Author: Clint

I’m by far not the only one to observe this but 2022 so far doesn’t seem much different than 2021. And yet, of course it is. My mom and aunt are gone and although our family Xmas celebration went as well as could be expected under the circumstances, it’s nigh impossible not to feel like it was a couple of stockings short. We’ve been feeling sick on and off ever since our convention outing, and some of it has been pretty draining even though any COVID testing we’ve done has come up negative. That said my day job is insisting on people being back in the office (despite escalating infections and the empirical fact that we successfully worked remotely for more than a year) so I can’t help but feel like it’s only a matter of time. Omicron is reportedly milder, especially if you’re vaxxed and boosted, but as someone who is diabetic, overweight, and suffering from sleep apnea I’m not looking forwards to the possibility of rolling the dice, so to speak.

Anyhow, all this means morale at the ranch is still not at any sort of high point and sometimes is pretty low, but Dawn and I are taking all y’all’s advice and moving at a pace we can manage, figuring week to week how our “spoons” are doing. If my day work holds its course it means things will be getting busy very soon and the circumstances of that are going to be extra stressful, which might not be great for the creative juices. But before that we think we’ll be able to get this comic out and another in the week after. Health and spoons permitting.

Groundhog Day isn’t until next February but here Dawn and I are, preparing to squint our way back into the metaphorical daylight after a long hibernation. I mean technically we started that earlier by getting a new comic posted back in November, but here today is another page! And then Friday we’ll be rolling out and setting up a convention booth again at long last for Season’s Screamings.

I think we still have everything. I think it still works. I hope we remember how to put our banner up. Will we see our shadows, or will we scurry back into our hole for six more weeks of winter?

See, now, even my metaphors are rusty. Here comes the nerd brigade in my head with corrections…

– Um, actually, it will be December 17 this Friday and Winter in the Northern Hemisphere in 2021 does not begin until the solstice on December 21st.

– Um, actually, the groundhog tradition states that if the groundhog sees its shadow it will retreat to its den and Winter weather will linger, while if it does not see its shadow then an early Spring is forecast.

– Um, actually, rodents have no influence on global weather patterns and so this is all superstitious nonsense regardless.

But you know, I feel like the tentative squinting will at least be a fact. Luckily we don’t have to be there for setup until noon and the convention is happening right in our backyard… okay, not quite that close but close enough that a run back to our place for anything forgotten is not out of the question. Our booth placement doesn’t seem like the best and we don’t know who our neighbors will be, but as far as getting back into the pool this is not the deep end.

There, that metaphor was better. Enjoy the comic, and if we don’t see any of you this weekend then hopefully we’ll see you next year!

I don’t do the therapy thing. Never have. I don’t think it’s useless universally, but for me I just can’t ever conceive of talking at a stranger about my personal issues and having that help.

Now writing about my personal issues to a whole bunch of people who are more or less strangers? (no offense meant to y’all)… I suppose that’s exactly what’s about to happen here, but hey, I’m not having to pay you anything.

Anyhow, Dawn does see a therapist and said therapist said to her that on the topic of grief and loss due to death of a loved one, it can take up to six months before your mental and emotional state return to a state of normalcy. I suppose I bring this up because by the time you’re reading this, six months will have passed since my mom passed away, and here we are with our first new comic page since she went into the hospital. On the one hand, maybe that’s just coincidence, but on the other maybe it helps to have some occasion to anchor onto even if it wasn’t exactly a happy one. Humanity as a whole does have a fondness for taking days out of the calendar and giving them significance. Anything that helps keep them from just blurring together, right?

Wednesdays were one of those anchors for us, but on the whole I think taking a hiatus from the comic was the right call, and I want to thank you all again for your patience and understanding. As warned, we may not get back to our once a week schedule until after the Holidays — I mean, this whole “six months” estimate is all well and good but the reality is murkier. Our Christmas this year is going to be short a couple of very significant stockings and I suppose I’ve still got some amount of breath held in terms of seeing how that goes.

But I cracked open MS Word and got some writing done, and Dawn got some drawing done, and as a result we have a bit more story to dole out for those of you who were yearning for your Zombie Ranch fix. Your loyalty is very flattering, and though it might not exactly be an action-packed cliffhanger at the moment, I hope it feeds the need and your humble proprietors have demonstrated that in the wake of all the loss, they haven’t lost their touch.

One of the ways I see a movie with several characters broken down is in terms of screen time, i.e. how many minutes each of those characters is “on screen” for an audience. The main protagonist and/or title character would most commonly have the biggest total, but that’s not always true, and such deviations are not always bad, but if your main character turns out to only be onscreen for 15 minutes out of your 150 minute movie, either that’s intentional or something went seriously awry.

You can’t really tabulate a comic in terms of screen time. I suppose you could use pages or panels that someone appears in. Or should you use dialogue balloon count? Both? Should you even bother doing so, when there are all other manner of hobbies calling you, not to mention the dishes ain’t gonna wash themselves?

But part of me is curious if Suzie would still have the biggest count. I might check that out some time, provided one of y’all doesn’t beat me to it.

Astute long-term observers of this comic will have noted that while over a decade has passed for us here in the “real world,” the timeline presented in Zombie Ranch (special presentations aside) covers a span of at most only a few weeks. You could posit this is due to our relatively slow update schedule. But if we actually get into relativity, science provides an alternate explanation, which is that the Zombie Ranch world is in fact moving very, very fast compared to ours.

Hey, don’t talk to me, talk to Einstein. Which might be difficult on account of him being dead, but his special theory of relativity lives on and the time dilation component he predicted may in fact be true. There’s a lot of math involved here but the basic premise (in my layman’s understanding, anyhow) is that the passage of time can be subjective based on the velocity of a given object. Clocks literally tick slower, enough so that clocks speeding along on board satellites in Earth orbit have to be programmed to adjust ever so slightly for the difference.

A popular example is an astronaut traveling near the speed of light who returns from what to them was a ten year space voyage only to find that over thirty years have passed for their planetbound friends and family. Oh, gravity is also involved in this equation, not just speed. You get near a black hole and amongst other issues, time is going to get wonky.

Anyhow, scientifically speaking over a decade may have passed for us but the folks in our Weird New West are obviously moving, not much slower than we, but much faster.

And also, our story has a lot of gravity to it.

So there.

There are exceptions to every rule, and visual mediums of fiction are no, err… exception.

I’ve been watching The Falcon and the Winter Soldier on Disney Plus and I feel like I’m really starting to sound like a broken record regarding Marvel Studios’ track record because damn if it hasn’t been far better than I expected. I figured I’d watch it just ‘cuz but now much like WandaVision I’ve been eagerly looking forwards to Fridays again.

Anyhow, spoilers to a minimum but the most recent episode has some heavy scenes, one of which is has an elderly black man talking about his past. And that’s it, just him talking, with a few reaction shots and props spiced in. No flashbacks, no ghostly sound effects… it’s about as minimalist as it could get, and also of course breaking the rule of “show, don’t tell.”

Talking heads can easily be boring, or a sign of budget limitations and nothing more. And yet, I found it riveting and all the more effective for leaving things up to the imagination. I was reminded positively of Quint’s speech in Jaws about his time on the final voyage of the ill-fated U.S.S. Indianapolis. The speech in TFATWS was not nearly as pure as that one unbroken tracking shot, but it reminded me of the exception. Sometimes, just sometimes… tell can be better than show.

It feels like that to be an artist (which includes writers, yes) is to be constantly second-guessing yourself. To be an artist producing something for others is to be constantly second-guessing yourself but also forging ahead with it anyhow because otherwise you’re not going to get anywhere.

To be producing art long-term is to eventually be wondering about that saying of either dying a hero or living long enough to see yourself become the villain. All those sins and pet peeves that drive you crazy when you’re a consumer… can you truly say you’ve avoided them now that you’re on the production side? Would you even be aware if you had slipped? If you do notice, are you guilty about it or (perhaps worst of all) do you now just shrug your shoulders and embrace the dark side?

These are the kinds of thoughts that… well, they don’t keep me up at night, and perhaps that’s it’s own sign of degeneration. But I still get them while writing. For instance, one thing that can annoy me is if the author’s voice starts coming through the mouths of every one of their characters in a “samey” manner. Don’t get me wrong, an author’s work should have some mark of style to it, but omnipresent quippiness in dialogue can get old fast. And yet here I am recently wondering if the words coming out of Whitecloud are true to her or is she no different than Rosa’s teasing of Frank way back when? Is Frank himself having the occasional wordy (or at least semi-wordy) retort a betrayal of his character? Basically, am I shoving my own words into their mouths, chortling at my cleverness at the expense of consistency and verisimilitude?

But the story mustn’t grind to a halt from artistic paralysis, so eventually the words have to get published. A lot of times it helps to set them down in a draft, walk away and come back later and see how it reads, and if it doesn’t make me cringe I feel better about it. And then there are times I still fret right up to the moment I have the comic locked and loaded. Sometimes beyond that. But hey, Sturgeon’s Law says 90 percent of it is crap anyhow. I’ll content myself with feeling skilled at least 10 percent of the time.

I’m writing this blog entry later than usual since after the comic was done, Dawn and I decided to take a break and watch Godzilla vs. Kong. At home, mind you… by this time tomorrow we should have our second doses of vaccine and hopefully won’t be laid up too badly from it.

This is around the time of year we would usually have been casting around for some big, noisy movie of no guaranteed complexity to watch in a theater. Just something for the two of us to get out of the house, get drunk at an adjoining restaurant and then toddle across the mall to experience. Kaiju and kaiju-adjacent films such as Pacific Rim and Kong: Skull Island had been heroically filling that need and it was with heavy (but cautious) hearts that we did not continue that tradition in 2020.

But one thing Covid has definitely seemed to do on the entertainment front has been to fast-track the rise of subscription and/or on-demand streaming services, including the heretofore unheard of option of opening up a new film to home viewing at the same time as its theatrical release. They’re still figuring out how all that’s going to work, it seems. Some like Disney are charging premium prices for it even if you already have a subscription to Disney Plus. Some like Warner Bros. are offering GvK for no extra charge to HBO Max customers. That kind of makes it hard to put any revenue figures on the “home release” but it certainly seems to have been a popular choice, as well as exceeding all expectations at the theaters themselves.

While I’m not one of the folks who braved going out to a public showing, after watching at home I definitely feel the temptation. There were a lot of awesome moments I couldn’t help but think would have been so much more awesome on a huge screen with seat-shaking surround sound vibrating through my being. Spectacle might be the simplest form of entertainment but it has its power, and even though I wouldn’t call our home setup terrible it still doesn’t compare to the thrill of a theatrical excursion. I think the fact GvK performed so well at theaters despite streaming being available says a lot. Maybe both options can co-exist, even once the pandemic is past us?

But that’s just a layman’s opinion and the insiders of Hollywood seem to be spinning a different story. I suppose time will tell if everything really does go back to business as usual, or if some new hybrid model emerges for the future.

Where Dungeons and Dragons or really almost any RPG is concerned, the operating principle for the game master is to prepare to be unprepared. Players will almost always do something undreamt of in your philosophy. Is it good as any kind of writing exercise? Maybe, but if you’re the kind of writer who has everything plotted out just so you might end up frustrated when you make contact with the chaos that is other people. If you think you’re having trouble because your own characters are resisting going where you want them to go, wait until you meet the characters of your friends!

A tabletop game master does not have the luxury of the impassive computer environment which can put a stop to stray wanderings by means of a simple waist-high fence. “Railroading” players is still possible but it must be done with great subtlety lest they catch on and become disgruntled; after all, part of the draw of the tabletop session, whether in-person or virtual, is the flexibility and possibility of creating a story ultimately bounded only by the desires and imaginations of all involved — and the occasional critical success or failure. Tabletop is best approached as less of a writing exercise than an improvisation exercise of the kind you might have experienced if you’ve ever taken acting courses or perhaps just watched episodes of Who’s Line is it Anyway? Improv theater does not take “no” for an answer. It takes the starting parameters of a scenario and builds upon it and every twist and turn is met not with the stonewall (or waist-high fence) of a “no” but the evolving path of “yes, and…”

Not every game ends up like this, particularly in D&D which can focus less on character interactions and more on tactical combat depending on what the folks involved want. Now don’t get me wrong, I like my tactical combat as much as the next dude but hey, that’s something computer games already do extremely well. What computer games still can’t simulate is the absolute insanity that can happen when the fence is no longer an issue, and I am well pleased with our current game which has spent its last two sessions “in-town” with the closest thing to a tactical situation occurring when characters were attempting to eavesdrop on other characters. I don’t think our DM could ever have foreseen what’s happening, but to her credit she has rolled with it and still has her plot ongoing even if the party at the moment is more concerned with the social implications of root vegetables than getting out and questing.

I’m not even kidding. “Yes, and…”

Happy news for your humble proprietors… since Dawn and I work our day jobs as part of California’s educational system we qualified to get our COVID vaccinations done. First shot was last Wednesday, second will be early April. We’ll still be telecommuting for the time being but I’m okay with that. I think I honestly adapted better than most, what with already being antisocial and enjoying spending hours at my computer desk.

Antisocial might be the wrong term. Selectively social? I do like the occasional hangout with friends and I’ve missed visiting some of my restaurant haunts. Other than that, online gaming plus chat via Discord has really seemed to fill my interaction needs. In fact I’ve really come to appreciate playing “tabletop” RPG like Dungeons & Dragons remotely, because helper apps like D&D Beyond and Roll 20 exist and have really streamlined the experience, and meanwhile we can use Discord to shitpost commentary and GIFs while it’s happening. If we were sitting around a table we’d be rightly expected to shut the hell up at some point so the DM could talk and/or hear.

One campaign Dawn and I have been playing in has been entertaining enough there are thoughts of jumping on the Podcast bandwagon with it. We’ll see how that goes. In the meantime we plug along, but hooray for virtual socialization. It’s been a rough year but just hearing the voices of your friends can go a long way.

I’ve been holding off writing about Marvel’s Wandvision because for once I wanted to wait until the series was done before giving any thoughts. A novel concept for me with my long history of early impressions here in this blog, some of which bore out nicely and some of which, well, did not. But nine episodes? I could wait nine episodes, even if that meant nine weeks.

And honestly it still hasn’t been a week since the finale but the spoiler tags are largely ripped away and the interviews have begun. Of particular interest to me are two which were given by director Matt Shakman and head writer Jac Shaeffer concerning the development and execution of what became a very ambitious project. Of course don’t click these links or even read this blog further if you still haven’t watched and want to go in blind:

Matt Shakman talks cut story bits

Jac Shaeffer on Wandavision development

There are people who love the Wandavision finale, people who are satisfied, and people who hated it, at least one of my acquaintance who stated it retroactively ruined the entire show for him. He did not explain why, but man does that ever bring up one of the greatest terrors there is for a creative: endings. Especially for a popular property that has speculations running rampant and people gnashing for answers, and in some cases all the gods there may be help you if you don’t end up giving them the answers they wanted. Collider’s tongue-in-cheek piece is a useful reality check. As for myself, I won’t argue there was flawless execution, and perhaps the writers knowingly toyed with our expectations, but on the other hand it’s interesting to note the implication or even outright confirmation that there were things even they wished they could have done but circumstances dictated they were not to be. I liked what I was given a lot. It was emotional, it was thematic, and it was true to the title characters. To me it’s perhaps a miracle (“and there is nothing more horrifying than a miracle”) that the finale hung together as well as it did what with a global pandemic coming along and derailing post-production and most any thought of reshoots.

And if the path there ended up being strewn with red herrings (both intentional and ones that were merely a result of overactive theorizing), I still found it quite an enjoyable journey full of attention to detail and creative use of media to tell the story, and some fine acting as well. If anything I am pleased to note that the creators are mortal men and women after all because for awhile there I was caught up in a bit of my own grief that they were using some of the same elements I’ve been using in a far more coherent and and effective way. You get these little splits when you’re a writer experiencing good stuff. The bad stuff you just laugh or groan at, the good stuff you enjoy but also groan in a different way because part of you is convinced you’ll never do anything even half as decent. Then, thankfully, sometimes you get peeks behind the curtain and realize that it’s not nearly as effortless as it can seem and the creators have wrestled with their own doubts and disappointments along the way, and in the end just have done the best they could to tell the story they wanted to tell.

It’s a magic act. Did you see the wires? Did you see the (wo)man behind the curtain? And if so, did you care?

Flourish.

A friend recently linked me to this blog post as possibly “relevant to my interests.” She was, of course, correct.

What a Western Isn’t

It’s not the easiest read and perhaps also not the clearest in terms of what the author is trying to say, which is perhaps unsurprising if you’re trying to define something by a negative. What does a black hole look like? Well, by definition we don’t really know, do we? We’re just making our best guesses based on its effects on what we can observe.

But I think I would find agreement with him on what I believe is his basic thesis, which is that the classic Western is far more convoluted (and even subversive) than many might assume, even before the controversial “deconstruction” that was High Noon. Or, in our more modern era, we might see Unforgiven in the same way. I believe his main point is that a true Western is not a simple matter of sound and fury but of hard choices and complicated people. He doesn’t like the remake of 3:10 to Yuma and I agree with him, especially since I have seen the original and found it far superior in terms of having something to say, so to hear that the remake’s director was comparing cowboys to “Greek Gods in chaps” in his commentary is at the same time a WTF and also an insight into what went wrong. That comparison is far more apt to superheroes than cowboys.

Now sure, we’ve got our Zorros and our Lone Rangers and our Man with No Name, but they’re all still a far cry from Superman and Wonder Woman. Get down to the “street level” of characters like Hawkeye and Daredevil and that’s a lot closer, but still, the classic Western at least is populated with heroes who may have extraordinary skills and/or determination but are very, very mortal. William Munny may slaughter an entire saloon full of enemies at the climax of Unforgiven and emerge unscathed but not long before almost died from a fever. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance may exhort “print the legend” but the classic Western depicts the more muddled circumstances behind the legend, the real story rather than the dime novel exaggerations and fabrications. The latter can be entertaining in its own right, but is it a Western?

Well, I suppose I’m not going to die on the hill of saying what does and doesn’t count, but it seems to me that the ability to transplant a “Western” into other settings like feudal Japan or outer space means there are certain conventions of the genre that transcend the American Old West. The titular character of The Mandalorian is a badass but also a man dealing with a rickety ship and a recalcitrant toddler and who sometimes gets the crap kicked out of him despite his skills. Plus he’s trying to live by a code in a largely lawless frontier, which doesn’t always hold up when faced with the murky realities and relationships of his profession, and all of that just screams “Western” to me far more than six-guns and stagecoaches ever will.

So I ended up binge playing the RE2 and RE3 remkes all the way through and then went back to RE7. And just recently I finished RE7, and…

Holy crap, that was good. That was an experience. I went in basically totally blind as to what to expect (beyond being captured by a crazy backwoods family and then chased by a big guy with an axe), and I think I highly recommend doing the same if possible because the protagonist Ethan Winters is similarly clueless and there are a lot of layers to peel back on a very horrific metaphorical onion.

So yeah, because of that I feel like I shouldn’t actually get into any details except that the game gets my highest stamp of approval. This was well put together by a team that wanted to excel at their goal, and their goal was to scare the crap out of us while also telling a very compelling story. The visuals are realistic, the character modeling excellent and the acting is good enough to keep you well immersed in the unfolding insanity. And oh, the gore! Not a game for the faint of heart, this one. It is downright brutal, but held back just enough that it’s also hard to desensitize yourself. And although the first-person mode is a departure from the rest of the series, you definitely can’t beat it for horror purposes, especially if you pair it with some surround sound headphones so you can spin in paranoid fear at the slightest weird sound behind you. Sometimes that paranoia might save your life.

The creepies are crawly and the boss battles are excellently done, particularly in the beginning where brute force won’t get you far compared to awareness of your surroundings. Sometimes the particular subgenre will switch up on you as well and you’ll have to adapt to and survive a new kind of crazy.

RE7 fits neatly into the lore while being its own thing, and what a moody, scary, fantastic thing it is. If you like horror games and you haven’t done so yet you need to play it, period.

Or perhaps I should say: JOIN US. ACCEPT HER GIFT.

The Resident Evil franchise from Capcom is one of the granddaddys of the survival horror genre in video games, not to mention zombies.  Full disclosure that I never played the original 1996 game beyond a short demo, which was enough to turn me off because no amount of novelty was going to get me past the absolutely atrocious writing and voice acting. In particular I will never forget this early exchange between two members of an elite Special Forces team:

Dude (cheesy voice): “Jill, can you use a gun?”

Jill (girly voice): “I think so…”

I guess no offense to those of you who soldiered on, but I was out and I’ve never gone back, even when they eventually rebooted it. Same reason I have the unpopular opinion that Silent Hill 2 is not the greatest thing ever — it was a cool concept and setting but that dialogue just felt like I was getting my teeth pulled. I’m one of those weirdos who doesn’t skip cutscenes or even questgiver text when playing a game so I find it rough if that’s not clicking for me.

Luckily for my relationship with RE, Resident Evil 2 debuted in 1998 and felt much improved and immersive, even if running from zombies was interspersed with trying to find heart-shaped keys. I also liked the innovation of the disc it came on being 2-sided — on one side you played through the game as rookie cop Leon Kennedy, and on the other you played college gal Claire Redfield, and their stories intertwined and diverged in intriguing ways after a shared beginning. On top of that, once you completed the game you unlocked a second run-thru which wasn’t just the usual “same-game-but-you-keep-your-upgrades” but provided new scenes and even an extended ending that represented the truly complete story.

You basically got 4 complete games for the price of 1, which is a heck of a thing to consider in this modern era where you’re lucky to get a no-frills experience that works without day 1 patches, microtransactions and DLCs. The dialogue was still sometimes funky but not teeth-grinding and really, it’s a deserved classic. Resident Evil 3 followed up the next year and was a major upgrade for the character of Jill Valentine (yes, that Jill quoted above) while also remaining one of the more intensely terrifying experiences I’ve had playing any game.

After 3 the series took a different tack and even though I played RE 4 and RE 5 I completely took a pass on RE 6 or any of the other seemingly innumerable spin-offs like Code: Veronica. They might have been good or at least enjoyable, but it wasn’t until this year when I finally fired up Resident Evil 7 that I got hooked back in.

Because holy shit is RE 7 impressive. And immersive. I may have to do a whole blog about it when I finish but so far the controls, the acting, everything is just amazing, particularly while wearing the new headphones Dawn bought me so I can hear the measured tread of the thing chasing my protagonist. It’s a completely different play style than the old games but the scares are there and the puzzles are worked in enough I can suspend my disbelief.

Now perhaps ironically, it’s so good that I started paying attention to the recent RE output again. I watched the demo for RE 8 and it was jaw-droppingly gorgeous (even when horrific), and noted there was a free demo for the Resident Evil 3 remake. I was vaguely aware they had done remakes of 2 and 3 but hadn’t been all that interested since they basically just looked like 4 with their over-the-shoulder viewpoints and such. Lo and behold though, after a few minutes of playing that demo I broke down and bought RE 2 and 3 both because there was a special sale of a “Raccoon City bundle.” I hate bad dialogue and pacing, but I’m an absolute sucker for the opposite and the remake was hitting my buttons. It was this lore and these stories revisited with the more mature pass (not just mature in terms of adding F-bombs) I always dreamed of.

So two things: one, RE 2 was hard for me to pull myself away from because I found it just that immersive. RE 3 I have to take breaks from because I’m once again finding it just that terrifying. You know it’s a good boss fight when it ends and you let out a breath you didn’t realize you were holding, and if there’s any regret it’s that sometimes I can’t stop to appreciate the apocalyptic scenery fully while running for my life.

I’ve heard people were unimpressed or even disappointed with these new iterations but I don’t get it. I suppose maybe if you paid $60 but then again that’s why I am the patient spider with my game purchases. There are no microtransactions and all the content and unlockables are included with the exception that you can buy some extra outfit options as DLCs. And there’s a try-before-you-buy demo, which is something that at some point fell out of style and I dearly wish every major game still had. The cynical side of me says that’s because the current AAA game industry model seems to be getting as many people as possible to buy or pre-buy a new game based on hype alone, which seems more often than not to lead to either buyer’s remorse or a sunk-cost denial of day 1 problems. There’s no guarantee that a playable demo couldn’t just represent some finished bit that works while the rest doesn’t but it’s at least something. A good one shows the company has some pride in their work and gives you your taste of what to expect, and it feels better than going in completely blind. That used to be how games were marketed, by presenting the public with the opportunity for informed decisions. I turned away from the original RE because of a demo, and then RE 2 got me back on board. Now, in a lot of cases it seems like companies market them by hiding as much as possible, and sometimes in intentionally malicious ways, to the point where Cyberpunk 2020 is getting CD Projekt Red sued not by angry consumers (or not just by angry consumers) but by their own investors.

But I digress. These remakes float my proverbial boat in a way I completely did not expect, evoking the nostalgia of the originals but being new experiences in their own right.

Oh, and like in Shadow of the Tomb Raider, you can choose whether to rapidly tap buttons during events or just hold them down. You didn’t get that choice in the old days, and my old bod again appreciates the option.

“Get back on topic!” said the handful of readers of this blog. Maybe.

So to assuage this no doubt nonexistent controversy, I’m going to mention a few zombie video games in development. One I’ve played a demo of, the others are just pure conjecture from trailers, etc.

I guess let’s start with the one I actually played, courtesy of a free demo period on Steam which at the time you read this will have ended the previous day. We are timely as ever! I did post about it on our ZR Facebook page over the weekend, so maybe some of you saw that. Anyhow:

The Last Stand: Aftermath

This one’s an interesting concept. Instead of guiding a single character or group of recruits through a zombie apocalypse scenario, you have “volunteers” that you control through the game world one at a time, sneaking through zed-infested neighborhoods seeking gas for your car and supplies for your compound. Oh also doses of anti-viral, since you’ve been infected by a new strain of virus and don’t have long to live. The anti-viral only temporarily slows the progress of the disease, so you’re basically doomed no matter what.

“You” is a temporary concept by design, though. The car you travel in, gas up, and (most importantly?) load supplies into has a beacon in it and will get recovered by the compound when you meet your untimely end, one way or another. Then the next day you pick from one of three new volunteers who have shown up back at home base and start off again. Same car, different fodder. Life is cheap I suppose, while working cars are not. The supplies your last run picked up can be used to help out the new guy (or gal) and hopefully they’ll get further along. It’s sort of similar to Hades except instead of being an immortal who keeps reincarnating when defeated, you’re guiding a never-ending(?) stream of different folks who know they’re going out but basically want to do some good for the tribe before they die.

I was a little muddled on the objective but I believe it’s to get beyond “The Wall” and then…? But it’s not like I got very far, only a few neighborhoods before I stirred up one too many zeds… when they get riled enough to start running after you it seems to be game over for that particular survivor, or at least I couldn’t find any way to get out of that. In fact I couldn’t even seem to traverse obstacles that I’d jumped over or through just a minute before and which I would have dearly loved to put between me and them. That and an unfortunate problem of not being able to see your character or zombies at times because of an imperfect isometric viewpoint is a frustrating bit because some of the other activities like sneaking and distraction and such are fairly intuitive and, dare I say, cool.

But since the game is still in pre-release there might be time to smooth out the kinks, so worth keeping an eye on, especially if you’re a fan of rogue-like (or “rogue-lite”) games. It definitely preserves the high body count a zombie movie often involves!

Posting about Control feels a bit like being one of those reviewers who had to give their thoughts on Wandavision based on the first three episodes they were provided by Marvel. It’s not presented in the trappings of a sitcom but I feel like there’s a similar thought that maybe the rug of my perceptions will be yanked out from under me as I continue playing, and that’s acknowledging that things have already gotten really effing weird.

On its surface Control is a third-person shooter experience with superpowers tossed in. You play as Jesse Faden, a drifter who as the game starts seems to have drifted her way into the lobby of the Federal Bureau of Control (name drop!) at your behest.

No, really. Jesse narrates to herself as she goes along but also has internalized discussions with someone and as far as I can tell, that someone is you the player. If it turns out not to be the player, well, that’s one of the possible rug pulls that has me intrigued (and possibly unsettled). The lobby of this government agency is deserted and Jesse has next to no idea why she’s there, but as you explore a bit you pass portraits of directors and such and… uh, why is there a portrait of a janitor on the wall next to those, his back turned from your gaze?

You’ll meet that very janitor shortly and he is as enigmatic as he is Scandinavian, and says you must be here for the job as his assistant. Perhaps surprisingly, Jesse agrees with this even though she makes clear it wasn’t why she came. She’s no stranger to grunt work.

But then Jesse meets the Director of the FBC. And then Jesse is the Director, and the portraits you passed a few minutes ago now have you in them complete with nice suit and nameplate.

Of course the building turns out to be in lockdown due to an invasive and hostile presence and you have to stop it, often by shooting things or blowing them up, and in fact the environment turns out to be delightfully responsive to destruction even before you get your first psychic superpower. Afterwards, holy crap does shit get torn up in satisfying manner and that is (forgive the phrasing) a blast.

But nested on top of that is a huge labyrinth of mindfuckery where reality warps unexpectedly and break rooms become portals to other planes of existence. Jesse navigates all this with a degree of aplomb, even hinting to you that all the weirdness is a relief to her after years of stressing out at the mundane world and what she always felt was a veneer of normalcy laid over… something. That said, she’s both Director and Janitor’s Assistant now and has cleaning up to do.

The most fascinating bit which I only realized after I’d purchased the game and started playing it is that not only is it developed by the same team that did Alan Wake and Max Payne but Control goes a step further and is actually set in the same shared universe as the former. The events of Alan Wake are not the only anomaly in the world and the FBC was founded to keep tabs on and address such things so that the general public could go about their lives with a minimum of possessed former people trying to murder them. There’s all sorts of missives and dossiers to find detailing these activities, although a lot of it is redacted (even to the Director?! hmph). Well maybe that’s because the former Director is still talking to you from beyond the grave. Not to mention there’s The Board, which doesn’t seem to be made up of people at all.

Anyhow, much like in Alan Wake there’s a lot to think about and be creeped out by in between the blasting and I very much appreciate that. And there’s Ahti the Janitor and yes I’ll spell that with a capital J because hoo boy is he ever something more than he seems — but he’s also a foulmouthed Finnish(?) custodian who keeps muttering idioms that I suppose might make more sense if you were Finnish as well. If you’re a conspiracy buff you’ll probably also be pleased by a lot of easter eggs regarding various lore along those lines like MK Ultra.

And then you blast more baddies with your mentally reconfiguring gun (which might have been Mjolnir or Excalibur in a previous life?) and use your telekinesis to slam an explosive cannister into some fool’s head and send him ragdolling across the room. It’s this strangely satisfying dichotomy of Ego and Id and I have been totally there for it.

The Ultimate Edition debuted this year and I got it on sale, natch. Been well worth the pricetag for me even if the bottom drops out before the end, but when all was said and done they stuck the landing with Alan Wake so I have similar hopes here that when the answers to the questions start coming, they will at very least be tantalizing rather than disappointing.

In the meantime, pew pew. Boom.

I’ve been a fan of the Tomb Raider franchise since all the way back to Lara Croft’s first debut in 1996. And not just because of the tiddies. I mean honestly, the way things started it’s kind of amazing to think there was ever a controversy over what was basically a triangular wedge. Mind you the marketing did skew heavily towards sex appeal and there were rumors of a “nude code” but…

I digress. After several sequels the series rebooted itself in 2013 as a prequel, featuring a younger and far less confident Lara as she took her first steps towards becoming the badass adventurer originally presented. Lara Begins, if you will. The sexuality was also dialed back quite a bit unless you have a thing for torture porn — which hopefully neither you nor the developers do, but I can’t deny there was a lot of wading through gore and dealing with graphic injuries. Someone watched The Descent.

Fortunately by the end of the 2013 game Lara seemed to have found her footing and become the badass. Unfortunately, the follow up seemed to reset all that and put her back in mopey, bumbling noob mode, which was also weird because now you’re doing all the badass things and stealth-or-not-so-stealth killing dudes by the dozens like a pint-sized (Frank Miller) Batman.

Now at some point it was clarified(?) that these reboot prequels would be a trilogy and at the end of the trilogy Lara would at last be her classic self again. So okay, 2018 comes along and the last in the series debuts with Shadow of the Tomb Raider.

And, alas, the scuttlebutt comes down the pipe that we’re still dealing with noobLara, wracked with guilt and parental issues — again in between murdering a lot of folks and animals — and that by the end that arc still isn’t really resolved. So I wasn’t especially motivated to want it at the time, but two years later the Definitive Edition was on sale and no matter how much I’m bitching about certain things the series does draw me back because I’m an exploration junkie and the games still do preserve the core of Tomb Raider that I liked in terms of exotic vistas and spelunking Lara’s way through ancient temples, puzzles and traps. SotTR absolutely delivers on that score and I find it immensely satisfying even if Lara’s introspection and dialogues still occasionally feel frustratingly lacking in confidence compared to her actions.

One other thing that stood out to me was how petite this version of Lara is, and I’m not sure I got that from even the previous installments of the prequels. Lara is very smol, as the kiddies would say — standing amongst a group of mercenaries that capture her near the start she looks almost like a child. As you play though I suppose I’d say this is considered more feature than bug, as there are a lot of small cracks Lara squeezes through that would have trapped or stymied someone of larger stature. If you are at all claustrophobic, this game may be very anxiety-inducing, especially the parts where you’re underwater. And even if this Lara probably isn’t any more than 5’2″ or so, she’s still a rabid little wolverine in combat that can wrestle jaguars and take down grown men twice her weight class.

I haven’t finished the game yet so maybe there’s still time to see her get back to that confident, quippy globetrotter introduced in 1996, but I’m keeping my expectations low and just enjoying the ride. Like I said, it’s definitely scratching my exploration itch especially in this time of pandemic where I rarely even get out of the house.

I should also give some special mention that even if the character’s evolution might be lagging, the controls are as good as they’ve ever been even with some new moves added. It’s all very intuitive, and I am extremely appreciative to whichever dev recognized that 1996 was 25(!) years ago and some of us aren’t as spry as we used to be. There are skill upgrades allowing for more reaction time and even some comfort settings in the game menus now allowing for options like just holding a button/key down rather than having to tap it rapidly, and my fingers and wrists are thankful for this and hope to see more games following suit in the future. Another feature I hadn’t seen before is that when you’re playing around with your graphics settings you can run a “benchmark” which basically goes through three separate rendered scenes to show you a preview of your detail vs. your framerate — and as someone who likes things as pretty as possible (but not so much that the game gets unplayable) it was wonderful to be able to tweak the dials to my liking before even starting the show.

Sometimes a good trailer is all it takes to make me buy a game.

No, that’s not true. But it helps. If a game floats across my Steam feed (whose algorithms might be getting scarily accurate at showing me things I might like) and the trailer intrigues, I’ll stick it on my wishlist which basically bookmarks it for later consideration. Greedfall was one of those and I can’t remember if it was this trailer specifically which caught my attention but it’s close enough:

Like many trailers this one has the fault of not bothering to show any actual gameplay but the concept alone got points. It looked like a fantasy RPG set not in the usual faux-Medieval or Early Renaissance period but instead the Colonial era of the 17th and 18th Centuries, complete with a “New World” being encroached upon by the Old.

Focus Interactive is the publisher and while I can’t say all their stuff has been hits with me they’re an indie studio that at least doesn’t leave the bad corporate taste in my mouth that a soulless megalith like EA does. Anyhow when Black Friday rolled around a sale came up and I decided to take the plunge, though foregoing my usual hours-long character customization process for RPGs so I could get in and make sure nothing was a deal breaker before my two hours of active play were up and I couldn’t refund the purchase.

So anyhow, the EA comparison is relevant for more than my disgruntlement with the modern AAA gaming industry. Or I should say, more relevant than I expected.

Greedfall is a Bioware RPG in the classic sense. Meaning before EA bought out Bioware and gutted it into a corpse wearing a label it no longer deserves to brandish. Yes, I have opinions. I will not go into them right now. Just suffice it to say that Greedfall’s gameplay reminded me so much of the first Mass Effect that I was shocked to discover it doesn’t appear anyone on the dev team is a Bioware expat. In fact, the game was made in France, by spiders.

No, really.

But seriously, it feels so much like Mass Effect and other Bioware offerings of their golden age, right down to the way your character reverses direction while running. Companions, dialogue choices, reputations, interactions, combat… and while I haven’t played through enough yet to find out if it’s got one of those big twists Bioware was famous for back in the day, the story is maturely presented and interesting in its complexity. Meanwhile the world is delivered pretty much as promised, and thankfully isn’t just a matter of “greedy invaders versus virtuous natives” (or vice-versa as it might have been in an earlier era). Bioware always liked having some grey areas even in a morally bipolar setting like Star Wars, and the Spiders revel in the moral murkiness of their original setting. There is a New World and there are natives and there are three main nations of the Old World each laying claim to a part, and you happen to be a highly important diplomat of the most neutral of them, a merchant kingdom who is trying to negotiate a place for your interests between the natives, the religious nation, and the science nation. Also there’s a terrible plague devastating your homeland and you’re hoping to find a cure.

You can choose to be male or female and customize your looks to an extent, including being non-white if you so wish (your name will always be De Sardet however, much like a former protagonist was always Shepherd). There are debates to be had on how white and male history truly was but the world of Greedfall establishes early on that it is most definitely not Earth, neatly sidestepping any such conversations. That said, the religious nation definitely has Catholic trappings and a Spanish flair to its style while the science nation is very Ottoman. The natives near as I can tell are somewhere between Amerindian and Pictish/Celtic in their inspirations, with a rather unplaceable accent that sounds like someone who isn’t Irish trying to sound like what they think an Irish person sounds like. As you might expect the natives have a druidic nature magic going, but the church folks have their own divine magic and the scientists have guns and alchemical mixtures for days. The New World (which is more of a large island, really) is definitely going for a temperate feel rather than Caribbean and you’ll be journeying through some lovely Autumnal forests and other tableaus of primeval North America on your quests, though no one seems to want to talk much about the active volcano at its heart.

It’s not on sale at the moment so the price tag on Steam is back up to $49.99 and I wouldn’t necessarily gush and say to pay it, unless you really pine for the good old days of Bioware past and want to support an indie title which really does have a surprising amount of polish to it. And even if the Spiders aren’t actually Bioware, they sure do seem like Bioware’s biggest fans in a way that so far I can only praise.

Given the current subject of the comic it would be timely to discuss the underlying assumptions of human currency, but I’m going to save that for another time. I said last week I wanted to just talk games for awhile and I’m sticking to my guns, dad gummit. So skip on through if vidja games bore ya.

The Outer Worlds is the one I talked about a bit last week so we’ll start there. TOW is basically “What if Fallout and Borderlands had a baby?”

I should specify here I do mean the 3D Fallout games, not the isometric originals. However, there is one feature the TOW developers brought back from the very first two Fallout games that Bethesda chucked when they got hold of the franchise. Allow me to post the meme I stopped in the middle of character creation to make, because I was just that giddy…

Yes, in the Ur-Fallout games if you created a character below a certain threshold of smarts you were treated to custom dialog choices and reactions befitting someone a few knives short of a drawer. It’s very possible Bethesda decided not to continue that out of fear of causing offense. It’s also very possible my friends and I are terrible people because we found them hilarious and missed the option in its absence. I suppose now I feel equal parts guilty and giddy. Guiliddy?

Anyhow, it’s not an accident the folks behind TOW included Fallout alumni who perhaps were more than ready to do a very Fallout style game out from under Bethesda’s thumb, even if they had to create a whole new setting to do so. What we end up with is basically a colonial space Western crossed with a nightmarish depiction of late-stage capitalism where mega-corporations control (nearly) everything and everyone. If that sounds a bit like Borderlands, now you’re getting why I said what I did at the beginning. The art style as well feels somewhere between the two franchises, and (surprisingly) TOW is an RPG which goes the Borderlands route of having no third-person view while playing. This is one disappointment for me because the character creator has a heck of a lot of facial customization options and the models look great, but in-game the only time you get to see your character are during a 360 degree idle pan that you can’t adjust or on your inventory screen, which you can’t angle or zoom.

It’s possible they did this because your character doesn’t talk out loud so there’s no reason to have the camera on them during dialogue. That does let the dialogue be a lot freer and more expansive on the player’s end because there’s no audio needed, and I’ll tell you it’s another bit that reminded me of earlier Fallout games where the camera would just center on the person you were talking to. Borderlands again for the first-person only view and a lot of the aesthetic, though you don’t always have to shoot your way through. In fact this time around your dialog skills can even have an effect on combat should talking not be an option, causing enemies to cower before your impressive presence, for example.

Anyhow, if you’re a fan of old-school Fallout pick up TOW when you get a chance. I’ve heard some complaints that it’s short and also no companion romance options, and so far no real modding support. That last is possibly the biggest reason to wait for it to be on sale like I did, just in case you feel like more bang was needed for your buck. But from what I’ve heard this first installment was extremely successful, so here’s hoping the next will be bigger and better, while remaining micro-transaction free.

So here I am back at the ol’ tiller, figuratively speaking. It feels like we got a headstart on the mess that was 2020 since at least half of our 2019 was a mess, but at this point I’m going to be very cautious about hoping 2021 will be better.

Computer gaming has been big for me in terms of weathering these storms with sanity intact. I mean that’s been the case nearly all my life ever since I was but a wee tyke playing Combat on my Atari 2600, but now with the conventions on shutdown and restaurants closed, etc. etc., it’s been nice to have a library of virtual escapism at my fingertips. Admittedly, I’ve been working my day job remotely since last March and mostly now tell the difference between a day on duty and a day off duty by how many windows I have open, and sometimes the workday ends and I’m in a haze for awhile or needing to take a nap while my brain sorts itself into leisure mode.

Toys are still good, though. New toys especially. For instance I was finally able to pick up The Outer Worlds as part of the Winter Steam Sale. I’ve waited awhile for TOW because it first debuted exclusively through the Epic game store and regardless of any business shenanigans going on there I just don’t need another launcher on my computer. Also it’s fine because it’s been a long time since I felt any need to buy games at launch, much less pre-order. The industry model of “release first, fix later” is rampant (the recent Cyberpunk 2020 blow-ups being an example) and if I have to wait a year or so for the kinks to be worked out, so be it. Beyond that I get three more benefits:

1. The price tends to have come down
2. There are often DLCs that have now been bundled into some Ultimate or Game of the Year edition.
3. If it sucks, remains unfixed, or isn’t what I expected, the reviews and Let’s Plays will have long been in the wind.

Out of all these the price is still the big one, I suppose, since in addition to any natural price decreases I tend to hold out for sales — although the more independent the studio and the better the effort seems to be, the more likely I am to pay closer to full price or even full price for a game. It doesn’t hurt that most indie games have a lower price tag to begin with.

But anyhow, all this is besides the point I suppose, and the point is that I now have TOW and some other new toys to play with, and I think at least for the start of 2021 I’d like to talk about my toys, even if their subjects aren’t really related to Zombie Ranch. It’s soothing. It also will prevent me from stressing about what to write. So we’ll do that starting next week, probably. Or you can skip. Whichever stresses you least. Heaven knows we all could use a little relief.