T w e n t y S i d e d
I think I’m finally getting the hang of this game, which means it’s time for the series to come to an end. Tonight at 7pm, Chris and I will be streaming the finale of this game. To really understand the ending, please watch this clip of the Red Letter Media Crew watching the end of Resident Evil: Afterlife. It’s three minutes and twenty seconds of concentrated joy / insanity.
In any case, I hope to see you there tonight. Here is the VOD from last week:
The Jill reveal is actually a huge relief for me. The first 4/5ths of this game gives us the following setup:
- Chris has this tortured
past about losing Jill, a person that we have no reason to care about.No reason in THIS story. I realize that returning fans might care for reasons of callbacks and fanservice.
- Chris now thinks she’s alive, and is pointlessly dragging us through the seven layers of hell looking for her.
- Jill is VERY OBVIOUSLY the woman in the robe. Not because it makes any sense in-universe, but because the basic mechanics of storytelling dictate that the mystery woman must be the woman we’re looking for.
So most of the game is the pursuit of a character we don’t care about, and the setup for a twist we can see coming a mile away. The writer seems to think they’re being clever, which makes the entire thing insufferable. Once Jill is revealed, we won’t have any more scenes where Chris shouts, “Who are you?!” at the robed woman while impotently pointing his gun at her, and I have to shout, “THAT’S JILL YOU DULLARD!” at the screen.
Also, I managed to find my old comics from the Escapist! Check it out:
I lost a backup drive in the early teens, and a lot of work vanished with it. I lost the high-res originals of DM of the Rings, which is a shame since an HD “remaster” would be pretty sweet. I lost most of my Stolen Pixels originals, some backups of my pre-Twentysided website, and a few coding projects.
I had all of this stuff backed up on a DVD, and also on a hard drive. Then we moved three times over the next decade, and when the dust settled my backups were gone. I have several dead hard drives here, and I can’t tell which one (if any) held those old backups. I have a spindle with 30 or so burned DVDs. (Most of them are family photos. We took a lot of pictures when the kids were young.) I’ve gone through the entire spindle twice, but none of them are the backups of my work.
The comics were at least available online, and for the last several years I’ve been feeling like I should go through the Escapist archives and download my old comics before the image links all broke. Well, I waited too long. The old comics are no longer linked anywhere, and the navigation links are broken. And even if you find the URL, the images themselves are gone.
BUT!
Last week I remembered that I used to submit my work via email, using my gmail account. The Google oracle remembers all, so it was easy to find the old attachments in my Sent Mail folder.
This gives me access to my old Escapist content, although as far as I can tell the DMotR stuff is gone for good. These days I use automated off-site backup, so hopefully this sort of thing won’t be a problem in the future.
Anyway, I hope to see you tonight on Chris’ channel. We plan to play until the closing credits, and I’d love to have a good turnout for the end of this game. Things are going to get ridiculous.
Footnotes:
[1] No reason in THIS story. I realize that returning fans might care for reasons of callbacks and fanservice.
The Game That Ruined Me
Be careful what you learn with your muscle-memory, because it will be very hard to un-learn it.
Raytracing
Raytracing is coming. Slowly. Eventually. What is it and what will it mean for game development?
Crash Dot Com
Back in 1999, I rode the dot-com bubble. Got rich. Worked hard. Went crazy. Turned poor. It was fun.
Why The Christmas Shopping Season is Worse Every Year
Everyone hates Black Friday sales. Even retailers! So why does it exist?
The Death of Half-Life
Valve still hasn't admitted it, but the Half-Life franchise is dead. So what made these games so popular anyway?
I know you weren’t a huge fan but did you ever finish RE4? Because I think you would love the scene where the traitor is revealed.
Is it that the traitor is you? No, not Leon, but the player themself? Because that would be a hell of a twist.
Even though I’ve beaten the game, I have absolutely no memory of this part. But I had a whale of a time watching you suffer through it :D
Can’t wait for tomorrow to see how it ends!
Aww, I’m really sad that the old Stolen Pixels comics aren’t available anymore, I had a list of them bookmarked (including the one here. Just love everything about this one), but thanks for putting it up here (also I remember your comments on RE5 was about how your family must think it’s a voice controlled game since you shouted at Chris to shoot people so often).
This reminds me that we should -like the whole chat and community -try to endow some kind of trust that will keep TwentySided Tale going after our host retires. The links will still probably die at some point, but at least it won’t be because the host stopped getting payed.
We can do that now already. Something like a static.shamusyoung.com domain. A wordpress-to-html program could convert everything including comments to static html.
Because this html is static, it can be saved as compressed gzip. Since most (virtually all) browsers support gzip decompression, the site can be hosted with minimal bandwith and cpu requirements. All the webserver has to do is serve the already compressed page. No database searching and on the fly compression.
Advantages of this setup:
1. It can be done now. No need to wait for the proverbial bus accident.
2. Provides a superfast access point for those who want to browse the backlog.
3. Switching a domain name from static.shamusyoung.com to http://www.shamusyoung.com and maintaining a nginx server that serves out static pages is a much lower maintenance burden than to try and keep up with wordpress and custom plugins. Which in the case of the proverbial bus accident is a good thing.
4. Comments will automatically not be possible. No security leaks, no moderation needed.
I have investigated this, but to pull of this properly, the easiest way is to use the wordpress server to do the conversion with a plugin. That does require access to the TwentySided server though.
You know, when other stories try to pull this kind of twist they at least have the very basic decency of trying to disguise the character as a member of another gender. It never works, but at least is a minimal effort that this game doesn’t even try.
Sometimes when the twist is so damn obvious that people can see it coming since before launch, creators try to use the old classic method of lying. “Whaaaaat? Nah, you think character C is actually character B in disguise? Whaaaaat? Don’t be silly, of course not. You’ll actually be so, so surprised at the reveal, we swear!” This is, in my humble opinion, the worst thing they can possibly do, because it shows absolute contempt for the audience’s intelligence. Arkham Knight tried to pull this and even people who weren’t familiar with the comics saw through it immediately. Not helped by the stupid-ass way the story was handled right from the start.
I think the best approach for this sort of thing is to let the audience know from the start the identity of the mysterious character. Don’t try to be clever just for the sake of a twist. Letting the audience know from the beginning not only is respectful, but can also lead to dramatic tension when properly used. Otherwise, try a different approach by pulling the rug from under the twist. RE5 could have easily led us all to believe this was Jill and then it turned out that oh, surprise, this is Claire, Chris’ sister, who when finally taken out of the mind-controlled trance tells them that Jill is still stuck in a tub somewhere. It might not be David Fincher stuff, but it’s an effort in making the twist a bit more clever.
The Arkham Knight example was very strange to me even having not played the game, because they were *marketing* a blatant contradiction: the intriguing mystery of the identity of the Arkham Knight, a brand-new character you haven’t ever seen before!
These can’t… *both* be correct, right? I mean, if the Arkham Knight is brand-new original character Soupy Jones, who was invented for the game and whom we haven’t met before, then there’s no mystery? It’s just a new character. There’s only a mystery if it’s a character that already exists in canon, who might surprise us by taking on this persona. But then it’s not a new, original character, it’s just a new costume? I know this might be an academic distinction in comics.
But then they still try to do both, by having it be a character that does exist in Batman canon but has to be clumsily introduced into the game as if they games’ audience should care about them when they don’t, ironically like Jack Krauser from RE4. Oh, it’s THIS GUY! Wow, mind BLOWN! … wait, who tf is this…
And when it DOES fully reveal itself AS an adaptation of Under the Red Hood? WOW. You…do realize that Jason’s motivation here is moderately to extremely incoherent if Joker is dead, Rocksteady?
In fact that one is doubly confusing. As far as the Arkham games continuity, doesn’t everyone assume Batman finally killed the Joker rather that Big J going down like chump from his own schemes?
For real, there’s one way to write this story as a mystery, but no, Rocksteady took the worst possible one in a series of routes that wouldn’t have worked. Here are the possible ways to write this story:
a) Introduce one new character and also the mystery of who’s the villain. Wouldn’t work. People would very rightly assume that the villain is clearly the one new character.
b) Don’t introduce any new characters, but have a mystery about who the villain is (obviously one of the old existent characters). Assuming you write it properly and not just have this character just change allegiances for no reason newcomers might not suspect, but old fans of the series will surely piece it together.
c) Same as b, but actually have the villain change allegiances for no reason. No one will suspect, but it’s really not a mystery, since there can’t possibly be any clues to it.
d) Introduce the mystery of the new villain, but make the reveal be a character that has yet to be introduced until this point. Wouldn’t work either because there’s again no real mystery to solve, it’s all a last-minute ass pull.
e) Do a vague mix of all of the above (which is what Rocksteady did), where you use an established character to the source material who is nonetheless new to this particular adaptation, having him be the only new character introduced (or at the very least the only new one that could conceivably be the villain. It wouldn’t make sense to have, say, Man-Bat also be the Arkham Knight), have him change allegiance for no valid reason (as Rho points out up there) and when everyone and their mom guesses the very obvious answer just lie about it even though your lie will be revealed by the actual plot and is therefore pointless. Bonus points if you screw up the reveal even more by showing a face that the player has yet to properly see on screen (as the old memories of Jason had his face obscured, and he was a younger version of the character).
f) Introduce a bunch of new characters in the story and keep a few of them as red herrings. Then the mystery is “which one of these brand new characters is secretly the villain”? It might not be the most compelling idea, but it’d probably work.
Honestly, if I didn’t know any better I’d think they deliberately chose the worst possible option just to piss off the fanbase.
I mean, “introduce two to four new characters at the start, then reveal that one of them is the mysterious new villain” is a pretty good way to do it? It’s the standard technique that the DCAU writers used when they were doing movies; several of the DCAU spinoff movies use a version of it, and in all cases it worked reasonably well; even when you’re pretty sure you know who the villain is (see: Mask of the Phantasm), you’re not quite certain because it could technically still be the other candidate.
What you’re describing here is option “f”, which is the one I said worked.
I never thought about it before but both RE5 and Arkham Knight effectively screw up their “twist” by addressing new information regarding a character and then oh by the way, here’s this other masked character that just showed up.
I’d give Resident Evil 5 the edge, however, in that Jill as the masked character wasn’t a major part of marketing. She was present, but she wasn’t the primary focus, nor who the game was named after. “RESIDENT EVIL: THE MASKED EVIL ACROBATIC WOMAN” was not the name by which they sold the game. However, it’s kind of hard to believe Jill is dead since she’s a major character of the franchise and you’d be stupid (well, even more stupid than the story already is) to kill one of your major characters and fan favorites in a flashback. I could even see someone having no clue the character would be Jill if only because they’re such an insignificant henchman that gets less screen time as both Excella and… uh… um… Fish Man Guy.
The biggest problem with Arkham Knight is that they were introducing a “new” masked character with a Batman homage going on and a real grudge against the Bat and knew his every secret and, oh, by the way, have you heard of Jason Todd? Kind of spells itself out for ya in the most obvious way possible. As much as it pains to say it, I think RE5 did a better job with its surprise that wasn’t surprising.
And a third approach to an obvious twist is making it ambiguous whether the main characters know it or not. One of the really cool things in replaying Persona 5 is the reactions of the characters still fit if they’ve already guessed the main twist.
Of course that’s a lot harder to pull off. Instead of “Who are you?” you have to say something like “Tell me who you are”, with the possible interpretation of “I want to hear you say it”. Meaning the delivery and reaction has to be believable for both interpretations. And you have to find that kind of ambiguity in every interaction.
Although I guess you can go the kid-friendly Fell Seal/Trails route; one character sees every twist coming, the other sees none of them.
Actually worked in The Return of the King, but there’s some author trickery to it. One of my favorite moments from the books is when Eowyn reveals herself to the Witch King (and the readers) instead of being Dernhelm. That’s a twist that probably no one thought coming, because when you think about it, it doesn’t make much sense. Merry’s been traveling with this woman for a few days, and doesn’t recognize her until that moment (even though he knows who she is and what she looks like) nor never wonders how she must be uh, heeding the call of nature, very differently from the rest of the soldiers around her.
Of course, the film had to dispense with the twist nearly from the beginning because it would have been just like the examples listed above.
Nah, the book blatantly hints at who it is right from the get-go. You can kind of give Merry a pass on it due to the whole cross-species thing (“big people all look alike”), but it shouldn’t really come as a surprise to the reader by the time of the big reveal.
To be fair, this sort of twist is much easier to pull off in a non-visual medium.
Given how many historical examples there are of women posing as men for various reasons (including fighting in different armies) that went undiscovered for years, it must not actually be all that difficult to do.
I think this is probably a Hollywood problem. Lots of women have passed as men for all kinds of reasons, but those women probably didn’t look anything like Éowyn actress Miranda Otto. But Hollywood casting agents feel the need to fill every female role with glamorous starlets, so we got a 104 pound woman trying to pass herself off as one of the the famously burly, hairy, and muscular horse-bros of Rohan.
It would be amazing to see a movie actually pull this off – cast someone who can pass as either gender and do an honest-to-goodness fakeout that fools the audience.
This isn’t really my area of expertise, so the only example I can think of is Tig Notaro? If the riders of Rohan had a few college-age dudes in their lineup, I bet someone like her could stand beside them without raising an eyebrow.
Then again, even if Hollywood DID pull it off, the internet would spoil it a week before the thing hit theaters and nobody would be surprised anyway.
That was Gina Carano, but she got herself blacklisted unfortunately…
Well the whole premise of the Crying Game kind of relied on that…
talking about backups, do you still have the experienced points stuff? I was going through the archives (of this site) and the experienced points stuff is gone. I wanted to reread the one on starcraft 2 AI but the escapist link 404ed.
I had the same problem when trying to read some of the even older Experienced Points.
Well the SC2 article was just an example. From what I found every experienced points got its URLs scrambled.
Yeah, I know. Just thought I’d share that I also like reading old articles from time to time. So some kind of archive would be appreciated :)
For the content on the Escapist, the links have changed, but it seems all the articles are still there, available from your two author pages (one for the legacy content, one for the content done after the site relaunched):
https://www.escapistmagazine.com/author/shamus/
https://www.escapistmagazine.com/author/shamusyoung/
For example the Starcraft 2 IA Chris is asking about is there: https://www.escapistmagazine.com/ai-hasnt-really-mastered-starcraft-ii/.
But for the stolen pixels, it seems a lot of the pictures are missing.
On the topic of preservation—most of your Experienced Points columns from the past ~5 years seem to have disappeared from the Escapist site. I’d love to have those back up to read if there’s anything you could do!
That strip was my favorite “episode” of Stolen Pixels, so I’m glad to have a decent version of it back. I went looking for it a few months ago, when we were replaying RE5, & I couldn’t find it on the Escapist or anywhere else. A re-post of those would be a great trip down memory lane, even though some of the humor would be a bit dated by now (much like looking through the archives of Penny Arcade or CTRL+Alt+Delete).
Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun has mysterious adversary and also exactly one named character who that adversary could possibly be. It doesn’t hurt the game too much, fortunately. I think that’s mostly because the game doesn’t make it personal for the game’s protagonists prior to the reveal. Most of the cast are mercenaries. It’s their job to find and ultimately kill the adversary, but none of them actually care about his identity for their own sakes.
The point, I suppose, is that if a game is going to do this kind of thing then it’s best to play it cool.
That Resident Evil: Afterlife fight scene is only rivaled by Highlander: The Source ending.
OK wtf did I just watch
Some kind of experimental art film, I think…
Man, that last stream had it all – survival, horror, zombies, drama, glitches, Chris Redfield not shooting his gun…
And those cutscenes, oh man! I could barely stop laughing! (“Is Wesker really trying to take over the world?” :D)
I’m almost sad that it’s over! Almost – those last levels were a major slog. As you were playing through it, it started coming back to me, and the only part I remember liking was the bit with the tentacles inside the ship.
I’m also somewhat embarrassed to admit that when I first played the game back in 2009, I thought Wesker was extremely cool. But hey, I was 16, and this was the only RE game I had played (I think it was the first one that came out on PC)!
Anyway, as I said, I don’t remember the vast majority of this part of the game. But I do remember fighting Wesker. Especially that last bit in the volcano! Which is weird, because the volcano is easily the weakest part of that boss fight. I had completely forgotten about that bit where you fight him in the hangar, which is easily the most interesting section.
Anywho, can’t wait for A Way Out – or whatever else you guys decide to play!
@RamblePack64 : What do you think of the rumor saying that come on, come on, Chris, come on, Chris, come, come on?
Have you set up your own off-site backup or do you use a service provider ? If the second, is it possible to know which one ?
For the curious, I use Backblaze: https://secure.backblaze.com/r/00sazn
(That’s a referral link.)
It’s all automated. It just runs in the background and saves a snapshot of my drive to the cloud. I’ve been using it for over a year and I’m pretty happy with it. (Although I’ve never had to do a restore, which is the REAL test.)
That Jill fight really showcases the lack of clarity in the boss fights. First time around, you kept grabbing at the magic mind-control device and not doing anything. Were you doing the wrong thing? Whenever you get close to Jill while restrained, the option is to grab the device, without any indication that this won’t work. This is something the game suggests, but it doesn’t seem to do anything. The second time, you shot the device, and it came off real quick. Is that the actual reason, or did you just fail every single QTE in the first fight? Does the “entreat” button actually do anything? Is the difficulty of the first fight intended? It’s all a bit of a mess, and this isn’t the only boss fight that has these kinds of questions.