"So Bad It's Good" or: Why you should watch bad movies.

     In order to put a little bit of a swing in my step of how I do blog posts, I decided to put together this little video to show WHY you should watch bad movies.

“Bored with Board Games” or: How I spent a decade slowly working on my own board game

    I’ve been working on making a video game slowly over the last 3 months. Since then I’ve been posting my edited pictures and links to the very rough first drafts of the game. I’ve really enjoyed sharing what I’m doing with other people, as I get feedback and a sense of power that causes me to develop a god-complex. Okay, not really, but I do enjoy sharing my ideas.

    It only occurred to me the other day that I’ve actually had another project that has been several years in the works. Literally, I’ve spent about 10 years slowly adapting it and changing the rules, as well as adding in additional characters. At this time, the game has about 150 characters from movies, comic books, video games, and books.

    The goal of the game is to select a team of characters, or even just a single character, and then duke it out with the other players. You can have a team that is comprised of Jedi, wizards, superheroes, super-villains, mythical gods, giant monsters and robots, or pretty much any other category. The game is only won when your team of characters is the last left on the field. 

    And what, you are asking yourself, is this game called? Well, I actually came up with the idea for the game and played it for a year or two with my family before we finally realized it needed a name. At that point, we started calling it “Super Smash Characters”. Yeah, really original.

    But before you start decrying this as a “Super Smash Bros” knock-off, just play the game a little and realize that the two are pretty distinct. One thing that I’ve done on purpose is that I’ve left some of the characters purposely unbalanced, because I figure that if you take a character that the other players know is unbalanced, they are going to gang up on you. If you want to be really creative, try playing it with Lego characters and on a Lego map that you put together.

Example Character Card:

If you are interested in downloading the game, follow this link: 

http://www.mediafire.com/download/174gta43n2a6v98/Super_Smash_Characters.zip

Here is the list of characters (Warning, it is pretty long, and it also doesn’t have ALL of the characters I’ve done):

4 Sword Links

Aang

Agumon

Altair

Antman

Anubis

Arbiter

Assassin

Banjo-Kazooie

Barbarian

Barbie

Batman

Battle Droids

Black Panther

Bolt

Boo

Bowser

Captain America

Captain Falcon

Charizard

Chell

Classic Godzilla

Darth Maul

Darth Vader

Deadpool

Doctor Octopus

Donkey Kong

Dr. Doofenshmirtz

Dragon Warrior Tamer

Druid

Emperor Palpatine

Feraligatr

Freya

The Flash

Frozone

Gabumon

Galen Marek

Gandalf

General Grievous

Gimli

Green Arrow

Green Goblin

Green Lantern

Guilmon

Harry Potter

Hawkeye

Hulk

Impmon

Ironman

James Bond

Joker

Katara

King Kong

Kirby

Knuckles

Kratos

Legolas

Lex Luthor

Link

Lui Kang

Mace Windu

Mage

Magneto

Mario

Mario Kart

Master Chief

Master Hand

MechaGodzilla

Megaman

Megatron

Metabee

Mew

Mewtwo

Modern Godzilla

Mothra

Mr. Incredible

Mrs. Incredible

Mumbo

Naruto

Necromancer

NES Mario

Neutranurse

Nightcrawler

Optimus Prime

Peach

Perry the Platypus

Phineas and Ferb

Pikachu

Pitfall Harry

Po

Pokemon Trainer

Prince of Persia

Qui-Gonn Jinn

Ratchet

Renamon

Rhino

Rogue (WoW)

Rogue (Marvel)

Rokusho

Samus

Sasuke

Scarlet Spider

Sceptile

Scorpion

Shadow

Shao Khan

Shifu

Sonic

Spiderman

Storm

Sub-zero

Sumilidon

Superman

Tai Lung

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

Thor

Toph

Veemon

Venom

Voldemort

Walker Boh

Wallace and Gromit

War Machine

Warbandit

Warrior

Wasp

White Witch

Wolverine

Wonder Woman

Yoda

Yoshi

Young Link

Zelda

Zeus

Zuko

New Idea or: How I Realized I Was Over My Head

So lest I get blamed by you, my two readers, for being lazy and not updating my blog, I thought that I would inform you that I've actually been quite busy working on my game. I have a couple of general ideas for other blog posts, but I tend to have a hard time writing when I'm not in the mood. And if I'm ever asked to write when I'm not in the mood, I just tell them that I have a headache.

For the big news, I've actually decided to put my initial project on hold. I realized that I didn't have anywhere NEAR the expertise that I needed for the programming or the general knowledge of the program I was using. It was kind of like if I was attempting to make a movie version of an intensely popular cartoon series without really having watched the show, and while also having a vastly inappropriately high view of my own movie making skills. The result would be something that would be incredibly bad, and would just work to push the fans of the original away from me while also making my own name box office poison.

More like an ironic twist. And I THINK that I used 'ironic' in the right sense.

And so, my two readers, I would like to announce my new project. It's called Pokemon: Manifest Destiny.

For those of you who aren't familiar with the Pokemon games, you are going to be a little confused. I apologize for that.

It's going to take place in a new region that was settled by those from the Kanto region. As such, this new region is going to be called the "New Kanto" region. I want to create something similar to the original Pokemon games, with the 8 gyms, the Elite Four, and a group that will oppose the player throughout.

Fire Starter Pokemon Evolution Line
From left to right:
Ashadder, Serpeugo, and Nagablaze

Grass Starter Pokemon Evolution Line
From left to right:
Leafound, Treenine, and Alphabark

Water Starter Pokemon Evolution Line
From left to right:
Ernlett, Seascent, and Ospray

Eagerly await, my patient readers! I will be more faithful in uploading more advancements that I've made with the game. Don't worry. I PROMISE.

Gotta Destroy ‘Em All Or: How I Decided To Choose My Story

                When growing up, I would have to admit that the best game I played was the Pokémon Silver Version game. I received the game along with a brand new Gameboy Color as my Christmas and Birthday present (as my birthday IS on Christmas). Not only that, but my younger brother received the Pokémon Gold version along with a brand new Gameboy Color.

                The times that we had with those games are still very fond in my memory. We were able to play with each other. We were able to fight each other by hooking the two games up with a link cable. As the years went by, my younger siblings got other Pokémon games as well, and we were able to play along with each other.

                For those of you who are no aware of the storyline for the Pokémon series, you take the role of a young child (usually around 10 or 11 years old) who is sent out into a world full of powerful creatures called Pokémon. While this may seem like a perfect recipe for disaster, in the game things are generally peaceful with the exception of at least one troublesome group who is bent on using Pokémon for their own purposes. However, it is up to you to set things right. Along the way you train your Pokémon and catch new ones, and you use your Pokémon to battle the Pokémon of other trainers.

While this sounds like nothing more than a glorified form of animal cruelty, the games have never really struck me as advocating for animal violence. The ideas of forming friendships with your Pokémon and treating them with kindness and care are always what separates you, the player, from the majority of the bad guys in the game.

Now for something completely different.

As a society, we seem to have a fascination with the destruction of ourselves. Maybe you could say that it’s evident in the way that we follow the destructive patterns of celebrities, or that we tend to portray love as something being very primitive, where we get together because of our fierce passions, but then those same passions lead us to fight and tear ourselves apart in a spectacular show of emotional gore.

I think, though, that it’s most evident in the love affair with have with post-apocalyptic scenarios. If you look at H.G. Wells “The Time Machine”, you see the main character go forward it time, seeing the rise and fall of civilizations, until he reaches the very end of the world itself. With the dropping of the nuclear bombs on Japan, though, we suddenly realized how easy it would be to truly destroy everything humanity had ever worked to build. Science fiction is chock full of the post-apocalyptic world, either destroyed by aliens, or the bomb, through natural disaster, or any other number of ideas.

I can think of civilizations before our own time who had thought about the end of the world. The Aztecs, for one, believed that the world had already gone through several deaths and rebirths, and that the cycle would continue. There are Native American tribes who have a similar idea. The Norse had the idea of “Ragnarök”, where the forces of good and evil would fight and destroy the entire universe, only leaving a very small handful of intelligent beings behind. The majority of Christian religions believe the world itself will be destroyed and those who are found worthy will be taken into Heaven. So the idea of the world ending, or of civilization coming to an end, isn’t new.

But did any of these groups have a very extensive, and almost obsessed, interest in their own end? Did they have literally thousands of stories of different scenarios like we do? Why is it that we seem to be so fascinated with the destruction of ourselves?

I personally love to see the post-apocalyptic world because of how I can use it to measure our own world against a possible future. I don’t necessarily believe that the world will be bathed in nuclear fire, with only a handful of humanity surviving in underground vaults while the surface world mutates horribly, but I find that the distinctions, and more importantly the similarities, that I can see between this hypothetical world and our world to be very striking.

It’s those similarities and differences that I want to explore, because they really are fascinating. In the world of Pokémon, you have a very established and stable world where extremely powerful beings are used in battle between groups of all ages. The ‘bad’ groups are either motivated by greed or ideals, but even they are stopped by a single person each time, which goes to show how powerful an individual can be in this society.

But I feel that there are a lot of potential issues. Pokémon grow through the process known as ‘evolution’. Essentially, when exposed to certain types of radiation, or when trained enough, or even when coming into contact with another Pokémon, they grow much stronger and change shape within a few seconds. What would happen in a world where humans are artificially manipulating the process of ‘survival of the fittest’ by battling these extremely strong creatures together all the time? I think that you would see the rise of deadlier Pokémon, as the only ones who would be left in the wild to reproduce would be the ones who are able to avoid or defeat a human trainer. And given the unique ability of a Pokémon to go through evolution extremely quickly, it probably wouldn’t be possible to predict what new dangers were going to show up.

In the end, I think that we are so fascinated with the end of the world because we are aware that while things are rather good for us right now, like in the world of the Pokémon games, there are a lot of things that aren’t being addressed. We continue to furiously use up resources that aren’t renewable. We continue to ignore our incredibly vital long-term needs in favor of the less important short-term needs. I want to try and explore in the game how a society dies, and what happens in the birth of new ones.

Can a society be aware of its problems, and still choose to continue along its path so that it may destroy itself? And do the new civilizations coming from the ashes of its death learn from their ancestor’s mistakes? Ironically, it may be that only those who have died can tell us the truth, but unfortunately they are dead and we continue to be blind. 

“Call me Ishmael” Or: How I Learned To Love A Silent Protagonist and Hate Chris Redfield

          If you don’t recognize the quote “Call me Ishmael”, then chances are you haven’t ever read Moby Dick or just forgot about it. Either is completely possible.

The thing that is important, though, is how the character of Ishmael is set up right there from the very beginning. When creating a character, I don’t think that you have to establish EVERY LITTLE CELL ON THEIR BODY right away. You don’t have to give their entire back story or reveal major character points at the beginning. In fact, I think that it would be wisest to save some of those things for a Shyamalan-like¹ twist further into the game.

Need I say more? 

                You may not think that characters are all that important. I’ve seen people say that you shouldn’t really care about a character from a video game simply for the reason that they aren’t real. If that’s your viewpoint, then I would like to forcibly point out how you ARE WRONG. Even if something isn’t real, you can still have a very palpable sense of emotion connected to them.

If you feel that you shouldn’t care about something because it’s real, then have you never read a book whose characters really tugged at your heartstrings? The Kite Runner is probably one of those books that will leave you crying on the inside and outside. Have you never become enthralled by a character on a TV show? And have you never cared about what happens to them? I absolutely love the show “Monk”. I think that the character of Adrian Monk is incredibly well-defined. You care about him throughout the entire series, and when it ends I felt quite a bit of satisfaction.

Video game characters fall on the same line. You can’t ever really play a game without knowing WHY you are playing it. Even in Super Mario Bros for the NES, you knew that you had to rescue the princess from a castle. In fact, I would argue that certain video game characters go the extra step from movies or books, because YOU, the player, get to determine what the character does.

This goes much further than just getting to jump on some bad guy’s head, or just choosing to jump over him. In the Mass Effect series, the creators of the game did a brilliant job in making it so that YOUR actions as Commander Shepard had a very real effect on the other characters. You could make choices that killed off characters. You could go on missions where side-characters were shown in a different light from what you had known. In fact, in the second Mass Effect game, if you did NOT get to know your crew well enough, and talk to them enough, then it was likely that many of them would die at the end.

Yes, the fate of the galaxy is up to him...

Then you have characters like Booker DeWitt from Bioshock Infinite. While you may not get as much of a choice as in Mass Effect to define him, I still felt a VERY real connection to DeWitt. Bioshock Infinite did a great job in making you constantly have to reevaluate what your motivations should be as DeWitt, and what his role was overall in the game.

Okay...he does have style...

Silent protagonists are something that are almost exclusive to video games. I tried thinking of silent protagonists from movies or books, but I didn’t have any luck. It’s very difficult to actually start to care about someone who doesn’t speak, or someone whose face you never get to see (think of Chell from Portal 1 and 2). The overall idea with those characters is that we are supposed to identify them as ourselves, because they don’t have a defined personality for our own image to clash against.

However, I have a very hard time putting myself in the mind frame of a lady who has amnesia (or she may not, but you never actually hear her talk about how she ended up in Aperture Labs) and is being forced to run through a series of increasingly more dangerous tests run by a psychotic computer AI, all the while hearing about why “The Cake Is A Lie” and using a gun to create transdimensional portals.

I may become engrossed in the game and trying to solve the puzzles, or in the very sarcastic and passive-aggressive comments from GlaDOS, the psycho computer AI, but I can’t put MYSELF into that situation. Maybe it’s something wrong with me.

However, Chell becomes a very real character to me, despite the fact that I never hear Chell talk, see her face (with the exception of using portals to act as mirrors), or see any emotions on her face. And the reason that I believe that Chell became a real character to me was through that very silence.

Confused? So am I, so let’s try to work through this together.

Chell never once complains. She never says anything. She takes the abuse that GLaDOS throws at her with a stoicism that I envy. Really, Portal 1 only has 3 or 4 characters who you EVER MEET THROUGH THE ENTIRE GAME. GLaDOS is the only one who you actually interact with, and it is through GLaDOS’ increasingly sarcastic remarks that I defined what Chell was to me. To somebody else, Chell may have been a serial killer who was trapped in this laboratory to use as a human guinea pig. To someone else, Chell may have been something completely different.

In the end, though, Chell becomes what we want her to be through her very silence. Through the very fact that although she doesn’t talk, I developed a personality for her that was completely independent of what I consider to be my own very special personality. (Any Freudians out there who are starting to salivate Pavlovian style at seeing that last sentence, go for it in the comments section)

Which brings me to Chris Redfield, one of the main characters from the Resident Evil series. Now, right off the bat I am going to say that I am HORRIBLY biased against the Resident Evil series. I only played RE5 and RE6, which is probably why I dislike the series so much.

For a little bit of background, Chris Redfield is one of the main characters who has been present since the very first Resident Evil game. He saw the outbreak of some sort of virus that turned people into zombies, and he helped form a worldwide organization that tracks down people using this virus as a biological weapon.

Chris Redfield is NOT a silent protagonist. He is very vocal. For Resident Evil 5, he actually has a very good sidekick by the name of Sheva who is pretty awesome. However, for me, Chris was very damaged. He constantly neared the edge of whining about his last sidekick who supposedly died while taking out the main evil guy in a flashback that you constantly see through the game.

Now, there are those scenes that just made me laugh, like when Chris literally punched a giant boulder until it finally moved and fell into place in a river of lava during the final boss fight, but I never felt like Chris was adequately defined for me for as to WHY he should be so whiny.

Of course, in Resident Evil 6, things get even worse. At this point, Chris repeatedly endangers himself, a NEW sidekick, and his entire team for the point of getting revenge. I just couldn’t feel sorry for him. He constantly grated on my nerves. In the end, I was actually hating him, even though he was the character we were supposed to sympathize with.

If you are still following my ramblings, then let me say this. Despite my deep hate for Chris, I still have to admit that I CARE about him. Even if I only care about him in the fact that I would like to see him never appear in any game ever, I still feel emotions toward him. Which, at least by my definition, is the mark of a good character.

My hope is that the characters I make at least draw some sort of emotion, even if it is annoyance/hate. I’d rather that you hated my characters than feel nothing at all, because at least you’ll remember them. 

Admit it. You hate this one.

1) By saying this I definitely am NOT saying that I like Shyamalan. I don’t think I will ever be able to forgive him for the damage he did with “The Last Airbender”, not to mention how ridiculous “Signs”, “The Village”, “The Happening”, and “Lady In The Water” were. So make sure that if you DO decide to have a twist in the plot of your story, that it follows much more along the lines of the first Bioshock game or Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic.

Starter Pokémon

Given how each game has a selection of three Pokémon, I have created some newer choices, (almost all of which are just palette changes from the previous, but with new types. All together, there will be 13 choices for your starter Pokémon. 

Other choices: Bulbasaur, Squirtle, Charmander, Totodile, Chikorita, Cyndaquil, and Eevee. 

------------------------------------

Charcle: Fire-Type

Pokédex Entry: It eats rocks, which are then converted into molten rock and stored in its shell. Attempting to break the shell can result in extreme pain from the lava.

-------------------------------------

 Frostander: Ice-Type

Pokédex Entry:

It is the opposite of its cousin, Charmander. Instead of producing heat from its tail, it emanates an incredible coldness. Coming into contact with the ice chunk on its tail can cause frostbite.

-----------------------------------------

 Ironquil: Steel-Type

Pokédex Entry:

It has hooked barbs on the end of its quills. Whenever something gets one of these quills stuck in it, it is very difficult to remove.

----------------------------------------------

 Marbulb: Rock-Type

Pokédex Entry:

Instead of having a plant on its back like its cousin, it has a rock. Marbulb lives in deep caves, where it defends itself from predators by making its skin extremely tough.

---------------------------------------------------

 Raindrop: Water-Type

Pokédex Entry:

Raindrop can move through the water as easily as it moves on land. It is constantly dripping with water. However, if it ever dries out, then it could die. 

----------------------------------------------------

Staticdile: Electric-Type

Pokédex Entry:

The intense energy found in a Totodile is only amplified by the electricity running through Staticdile. Staticdile is constantly moving at full speed, no matter how tired it is.

First workable (maybe) version of game:

Name of game-

Pokemon: Frozen Ashes

Version: 0.01

Link: 

http://www.mediafire.com/download/az8358sv2eqz227/v0.01%20Pokémon%20Frozen%20Ashes.exe

I’ve only gotten the first half hour to hour of game play done. I think I may have fixed the major gamebreaking bugs, but that’s still up in the air. 

=================================

For anyone who happens to stumble upon my humble ramblings and is interested, I HAVE gotten a little bit of my game finished. It’s a Pokemon game set in the Kanto region (where the Red and Blue versions took place) about 10 years after Red and Blue. In this version, things have really gone to crap:

Team Rocket has taken over Vermilion City and Celadon City. 

Saffron is under the control of the Fighting Dojo. 

Dangerous new versions of Pokemon have made it dangerous for people to be out in the wild. 

Professor Oak has disappeared. 

Different species from the Johto region (where the games Gold, Silver, and Crystal took place) have invaded the Kanto region. 

In combination with the new mutations and invasive Johto species, several Pokemon species have become extinct (namely Farfetch’d and Lapras). 

==================

If you DO decide to try the game out, please keep in mind that the GIRL gender choice does not work right now. It’s a programming issue. I am currently using the excellent Pokemon Essentials pack with RPG Maker XP, and I left the GIRL gender choice in there for the future. However, selecting the GIRL gender causes the game to bug out.