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Transformers: Combiner Wars

Bear Ribs

Well-known member
Transformers: Combiner Wars

Laconic: It's pretty Meh.

Combiner Wars is a Transformers series of 8 episodes of only five minutes long each. This means the entire thing is 40 minutes long and apparently, even with that much run time they had to add an awful lot of padding in the form of long, swooping shots, such as an entire minute and a half, a third of an entire episode, spent showing Starscream flying over a city. So needless to say, not a lot happens in this show.

The plot revolves around Windblade, who's apparently had a personality transplant from Grimlock for some reason, and her crusade against the Combiner transformers. And here's what I'd say is the biggest flaw of the series, it has a serious lack of combiners for a show with "Combiner" in the name. We get a couple minutes of Computron vs. Menasor in the first episode and a couple minutes of Devastator and Victorion in the last episode. That's pretty much it, everything else is about Windblade.

The story itself makes relatively little sense and could really have used some of the padding time to better explain what the hell's going on. It's set sometime after the Great War has ended (40 years if you look at some of the supplemental information), Autobots and Decepticons are at peace. But right as the Great War ended, for no given reason, combiners started appearing and fighting each other. Windblade is pissy because she's city-speaker for Caminus and combiners wrecked the place. We're told that combiners are some sort of nigh-unstoppable force more akin to natural disasters but that idea falls kinda flat since Windblade one-shots Menasor within a minute of meeting him in the first episode. Yep, just plain slices him in half in one stroke. It's very hard to take the combiners as an unstoppable threat seriously after that. We also never see any actual combination, or decombination, or really anything about combiners in general. The writers apparently actually forgot that a combiner's arm is actually it's own robot given some of the scenes. Actually I'm not even sure Combiners can separate in this show, it kinda treats them like an entirely different species or something, it's quite vague on what they are and the show contradicts itself a few times on that.

I'm also a bit salty about Starscream betraying the council. First because loyal Starscream would actually have been something new and different, but more so because we actually get an internal monologue and hear Starscream's thoughts in a previous episode, and he's thinking loyal thoughts with no betrayal intended to the council. Apparently Starscream knows he's in a cartoon and wants to mislead the viewers who can overhear him think to himself. This is not good storytelling.

They also really, really cheapened out on Starscream's ultimate combiner form. Starscream unites with all the Combiners to become a god... and appears as a glowy floating head atop of a glowing sphere instead of actually being a super massive robot made up of very massive robots made up of massive robots. And he's still small enough to fit in Metroplex's hand.[/quote]

It's not all downhill with the show. The appearance and teamup of Optimus Prime and Megatron is quite good and the scene of the council having a collective meltdown, because Optimus and Megatron working together can pretty much mop the floor with them? That's pretty cool. Megatron has some excellent dialogue, Jason Marnocha does a fine job of emulating Frank Welker and gives a lot of heart to a Megatron who's old and retired and over all this war stuff, but can still snap you over his knee like a twig and don't you forget it. Jon Bailey as Optimus Prime is not quite on the level of Megatron but not terrible either. The voice acting's generally up to snuff with decent emotion and not too much ham.

The animation is second-class. It's very apparent they cut a lot of corners to save money, such as having no complex combiners and only one or two transformations in the entire show (Never mind the final boss, apparently glowing spheres take up fewer polys that combiners, who knew?). Metroplex shows up for the finale but all we actually see is his hand, the rest never appears for some reason. The combiners are highly simplified and aside from Devastator don't even look like they're made up of other robots. There's also a grand total of seven (Non-combiner) Cybertronians apparently still alive, only Megatron, Optimus, and Windblade appear on one side and Mistress of Flame, Starscream, and Rodimus on the other. Windblade also has a pal who's a recolor of her that dies a few moments into the first episode, so not much there. The framerate is very low, mouthflaps are limited, and the cg in general about on par with shows ten years older than Combiner Wars. Megatron and Starscream are the only ones who ever have facial expressions beyond basic mouthflaps, which gives them much better characterization than the others.

Overall it's not much of an addition to the Transformers multiverse. The plot is nonsensical, the characters (aside from Megatron) aren't well developed, and the animation was done with more thought to budget that viewer entertainment. On the other hand at only 40 minutes total it's not going to take up too much of your time if you just want to see Wind Grimblade murderblending stuff for a while.
 
Transformers: Titans Return

Bear Ribs

Well-known member
Transformers: Rise of the Titans

Laconic: Improved, a (very) slightly higher quality of Meh. Needs more Omega Supreme.

This is the sequel to Combiner Wars. Actually it happens immediately after, as in minutes after the end of Combiner Wars. We open up with the combiners fixing the damage they did in the previous series. Devastator has split up into his components (off-screen, we don't get to see anything like that of course) and Menasor, Victorion, and Computron are helping them clear out debris.

Menasor and Computron both died in Combiner Wars so I'm not entirely sure why they're up and running now. I mean, I presume the events at the end fixed them but you'd think resurrecting the dead combiners would have some implications beyond “we can put them to work clearing rubble.” This bothers me more than it probably should since I suspect the real answer was “we already had a CG model of them so it's cheaper than making new ones for Bruticus and Superion.”

Rise of the Titans has twelve ten minute episodes so it's about three times as long as Combiner Wars was, which gives it a bit more wriggle room for having some story, and it shows as the story flows better and is a bit less clunky. There's still a significant amount of padding (We get the “reveal” that Starscream is possessing Trypticon seven times in seven different episodes, yes, that means over half the episodes have the dramatic reveal that Starscream is possessing Trypticon) but the longer series makes it less noticeable, two minutes of Hot Rod cruising down a freeway don't feel quite as wasteful when the episode is more than five minutes long, but there's still a heck of a lot of it for such a short series. Improbably, somehow it's the same story as Combiner Wars at one remove. The Combiner Wars ended and then, for no apparent reason, the city-formers woke up and started wrecking everything fighting.

The series corrects a few of my complaints about Combiner Wars. While still primarily about Windblade, we actually get a decent amount of Titan action going on (note that I didn't say good action). The fight between Metroplex and Trypticon spans several episodes (albeit with frequent cuts to other characters doing stuff). They also actually introduce a definitive villain, where the combiners seem to just be fighting “because” there's actual machinations and plots going on now. Unfortunately, they don't bother to resolved any of the plots by the end and the villain appears in the last episode for all of half a minute. The plot has some serious issues, both with pacing and with continuity. For instance, at one point Trypticon captures Emissary which allows Trypticon to breath fire. A whole episode is devoted to Hot Rod and Windblade running a daring rescue mission inside Trypticon to recover Emissary and strip that power from him. But then three episodes later Trypticon just starts breathing fire again even though we see Emissary with Windblade at the time. Characters also seem to do remarkably stupid things just to generate “dramatic” moments. After establishing how important Emissary is to Fortress Maximus, how much of a boost Emissary's power is, etc. etc. we get to the dramatic fight with Trypticon... and Emissary stands there like a dummy with Windblade and watches until Fortress Maximus starts getting beaten, at which point Emissary apparently suddenly remembers that yeah, his entire function is to power up Fortress Maximus.

The voice acting is good and significantly improved from the previous version. They retained Jason Marnocha as the excellently voiced Megatron but got Peter Cullen for Optimus Prime. They also got Mark Hamill in on it and he does a great job though with their budget, apparently they could only afford thirty seconds of him. The worst acting by far is the combined voice of the Primes, which frankly sounds so danged evil that if I heard somebody speaking with that voice I'd immediately reach for a shotgun and holy symbol. I do take a bit of offense at the fact that they decided the villain of the piece, Overlord, should have a southern drawl. It doesn't fit the character of Overlord at all and giving the villain a regional accent (especially southern given attitudes towards them) while giving all the heroes California accents is something that gets my goat a bit.

Animation is somewhat improved, the combiners now have car kibble and actually look like they're composed of several vehicles mashed together. Mouthflaps are more complex and the Cybertronians who have mouths mostly now also have facial expressions and emote properly. Combiners still don't separate and only a couple of characters can transform on-screen, most transformations are either just offscreen, obscured by a cloud of dust, or obscured by a bright glow so that they don't have to animate them. Cybertron has also gotten strange, somehow it now has water oceans, icecaps, rocky plains and mountains, and other features you wouldn't expect on, y'know, Cybertron. I suspect the animators really weren't Transformers fans and didn't do much research, possibly for budgetary reasons.

That said they still take a lot of cheap shortcuts. Few characters ever appear onscreen at the same time. Cybertron continues to be eerily empty of everybody but the main characters, Hot Rod goes cruising down the highways for several minutes and there's not a single other car on the road, nor are there any crowds fleeing the devastation nor bodies in the wreckage. This is particularly glaring in Transformers since, as a toy franchise, normally they want as many characters involved as possible to sell more toys of them. There's a lot of other shortcuts taken as well, for instance the animators love to put a huge bloom of light on the screen whenever anything important is happening so they don't have to actually animate it. At one point all four combiners join into one supercombiner but rather than animate an actual supercombiner, it's just scaled-up Victorion recolored orange and glowy. When they can't cover an important event that would be hard to animate with a glow (such as Trypticon's transformation) they have a huge dust cloud suddenly blow in the way of the camera so they don't have to animate it. Yeah, that happens with Trypticon twice on consecutive episodes. Large sections of it look like they clipped video game footage, a scene where Optimus fights all the combiners literally feels exactly like a 3rd-person shooter type game.

Choreography is downright rancid, the fights are just plain boring. Just about every fight is a complete stomp and everything is resolved with a deus ex machina. Overlord basically is straight up invincible to everything, Mistress of Flame hits him with drones, her staff, lasers, magic, does a Kage Bunshin, all kinds of nonsense to zero effect. It's not exciting because Overlord stands there like a dummy since it would be too hard to animate two characters at once. Fights tend to have huge amounts of “just because” going on. Metroplex starts out in serious disrepair and barely functional while Trypticon is at 100%... for no apparent reason given both of them were buried rubbish at the start. Afterwards Trypticon is still 100%... repeatedly, after every deus ex machina they throw at him. Rodimus Prime randomly decides he doesn't want the Matrix of Leadership anymore and becomes Hot Rod again, Fortress Maximus has working missiles even when he's asleep but not working anything else, Mistress of Flame decides not to bother using the Citadel's defenses because... heck if I know given how that could have really helped Metroplex but it means the defenses are available later when Optimus shows up for another Deus ex Machina. We get entire episodes devoted to things like the combiners firing Fortress Maximus' missiles at Trypticon, followed an episode later by the missiles hitting and doing nothing and Trypticon still being 100%. A lot of Deus Ex Machinas happen in rapid succession, about one an episode, and then go absolutely nowhere. Each new warrior appears to be taking a number or something because they show up immediately after Trypticon overcomes the last Deus Ex Machina and not a moment before. Maybe there wouldn't be so much destruction if, say, they used the Citadel defense system while Metroplex was still fighting him and had the combiners teleport in behind to double team Trypticon while also hitting him with the defense grid, but that would put too many polys on the screen at once so they have to take turns.

To give you an idea how ridiculous it can get, at one point all four combiners unite into one supercombiner to fight Trypticon, they then teleport to his position... but teleport in with their combined back to him and super-Victorion stands there like an idiot while Trypticon sneaks up behind her and sucker punches her. Yes, the four-hundred-foot tall cityformer sneaks up on someone. Then super-Victorion reveals that she'd forgotten they came to fight Trypticon in the first place and got distracted thinking about Overlord fighting Mistress of Flame and... just... really? Can't we get a real fight? Fights also seem to have no rhyme or reason for how things go down, for instance Optimus Prime just firing his Ion Blaster seems to do more damage to Trypticon than all of Fortress Maximus and Metroplex's powers combined. Megatron is able to physically pick up and body slam a combiner and fight all the combiners at once on an even keel. Who wins any given fight seems to be entirely the whim of the writers rather than any logical progression from size, ability, or skill.

Optimus Prime dies at the end after taking a hit straight through the torso from Megatronus. We're supposed to see this as a solemn tragedy but it's kinda spoiled by the fact that we all know he's coming back. Literally he and Megatron have had discussions about how often Optimus has come back from the dead with Megatron taunting Optimus about having killed him, and we see Computron and Menasor back after dying last season without anybody batting an eye. It's very obvious this is a universe where nobody stays dead so why does anybody care?

While we're at it why is everybody so danged bipolar about Megatron? Characters literally go from wanting to kill him for existing to following him in battle in the space of a single scene... multiple times. Weirdly, usually it's Decepticons wanting to kill him, Devastator and Menasor are quite gung-ho about squashing Megatron while Autobots are usually the ones slightly less prone to wanting to murder Megatron (right before deciding to follow his lead).

I'm going to digress a bit to rant. I really, really hate Mistress of Flame. She's extremely evidently an OC, which isn't much of a problem (I'm not going Trukk not Munky here) but she's a bad OC. She doesn't talk like other transformers, doesn't sound like other transformers, and doesn't look like other transformers. Her name doesn't sound like it belongs, she has a big foofy cloth cape that a Cybertronian wouldn't typically have, and she never transforms and has no kibble that would indicate an alt-mode. My best guess is that she transforms into a table lamp and the cape becomes her lampshade, but that's not really fair because a table lamp is useful and bright while Mistress of Flame is neither.

Personality wise she's quite obviously a “spiritual leader” who was imagined up by a rather aggressive atheist with no idea how religion works. This sort of person imagines that anybody who worships an "old bearded guy in the sky" must obviously be gullible and stupid, and they select their leaders based on faith, hence said leaders must be totally useless at everything because if you have skill and can do the job on merit, you don't need faith. Also you're being chosen by stupid and gullible people so they will naturally select for useless leaders, this all clearly makes sense. Mistress of Flame's answer to everything is that they should pray about it and keep faith, and when that doesn't work she tends to panic because that means the gods aren't with her. The atheist who imagines this character can't see how this is a stereotype because they despise religion, refuse to learn about it on principle, and start from the base assumption that religion and those who follow it are stupid and gullible, and so never look at how religious leadership works beyond “prayer.”

Now there are many problems that prayer and meditation can be the answer for, such as “I can't stop grieving for my dead mother.” There are other problems, such as “Trypticon just knocked out the structural supports and the building is going to fall on us if we don't move” where prayer is not the ideal solution. Guess what her response is? Yeah. She's useless at everything, fails at every task that doesn't involve praying, and most of the bad ideas come directly from her.

Despite this the brutal fight between her and Overlord gave me a significant amount of sympathy for her and made me hate Overlord. I just want to make this bit clear because that fight was pretty much the highlight of the entire series for me, not because I enjoyed it but because it was able to generate a visceral, emotional response in me and that us the hallmark of good work. It's all the more impressive in that it gave me that reaction despite my not caring about the characters involved.

Overall it's a step up from Combiner Wars but still obviously cheap in production with a lot of shortcuts and a plot that appears written by a five-year-old.
 
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Sunless Sea

Bear Ribs

Well-known member
Sunless Sea

Laconic: It's a very well written book pretending to be a game.

Sunless Sea bills itself as a Victorian horror-themed roguelike game. You play the captain of a steam-powered ship travelling the Zee, a vast underground ocean filled with monsters, pirates, and eldritch gods. "Your first captain will likely die," goes the tagline, "others may live." They did the Victorian horror very well and the roguelike terribly.

So confession, I have not and probably will not finish the game, I have about twelve hours in it and am giving my impressions from that.

In general you should consider the claims of being roguelike a lie. Sunless Sea at most has some of the islands move slightly, but because their storyline elements require them to be in relatively specific spots, they can't even more around very much. Venderbight will always be a bit north of Fallen London, Hunter's Keep just a short distance east, Whither is always north of Venderbight, and the Khanate islands far to the east and past Pigmote Island. They might as well have just made their map good to start with and not bothered with the small bit of movement they programmed in. The actual meat of the game is the detailed writing and storyline on each island and that doesn't change, so any roguelike random elements are pretty meaningless.

Honestly my feeling is that they should have removed the entire ship element from the game. Sunless Sea clearly wants to be a visual novel and just has some very clunky "steer a boat" mechanics stapled onto the side. It would be more enjoyable if you just clicked a dot on the map and your boat moved there while X fuel and food are deducted from your cargo for the trip. The long periods of sitting there boredly watching my ship puff along towards the next island did it no favors, I couldn't even tab away because something I have to run away from might appear and I'd need to change course slightly.

The decisions on how to play annoyed me a touch, not that they're bad but they're extremely unintuitive. The game puts a lot of effort into generating fear via "the unknown" but they go so far that frequently I'm frustrated because "the unknown" tends to include stuff like what a ship captain actually does and things my character should actually know. My first few deaths happened because I felt, logically, that as a cargo ship captain I should buy goods in Fallen London, haul them to other ports for a profit, and take those port's goods back for more profit. In fact, you need to fill nearly your entire hull with coal and food to make it to another port and your profit comes from compiling "port reports" with the admiralty, who will give you some more coal as well as a few dollars echoes for reporting on what's happening. Nearly every cargo sells for around the same price at every port (Less than you paid to buy it because the game doesn't recognize that you shouldn't be paying twice as much to buy commodities as you sell them for) so getting any kind of profit is pretty much impossible. You're not supposed to be hauling those goods to make money, they're mostly used as a key items that unlock a specific plotline or option on one of the lslands' stories. Towards the mid-game some cargoes actually do become worthwhile to ship (The admiral also quits wanting reports around then for some reason, he probably got sick of deciphering my handwriting).

It's not that the life of a spy is a bad idea, but again, unintuitive. If you didn't know upfront that all your early-game money came from port reports you're not going anywhere, all my deaths were nigh-immediate from buying cargo instead when I first started. The game pretty much presumes you're doing a wiki walk at every stage and rarely explains how anything works, and I tend to prefer to discover things on my own so it didn't mesh with my playstyle and wasted a lot of time. Once I actually looked up what my character is supposed to do, I never suffered another death as the play is quite easy as long as you're aware of what you should be heading towards.

Similarly unintuitive is the combat system, no it's not hard it's just kinda dumb. I lost a couple of early captains to taking out pirates, not because the pirates were dangerous mind you. It was dead easy to maneuver to casually wipe out even the tougher ships without taking a hit in return, so much that I figured out all I needed in the first fight. But it turns out those pirate ships and monsters had so danged many HP compared to my gun damage that my crew, who make Pac-Man look like an ascetic monk for appetite, ate so much food during the battle I couldn't make it back to port without starving. You also always choose to scuttle a pirate ship rather than, say, put a prize crew aboard and selling her for some fat profits (this is kinda a recurring theme, the game wants you poor and on the edge of starvation all the time so any situation where you could logically make some good money such as capturing an enemy ship, the game will cutscene it away and take away your ability to do so) and they generally have barely anything worth salvaging, usually one box of food or one block of coal, so fighting them is always a net loss. The only thing worth shooting at is the bat swarms, who go down in only a couple hits and can be eaten though even that costs you a big chunk of terror for some reason (I think my Captain knew about COVID) so still barely worth it given how expensive it is to recover from terror.

You're sailing a cargo ship through pirate-infested, monster-filled oceans and the game doesn't like you hauling cargo or fighting pirates and monsters. Instead it revolves around filing paperwork. When I did manage to get a cargo of undead tomb-colonists to drop off, the game failed to give me a logbook of where I was supposed to drop them off and since they had to go to three different ports (which I hadn't discovered yet) I couldn't remember by the time I'd found the places and it gave me no hints as to what I was supposed to do with the cargo I'd picked up two hours earlier. Then it punished me for dropping them off at the wrong place after I read in the Wiki that you're actually supposed to drop them off in Venderbight, so blegh.

So what is good? The writing. Every island has some bizarre events whether rituals, strange customs, monsters, or just weirdness for you to discover and take part in. There's an island where sentient rats are at war with sentient guinea pigs and you have to pick a side or, if your stats are high enough, broker a peace between them. There's an island where everybody wears masks and you are literally whoever's mask you wear, responsible for the deeds your mask has done in the past and expected to act out the part rather than be yourself. One town is actually a suburb of hell itself and you can make deals with devils there. I wound up romancing the Cladery Heir, a woman of some kind of noble family (though her dad's an undead tomb-colonist) who is unable to think or talk to you if she's not dissecting something so the process of romancing her involves bringing her new and interesting corpses to play with while you chat or make love (she also cut my ear off and surgically removed part of my personality in the process though I have no idea what since my character had no personality to start with). All the stories are good, evocative, and interesting and will draw you in once you get to the islands. Since you need very specific bits of cargo for a lot of those stories, again just wiki-walk and spoil yourself on the goods and items you need first or you'll just waste a lot of time puffing over to an island that doesn't do anything.

The only real complaint I have about the writing is that literally everybody is some kind of weirdo involved in eldritch things. Even having lunch with one of the ladies at Hunter's Keep about a hundred feet from Fallen London will get you the attention of one of the mysterious gods of the Zee depending on who you have lunch with. Nothing isn't part of some creepy eldritch plot or conspiracy. At a certain point the eldritch becomes mundane because there's no normal to compare it with anymore.
 
Mummies Alive!

Bear Ribs

Well-known member
Mummies Alive!



Laconic: The last hurrah for 90s style action cartoons.

Mummies Alive! (Yes, the exclamation point is part of the title) ran at the tail end of the 90s, being a urban fantasy action series. It ran for 42 episodes in one season.

Sometime in the ancient past a young Pharaoh-to-be was murdered by the evil sorcerer Scarab, who absorbed the pharoah's life-force to become immortal. His father had Scarab entombed alive forever and the pharaoh's four bodyguards were mummified to protect him in the afterlife.

Fast forward to the present day (of 20 years ago) when archaeologists open up Scarab's tomb and set him free. At the same time this opens up the "Western Gate" that separates the magic of the ancient world from the modern day. A young boy named Presley is the young pharaoh, reincarnated into an american kid living near the golden gate bridge which happens to be where the western gate is, and Scarab promptly hunts him down to drain his life-energy and regain his youth (Scarab is apparently immortal but gets to be wizened, old, and suffering from all sorts of infirmities forever). In a case of exceptionally poor judgement, Scarab corners Presley in an Egyptology exhibit at a museum where his four guardians are on display and they promptly resurrect themselves to fulfill the ancient duties they'd failed at thousands of years ago...

The show had a catchy theme song and the voices worked well. Nobody had an Egyptian accent of course. The rest of the music was decent as well.

The animation was quite good, significantly better than most of what you'll encounter today as it was right at the zenith of the action-ey 80s-90s style before cheap Flash animation ala Johnny Test took over the industry. Dramatic shadows and fast, smooth movements in the fight scenes are the highlights, with it not quite imitating anime but clearly taking significant cues as this was right when the anime boom was really taking off. There's a bit of stock footage in the mummy transformations and some of the spells but the show keeps this fairly light, usually lower than you'd find in, say, Sailor Moon. The show has one recycled-animation clipshow episode which I don't care for but the ratio of 1:42 isn't terrible.

The writing is a bit hit or miss. As you'll note even from the intro, there's quite a bit of physical comedy going on and the show has a wry sense of humor. Conversations tend to involve monumental amounts of snark on all sides. Heka, Scarab's... staff? Pet cobra? It's rather hard to tell. Sometimes he carries her around and uses her as a sorcerer's staff and other times she's just off doing snake things or even filing paperwork and acting as his secretary. I have no idea what Heka actually is besides an absolute treasure trove of snarky comments and puns "I just work here, part of the Staff you know?" She says in staff form to avoid being broken in the first episode. No matter what Heka tended to have great dialogue.

A few other Egyptian myths show up as guest villains or heroes to mess with the forumal from time to time, and for some reason Talos, the man of bronze from Greek mythology, was a recurring guest villain. They didn't stick with the myths very well, preferring comedic or action characters instead. Anubis was not only a villain but a complete airhead. Bastet is malevolent but appears to be so mostly because she's angry that Presley isn't doing his duties as high priest and fetching her some worshipers, and then she's defeated because she can't resist a tuna sandwich.

Scarab's other minions were shabtis, basically Egyptian terra cotta warriors who... I'm pretty sure these were the weakest, most pathetic minions of any Saturday morning cartoon villain. The writers were clearly aware that the minions were made of easily broken clay pottery and had a lot of fun having shabtis killed by being bumped into, a door opening into their faces, walking into walls, whatever. Honestly shabtis made Shredder's robo-mooks in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles look like Spartans in comparison.

Overall it was a fun show, dumbed down significantly for it's expected pre-teen audience but still with great animation and music. The personalities were good and if you like snark, the humor is going to be right up your alley. The focus on Egyptian art for it's inspiration and motifs gave it a distinctive look different from other shows of it's era. But if you love Egyptian mythology or want accuracy you're probably going to have an aneurysm just watching it.
 
Xyber 9

Bear Ribs

Well-known member
Xyber 9: New Dawn



Laconic: Good story, bad CG.

Xyber 9: New Dawn was first run in 1999, but only ten episodes were aired before it was canceled. Later the remaining twelve were played by Disney Jetix in 2007, finishing the story that had long been delayed.

The general theme of Xyber 9 is a post-apocalyptic wasteland, with warlords feuding over bits of leftover technology as society continues to crumble further. It was (somewhat unfairly in my opinion) compared frequently with Star Wars in it's initial run, being put as a ripoff due to having a teenage hero, elderly wise mentor, and evil villain wearing black. I find those to be fairly stock characters myself and didn't see much Star Wars in it. The story focuses on Jack, a young boy who dreams of being a hero. He comes across the last Xyber, a staff-like sentient computer capable of hacking anything it can interface with. Very fortunately although there doesn't seem to be any Wi-Fi in the post-apocalypse, everything from municipal factories to powerplants to every last car and battlemech has a universal input slot Xyber 9 can be jammed in.

A computer might seem like an odd choice of superweapons for a hero but it quite fits the theme of the show. Xyber 9 never treats defeating an enemy or destroying an army as a victory, all the various warlords are doing that all the time anyway. The victories for the heroes are recovering ancient technology and restoring it to working order, and uplifting society bit by bit. The first story arc is about restoring a hydroelectric plant so a city has power again, while later they recover genetically engineered crops that produce a harvest every 2 days that can feed the world, and at other points they recover other miracles of science. These are always put forward as the real victories and Xyber 9 is essential to recovering many data banks, restarting many factories, and getting the various other ancient artifacts working again.

The cast features a fairly typical bunch without any really different or unusual archetypes. There's Jack, the young blonde hero. Ikira is the wise mentor, a master swordsman with a dark secret. Anakonda (real name too long to pronounce) is a wild-child redhead who was raised by... snakes? Raised by snakes. The snakes somehow taught her to change color like a chameleon, apparently that's just a thing Xyber 9 snakes can do and it's a learnable talent. Princess Rosalyn is the rebellious daughter of the evil King Renard and part of a love triangle with Jack and Anakonda. Mick is a bit of a grifter and 'mech pilot who looks out for number one but always turns out to have a heart of gold. The heroes are rounded out by Willy, a great cook and massive guy who rarely speaks and usually when he does, it's to shut Mick up. All in all it's a fairly stock collection of characters with Anakonda by far being the most unique.

King Renard tends to play the role of villain but behind him is the sinester Machestro, leader of a race of light-sensitive molemen called the Machina who dreams of blocking out the sun so that his people can return to the surface.

On the sound front Xyber 9 has a well-written score and great voice actors. René Auberjonois provides both the voice of Xyber 9 and his trademark dry wit. Tim Curry brings King Renard to life excellently. The other actors are, perhaps, not quite as good as those two but still more than adequate and with a decent range of accents and speaking styles.

The artwork is less impressive. Xyber 9 came out when cartoons were transitioning from hand-drawn to computer animation and it hit the polygon ceiling... hard. It's really, really obvious when the show switches from it's cel-shaded look to a 3D rendering. Worse, since they wanted the sweet, sweet toy money it switches back and forth through various vehicles and characters fairly rapidly which only makes the bad CG look even worse and more obvious. On the plus side, the vehicles are rather awesome with a wide range of rovers, hoverbikes, giant mecha, colossal railguns, mobile fortresses, etc.

Overall it's a fun show with a better message than most of it's peers and aspirations to be more than a typical action show. It never actually reached those aspirations, in part because of it's early cancellation, but hey at least they tried to go beyond usual Saturday morning fare. It has engaging if a bit generic characters and a unique plot along with very cool 'mechs. If only they'd drawn them better...
 
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Gargoyles

Bear Ribs

Well-known member
Gargoyles



Laconic: Shakespeare, urban fantasy, and high tech combine into one of the best animated shows of all time.

Ah, Gargoyles, the show that gets trotted out as an example of just how good western animation can get. Even decades after it's ending it still has a cult following. This really was one of the best ever made.

Gargoyles was a Disney Block show that ran from 1994 to 1997, as the show essentially had a satisfying conclusion and wrapped up much of it's story at the end of season 2, and the third season, renamed the “Goliath Chronicles” was significantly lower quality, most fans regard the tiny third season non-canon and only count the first 65 episodes. Slave Labor Graphics made a comic series in 2006-2009 that continued the story past season 2.

The show was known for complex multi-episode story arcs, surprisingly dark themes, very mature handling of hot-button issues like guns, and character-driven melodrama. These were things relatively new to cartoons at the time and Gargoyles paved the way for a lot of good things to come. It compared favorably with Batman: The Animated Series and was able to outcompete most anime even when anime was booming specifically into Gargoyles' niche. The show had an enormous amount of references to Shakespeare (The Weird Sisters, who were also the Witches 3 of MacBeth are recurring characters), and quite a bit of references to ancient mythology, not just the bits that are common and popular. Chu Chulain shows up, as does Anansi, Anubis, Raven and Coyote, and many other obscure mythological beings.

The show took the view that all myths were true, but few were accurate. Many ancient myths were based on gargoyles themselves. The ones in the show were from Scotland, and looked a bit like traditional demons, but other races of gargoyles turned out to be very different, with Japanese gargoyles looking like Oni, South American gargoyles looking like like Quetzcoatl, and when we see English gargoyles one is a unicorn and another a griffin. Other myths are based on the Fair Folk who play a major role and take all manner of strange forms.

Possibly just as an inside joke, the show notably had a large number of Star Trek actors as the voice talent. Given his skills at acting, if you don't watch the credits you'll likely have no idea that Lt. Commander Data and freakin' Puck (yes, the mischievous Shakespeare fairy) are the same person. But there it was. Jonathon Frakes and Marina Sirtis played the two core villains. Michael Dorn, and Kate Mulgrew had recurring roles (and Brent Spiner as Puck of course), and Avery Brooks, LeVar Burton, Colm Meaney, and Nichelle Nichols all had bit parts. Some noted Star Trek writers like Diane Duane had writing credits.

The underlying plot is relatively simple. A thousand years ago the world was one with magic, superstition and the sword ruled. Gargoyles were a race that lived alongside humans, but turned to stone by day and could only live at night. We're introduced to their world through flashbacks throughout the series explaining how they lived, generally in symbiosis where gargoyles would protect a castle at night and the humans protected the gargoyle statues by day. It didn't always work out well and there was significant suspicious and racism on both sides.

Through a series of tragedies, misunderstandings, and betrayals the five main character gargoyles are hit with a magic curse that causes them to be turned to stone day and night, until the castle they are trapped in rises above the clouds*. For a thousand years, they sleep until the richest man in the world David Xanatos, learns of the ancient legend and has the entirety of Castle Wyvern disassembled and then rebuilt on top of a massive skyscraper in New York, higher than the cloud layers, and they live again....


*This is a notable feature of magic in Gargoyles, every spell that has lasting effects has to have a special “undo” condition and figuring out and exploiting them is a repeated plot point.


So what made it so great? Part of it was the exceedingly well developed characters. David Xanatos was one of the smartest villains in all of animation, not in the “I invented a death ray” kind but in having genuinely intelligent plots and arranging his schemes in such a way that no matter what his enemies did, he would profit from it. To this day many people know what a “Xanatos Plot” is even if they never saw Gargoyles. Demona, by contrast, was highly emotional, malicious, and revenge-driven, making her plots vastly different from Xanatos' and giving the show some variety. MacBeth was a tired old man, still honorable but incredibly skilled and rather bitter that Shakespeare's play about him painted him in such a bad light. Hyena and Jackal meanwhile were straight up psychos with creepy bodies and even creepier minds. On the heroic side each of the Gargoyles and the few humans they trusted were well developed as their own character with their own goals, hopes, and plans.

The show notable handled some adult material quite well, and bypassed many pitfalls of “very special episodes.” Characters learned and grew from their experiences as the show progressed. For example, one episode has Broadway start playing with Eliza's gun after watching a western movie, and he accidentally shoots her. The other gargoyles believe this was a hit by the mob and nearly go on a killing spree before things are cleared up. But notable the show doesn't peddle a “Guns are bad” message, nor a “violent movies are bad” one. Rather the characters take reasonable precautions afterwards, Eliza gets a gun safe and never leaves her firearm lying around afterwards while Broadway never plays with guns again (and makes a point to destroy those he takes off of thugs). The lesson was not to play with guns and to safely store them which was handled with dignity and maturity. Needless to say, network censors hated it and banned the episode.

Gargoyles came to it's end due to Disney having a bit of a meltdown. Frank Wells' death and the power struggle that resulted in Disney's executive leadership led to Jeffrey Katzenberg splitting to go form Dreamworks. Unfortunately with him went a big chunk of the staff supporting Gargoyles. Greg Weis had positioned Gargoyles to be the jumping-off point for an ambitious “Action Universe” with multiple spinoffs forming an urban fantasy equivalent to the greater DC Animated Universe, but without most of the people who'd been working on the individual projects, the entire thing stalled. Eisner wanted something more like a typical Saturday morning cartoon and Gargoyles was anything but. It didn't help that Gargoyles really didn't have a lot of merch options, while there were plenty of figures for the characters (and a single episode where executives tried to force a “Gargoylecopter” in that was hilariously hamfisted and quietly ignored after), the show didn't lend itself to sprawling playsets and lots of vehicles to make toys of.

Seeing the handwriting on the wall, the staff wrote the last couple of dozen episodes to bring the show to a climax and did a great job of sewing up numerous loopholes. Then Eisner demanded it be revived, but without the story arcs or complex themes, and placed in a Saturday morning slot. Greg Weis, who was deeply involved by that point, protested the changes and Eisner removed him from the show entirely which did it no favors. All this led to the failure of a third season that was quietly shut down after 13 episodes. The comic continued the story but Disney suddenly demand extortionate licensing fees far in excess of the original agreement in 2009 and the comic ended as well. There's been talks of a movie or revival ever since but it seems unlikely Gargoyles will ever return outside of reruns.

But honestly I think that's okay. Gargoyles gave us an amazing 65 episode run that was tightly woven, witty, and well-plotted. It went out on a high note (as long as you pretend Goliath Chronicles never happened) and knew what it wanted to be. That is, perhaps, a better way to go than limping on as a ghost of it's former self for years of remakes and soft reboots, trying to recapture lost glory. Still one can't help but wonder what might have been if the Action Universe had become a reality.
 
ZZT

Bear Ribs

Well-known member
ZZT_Title_screen.gif

Laconic: A text editor that underwent significant mission creep.

Gather round folks, to hear about one of the old, old legends of gaming. People talk sometimes about how a game has lasted abnormally long, DOOM is considered remarkable in that aspect, but ZZT is older. It was the first serious creation of Tim Sweeney and on the back of ZZT's incredible success, Epic Megagames was founded and everything else Sweeney has done ultimately evolved from ZZT. I mean that in a more literal way than most would, after it's release Sweeney had a level-designing contest among the avid ZZT players. The six top-scoring submissions scored... employment as Game Designers for Epic and those fans went on to create it's early library. It still has an extremely enthusiastic fan community even to this day with new boards being regularly released. ZZT's original code was lost when Sweeney's hard drive crashed and the fans went on to literally recreate it, line by line until they had a file that, when compiled, was identical to the compiled version to the byte. That's how dedicated the fanbase is.

The game's name was chosen so that it would always be the last entry on alphabetical listings in old-school BBS's and paper catalogs, before there was an Internet. Later fans suggested it should stand for "Zoo of Zero Tolerance" and Sweeney enthusiastically adopted it.

The game itself came about because Tim Sweeney was trying to make a text editor that he could use to write ASCII files in PASCAL while he was a Student in Maryland. No, I'm not exactly sure how a game came from that either, the creative process works in mysterious ways. He noted that some ASCII characters looked like walls, and then used his nascent text editor to draw a set of four maps, then wrote a game engine so he could play on those maps and ZZT was born.

The game itself is pretty primitive, being designed to work on even an old 8088 processor. Graphics are entirely ASCII text characters and the map is a single screen with various characters representing the walls, water, enemies, and so forth. The game worked fine in black and white but, being very advanced, could also use EGA graphics allowing up to 16 colors to be on the screen at the same time, an incredible luxury. Controls are equally simple, the direction keys move a little white smiley face representing the player, holding SHIFT and a direction key fired a bullet in that direction, and... that was all the controls, there were no others.

As you might guess from references to fans creating boards, what gave ZZT it's extraordinary longevity was that it came packaged with a level editor, long long before there were any mod communities existed. This editor was extraordinarily user-friendly and intuitive, it probably catapulted a number of people into game design. It was credited with being the first game, ever, to use object-oriented programming, the language "ZZT-OOP" which allowed designers to write complex scripts to control the board and manipulate the game directly. For those who didn't feel like coding there were a number of pre-coded objects, some enemies and a few puzzle elements, such that you could make a solid game without writing a single line of code. Using this editor people have produced everything from shoot-em-ups (There's ZZT versions of DOOM and Wolfenstein 3D), puzzle games, RPGs, there's even (somehow) a ZZT version of Lemmings. Incredibly there's at least one music player despite ZZT not having any support for sound cards so if you ever wanted to listen to Celine Dion as played by that tinny beeping speaker built into the motherboard to generate audible error codes on startup, ZZT has you covered. Many of the fangames are legends unto themselves and even years after being produced, people speak favorably of games like Evil Sorcerer's Party (A political thriller in which the Eponymous Evil Sorcerer's Party has hypnotized the entire nation to vote for their candidate, so you, our hero, have to manage to make an election ballot so idiotic and procedures so complex that they still lose the election) or Run-On that frankly... I have no idea how Run-On was even possible, somehow somebody made a procedurally generated endless runner game in ZZT. The stuff people have managed to do with it's primitive coding system of only a few dozen commands and a few kilobytes of memory is nothing short of awe-inspiring.

ZZT had a lackluster sequel in Super-ZZT, which lacked the easy-to-use level editor and thus died a fiery death almost instantly. It spawned a few imitators, MegaZeaux is notably better in every way except that it's not ZZT and lacks the charm of being so primitive, and it too faded without managing the amazing success of ZZT.

Overall it's a game with legs like no other. When the current crop of fad games are forgotten dust and bytes on some lost server farm, ZZT will still have new content being made for it.
 
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Histeria!

Bear Ribs

Well-known member
HISTERIA!



This is seriously like one of a dozen or so intros they used. The show loved it's rotating intros. Quite a few episodes took the Saturday Night Live approach instead and had no intro.

Laconic: Edutainment at it's finest.

Histeria! (Yes, the exclamation point is part of the title) was a lone attempt at educational programming by Warner Brothers in it's era, a daytime cartoon that ran from 1998 to 2000. The basic framing... despite the H-shaped starship in that intro there was no time machine, and no actual framing or reason for why the show happened. It was built around the idea of the old-school variety show, like the Sonny and Cher Show, or perhaps a more musical Saturday Night Live, with various skits, songs, and dance routines designed to teach kids about history via frenetic comedy and general zaniness. Sometimes they went even further with that, such as when they interpreted Atilla the Hun's engagement with Europe as a literal variety show with Atilla and his female opposite, Hun. The Emancipation Proclamation was made into a square dance. They cover the Tudors in one episode, but reinterpret them as Kaijuu.

The show came at about the same time as Animaniacs, and had a similar zany feel, witty writing, love of hidden innuendo and making the censors cry, and even some crossovers. It had a wide cast of crazy characters who enacted most historical events (or in the case of the Histeria Kids Chorus, sang about them) and usually had a "Guest Host" of a historical figure relevant to the theme of that episode. The characters tended to have punny names such as Charity Bazaar, Aka Pella, Loud Kiddington, Pepper Mills, and Miss Information. I suspect this is the only cartoon that routinely had a baby get trampled, squashed, entombed, exploded, used as a soccer ball by Nazis, and so forth. Big Fat Baby took a lot of damage.

The show was fairly good at portraying the ugly side of history though given it was aimed at young children. They usually found a way to wink wink it without being too horribly bloody for the audience. Often this was done via extremely ominous songs, such as them rewriting "A Few of My Favorite Things" for Josef Stalin:



The show also loved mocking network censors. Lydia Karaoke, a WB employee responsible for trying to keep the show clean, was constantly the butt of various jokes. In one particular episode they covered the history of sewers and, upon learning that Thomas Crapper was a historical figure, immediately began mocking Lydia because she couldn't stop them from saying "Crapper" over and over again on a kid's cartoon show. In another episode Lydia was rather brutally mauled by museum employees for painting a dress on Botticelli's Birth of Venus to keep the cast from displaying nudity into a primetime children's cartoon.

The show had a large number of running gags, as well as shows-within-a-show such as Toast's Ask Me If I Care (Hint: If it wasn't surfing or Rock n' Roll, Toast didn't care), or Pepper Mills hosting Pepper's Pep Rally. The characters would appear in various costumes and guises as if they were actors, while retaining their normal personalities and quirks regardless of whether they were Vikings, Mongols, Minutemen, or Conquistadors for that episode.

Overall Histeria did a fine job getting some limited sense of history into people. One can only cover so much when it's in 22 minutes a day, much less when you need to distill, say, the entire 900-year Chou Dynasty down to a four-minute skit based on Family Feud, or translating the bloody French Revolution through a song called "Chop Chop." Nonetheless the watchers did come away with more historical knowledge than before watching and it was good at hitting the high points and making the jokes funny enough and the songs memorable enough for kids to hold those facts. Zany, unpredictable, and a last gasp for variety shows, that was Histeria!
 
Robotix

Bear Ribs

Well-known member
Robotix


Laconic: Awesome model kits, I wish we had toys like this today. Oh, wait, good news...

Spelled with an "X" because that's how everything cool was spelled in the 80s. This was a toy franchise first, one that got a brief attempt at a show that, well, didn't make it, sadly. Because those were some of the most amazing toys. Robotix toys didn't have a toy inside, exactly. It was more of a science experiment, a mass of parts, wires, motors, and gears you could use to assemble your badass robot, or any of a variety of other badass modules from the parts, with suggestions like "Build Bront... or build Bront into a Space Sled... or build Bront into a Rover..." There'd be instructions and several suggested options but ultimately, much like Legos, a Robotix kit was about making it your own, except the kit was also motorized with battery-powered systems so it would move, turn its head, and pick up somebody else's wimpy action figure in its claw and throw it in the trash.

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The story of Robotix is... pretty much summed up in that above vid of the intro. On a distant alien planet of Skallor, two races, the Protectons and Terrakors, were at war (Three guesses which were the good guys, and the first two don't count.) A supernova destroyed the surface of the planet so, despite hating each other, the two races cooperated to survive and went into stasis tubes to wait for the planet to recover (I'm not quite clear on how a planet recovers from a supernova but sometimes the show called it a space storm so there's that). Sadly, the tubes were apparently made by the lowest bidder and a radiation leak killed most of them. Compu-Core, the extremely lawful stupid AI monitoring the situation, downloaded the survivor's minds into Robotix, immense modular construction robots.

Umpty-quadrillion years later a human exploration ship checking the place out was shot down by an alien battlecruiser and landed on Skalorr, where the robitix'ized Protectons and Terrakors were continuing their ancient war... badly. There was a bit of a catch, the Robotix frame wasn't built for self-actualization, they were supposed to interface with an organic brain and without one, most of the Protectons and Terrakors were having a good day if they could walk in a straight line, much less fight. Fortunately, a shipful of human brains just became available to interface with. The Terrakors had a bit of an advantage in that they actually had a working spaceship, and the more cynical humans joined them for the promise of a ride home once the Protectons were dust, with Kanawk and Nemesis openly and loudly despising each other but still working together for mutual goals. Meanwhile the more idealistic humans decided to join the Protectons.

Robotix was part of the Super Sunday Block alongside Jem and the Holograms, Inhumanoids, and a Big Foot cartoon. As a result its format was a bit odd, rather than the typical 22-minute episodes, each episode of Robotix was just 6 minutes long. Jem and Inhumanoids would go on to be successful enough for full-sized shows, while ultimately Robotix and Big Foot were canceled. The fifteen 6 minute episodes were all a single narrative covering a few days, with each one flowing into the next. The 90-minute Robotix movie was simply the episodes put together without commercial breaks and a "To Be Continued..." marker every six minutes. A single-issue comic was made by Marvel in 1986 that roughly followed the first couple episodes of the show.

For a 1985 cartoon, it was fairly tightly written. Skalorr life was intensely poisonous to humans and keeping track of rations/stealing food were a major part of the narrative, along with seeking resources and constantly rebuilding battle damage. It led to a fairly satisfying climax as the alien ship finally launched, only to lead to greater battles in space as they continued their fight in an asteroid field up to the conclusion.
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The show took its cues from the toys, so for instance not only could you build Argus into a crawling lizard-car with a claw on the front using the kit, Argus actually got rebuilt into that car for an episode of the show. The ability of Robotix to rebuild into new forms, and repair themselves with parts from each other, was a major theme that was played up throughout. The battles were utterly brutal, pushing the envelope of what the moral guardians would allow even for robots with some absolutely painful noises as limbs got ripped off, legs got smashed, and wheels got shredded only to be rebuilt into new configurations inspired by the toy kits over and over. Even humans didn't escape unscathed, Kanawk was rather shockingly killed onscreen when Argus smashed him in the finale. The characters also had a rather unique look, since the show had to match the toys, and the toys had to be able to move by remote control, the characters are, well I won't exactly say practical because they were frankly insane; but they had to actually move, balance, and walk like something a kid could build from the parts and those limitations show up pretty clearly. The designs themselves are quite bizarre and have a distinct Star Wars vibe, as in those goofy, on-off droid designs in the background that make no friggin' sense and just have random arms and legs everywhere. I could totally see Tyannix trying to shoot down the Millenium Falcon.

Believe it or not, while the show's been gone since 1985, Robotix is still going strong. The toyline went through a bit of a slump but recovered, and spent some time as day-glo bright colors before returning again to their industrial grunge roots with new models sold as Edutainment toys by Learning Curve. The incredibly epic Robot Commander that is their current flagship builds into a remote-controllable robot five feet tall, bigger than most of the kids who would play with it.

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Overall it was probably a bit ahead of its time. I might wonder nostalgically what might have been, but it went out like a champ instead of becoming lame and bloated, and has introduced kids to the exciting world of building robots for half a century. Not a bad legacy.
 
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Bear Ribs

Well-known member
So I'm most of the way through my "Cool stuff of the 80s and 90s" that I wanted to prioritize. I need to finish up the Transformers trilogy but Titans Return rather sapped my will to live and I'm not sure I can finish it now. Does anybody have suggestions for the next review?
 
Captain Simian and the Space Monkeys

Bear Ribs

Well-known member
Captain Simian and the Space Monkeys


Laconic: Another sci-fi show with animal characters, this one with an unusually good sense of humor.

Captain Simian and the Space Monkeys debuted in 1996 and ran for a single season of 26 episodes. It's an action/comedy blend that worked surprisingly well considering how it tended to flip-flop between deadly serious and farcial content.

The framing of the story begins with a race called the " " who are so advanced it's impossible for lesser beings to comprehend, say, or even write out their names. A running gag consists of every other character waiting politely and presuming that, for some reason, they're simply pausing before saying their name instead of the universal censoring going on. These beings have been protecting the universe for untold ages and wanted some time off to party in the 10th dimension, so they decided to foist responsibility for stopping Lord Nebula off on humans. Enter the 1960s, where the earliest rockets are launched, and an American rocket is sent up with a chimpanzee named Chuck aboard. The " " promptly yoink Chuck and are a bit dismayed at first because they were under the impression that humans had evolved a bit more than this, but solved it by increasing Chuck's intelligence and gifting him with speech, after which they hightail it to their 10th dimensional kegger.

Chuck, now renamed Captain Simian, uses their leftover technology to yoink himself a crew. He gets a kleptomaniac spider monkey named Spydor, a Gorilla named Gor-illa, a genius but mentally unstable orangutang named Dr. Splitz (And his farmboy yokel second personality, Splitzey), and the last crew member, a golden snub-nosed monkey named Xiao Lin who had previously lived in a Buddhist temple and was worshipped as a goddess, and saw no reason that level of deference should not continue.

I suspect the writers didn't do a whole heck of a lot of research on Buddhism before coming up with that. Also not the most original array of names I've ever seen.

The villain was Lord Nebula, who was a hybrid, half human and half black hole. No, don't ask me how that ancestry worked out. His goal was to purge his human half, allowing him to become a supermassive black hole that would consume the entire universe and cause a big crunch, after which he could recreate all existence in his own image. His human half was the only thing holding him back, and constantly gave him various intestinal ailments which generated... Nebulae. He happened to be voiced by Michael Dorn and at least didn't get beaten up as often as poor Worf...

His henchman was Rhesus 2, a Rhesus monkey also yoinked off an experimental earth rocket, with an exposed brain he often swapped out for other brains since his various brains thought in different ways and had different strengths. He greatly loved puns and produced a bizarre and quite creepy mix of body horror and funny wordplay.

Thus the stage was set and the crew of bickering, barely functional monkeys fly through space mostly foiling lord Nebula by accident while trying to find bananas in space. The show was overall fun and packed with shoutouts to many other sci-fi shows, and more monkey jokes than you can fit into a barrel. It had a halfway decent ending that actually wrapped up the series, more than you can say for most cartoons. Overall it wasn't particularly innovative but made up for it by being fun.
 
Xena: Warrior Princess

Bear Ribs

Well-known member
Laconic: The most popular show on TV... somehow.



Xena: Warrior Princess is a cult classic, target of a thousand parodies, launcher of a great many ships, and equally beloved and hated. It was praised for having a remarkably strong female protagonist before that was really a thing, and hated by the same people that praised it because she tended to show her strength through stunts like throwing daggers with her cleavage. It ran for six season, from 1995 to 2001, a total of 134 episodes. It was, no kidding here, the single most popular show on TV in the entire world at its peak, and was in the top 5 for every one of its six seasons. It was insane how popular it was, and infiltrated all levels of pop culture and especially academia. Before they got their current names, the dwarf planet Eris and its moon Dysnomia were called Xena and Gabrielle in honor of the show's protagonists and that apparently came close to being permanent.

Originally it was a spin-off of Hercules: The Legendary Journeys, a Kevin Sorbo vehicle in which he traveled through ancient Greece defeating warlords and saving the day. Among the enemies he defeated was an evil Thracian princess who had been blessed by Ares to cause as much strife as possible. After beating her in battle Hercules was able to, depending on how you read the subtext, either show her the light or turn her good by slipping her the D. The episode proved popular enough that the producers greenlit a pilot for her to get her own show, which soon eclipsed Hercules and became ridiculously dominant in the ratings.

The basic format was simple, a reformed Xena and her loyal farmgirl-turned-bard sidekick Gabrielle travel through ancient Greece righting wrongs, stopping villains, and saving cats out of trees. That last bit is only half in jest as one of the show's strong points was that it did not at all take itself seriously. It's fairly apparent that the writers actually knew their Greek History and Mythology, there's a surprising number of very obscure references to be found, but they also just as clearly threw everything they thought was fun together and ignored all reason and historical accuracy in favor of crazy hijinks. Xena personally takes part in historical and mythological events thousands of years apart. Among other things, she teaches a shepherd named David her best giant-killing tricks before he goes off to fight Goliath, she's present during the Trojan War, and fights the battle of Thermopylae. Note I didn't say she fought in the battle, Leonidas and his 300 men were no-shows so Xena kills the entire 100,000-strong Persian army herself except for the few that manage to run away. No, the Greeks won the battle of Themopylea, what are you on about? She also gets Homer into writing, invents gunpowder, develops the entire mathematical field of geometry, is present for Jesus Crucifixion (?), is the pirate who captured Julius Ceasar, kills Marc Antony, tempts Lucifer into becoming Satan (!!), and winds up fighting Ceasar Augustus. Needless to say, the timeline is a touch muddled and that's before considering the actual time travel, reincarnation, and other shenanigans that happen. Aphrodite was a bimbo California Girl, there was a traveling Salesman named Falafel who invented fast food, and Xena develops psychic powers by traveling to China (?!). At one point she judged an art contest where a Greek named Pablus Picassus invented surrealism a bit early, and another artist was kicked out for plagiarism, named Xerox. The writers just clearly had a lot of fun and didn't take things too seriously.

One interesting aspect of the show's dynamic was that it showed the logical consequences of superpowered Amazon warriors and Princesses running around who were strong enough to wipe out entire armies, that is to say, in-show no man had a problem with hitting a girl and the show absolutely didn't expect them to. A guy backhanding an Amazon into the ground and putting a sword through her was treated as absolutely no worse (and no better) than an Amazon doing the same thing to a guy. The show was absolutely egalitarian in treating women as equal to men, bizarrely so by modern standards.



While the writing was undoubtedly distilled essence of camp, it was also surprisingly well done. Xena's guilt over having a body count larger than Mao Zedong was a recurring theme and a great many of her enemies gave her a lot of grief because they were basically justly after her head for having burned their homes and killed their families. Her greatest antagonist across the series, Callisto, is one such who lost her family to Xena's warlording ways and Xena's attempts to fix the situation managed to escalate hilariously across the seasons, Callisto wound up becoming immortal (Hercules Fault), then becoming a full-on Goddess (Xena's Fault), and before the end Armageddon was underway and Callisto had somehow become an Archdemon leading Satan's legions in an assault on heaven (Xena's Fault again).

It's impossible to discuss Xena without discussing the teasing and shipping. The show was an absolute masterpiece of double entendre and knowing exactly how far to go without crossing the line, somehow across six seasons they managed to keep everybody wondering if Gabrielle and Xena were lesbian lovers or just good friends... who shared a bed, bathtub, and much more. They also managed to expertly maintain a tease as to whether Xena was in a sexual relationship with Ares... and if that situation was incestuous because maybe Ares was her father. She also had the same teasing maybe-sexual-maybe-platonic deal going on with Hercules and a few more, the show just really, really like its teasing subtext and was superb at managing it.

Xena had a fairly distinct look. Xena fought with a short sword at times but her trademark weapon was a magic chakram that was clearly made from the same stuff as Captain America's shield given its ludicrous bounciness and ability to completely ignore the laws of physics. Oddly the weapons were fairly reasonable with spathoi predominating, though midriff-bearing armor was the order of the day for female warriors and amazons. It was filmed in New Zealand and the show made full use of the lush vegetation and beautiful landscapes to produce their vision of ancient Greece. The world itself was mostly untamed wilderness with small fortified towns here and there, and travel between them was near certain to result in attacks from bandits, warlords, or the like. Basically your typical DnD adventure. The special effects were... better than original Star Trek maybe? Yeah, they were pretty cheap to be sure.



Oddly enough Xena's legacy is a bit muted for how tremendously influential it was in the day. It did manage to generate literally hundreds of tie-in products, video games, an animated movie, comics, and more. A large number of shows spawned imitating the style and format, from Sinbad to Conan The Barbarian to eventually the sci-fi and revolutionary America clones Cleopatra 2525 and Jack of All Trades. None of them had the substance, and none really captured the magic Xena had. It was simply not easy to get that exact proper blend of camp, fun, and silliness mixed in with a horrific amount of gratuitous death and violence that Xena did so well. The b-grade daytime adventure/drama show eventually faded out of the limelight and hasn't returned since.

There was an attempt to do a remake of Xena back in 2015-17. Thankfully it died stillbirth as there's just no way anything remotely like Xena could be made in the modern day climate. Overall a very strange yet appealing piece of television history.
 
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Captain N: The Gamemaster

Bear Ribs

Well-known member
Laconic: Nintendo, the Cartoon



Captain N was a Saturday Morning cartoon that ran from 1989 to 1991 and for 34 episodes. For most of its run it was part of a block along with a Super Mario Bros. 3 Cartoon, and later the Super Mario Bros. Super Show. The premise is fairly simple and explained pretty well in the intro above, all videogames exist in their own universe called Videoland, connected by Warp Zones. Mother Brain from the Metroid series has nearly taken over and banished King Charles, ruler of Videoland, and his daughter Princess Lana uses a Power Glove to open the ultimate Warp Zone and summon a California high schooler named Kevin Keene who happens to be an expert at all things Nintendo. Kevin promptly turns things around for her and teams up with various Nintendo heroes to fight various villains across Videoland. As Captain N, he came equipped with a control pad and Zapper lightgun, which gave him superpowers. The control pad had a pause function to give him a brief timestop, the direction keys for bursts of super speed, and the a or b keys let him jump to extreme heights, while the zapper "dematerialized" enemies because Nintendo's violence policy at the time forbade them from using the word "Kill"

According to what I learned listening to the creators, Lana was originally planned to be Princess Toadstool (She hadn't been renamed Princess Peach yet) but when the Super Mario Bros. cartoon was greenlit (along with the option for a Legend of Zelda cartoon that eventually came to fruition), they retooled her into an OC princess (with maximum 80s hair) of all games instead to avoid overlapping characters. As a result, despite everything else Nintendo being all over the show, the Mario Brothers and their crew were conspicuously absent. Samus was also missing in action, though she appeared in the spinoff comics*.

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The rest of his crew consisted of Megaman, Kid Icarus (apparently the writers didn't realize that was the game's name and the protagonist was called Pit), Kevin's dog Duke (A golden retriever in the live action scenes and a beagle in the animated ones, I have no idea why), and Simon Belmont. All of them had various weird decisions in their designs. Megaman was turned green, two feet tall, and had a black visor over his eyes. I've seen the theory that the artists had a poorly adjusted TV that colored Megaman green when they tried playing it, but I personally doubt that because they clearly hadn't played any other games (Jeffrey Scott famously stated that Samus wasn't present in the show because he didn't know she existed). Rather, I suspect they started with Bad Boxart Megaman as their model and tried to make something a bit less godawful, which they did though that's not the highest hurdle in the world. He tended to add "Mega" to every sentence and had a bizarre gravelly voice. Kid Icarus, aside from the name, kept his appearance although "Cupid in a toga" isn't that complex a design so that likely helped, his quirk was appending "-icus" to the end of every other word he spoke. Simon Belmont suffered the worst of it, managing to get a bizarre outfit with aviator goggles and a fleece jacket, a backpack that seemed to be a bag of holding, and his signature whip which appeared to sometimes be sentient on its own. His personality was also horrifically changed, it was common for network censors in that era to outright demand that one character be uncooperative with the group so that he could be karmically punished (the crew that made Dungeons and Dragons notably spoke on this issue and did their best to make Eric actually have a point to spite their morale guardians) and unfortunately, that meant Simon carried the idiot ball for most of the show. He was a narcissistic egotist who spoke of himself in the third person, was extremely flamboyant, and competed with Kevin for Lana's affections though very poorly since she never reciprocated his bizarre courtship. A sentient Gameboy joined the team halfway through their run, voiced by Megatron Frank Welker. Link and Zelda made a few guest appearances.

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The Gang's All Here

On the villain side, Motherbrain was generally the leader with King Hippo (who was, for some bizarre reason, blue. I cannot figure out how they came up with that, as King Hippo from the game was literally part of the opening credits, they could not have missed that his skin was orange in Punch Out), a cowardly Eggplant Wizard, and Dr. Wily as her henchmen. Dracula (always referred to as "the Count," I'm not sure if they thought the name Dracula was trademarked or something) made several appearances but generally only for his own schemes, as did Ganon and a few other villains. Donkey Kong made frequent appearances, and was the size of King Kong now, but was generally more a Kaiju-class force of nature than an actual villain or hero.

Generally, the show followed a fairly typical SatAM format, Mother Brain would come up with a new scheme to take over Videoland, and Captain N and his crew would engage her minions in various adventures and finally save the day just in time for the credits to roll. The big draw was seeing all your favorite videogames brought to life onscreen, not the great writing. And onscreen they did appear, a plethora of games showed up in various locations. The crew had the inevitable beach episode in California Games, the palace kitchen had a warp zone to Burgerland, they found Kevin's lost dog in Bayou Billy, they had to survive the incredibly lethal 'burbs (and teach a lesson about literacy) in Paperboy, had adventures in Final Fantasy, brought peace to the elves and dwarves in Faxanadu, found Lana's shy and unconfident brother hiding out in Tetris of all places, and even managed to spend an episode on Marble Madness, among many others. The show had a rather surreal level of "videogame" logic with frequent extremely surreal events, like Simon Belmont ramming into a giant gong that just happened to be out in the middle of nowhere during a race.

The animation was, even for an 80s cartoon, remarkably wretched. I don't mean it was cheap like a Hanna-Barbera cartoon, it didn't use those shortcuts to save on animation, it just had piss-poor art frequently especially in the last season when it appears the budget was slashed. There are numerous scenes where they seemingly just plain forgot to add in the background and the artists appear to often have trouble with concepts like "both eyes are the same size and point in the same direction."

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What the heck is wrong with Pit?

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She's so hot.

As a whole, the show was quite successful. While most shows of the time were basically extended toy commercials, Captain N had the advantage that its toys were already a popular thing in the form of Nintendo games, so it just had to sell those, and sell them it did. There was very little actual Captain N merch to compete with the already existing Nintendo Merch it was supposed to sell. It was surprisingly short and the last season was quite compressed so as to fit in a half-hour block alongside the Super Mario Brothers show it was squashed up against, so the later runs of the episodes often had important scenes cut out. Eventually, it was turned into a syndicated series by welding it to the two Mario cartoons and a Legend of Zelda spinoff to get the minimum 65 episodes syndication required.

Overall an interesting look at how non-gamers viewed videogames at the time, and a nostalgic blast for old games. The 80s hair has not aged well though.

*And was hilariously different from her video game modern incarnation. They went hard on the "bounty hunter" aspect for Samus so rather than the grim, humorless death machine that modern Samus is, she was a grifter, conniver, and generally a backstabbing rogue who competed with Princess Lana in ridiculous ways to try to win Kevin's affections.
 
Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman

Bear Ribs

Well-known member
Laconic: One of the most influential comic-based shows you've never heard of.



Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman was a moderately popular version of the franchise that ran for eighty-eight episodes and four seasons from 1993 to 1997. In a strange twist, rather than focus on comic book adventures, it was primarily a romance show. That's not to say there wasn't plenty of time travel, alien invasions, supervillains, and world-devastating monsters. However, the superheroics tended to be heavily mixed in with Clark and Lois' dating scene and romantic entanglements, with a B plot often revolving around Jimmy Olsen's failure of a love life.

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The first season had some trouble finding its feet. Jimmy was, for some reason, cast by Michael Landes who was... not a bad actor at all but not remotely Jimmy. He was quietly replaced by Justin Whalin in the second season who at least had a vague resemblance to comic Jimmy. The first season also had Cat Grant as a gossip columnist and village bicycle which really didn't work and her character was dropped entirely in subsequent seasons.

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Overall the special effects were... decent for a TV show made in the early 90s. CG barely existed so green screen and expensive practical effects had to be used. It may look meh by modern standards but it was good for its time, albeit not good enough to compete with the monster budget Star Trek shows had at the time. The acting was decent, though Dean Cain did a very poor job of pretending to be humble, clumsy, and effacing the way traditional Clark Kent did to hide his identity. It is, perhaps, a tad unfair to compare him with Christopher Reeves's masterful acting, but that was the Superman everyone remembered until then. Teri Hatcher did a fine job as Lois Lane and then, for some bizarre reason, became typecast in TV shows as a skanky bad girl who was as far from Lois as you could get for the rest of her career.

It is impossible to overstate how influential this show was on the comic books. Despite its other shortcomings, it really, really changed the entire face of the Superman franchise. In the middle of the Dark Age of comics where everything was edgy and black and grimdark, Lois and Clark reminded everybody that Superman was supposed to be wholesome and fun, and literally, the end of that era of comics coincided with this show going back to its roots. This show was moderately famous for a single line that changed everything:

Lois Lane: "Who's asking, Clark, or Superman?"

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Before then it was taken as a given that Lois didn't know Superman's secret identity and was trying to find out. But Lois and Clark changed things and had Lois know his identity, and they married in the middle of the show. The comics followed suit, having Clark and Lois marry in 1995 and that situation has continued ever since. The Kents being alive rather than the dad, at least, being dead was also something pioneered by Lois and Clark, with the show frequently having Clark call up or even visit his parents for advice and making the Kents a much larger part of the mythos than had previously been possible. Today it's a given but before it was presumed that Thomas Kent was dead and Martha a non-entity. The show also pioneered the idea that Clark was the "real" person and Superman was who he pretended to be, before that it was normally assumed that Superman was the real person and Clark was just a show he put on. This concept too took over comics and it's taken as a given today. The show also emphasized how often Superman influenced the world socially, constantly attending events for charity and even visiting birthday parties, weddings, and other events. Much humor was derived from this but the show made a point that he actually did more good in the world this way than stopping a runaway train, though he stopped the trains too.
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The show lost steam badly in the fourth season and foundered pretty heavily. Lex Luthor was used up as a villain halfway through and there wasn't much of a revolving prison in the show, enemies like Metallo tended to wind up dead as a doorknob and rarely came back. By the end, having killed much of the original rogue's gallery, they resorted to original characters, most specifically Tempus, a time-traveler from a utopian future who wanted to remake things into a bad future because he was bored with all that happiness and sunshine. Not a terrible concept but he was overused and presented as more of a nemesis than Lex Luthor ever was, which angered many comics fans. Ultimately though a fifth season was planned, the show was canceled on a cliffhanger where for some reason Lois and Clark's baby from the future was dropped off on their doorstep, an ignominious end.

Overall Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman is a relatively forgotten piece of the lore but it literally reshaped the entire comics industry, and the changes it made to the Superman legend continue on to this day. The DCAU began to pick up steam with Superman: The Animated Series beginning in Lois and Clark's last season and borrowing a large number of the TV show's ideas and carrying them forward for a new generation. It's probably one of the most influential shows most of the fans of the franchise have never watched.
 
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Bear Ribs

Well-known member
What to say about Anodyne 2: Return to Dust?
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In the modern world, we see huge corporations pour millions of dollars into making AAA games, and then when you get to play them, the game is garbage. But Anodyne 2: Return to Dust breaks the mold, it was made by just two people working on a shoestring budget, proving that even with those limited resources, they could also produce garbage.

Well if you look at reviews of it online, you're going to find tons of them explaining how Stunning and Brave it is with very little talk of gameplay, for good reason. The gameplay sucks. But first let's take a look at the story.

Anodyne 2 follows Nova, a "Dust Cleaner" who is taked with removing the highly toxic dust that infests citizen's bodies. Nova is uniquely able to shrink down to microscopic size and enter the bodies of citizens, allowing her to fight the dust on it's own level. Equipped with a vacuum cleaner-like weapon, she is able to suck the dust up and dispose of it later.

Nova was created by The Center, a godlike being that interacts with the world through it's prophet-like creatures, Palisade and C-Psalmist. Needless so say, the story is cliché as it gets. I knew The Center was going to turn out to be evil before I'd made it through the tutorial levels. "Our analogy for God is secretly evil" isn't exactly the freshest take ever. Their analogy, however, is really, really, weird. The Center is represented by city life, a work-yourself-to-death ethic, lack of any pleasure, and no families or childbirth allowed as it interferes with work. Nova herself has a "Holy

Meanwhile, the dustlife that is used to represent the "atheism" perspective is associated with a rural farming community, a love of professional wrestling, a strong desire for children, taking life slow, appreciating good food and friends, and a dignified acceptance of death when the end comes.

Yeah, everything they accuse you of, they do themselves.

The MC actually does have a bit of personality, to be sure. She starts out the typical mute game protagonist but around the third act, we discover she can talk, she just never bothered because it wasn't related to her job of sucking dust. She has a temper and develops her own pseudo-religion to replace her lost faith, with the Glandilocks Seed being a metaphor for how religion brainwashes kids into accepting it's precepts and once raised in a religious household, the child can never, ever, be free of it's taint.

Yeah.

As far as the story itself, it's sloppy. You'll see plenty of reviews about how Stunning and Brave it is and all those are really, really light on specifics because the specifics are awful. You interact with a range of creatures and most have their own stories, much of the game is just wandering around until you find somebody suffering from dust contamination and then cleansing them, but most have their own oddities. However, it doesn't add up to anything solid and everything is disjointed and disconnected.

Just as an example, in around the third act, it becomes a major plot point that nobody connect to The Center knows what food is or eats. In fact by the end, just tasting good homecooked dustlife food turns out to be corrupting as nobody's every used their tastebuds. Which is really weird, because in the tutorial level you go through the Yolk of Yummy and Yolk of Sippy to get cereal and milk for the Glandilocks Seed to have breakfast, and the first level in Central Cenote City includes a grocery store and one of the first dungeons is inside a foody who's dust contamination caused his entire body to be covered in taste buds because he loved eating so much.
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One of the more normal-looking inhabitants...

Similarly we're told that nobody connected to The Center can have children, they come from The Center only. However you see kids in the aforementioned Grocery store playing around and a wormlike mother whose had more children than she can support in the Central Cenote City, the first level. The stories don't really make a lot of sense when put together because it's deeply apparent the authors were checking off boxes and not thinking about an actual, coherent narrative. You're supposed to be special because only Nova can shrink down to dust size but later you find an entire apartment complex of dust-sized inhabitants who are all followers of The Center.

In the first level, after doing your second dungeon, Nova collapses from overwork and Palisade expresses concern about how Nova is overdoing it. However, Nova never has this problem again and it just really doesn't show up anymore after. There's tons of scenes like this but they're never connected to each other. It just doesn't hold together as any sensible kind of narrative, just a series of random events. At every point, any chance of continuity is pissed away for The Message.

There's also a weird mechanic that shows up halfway through the game with C Meta who has you collect metacoins and then gives you metadata in exchange for them. This consists of deleted scenes, emails the game designers sent to each other, and other stuff explaining how they developed the game. This is... kinda interesting but also massively breaks up the flow of the game and what little continuity it has. Other characters often break the fourth wall as well.
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'Kay then... I'm not sure why every NPC appears to be twenty feet tall but go with it.

This is beyond the issues with the actual message itself. The authors are pretty much starting from the assumption that of course they're right and of course anything religious is evil so they don't really ever bother to establish anything, they just assume they're right. F'rex in the dustlife section, Nova becomes a professional wrestler called Weed Wych (just go with it) and there's a lengthy section of rhythm mechanics to simulate your moves. Then, suddenly, they spring a new wrestler on you, The Center! The Glandilocks Seed, and Nova, both get angry at being told to basically fight their god and humiliate them for the crowd and the story implies this is obviously terrible and we should side with the dustlife. But the dustlife basically sprang this on Nova without her permission or doing anything to vet the idea, for me that was much worse than her being "emotional" and having a breakdown on stage due to being basically asked to commit heresy.

Soon after, Nova winds up creating her own religion in which she ascribes all kinds of magical rituals and powers to a set of toys Palisade gave her to play with, believing that by rolling a set of dice, crossing a bridge, and then going down a slide ritualistically she would eventually cause Palisade to come back from the dead (Earlier, The Center killed Palisade for suggesting that Nova should be allowed to take a break from dust busting to rest). I guess this is meant to represent how religion is all just made up or something.


Mechanically, well, the game is rancid. It has two basic modes, a 3D world designed around Playstation 1 level graphics, and the dustworld which is based on Super Nintendo 16 bit graphics. The 3D world is awful, there's nothing really to do there except find whoever you're next supposed to climb inside to fight their dust. It appears entirely designed to waste the player's time for no reason. As an example, there's a big central elevator you have to take from The Center's sanctum to the city, and once you've cleared enough dust, the surface of the island above. You have to stop and press the buttons at every single floor, then go through an animation and wait for it to load the next floor, even though you never use any but the bottom and top floors. The waste of time is annoying as hell. Nova's overland travel speed is terribly slow, she can transform randomly into a car for no apparent reason which helps a little, but the distances traveled are still immense and most of the world is just empty scenery. There's highways and a carwash but you're the only car in existence. Most characters are extremely low-poly weirdlings usually with only two limbs and a limited dialogue. There's a shooting mechanic but it's barely used, you have to "spark" a target a few times in order to jump inside them but there's no shooting enemies, no combat, nothing but rancid 3rd Person Perspective jumping puzzles and a lot of clicking on odd characters for dialogue... and lots... and lots... and lots... of driving along the highway as a car to your next dungeon.

The long travel times are aggravated by the core mechanic. Nova has a pitifully small capacity for dust in her vacuum storage tank. You have to bring many loads of dust back to The Center to unlock the next stage, but it takes so long to get to any outlying dungeons that the actual fastest scenario is to run through one of the early dungeons (By my reckoning, the most efficient is the tree-imagineer dungeon) over and over bringing back tiny loads of dust to The Center, then just wasting whatever you get at the next plot dungeon for cards (you need both dust and cards to unlock the next area, but cards are unique and there's usually only one per dungeon while dust can be farmed) because hauling it back is so time consuming and your tank will be full and wasting dust long before you get to the end. Then you get the meta expansion and realize you have to traipse all over the places you already did, at your pitifully slow speed in order to gather metacoins...

The 16-bit sections are much better. Firstly because the 16-bit era was just a bit tighter than the experimental phase of the 3D era, basic top-down mechanics were a solved problem then. Partly because you can actually do something besides click dialogue boxes and jump around. Each person's insides are a dungeon that represents their psyche. In practice this means each dungeon has a specific gimmick, like a split screen, a burning mechanic, a reflect gimmick, or what have you. The dungeons themselves are very simple fare, there's not many branching paths and usually just a straight shot once you figure out the dungeon's specific puzzle solving mechanic. That said, there are a lot of different gimmicks and they can be fun to solve.
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In between the two levels is a wretched Dance Dance Revolution-themed mechanic. Some people will automatically repel you (despite begging you to enter) so you need a rhythm game to simulate getting past their defenses. It's not actually synched to the world's music and serves only to be extra-annoying.

There are two possible endings. In one, you agree with The Center in which case The Center causes an event called The Anodyne in which it absorbs the life-force and emotions of every living thing, killing all other living things all to empower itself. So unexpected, I never would have guessed the God Analogue would turn out to be evil in the end.

In the rebellion ending Nova suddenly uses the power to turn invisible... which she didn't have before (though granted the dustlife randomly does have it) and then steals the next Dust Cleaner Reva when she's being trained. She kills Reva's Glandilocks Seed. C Visionary suddenly eats C Psalmist for more power (remember how nothing attached to The Center eats? The authors didn't). Nova kills C Visionary and then escapes on a boat to find a new place where she can be a mommy without having to give birth herself, just taking the kid away from the religious environment for her own good.

Yeah. So that's Anodyne 2: Return to Dust.
 

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