President Simulator 2k15

Hey there, folks! As I try and kick my creativity back into gear, I’ve been thinking about exploring writing in other media. Luckily, I recently got a chance to put my dormant skills to the test by writing a video game for a game jam!

President Simulator 2k15 is a collaboration between @skeletim and me. We wanted to get at least one game under our belts at some point, and a game jam on itch.io—the No-Brainer IF Jam—felt like a great excuse to finally work together in a new medium for both of us.

I think everything came together swell. I wrote and did the art, Tim had the idea and the editor’s eye, and we both coded, learning as we went. Please give it a try! It’s playable in-browser on itch.io, here, or you can click through the widget below. And if you have, thanks for playing!

“Exoortium,” August 8, 2011

A Deadshirt Webcomics Guide to: Alexander Swenson’s Bonne Fête Job Dog

Successful webcomics seem to be long-running and expansive by definition. The most revered narrative webcomics stay eternally fresh by rotating through an ever-increasing cast of characters and taking us on new adventures at the edge of a meticulously defined world, filling out yet more of the setting we love. Seeing a story unfold as it is drawn page-by-page and seeing the evolution of technique across years of storytelling are some of the greatest things that webcomics have given us as an emerging form. Much praise is heaped upon these titles—and rightfully so—but celebration of the succinct or the complete seems conspicuously absent from popular discourse.

Short stories seem to come and go in a relative blink when set alongside the towering archives of the great webcomic monoliths. Completed stories fade from view as the ones around them just keep going. As such, I’d like to bring attention to a webcomic that is both short (100+ pages in two years) and complete—one that deserves much more love and recognition—because while webcomics have cultivated a set of unique qualities that make the form truly special, there should still be space to discuss and love the webcomics that are merely comics on the web.

(Read more on Deadshirt)

Grim Fandango Remastered: New Unlife for an Old Classic [Review]

When Grim Fandango was originally released in 1998, it was met with critical acclaim but poor sales. Trends in gaming were changing, and players were looking for more graphics-intensive titles with the novelty of Internet multiplayer. The age of the first-person shooter had begun and adventure games were on the wane. LucasArts, the monolith of adventure game developers, decided to cancel further development of adventure games, and let go most of their dev teams in the years that followed. For a while there, it seemed like Grim Fandango would be the last great adventure game ever made. When new games pushed it off the shelves, it basically became lost to time—out of print and held by a company uninterested in reviving it.

Fast forward to a little over a decade later, and adventure games are thankfully back on the up and up. LucasArts veterans at Telltale Games have achieved a noteworthy level of commercial and critical success with The Walking Deadgames. Video game auteur and Grim Fandango creator Tim Schafer is finally revisiting the point-and-click adventure after his 2000 split with LucasArts; the Broken Age series is being developed at his own Double Fine Productions. With this new resurgence in mainstream popularity, the adventure game genre looks like it is finally here to stay. Good news for new games—great news for old ones and the people who remember them.

Now, with a new deal between the newly Disney-acquired LucasArts, Sony, and Double Fine, Grim Fandango is finally seeing the light of day again, by the hands of its original authors. While the adventure games of today have evolved inGrim’s absence, many of them are still indebted to Fandago’s artistic success. It’s about time we got the chance to revisit it. The remastered edition is a loving look back to an era when adventure games were not merely a thing, but the thing.

(Read more on Deadshirt)

Gave a gift of some Netrunner promos to a couple of friends of mine for a late Christmas gift. I made sure to present the whole thing in a package worthy of a corporate terrorist/computer security specialist. I was especially proud that they actually needed a Phillips head screwdriver on hand to open it.

LISA: Weird End of the World [Review]

Pop culture has an obsession with being “edgy,” whether it be through grittiness, hyperviolence, or manipulative melodrama. “Edgy,” as a term for describing somehow-exciting and somehow-different new art, has seemingly been drained of any positive connotations. It has become a word that’s to be used exclusively with a sarcastic tone, mocking the tryhards that would use it unironically to describe their supposedly daring and incisive new thing.

So what is LISA? A game with the unofficial subtitle of “The Painful RPG,” that touts a post-apocalyptic setting defined by amorality and violence, that features amputation and drug addiction as game mechanics—it’s edgy, certainly. But LISA is an effective reminder that “edgy” doesn’t always have to be said with an eyeroll and a scoff. Developer Dingaling has put in the effort to present a game that varies wildly in tone and charms, that does all it can to dodge the fatal one-note nature of so many other games that have tried and failed to claim edginess. LISA is a Venn diagram of “disturbing” and “silly” with a surprising amount of overlap, making its tangents purely into either side all the more effective.

(Read more on Deadshirt / rate this review on Steam)

Inherent Vice: One Stuffy Joint [Review]

Shrouded by a marijuana haze, a stoner chuckles at something and so do you. This is the prevailing feeling of Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest, Inherent Vice, a stoner noir based on the Thomas Pynchon novel of the same name. Its pleasures are cotton candy fluff—ephemeral bits of oddness that catch you off guard, like the sudden changes of subject that make conversation with the affably high so appealing. If you are a fan of the limited coherence that comes with altered mental states, here is a movie that may tickle you.

However, the fleeting nature of such things is just as much a mark against the movie as it is the reason it’s worth watching. Nothing ever lingers, so once it’s over, you’re left with the vague memory that Vice was something you enjoyed, but without the ability to recall any specific details. That right there is probably the biggest strike against Vice and its two-and-a-half hour runtime: momentum constantly dissipates as soon as you’re ready for it to set in, and by the end of the story you’re left feeling pretty OK but otherwise unfazed. Since every scene feels like it begins in medias res after a particularly lengthy toke, perhaps this slippery quality is simply an indication that the movie is flawed by design. As such,Inherent Vice is a decent movie with a huge margin of error for how much you’ll enjoy it. My guess for most folks is “moderately.”

(Read more on Deadshirt)

Rage of Bahamut: Genesis: Badass Fantasy Mural Chic [Review]

In 2007, the people behind the cheapo freeware game Elf Bowling got a movie made about their game. After a few years of tricking people into paying to play their game on handheld consoles, Elf Bowling the Movie: The Great North Pole Elf Strike was released to absolutely no fanfare.

Nowadays, the free Flash games of the past have been succeeded by the “free,” microtransaction-laden mobile games of today, and they are making money hand over fist. Granted, the most successful mobile gaming titles are a lot better than Elf Bowling, but you can probably see where I’m going with this. Considering the low overhead involved with the creation and maintenance of these games, their companies are basically making infinite money, too much money to simply throw back into the game. This is the type of money that doubles itself if you’re lucky. All you’ve gotta do is push out the right kind of schlock. Game of War: Fire Age just threw a portion of their reported $40 million ad budget into hiring Kate Upton to be the face of their game, and their ads. The Angry Birds movie is happening in May 2016.

Rage of Bahamut is a mobile game. In fact, it’s a collectible trading card game. Some of the most memorably bad, glorified advertisements we know come from Japan, and it is easy to imagine what Rage of Bahamut: Genesis, the game’s anime adaptation, might be: a slog of cheap animation, saccharine kids’ show morals, and questionably cool collectibles. But instead of being the next Yu-gi-oh! or Beyblade, Genesis is the first example I can recall of an advertisement in name only. The final product is a rollicking action-adventure fantasy of stellar production values with nary a trading card in sight. It sets a high bar for other mobile game developers to spend their money right, while also offering a show with the freshest appeal this season.

(Read more on Deadshirt)

The Interview: Freedom of Unfunny Speech [Review]

Every now and then, there comes along a movie that changes everything. These are typically known among scholars of cinema as “good” movies, or “interesting” movies, at the very least. Before ever being released in theaters, The Interview had sparked a new(!) conversation on free speech and censorship that certainly seemed to herald a great game-changer of a movie (starring James Franco and Seth Rogen, sure, but I will admit for all of us that we were more optimistic than usual). Everything about the movie’s road to release is now an important part of film history, from the Sony hack to the presidential reprimand that led to the movie’s sooner-than-anyone-expected digital distribution. We seem destined to talk about The Interview for a long while yet. Too bad, then, that it’s a boring piece of garbage.

At this point, we must set aside the political and cultural importance surrounding the movie’s existence. While this offscreen, meta-appeal of The Interview is all very neat, these conversations are already happening, and they are happening elsewhere. My goal here is to analyze this subpar comedy, which we have been forever cursed to remember, for what it is, and why we weren’t blessed with something much better instead.

(Read more on Deadshirt)

The Yawhg [Review]

Damian Sommer and Emily Carroll’s The Yawhg is easily the most beautiful piece of choose-your-own-adventure fiction ever published. Carroll’s indie comics superstardom is immensely deserved and her work here depicts a wonderfully colorful world with a sensitive fairy tale look, defined not only by the setting, but by the flourish of the visual interface and of her distinctive hand lettering. Sommer and Carroll’s writing is whimsical, amusing, and mysterious, all in good measure. Ryan Roth’s shifting soundtrack feels perfectly of this world without being overbearing. As a production, The Yawhg is an aesthetic triumph.

As a game, its success is tempered. The Yawhg tells a story that would have benefitted from more prose. Completing one cycle in the coming and going of the apocalyptic Yawhg event takes only a few minutes. The random events are interesting but never deep, always dropping a choice in your lap before you know it. Every encounter is succinct to a fault, eschewing any sort of satisfying narrative exploration for an exceedingly quick presentation. Some choices and events will affect future encounters for other members of your party in different areas of the world, which is quite impressive. Still, the number of possible events is not astoundingly numerous, and given the short length of each “run,” events may repeat themselves as early as the second playthrough, before they’ve even vacated your short-term memory.

Playing the game with other people does somewhat alleviate the problems I’ve mentioned. It’s a joy to actually play a choose-your-own-adventure that actually allows for multiple people. Seeing the consequences of certain events weave between characters controlled by different people leads to some wonderful reactions. Chatter will do a lot to lengthen each go-around. As a social game, it’s quite nice. However, hosting or attending the right party that wants to kill an hour playing something like The Yawhg is an uncommon occurrence at best. And when it comes down to it, I prefer to immerse myself in the twists and turns of a good narrative and the beauty of great visuals all by my lonesome.

For me, the pleasures of The Yawhg are few – too few for me to heartily recommend. It is not a bad game, but it is a game that caters to a group of people who often play games and experience art together. It’s just not a game for someone like me.

(Read this review on Steam)

Well, it's Christmas time and I just had to share some pictures of the best gifts I got myself this year because I'm a big ol' anime nerd. Got a whole lot of used Madoka Magica figmas on eBay for an insane deal about a month ago! The show is brilliant and its conceptual freshness and thematic consistency have made its characters some of my favorites ever. Their wonderful magical girl costume designs don't hurt either!

Vassar College aims to provide the historically completely white experience of higher education to a student body that is merely predominantly white. When I was still entranced by the mirrored sheen on the inside of the Vassar bubble, I could still believe that these truths about demographic breakdowns were but cynical ones – accurate but irrelevant realities – that could be reasonably ignored in our more-universal-and-enlightened-than-not four-year stay in the ivory tower.

I was a fucking idiot. At some point in my life, I actually thought that learning about race and institutional violence in class must have guaranteed a campus-wide self-awareness that would prevent such things from taking hold there. And since I had purposefully aimed for the erasure of my Asian ethnicity and since I had been comfortable around white people all my life (things I would only learn how to admit later), my naiveté was supported by a college experience rife with blind spots.

Two years later, I understand that there are American experiences almost alien to me that are very real and necessary to acknowledge. I carry a cultural bubble from Vassar but the days of me reeling at any challenge to it are long over. I know that I have much to learn.

Now has been the first time in my life when I have been aware of a contemporary national discussion of race. I know people who say without pretension but with learned fear that they saw themselves in every black victim in Ferguson. How else can I possibly respond to that but by listening? Today, Kiese Laymon, a black professor of English at Vassar, has spoken up about race and its white complications at my school – things I never saw back then because I was ignorant. I would rather learn how to be honest about my past for the sake of others than nostalgic for my own.

The student body of Vassar College has a makeup that reveals few freckles. I suppose that I am one of those freckles but I had and still have the privilege of appearing white to others and myself. For many others, that privilege is a fantasy, separate from a world that constantly reminds them of who they are in a very specific way. Thanks to Professor Laymon for connecting that to a place I found so familiar and jarring one of the more entrenched ideas in my worldview in the process. I hope he continues to teach for a great, long time.

Parasyte: A Boy and His Thing

When we finally meet a sentient alien species, will it be on our terms? Will we be alike? Or will we be so different as to find the very idea of each other grotesque? Perhaps the most important part of this question is whether we will be the ones finding them, or if they, whoever they are, will be the ones to find us.

Parasyte is another version of the story told by Invasion of the Body Snatchers or The Thing: that when extraterrestrial life finds us first, it will quietly usurp our position at the top of the food chain and every other biological throne that we take for granted … all without us ever knowing.

(Read more on Deadshirt)

I love superb visual design in games of any sort. If a game just looks good, I'll at least give it a try. Even if the game itself isn't that good, creative images can do a lot to make up for that.

I'm not a big fan of Clue (or Cluedo if you're not from the States), but this old set that my friend dug up is so eye-catching as to make me want to give it another try. It's all so absolutely whimsical and the characters remind me a lot of Jay Ward designs. Each room card has a nice idea to it (love that bird in the conservatory or the mail plate in the hall) and the weapons are colorfully imagined (those bits of green, blue, and brown make the metal weapons so much less drab. The knife handle and shape are wonderful).

Deadshirt's HORROR MONTH: Repulsion

(A short essay I wrote for Deadshirt about Repulsion, one of my favorite horror movies. Made in 1965, its socially conscious cinematography crafted effective scares out of the male gaze and male entitlement. It's certainly a movie we should talk about more.)

When Roman Polanski’s Repulsion was released in 1965, the tagline that accompanied the American theatrical poster was, “The nightmare world of a virgin’s dreams becomes the screen’s shocking reality!!” as you can see in the picture above. It’s a sensational and immensely pulpy combination of words that simplifies the movie’s plot and themes to their most shallow interpretation: a woman, repulsed by the opposite sex, has her worst fears realized. I’m not sure how they did things in the 60s, but 21st century attitudes towards stories of women and sexual violence have fortunately started to veer away from the basic “sex sells” attitude of that bygone era. As a more mature culture, we are aware now more than ever of certain cracks that run through society–abuse, mental illness, sexism–and the importance of narratives that bring them into the light. Repulsion is a story of a victim of abuse, faced with the everyday horror of the male gaze and male entitlement. We can never know what general audiences took away from Repulsion back in the 60s, but the movie still works as a modern horror, perhaps even more so, because the social ills from where it draws its scares are more broadly recognized today.

(Read more on Deadshirt)