty at best, but I’m fairly sure that his shield is the worst weapon ever, by virtue of the fact that it’s the best defensive tool ever. I’d like to take a moment to tell you all about a particular man. I’m not going to name him because quite frankly you don’t need this man in your life, but trust me when I say that he is very real. This man may very well be, at least ideologically speaking, the worst person on the planet alive today. He has a website (which I’m not going to link) where he posts articles about things like how a Jewish conspiracy runs the entire world from the shadows, and how feminism is a disease which can be “cured.” He has an article that’s literally just called “Anti Semitism is Often Justified.” And I know I said that this week’s article was supposed to be brighter, and I promise it will be, just bear with me on this for a second. |
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Scott Watmough has many strong opinions about many things that he knows very little about. They're usually about video games. Archives
March 2018
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