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Fi's Fictional Christmas Wishes Part 4: Gadgets

12/21/2013

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(For more fictional Christmas wishes, check out Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3, and the list of the same topic on Matt's blog)

I got fashion, Matt gets gadgets. Not that I wouldn’t love to find these toys under the tree…

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Videogame health pack (or several gross thereof)

It doesn’t matter which game, as long as it’s one of the many with health packs that will heal anything completely and instantly (no Amazon Trail first aid kits, please). The only problem is the uncomfortably weighty question of when to use them, since hopefully I won’t have critical plasma burns too often in my life. If they’re not the kind that vanish if you don’t use them fast enough, please bring me enough to keep me writing until I’m eighty with a few to blow on skipping the odd Christmas flu!

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Pensieve

Harry may not understand what Dumbledore’s talking about when he describes having too many thoughts in his head all at once, but what writer doesn’t? A pensieve (and the necessary magical ability to move memories around) allows you to store distracting thoughts and memories for later. I might not use it much for that; the idea of being cut off from any information worries me a little whatever the benefits might be, but the pensieve also allows you to look at those thoughts and memories from a fresh, third person perspective. In other words, I could beta read for myself! Oh, uh, and gain insights about my life too, I guess.

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Batman cowl with detective vision

This was a tossup between fashion and gadgets, but here it is. Not that the Batman cowl isn’t inherently awesome-looking, but the Arkham videogame version is all about the gadgetry. In fact, if I could get it in the form of sunglasses for everyday use, that would be even better. Detective vision isn’t just infrared and X-ray, it highlights exits, weapons, electronics, and, most importantly, plot points. Most of the time, anyway. In my Marge Simpson-esque lameness, I can’t help looking at that technology and imagining myself standing in the kitchen, wondering how to open a novelty box of cookies or where I dropped that steak knife and whipping this on to find out and move forward with my objective.

Agree? Disagree? Comments are always welcome! Or keep up with my fictional musings by joining me on Facebook, on Twitter, or by signing up for email updates in the panel on the right!

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Fi's Five Least Envied Fictional Jobs #5: Strategy Game Scout Unit

11/5/2013

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As some readers who keep up with me on Facebook or Twitter may already know, I’m currently in the process of looking for a new day job, thanks to my current job of nitpicking paperwork and yelling at salespeople being phased out at the end of the year.

As even more of you certainly already know, job hunting is no easy task, for anyone, much less someone who fears customers like the zombies they so resemble in the mornings and whose soul belongs irrevocably to this mad endeavor of fiction and to her partner therein.

The search for a suitable nine-to-five desk chair where I can daydream while putting my obsessive-compulsive tendencies to bread-winning use naturally has me reading a lot of varyingly ominous job ads at the moment. Optimists that we are, Matt and I have decided to cheer ourselves up this Thanksgiving month with lists of the five fictional jobs whose ads we’re most thankful that I won’t have to answer.


You can read his list as it unfolds on his blog here.


At number five on my list, Strategy Game Scout Unit.

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Wanted: Scout

Must be able to run at a minimum of 20 mph and be comfortable working independently and WITHOUT showboating. 20/10 vision required!

This is a full-time position with significant mandatory overtime. Paid travel and tasteful funeral provided. Sorry, no weapons permitted.

Okay, strategy games don’t look like a whole lot of fun for anyone other than the players. At best, depending on the style of game, the other characters get to be contented boring citizens who occasionally complain about little things like poor farmland, low educational standards, and encroaching barbarian hordes. But of all the common types of units, Scouts have to have it the worst.

Sure, everyone’s fair game for suicide missions in strategy games, but Scouts are specifically designed to, well, scout, in universes where the knowledge of all units is instantly transmitted to the player in the sky. Coming back alive to share the acquired information is in no way necessary to a Scout unit’s job.

Now, let’s say they don’t mind that part. Let’s pretend all the characters in strategy games live in a Klingon-esque world, eager and excited to fight and die for the empire. It’s certainly a lot more fun to play that way. Even then, the Scouts still have the worst job, the one that doesn’t actually involve any fighting. That’s not what they’re supposed to be good at. In many games they can’t do it at all.

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Not intimidating.
If Scouts survive long enough to see their civilizations attack the ones they’ve been spying on, it’ll be through a combination of luck and well-timed running away. And when the real fighting begins, surviving Scouts are left behind, useless and obsolete.
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Who else is starting to feel sorry for 343 pixels?

Agree? Disagree? Comments are always welcome! Or keep up with my fictional musings by joining me on Facebook, on Twitter, or by signing up for email updates in the panel on the right!

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Event Review: The Great Horror Campout

6/10/2013

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Event Review:

The Great Horror Campout

B-

The Basics:

An overnight interactive horror experience featuring a scavenger hunt, several different theme zones and small horror mazes, dinner and breakfast, tent hopping monsters, and frequent kidnappings.

The Upside:

The actors were enthusiastic and professional, there were some intricate sets, and the costumes were fantastic. The whole concept of an overnight horror camping experience is unexplored territory, and the competitive angle of the scavenger hunt and the constant presence of the monsters in every part of the event make for a very different psychological experience from the typical Halloween haunt. And, of course, being in June, it caters to Halloween-all-year types like Matt and me and avoids a lot of potential weather problems.

There were some great moments that had the feel of a living videogame. One maze required sneaking past a pack of Chupacabras by freezing whenever they turned to look (I was seen once, bagged, and dropped in another part of the maze for my group to find). Matt jumped into a windowless van that was roaming the campsite promising free candy, had the door slammed behind him, and escaped a few laps of the tents later with a Werther’s Original and a missing child poster, two prizes that really, really should have had a higher point value. While trying to rescue him, I avoided being thrown in the trunk of a car by a clown for the sole reason that the trunk was full at the time. Those were some very notable highlights, as well as some sentences one never expects to type.

The Downside:

The planning level of the event and the newness of the concept allowed for some pretty major logistical issues. The idea of combining a scavenger hunt with Halloween mazes sounds awesome in principle, but in practice, having large groups of people scouring every set and crawlspace of a maze instead of running from the monsters only causes massive congestion and a pervasive feeling of paranoid boredom, appropriate for standing in line for a maze, not for being inside one.

For every game moment that worked well, there were several that didn’t. The scavenger hunt items were rarely restocked, and it would have been impossible to be among the first to reach everything with all the traffic flow problems, so it became clear very early, even to those with excessive competitive spirit, like Matt and me, that the game was effectively unwinnable, taking a lot of the fun out of the levels. There’s a lot less satisfaction in reaching into the goopy chest of a fresh Bigfoot kill knowing that all the precious ribs will already gone.


One area required guests to smear their skin with blood to mask their scent in order to get close enough to a bug’s nest to reach in to find a grub. The more blood, the better the chance of a find, we were told. The woman in line in front of us jumped in the blood vat and soaked herself, to no avail. Zombie dancers in another area asked for volunteers to be locked in coffins, one of the scariest-looking challenges, but in spite of what the clue promised, there was nothing to be gained or solved or accomplished. People just ended up having to buy their way back out with items they’d already found.

There were some random announcements where people got pulled out of mazes (without any interesting theatrical fanfare) for pointless wristband color changes. The event really ran out of steam at 2, when the hunt ended,  and the task of surviving until morning through the monster visits (which also sounded awesome on paper) became more of an obligation than a challenge, with nothing left to look forwa.

Then there were the more mundane issues like the tents being quite small for four people (and misnumbered at the beginning of the night), and the authentic special appearance by the LAPD at around 3am due to the easily anticipated noise complaints from the houses across the street from the very urban campground location.

It was a fun, memorable time overall, and I’m glad to have gone and proud to support innovative horror thinking, but without some major refinements, I probably wouldn’t pay another $150 a head to go again.

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Fi's Five Favorite Underrated Twist Endings #2: Wreck-It Ralph

5/23/2013

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Of course,

****Spoiler Alert****

This one’s not on any lists of classics for the simple, obvious reason that it’s too recent, but what praise it has received focuses mainly on its cuteness and its reverence for the videogame culture it draws on, not its beautifully executed twist. Here’s how it goes:

Ralph is an arcade game villain who wants to prove to the other characters that he can be something more. Such aspirations are frowned upon, ever since two early racing games were destroyed when the hero of the older one, Turbo, abandoned it and tried to take over the newer one. “Going Turbo,” has even become slang in Ralph’s arcade community for endangering a game by deviating from the assigned roles.

Ralph’s quest forces him to team up with Vanellope,

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A glitchy, accidental extra character in the new candy go-cart game, Sugar Rush, who wants to win the secret, characters-only round that determines the next day’s list of available avatars, so she can become a full character in the game.

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King Candy, ruler of Sugar Rush, is against giving her this chance and offers the seemingly reasonable explanation that if people are given the chance to play with a glitchy character, they’ll think the game itself is broken and have it shut down, but Ralph discovers that King Candy has already made alterations to the game, and he’s really afraid that if she competes, she’ll reset everything to normal.

The race is on, King Candy does everything he can to stop Ralph and Vanellope, and in the struggle, he glitches up as well and reverts into Turbo,
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Who was not killed along with the two racing games he altered, as everyone assumed, but continued on to alter and take over the newest one, Sugar Rush, by partially deleting the original ruler, Princess Vanellope.
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It’s another one of those perfect “I should have known!” endings with just the right number of clues (including Ralph’s in-passing joke about how overpoweringly pink the castle is), but it still comes as a shock, because it’s not the sort of movie that even needs a big twist.

The climactic sequence already has Ralph’s 2D fix-it game, the candy-themed racing game, and a nearby humans vs. aliens first person shooter colliding with all the awesomeness that combination demands, plus the Disney heartstring-tugging of Vanellope chasing the hell out of her dreams and Ralph making peace with who he is, AND one of the great Disney villain deaths involving man-eating insects, Mentos, and whole lot of Diet Coke.

Getting to see the mysterious pieces fit together is icing on the fresh baked racing cart.

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Top Five Characters that MUST Be Released as Injustice: Gods Among Us DLC (According to Fi)

4/23/2013

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Don't get me wrong, this is a great game.
I think the creators did a great job picking characters, balancing heroes and villains and affiliations with particular heroes’ separate titles, and combating the numbers imbalance between cool male and female supers as well as possible.

I must also acknowledge that I very nearly made this a top ten list because there are so many great characters left to choose from. It’s really hard to narrow it down. Nevertheless, here are the five I’m most ardently hoping to be able to play with in the near future:

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Martian Manhunter

This guy feels like the most serious oversight, being a founding member of the Justice League, and there’s so much that could be done with him in a fighting game! You can practically pick a superpower out of a hat (other than being fireproof), and he’s got it.

My suggestion for his character ability: Becoming temporarily intangible.


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Mr. Mxyzptlk

He’s an odd choice, given the game format, but that’s exactly why I want him! He’d be the most distinct, easily, his main powers being a colorful sense of humor and godlike control of reality! Can you imagine the surrealist charge-up attack sequence he’d have?

My suggestion for his character ability: Turning his opponent temporarily into a large, green, defenseless bunny.

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Poison Ivy

I understand her absence. I do. It’s unfortunate that most of the best female DC characters are Batman villains, and only so many of those could fit. With Catwoman and Harley Quinn (neither of whom I’d want to give up), there really wasn’t room for her. But as soon as expansions do allow for more Batman villains, she has to be first in line. She’s an A-lister with colorful, distinct gimmick. She can grow thorn bushes under opponents like Killer Frost’s ice spikes.

My suggestion for her character ability: Hmm, I’m going to have to go with the mentally paralyzing lipstick kiss, but I’m so tempted by throwing someone into a giant pitcher plant. That can be her charge-up attack.

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Parasite

His name tells you all you need to know about his powers, and are they not perfect for a fighting game? His throw could siphon part of the opponent’s life bar onto his own.

My suggestion for his character ability: Mirror the opponent’s last used special ability.

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Black Canary

In the mixed-title, Justice League style game world, she’s right at home, and she’s a martial artist with one particular offensive ability, a lethally powerful sonic scream. It’s like she was designed to be a fighting game character.

My suggestion for her character ability:
Uh, do I have to spell it out?

So what say you? What absolutely necessary characters do you think are most unjustly missing from this painfully short list?

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