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SWTOR cut-scene doodles.

Mr. Light-side (Sith Inquisitor).
Bug Girl and the Fallen (Imperial Agent and Jedi Knight).
Space Daddy (Sith Warrior).

Star Wars: The Old Republic character doodles drawn during cut-scenes.

I’ve currently finished three of the class storylines:

  • Sith Inquisitor (Assassin): My main, and the only class I’ve played to level cap. Class story is bananas in a good way, but was extremely meh on the companions. Played aggressively light-sided, initially romanced the padawan girl (… ick) but immediately ditched her for Space Husband Theron Shan in the expansions.1
  • Imperial Agent (Operative): Story starts a bit meh, gets strong in the middle, and kind of… never really delivers at the end. The “un-reveal” of Hunter left me so annoyed I just shot the guy without listening to any of his end-game speechifying, so no idea what he wanted to try and tell me. Another (mostly) light-sided play-through, romanced Vector, gave the Codex to the Minister and remained with Sith Intelligence. As an aside, the story really, really seems to want you to be mad at the Minister for the codeword thing, though honestly I thought his rationale for it was pretty reasonable in the context of how the Empire operates. The SIS using the codeword, however, was not; I killed everyone who did so and honestly it was enough to make me regret working with them on my main. I can see why people describe this as the best of the class storylines, even if I didn’t think it qui-ii-ii-ite pushed things far enough in the third chapter…
  • Jedi Knight (Sentinel): Ditched at Alderaan for Warrior (which see below). I just… couldn’t. The story is so boring and, honestly, I loathe the Knight’s voice acting.2 I can see why they chose it, but… ugh. No. Ostensibly playing dark-side for lolz, but the actual dark side choices for Knight are so boring—and honestly mostly petty and stupid to boot—compared to those in some of the other class storylines that I’m honestly struggling with it. On the plus side, I really like the aesthetics of Sentinel (setting enemies aflame with blue fire!), so… there’s that.
  • Sith Warrior (Juggernaut): Giant space daddy. Class storyline is straightforward but engaging, particularly if you’re a huge sucker for Lawful Evil like yours truly. Played aggressively neutral-aligned to confuse the galaxy, which was a lot of fun. Enjoyed the companions, but all the romance options for a male PC were super skeevy so romanced no one3 and slept with every NPC the game allowed me to sleep with instead. Enjoyed the play-style more than I thought I would, too.

Currently working on the Trooper (Commando) to unlock all four buffs, and I’m actually enjoying it a lot more than I thought I would—both play-wise and story-wise—though I’m not… hugely enthused with the direction they seem to want to take with the General…

But… yeah. That’s what I did in my New Year’s break!

Also: I still need to buy a new scanner…

  1. He’s currently mad at me; I’m trying to betray the Empire, Theron, but it’s not like the game allows you to defect! I just wanna shoot purple lightning at my enemies is that such a crime? [↩]
  2. I actually re-rolled to get away from the male VA, though the female one isn’t much better. [↩]
  3. I’m also sensing a… theme with the whole “romance your impressionable young female padawan/apprentice/subordinate/slave” which… every class has at least one of these, so like… gross, Bioware. Gross. [↩]
2020-01-06T08:10:53+11:006th January, 2020|Tags: gaming, mmos, my art, pop culture, star wars, swtor, video games|
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Drip feed.

Suppose the people who hate free to play games win the argument and get rid of microtransactions. Suppose they change the laws so you have to get your looter shooter Destiny/Anthem/Division dopamine drip for one fair fixed price. So you’re grinding hundreds of hours to get better armor, but you aren’t spending more money. Just time.

What is the creepy part? Is it evil to charge a dribble of money for a game so addictive it devours hundreds of hours of your time? Or is the problem making the game so addictive it consumes hundreds of hours of your time in the first place?

Jeff Vogel on addiction.

As someone who has far more money than she does time (or, frankly, patience), I confess I do have a preference for games that sell shiny cosmetic items via microtransactions (or even macro transactions) as opposed to making me grind shitty content I don’t want to do endlessly; it’s one of the reasons I prefer Guild Wars 2 over World of Warcraft, for example, because in the former I can just buy my shiny mount then use it to tool around running lowbie alts in the noob zone rather than repeating the same single boss fight over and over and over again for hundreds of hours.1

That being said, the microtransaction/loot box culture in mobile and triple-A gaming is… something definitely worthy of critique, at minimum.2

(Also probably worth discussing: the morality of “endless” games in general…)

  1. Though GW2 certainly has that sort of content, too, if that’s your bag, baby. [↩]
  2. Or, let’s fact it; regulation. There’s no universe in which the system of lootboxes currently implemented in most games isn’t gambling which is, y’know, at minimum highly regulated—and often outright banned—in most places. So… y’know. [↩]
2019-09-04T11:40:18+10:003rd January, 2020|Tags: gaming, video games|
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Bit o’ the old ultraviolence.

'I'd Have These Extremely Graphic Dreams': What It's Like To Work On Ultra-Violent Games Like Mortal Kombat 11

Mortal Kombat 11 is a brutal game. That’s what you come for — sensational, over-the-top violence that’s inventive and gratuitous on a level that doesn’t exist anywhere else. It can be shocking in its detail and funny in its executio...

So apparently working on photo-realistic, hyper-violent video games can have negative health impacts for developers. Would could ever have possibly guessed?

(For what it’s worth, a lot of the impacts seem to be related to the viewing of real-life violence and injury people like game artists have to do to get things looking “right”. So this isn’t a “exposure to fantasy violence is bad for you” thing so much as… exactly the opposite of that.)

2019-07-08T13:14:17+10:007th November, 2019|Tags: gaming, video games|
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Bearchickenbull!

I could have a regular chocobo or I could dress one up as Behemoth and ride that instead!

(Still needs a few more shades of feather dying to get blackerer but I need to, like. Save up the gil for it again, oy…)

2019-10-31T13:20:13+11:0028th October, 2019|Tags: final fantasy, gaming, mmos, video games|
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Your mount’s blowing glue!

So I’ve been playing Final Fantasy XIV recently and finally unlocked mounts on my Arcanist and, well. There really is only one mount I could possibly choose…

This is my second go at FFXIV; I played it a little bit wa-aa-aa-ay back when, and remembered enjoying it but not enough to justify a long-term subscription. I jumped back into it recently thanks to the cross-promotional mission in Boyband Car Adventures (a.k.a. Final Fantasy XV) and yes, okay, Square, your promo worked you win. I guess.

FFXIV has the problem all long-running MMOs have in that Everything Is Just So Much, exacerbated by the fact that you can literally be All The Things on one single character. Because I am extremely predictable, I chose an Au Ra and choose the healing pet class as my “main”. Combat in FFXIV is… old-fashioned, and very slow, but… eh. It’s fine. I’ve spent the last two days leveling all my crafting classes to 20ish, and am now cleaning up the lowbie start quests from the combat classes. Then I guess it’s getting those last three levels I need to unlock Summoner…

2019-10-22T09:40:10+11:0019th October, 2019|Tags: final fantasy, gaming, mmos, video games|
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Stomach this mournful tone.

You see where this is going, right?  Red Dead Redemption 2 came out in 2018.  And in 2018, you can’t talk about cons without talking about the con that is America.  With its conman president, enabled by the con that is conservatism, selling the con that is the American Dream.  It’s an old story, one that Red Dead thinks it’s in on.  The con of the frontier, the con of settlers, the con of whiteness, the con of exceptionalism.  Necessary violence as a path to freedom.  The con of freedom.

Defenders might say Red Dead Redemption 2 is about this very American con.  It’s not.  If it were, it wouldn’t center shitty white men.  It wouldn’t use Native characters as props for white plots.  It would have actual cogent criticism embedded in its structure rather than all this wasted extravagance.  It wouldn’t have dead eye.  It wouldn’t be a shooter at all.  It would explore alternative mechanics.  It would not mourn.

It is here, between its seeming subject and the actual experience of playing it, that we have the heart of Red Dead Redemption 2’s con.  We have white american outlaws and traditional gamers, both sick with empire.  We have collaborators with the systems that enable their delusions.  We have pain at the expense of everyone who is not them.  And in this particular moment, that makes RDR2 not only the worst game of the year, not only the worst game of this generation, but an active contributor to the all-consuming falseness eating our world.

Replace the cowboy hats with MAGA hats, and it becomes a little clearer.  This is a family not of outlaws but of reactionaries.  There’s nothing radical or courageous about them.  The entire tone of Red Dead reflects this current conservative moment, the con being perpetuated.  Your main man Arthur isn’t even a special case.  Sure the world has plenty of dumb loyalists like Bill and charming young dipshits like John, always claiming “I don’t have a choice”.  But there are just as many Arthurs out there in red caps as racist fucks like Micah.  Not true believers but sad sacks gone sour.  With more sulk than bile, longing for a past that never even existed.  And these Arthurs, like so many gamers, don’t even care anymore that it’s a lie.  They gave up responsibility for the truth a long time ago.

What does it mean to long for a lie?  Where does it end?  Especially when, at most, what you’re longing for is a feeling.  Well, what you remember of a feeling.  Hasn’t anyone told you the bad news, sweetheart?  It’s not coming back.  Not the old west, not your white stories of America, not frontier or freedom.  And not Soulcalibur or Far Cry 2 or Rockstar’s heyday either.  None of it’s ever coming back.  Certainly not your lost feeling.  It’s just as your conservative heart fears.  Nothing will be made great again.  Because past greatness is a con.  And there is no again.

tevis thompson on redemption.

This is a long quote from a long essay, but it’s something I think (along with its interlude) should be mandatory reading not just for everyone who plays videogames, but for everyone with any kind of investment in or fanishness over modern, specifically American,1 pop culture…

  1. Yes, endless flood of Marvel films. I’m looking at you. [↩]
2019-05-15T08:54:40+10:0013th October, 2019|Tags: culture, gaming, pop culture, video games|
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Ethical art.

If you’re speaking to an (essentially captive, given the marketing monies involved) audience of five million people you’d better be sure your ideas are, at least, not actively harmful, and in fact should ideally be improving – – fine. How about an audience of 50 people? Or an audience of 0? Does that mean this work is less moral than what speaks to a larger crowd – in effect, that it’s worse? And what about the relationship to audience that this kind of teaching implies? i can think of several occasions where people from different subcultures or minority groups were reprimanded because something in their own experience might read differently, or problematically, when presented to a presumably white/cis/affluent etc audience – which is of course the audience that matters, because what’s the value of presenting work from an alternative perspective to an audience already familiar with that perspective, to whom it has no automatic moral significance (might, in fact, merely be ‘aesthetic’)? Compare the complexity of a specific local audience which can think for itself to the easy win of the alternative:  a phantasm audience of moral blanks to whom rote lessons in hypothetical empathy can be tastefully and profitably imparted over and over, forever.

If the ethical act is that which we’d be willing to posit as universal law, perhaps we could say: the ethical artwork is that which we’d be willing to mass produce. Small or hobbyist developers are encouraged to work from the perspective of a mass-productive capacity they do not in fact possess; their successes and inevitable failures are hoovered up alike by the industry proper for later deployment in the form of cute dating sim or inspirational narrative with similar but sanitized tone or aesthetic. In essence a kind of moral QA testing, with all the job security and recompense that this implies.

myfriendpokey on audiences.

I think the line ethical artwork is that which we’d be willing to mass produce is probably the most scathing rebuttal to the ~comfy uwu~ brigade I’ve ever read.

See also this and and this… and you can tell this is a topic that’s been on my mind a lot recently, no?

2019-07-31T09:40:01+10:0010th October, 2019|Tags: culture, pop culture, video games|
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It’s older than some of you, probably.

So my parents are cleaning up their house preparing to downsize, which involves going through all the junk I left there when I moved out.

And one of the things they found? My ex’s old OG edition GameBoy,1 that she gave to me so I could play Pokémon; it still has a copy of Pokémon Blue slotted into the back.

To this day, I still give away my old laptops/computers/tablets/phones/consoles/etc. to friends, to pay forward the fact Ex gave me this way back when we were like sixteen and I desperately wanted, yet couldn’t afford, my own…

  1. I assume my parents have meticulously returned this to me because the last time they moved house they threw out our family’s One Console, an original ColecoVision, and I’ve whinged at them about it ever since… [↩]
2019-10-01T09:01:28+10:0030th September, 2019|Tags: gaming, tech, video games|
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