Role Playing Game: The Prison Incident

Some times players can be perfectly in-character and still royally screw over a mission. This game that I ran as a guest-GM demonstrates this well.

The System: BESM-d20, a fairly versatile system (from a defunct publisher) that really ought to have been polished a bit more.

The Setting: Loosely based on the manga Fairy Tail, the game takes place in an alternate history Europe where magical guilds have formed to handle major crises. The player characters are all members of a guild known as the Pathfinders in the Italian city-state of Venezia.

The PCs:
Iona – The main GM's character, Iona is a sword-wielding Magical Girl and daughter of the now-deceased guild master Roy Lombardi.

Nyxz – The guild Bookkeeper and medic, Nyxz's primary combat ability is putting up force fields for the rest of the team.

Domon – Son of a famous pirate-catcher, Domon is a swordsman with a love of strategy, though he usually thinks so far ahead of the given situation that he misses should-be-obvious details.

Aria – A scholarly wind mage of high birth and haughty demeanor.

Henry/True Justice – A janitor with a cosmic entity obsessed with justice bonded to his soul.

Jake – A cross between Harry Dresden and Doctor Who, basically.

Tarragon – A metallic golem that Henry built while trying to build a toaster. Tarragon is convinced that he is actually an entity older than time itself and that Henry just 'discovered' him.

The Set-Up:
We open in a black dream space, via which a criminal known as Charles (dun dun dunnnn) appears to the heroes and informs them that a group of his followers who were caught years ago are sentenced to be executed in three days. Due to an oath they took, they're bound from using magic at a spiritual level. Therefore, Charles is going to switch the heroes' minds with those of his followers. If they can break out within the three days, he'll switch their bodies back. If not, then his criminals get to keep the Heroes' bodies.

What happened:
All was going well at first. The players got a feel for the rhythm of the prison. They learned from a current inmate and former guard that a sedative was placed in the food served at the evening meal to make the inmates more docile and tired at night. They began to concoct a plan to switch the prisoners' meals with the guards' meals and try to escape while the guards were asleep. Unfortunately, communication wasn't the best between the characters. Henry, trapped in the body of Harley Quinn expy, found that he could still transform into Justice. He used this fact to prove to a guard named Michaels that he wasn't really the criminal and attempted to set up a deal in which they would meet with warden, and he would help them get the entire ordeal straightened out.

This would have been completely anti-climactic, so I decided on the fly that the warden was an utter prick fanatically obsessed with keeping people prisoners inside. The warden (a powerful psychic) telepathically planned with someone to betray the heroes and keep them inside. Michaels psychically overheard the warden's plan and tried to slip the information to Henry that night. Unfortunately, Henry had decided to eat the sedative-laced meal and was fast asleep.

On the second day, the group finally conferred and they decided to go with Henry's plan. They had decided to fast forward straight to the next day, at which point Henry would have found a note on the floor of his cell about the Warden's betrayal. Unfortunately, the player in charge of Henry decided he wanted to play the evening meal segment to confer with Michaels and make sure the deal was still on. Michaels was psychically attacked by the Warden to prevent him from spilling the proverbial beans.

Now, I supposed that the players would regroup and come up with a new plan to escape. Instead, Henry transforms into Justice in the middle of the prison's cafeteria, in full view of a hundred prisoners and multiple guards. Of course panic promptly ensues and the guards begin shooting at Justice. Justice flies outside and presumes he can fly up to the Warden's office and kill him or something (none of the players had bothered to inquire about it, but the prison had multiple Anti-Air guns on the roof of its wards to shoot down incoming aircraft and hostile dragons).

At this point, I was just about ready to have the AA guns just kill Justice for being an idiot. Meanwhile, I had twenty guards (all level 9) rush into the cafe to try and bring things back into order.

Jake's player didn't get the hint; he steps forward to fight the guards (he's a level 12 at this point, mind you, facing twenty level 9s.). Thanks to several factors—his attacking being a soul attack, and a natural 20, primarily—he rolled enough damage on his attack that it killed all 20 guards in one shot. At first I tried to save the scenario by dividing the damage between the twenty guards, so that it would do about 3 a piece.

But the player protested, so I decided I'd let the cards fall where they may; the guards' heads all went explodey, making Jake a mass murderer.

After that we sort of wound down, but the implication being that Jake's mass murder would compel Justice to kill him. This might break the entire campaign, but with some of the players busy IRL, we've not had a chance to finish the session yet.

So yeah. The moral of this story is, never make expectations, your players will always defy them.

The Bare Trap (Warning: Nudity!)

Got a minute?

I’ve got a topic that might make some people mad, and I don’t expect a lot of people to agree with me on this one. I just need to get my thoughts down on digital paper and maybe they’ll sound more coherent. Okay. Ready? My thesis statement is the sentence after this one.

Society really needs to get over the problems it has with female breasts.

Think about it. Why are boobs considered too hot for television? Why is it when a naked breast appears on cable TV, they throw in some token pixilation or a black bar over the nipple—which, I must point out, is the only portion of the breast that looks the exact same on women as it does on men. Why is the nude form of a woman visual contraband in mediums and real-life locations that don’t hold the same standard for men?

Some might argue it’s because of their tendency to arouse or at least excite your average heterosexual male. This argument might hold water if the entertainment industry were something like it was in the 1950s, when Lucy and Ricky had to sleep in two different beds, even though they were already married. But every medium today is full of sexual themes, T&A, and fan service. Television shows like Nip Tuck have shown scenes of oral sex that couldn’t have been more explicit without showing the body parts. Movies that miss the R Rating can still be packed with all-but-naked women or lacy lingerie love scenes.

And don’t even get me started on comic books, where sixteen years old is NOT too young to have female characters stripped down and in compromising positions. (A 2006 issue of Teen Titans comes to mind, in which a naked—and underage—Rose Wilson attempted to drunkenly seduce Robin. Conveniently placed black-as-night shadows were the only thing keeping the comic from a Mature Readers label.)

So if there is so much media intended to arouse—sometimes by means that go far beyond simple nudity—then why is it so offensive to just show boobs?

Seriously, I’m asking. I don’t know.

But here’s why I think it matters and why I think it should change. The emphasis on knockers going unseen except in adult content—whether intentionally or not—fetishists boobs. It takes a perfectly innocuous body part and turns it into a something seen as dirty, or at least off limits. That creates a problem when puberty hits the male gender. You see, while most boys will see their fair share of women’s naked chests, a few will believe that their desire makes them perverted or dirty minded. Instead of telling them that their interest is natural, we tell them that looking at nude women is a sin—and all the while they get a bizarre mixed message from the media that nudity is bad, but sexual promiscuity isn’t.

If you haven’t figured it out yet, this is pretty personal, because it’s what I went through. I was raised in a fairly conservative Southern Baptist home and went to a fairly conservative Southern Baptist church, and went through a truckload of utterly needless guilt over the issue of looking, lusting, and how much skin is too much. I didn’t even want to watch pornography—that is, I didn’t want to watch depictions of sexual acts, all the while those who were supposed to be guiding me were making me think I was a horrible person for the sin of… having hormones.

There’s another angle to this too. The Internet makes nude pictures easily available, but it also makes a lot more than that available. Just one wrong click can get you some of the vilest porn ever conceived. I was fortunate that I didn’t get pulled deep into the darker side of adult content on the internet—the stuff like bestiality, scat porn, and worst of all, child porn.

But some kids do wind up exposed to that stuff—and then what would be normal interest in the opposite sex becomes legitimate perversion.

Now, if you’re just flat out disagreeing with my… rant… diatribe… whatever this is… please bear with me as I’m gonna answer some objections I anticipate.

“What about the sin of Lust?”

Yeah, that’s the thing my church—especially my youth pastor—liked to harp on. But let’s take a look at the Bible passage that condemns lust in context. It’s in Matthew 5, if you want to compare.

27. "You have heard that it was said, 'Do not commit adultery.'^[a] 28. But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart.

Notice the context? Jesus spoke these words to married men who were using their minds to be unfaithful to their wives when it wasn’t possible to use their bodies. This is not a condemnation of the healthy and normal sexual desire that everyone experiences. The Greek word translated lust here is ‘epithymia’, also translated Covet. Covetousness and Lust both imply a strong and willful desire—in this case, a desire for someone who is not yours. Thus it’s okay to look at and enjoy the site of the opposite sex on both an aesthetic level and a hormonal level, if you don’t let yourself strongly desire them. (And weak desire can’t logically be a sin because humans do not have direct control over what they fancy; desires are not simply chosen, but cultivated over the course of time.)

Furthermore, notice that in this passage, that the impetus not to sin is placed ENTIRELY on the one who would lust. Thus, the church cannot Biblically argue that a woman who dresses (or undresses) in a manner that shows off the body God gave her is ‘inviting’ men to sin. Not only do the men have the option to look without lusting, but they have the option to not look at all. (Though I must say the latter option is considerably more difficult.)

The second objection might sound something like this:

“But that’s so immodest!”

Not necessarily. Modesty’s association with covering body parts is nothing new, and is found in the Bible—and likely in the holy books of other religions, but since I know very little about other religions, I’ll deal with just the Bible.

But... well, I did a bit of searching on the IntarWeb just to be certain, and the only reference I could find relating to female modesty is this, a passage in 1 Timothy.

9. I also want women to dress modestly, with decency and propriety, not with braided hair or gold or pearls or expensive clothes, 10. but with good deeds, appropriate for women who profess to worship God.

Modest dress, it would seem, has more to do with not flaunting wealth than it does with the length of your skirt. Modesty is an inward trait that may be reflected in dress, but is not determined by it. A woman who flaunts her sexual attractiviness would do it in jeans and a T-shirt as well as she would do it in a bikini.

And lastly...

“So you’re saying you think it’s good for us wimm’n-folk to just go around naked/topless/whatever?”

And the answer to this is… Not exactly. First of all, I understand that for many reasons, many women would not be comfortable in situations where they were exposed around the opposite sex. I’m not arguing for an end to appropriate attire or that nudity is appropriate in any situation, and obviously personal comfort and taste come in to play.

What I’d like to happen is for society in general just to chill out over nudity. The sight of the human body isn’t going to corrupt anyone. If that means women who want to are allowed to go topless wherever men are, then I’m fine with that. It’s already legal in some cities, including Toronto.

In closing, uncovering the body isn’t necessarily even a sexual act. Hopefully the drawings I’ve scattered throughout this blog post (which are all copyright to me, don’t steal them or anything) have pointed out some other possible meanings for depictions of nudity.

And with that, I’ve said what I wanted to say.

Peace.

The Robin Problem

I got to thinking about Robin today, and sometimes thinking leads to a blog post. So here goes. DC Comics needs to do something about Robin. The current version of the character is more relatable now than he has been in a few years, but things still aren’t perfect. Upcoming events as revealed by solicitations may change all of this, but as it stands, Robin needs fixing.

To understand where Robin went ‘wrong’, first we have to understand how Batman’s sidekick has evolved over the years. Legend has it that long ago in the distant past, around 1940, DC thought that Batman was getting too dark for the supposed target audience of comics—kids—and came up with a way to lighten him up a bit. Robin was introduced as Dick Grayson, a young circus acrobat whose parents were murdered by a small time mobster. Dick was taken in by Bruce Wayne and later discovered that his benefactor was in fact Batman; Bruce trained the boy and set him loose as Robin, the Boy Wonder. The rest is history; Robin became the first superhero’s sidekick, and inspired a wave of imitators.

Several parallel universes and four decades later, Robin had grown up a bit. Instead of a twelve year old boy, he was a 19 year old college student, at odds with Batman more often than by his side. Something had to give. So the then-writer of “New Teen Titans”, Marv Wolfman, decided to get rid of the Robin identity altogether (and thank God he did, given that no young adult male should be running around in hot pants)…

The result was Dick Grayson becoming Nightwing. A new boy, also a circus acrobat, was brought in to replace Dick. His name was Jason Todd, and he was essentially a carbon copy of his predecessors. The only difference was that he had red hair—which he died black anyway to be more like Dick.

Then along came a Crisis. Or rather, a story called Crisis On Infinite Earths. The end result of that is a moment taken straight out of Weird Al Yankovic’s song “Everything You Know is Wrong”—a bunch of little details about the universe of DC Comics had changed. Some things remained. Dick was still Nightwing, and Robin was still Jason Todd, but now Jason was no longer the red haired boy readers had tolerated; he was now a rude street urchin who badmouthed Batman and sometimes went a little too far with criminals. As in tossing them out of tall buildings too far. Needless to say, the criminal in question died.

Jason was hated, and DC actually polled the readers on whether he should live or die. Well, he died. So, once again, DC was without a Robin. Along came the third try. Third time’s a charm, right?

It was. The new Robin, Tim Drake, was a resounding success. He was different enough from Dick that he felt like his own character, but never as much of a rude little prick as the new and improved Jason. Tim got a duo of mini series dedicated to him, then his own solo title.

Part of the reason behind Tim’s success was undoubtedly his reliability. Sure, he was super-good at something, like all the Bat-Family must be. In Tim’s case, it was computers. But Tim was different. He had parents that were living, and in the course of his origin, only lost one of them. He continued to have a father for most of his published history—more on that later.

Tim first appeared as a thirteen year old, having deduced Batman and Robin’s identities at the age of nine. He soon grew into a fourteen year old in the first Robin miniseries, in which he traveled the world learning martial arts from teachers even more skilled than Batman himself. All the while Tim kept his identity a secret from his father and the rest of his supporting cast, while facing villains as dastardly and classic as the Joker or as new and bizarre as the General, a young boy who happened to be an evil military genius.

But somewhere along the way something happened. Tim turned fifteen sometime in the early 90s… and then stopped aging completely, even by comic book standards. A combination of factors led to this, but the main thing was the creation of a new generation of young heroes. Superboy, a clone with powers that mimicked Superman’s appeared, along with a super-speedster from the future named Impulse. Soon a new Wonder Girl joined them, along with a legacy hero named Arrowette. Tim and his friends were slipped into a generic age category—the high school age group. Though created over the course of the 90s, all of the “Young Justice” age group were pegged as being fifteen around 1997 and remained fifteen for years—despite DC comics having 1999 take place in real time and celebrating the new millennium in 2000.

Tim finally celebrated his sixteenth birthday in 2003, the age he would official remain during his early tenure in the newest incarnation of the Teen Titans. On one hand, things finally started to get moving again. On the other, some things changed for the worse. Tim’s father, Jack Drake, was killed off by one of the Flash’s supervillains, while his girlfriend Stephanie was tortured and murdered by the Black Mask.

Time skipped forward a year after the second Crisis, and Tim, now seventeen, was adopted by Bruce. He’s moved away from his computer nerd persona, becoming not entirely unlike Dick Grayson. And while his girlfriend… well, got better, Tim remains incomplete. While supposedly a genius, Tim remains in high school. Some of this may be attributed to the sheer amount of school he missed since becoming Robin, but it has to end some time.

I suppose this is where the opinion comes in, so feel free to disagree. Tim needs to graduate. He needs to move on. Despite all that’s happened and all that DC has editorially mandated to change about Tim, he and (what’s left of) his generation still remain in high school. And as someone who graduated high school not to long ago, I must attest that it feels forced. High school ends in the blink of an eye, and DCs teen heroes have been there far too long. Tim is by DC’s own timeline eighteen at this point—that’s five years of association with Batman and four of actually being Robin. He’s no longer the socially awkward computer genius he debuted as. He no longer has a father to hide his identity from.

I feel that Tim is becoming harder and harder to relate to because in almost every way, he’s grown up. He’s an adult trapped by the decrees of editors in a teenage wasteland. Perhaps being a young man in college myself, I am biased on this point, and I fully acknowledge that. Though in my defense, I don’t have trouble relating to other characters in Tim’s demographic, or those older and younger than myself. I simply think—as a fan of the character— that keeping him artificially pigeonholed at a certain age will eventually look ridiculous and make him less relatable to people of all age groups.

So what about the high school demographic? Well, DC has plenty of characters to fill the supposed void that would be left behind if Tim and his generation grew up. The new Blue Beetle, Jaime Reyes is a new member of the Teen Titans and an excellent new character. He was only introduced in 2006, and is already more relatable and likable than the person Tim has developed into. Kid Devil, Rose Wilson, Miss Martian, and several other young characters can easily pick up the torch of teen vigilantism.

One of the great things about the DC Comics universe is that it is traditionally more aware of the passage of time than the Marvel universe. Robins grow up, sometimes die. The Flash passes the torch to his successor and creates one of the company’s greatest characters in the process. And characters have finally started referring to the Silver Age of superheroes as more than ten years ago.

So yeah. It’s time for Tim to move on. He doesn’t have to reinvent himself as Nightwing.

Just give the kid his diploma already.

Role Playing With Mario

If you're one of the millions who have discovered the fantastic series of RPGs based on the illustrious gaming icon Mario, then this piece really isn't for you, because you already know. But if you're one of the many unfortunate souls who haven't yet discovered them, then read on. Five games that are sure to entertain you will soon be blogged about!

Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars

I suppose we should begin at the beginning. It all started in 1996 with a company called Squaresoft. You may have heard of them before—the guys behind classics in the gaming world like Chrono Trigger and the Final Fantasy series. They decided that it would be swell if they teamed up with Nintendo to make an RPG starring Mario, and thus was born Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars. And lo, it WAS swell. SMRPG begins as all Mario stories must—the princess, Bowser, and Mario. A kidnapping, an attempted rescue, a fight. You know the drill. Curiously Peach is referred to as 'Toadstool' by everyone in the game. I guess nobody at Square got the memo that it was okay to use her first name now, given that this came the same year as Mario 64, the game that introduced the US to the name Peach.

Anyway, during the rescue, Bowser's castle is attacked by a giant talking sword and Mairo, Bowser, and the Princess are scattered across the land. Luckily Mario lands in his own house, but Bowser and Peach are nowhere to be scene. Mario sets off to find that the castle has been taken over by an interstellar group of ne'erdowells called the Smithy Gang, and in the process Mario must locate seven stars to repair Star Road and beat Smithy's gang down. The trademark Mario RPG sense of humor gets its start here, as well as many staples of the series, such as timed hits during battles and visible enemies in the over world, things that help alleviate the often-tedious nature of Japanese RPGs.

Paper Mario

Originally called Super Mairo RPG II, Paper Mario began its life during the late 1990s, but didn't see the light of day until 2001. The N64 title was hurt by its late release when it came to sales, but the time in development created a game that more than made up for all its delays. Paper Mario slapped the Mario Universe wholecloth into a story book visual style that still holds up much better than most other games of that era. (Trust me, Paper Mario looks surprisingly good on a 52'' HDTV). Scaling back everything you traditionally associate with RPGs, Mario has an incredibly limited number of hit points and flower points, and everything costs and deals damage accordingly. There are no massive spells that do 9999 damage here. If your foe can hit you with a 7 damage attack, you're in trouble! But the lack of typical RPG excess is part of the game's charm.

This time around the villain is more familiar, Bowser has taken the Star Rod from the orbiting Star Haven and imprisoned its guardians the Star Spirits. There are seven of them, by the way. Mario has to travel all over the Mushroom Kingdom and defeat the guardians Bowser has put in place over the spirits, and enlists the help of some colorful characters of all races through the Mushroom World. Paper Mario is the poster child for everything Nintendo does right, and really cemented the place of Intelligent Systems as one of the best development studios in Nintendo's stable.

Mario and Luigi: Superstar Saga

The line took a detour onto the Game Boy Advance after its N64 outing, with Mario and Luigi: Superstar Saga hitting shelves in 2003. The game takes the timed hits of the previous games to a flawless extreme. Both Mario and Luigi team up this time, each brother controlled by one of the buttons. Mario responds to A and Luigi to B, and all of the game actions require the two to work together to accomplish their goals. The battle system was greatly expanded, adding combined “Bros” attacks to the fray, attacks that combined the brothers' abilites for—forgive me—MASSIVE DAMAGE. Defense was similarly brilliant, each brother dodging with a jump or reflecting with a hammer anything that came at them, as long as you pressed their corresponding button at the right time. This meant for the first time in the history of RPGs it's technically—if not humanly—possible to play through the entire game without taking a single hit aside from the ones the script demands the brothers to take.

On top of all this, Superstar Saga is easily the funniest game of the bunch, with an exuberant wacky sense of humor throughout. The story opens with emissaries from the Bean Bean Kingdom, one of the Mushroom Kingdom's neigbhors, revealing themselves to be none too friendly. They're secretly a witch, Cackletta and her minion Fawful. Together they steal Peach's voice and replace it with explosives! What follows is a trek that must be played to be believed, from Fawful's angry Engrish screeds to the climactic battle against the seven Koopalings and Bowletta at the end of the game—yes, Bowletta. I'll let you figure that one out. If you don't play this game, Fawful... WILL HAVE FURY!

Paper Mario 2: The Thousand Year Door

Back to Nintendo's main console in 2004, the series next entry was a sequel to Paper Mario that pulled out all the visual stops, using the full muscle of the Gamecube to do things that weren't possible on the N64. In addition to the visual upgrade, the game play got a few tweeks, with more interactivity in the battles (as if there wasn't enough already!) in the form of a dynamic audience that reacted to the fight and determined how much your Star Gauge—the meter that powers your special attacks—would charge with each action. Otherwise, the formula was very similar to the previous game: A mysterious door will only open every 1000 years, and beyond it lies a great treasure. The only way to open is to gather the Crystal Stars (You guessed it, all seven of them. Starting to see a pattern?) and beat the villainous X-Nauts to the prize behind it. Paper Mario 2's gameplay excesses can be forgiven largely because of the writing, which is brilliant from start to finish. The characters you meet through the game are instantly likable and more varied than those of the original game, lending the game a feel that you're in a vastly different part of the Mushroom World than where Mario Normally treads. Sure, there are franchise mainstays like the Goomba (this time an archaeologist named Goombella) and the Koopa (now a hoodie-wearing ex-coward named Koops) but you get more than that. A baby Yoshi joins the party, as well as a 'Shadow Siren' and a very large and busty ghost madame with a pair of lungs even bigger than her pair of... eyes..

You even get segments where you get to play as Bowser this time around, through areas that play like classic 2D side-scrollers. It's fun stuff all around.

Mario and Luigi: Partners in Time

Nintendo certainly got a lot faster at releasing these games, but it may want to slow down a little. Probably the weakest link of the bunch, Mario and Luigi: Partners in Time for the DS takes the gameplay of the first to an illogical but nonetheless fun extreme. As the title implies, you team up with a blast from the past—Mario and Luigi as babies. Wait a minute, weren't these guys raised in Brooklyn?

Nintendo doesn't even try to make sense of it, so neither will I. The game ads the little tykes, who have scaled down versions of all their adult counterparts' abilities, and like the first game where Mario and Luigi responded to individual buttons, the babies take advantage of the DS extra two and respond to X and Y. The sense of humor isn't quite as good, but its still a worthwhile adventure for any DS owner.

This time around the enemy is the dangerous Shroob, more aliens from beyond the stars who attacked the Mushroom Kingdom more than thirty years ago, sending shockwaves into the present. (Again, don't try and make sense of it.) Mario and Luigi team up with their baby selves to collect the shards of the Cobalt Star and restore the space time continuum to order—and fight a bunch of aliens along the way.

And there you have it. Five great games, four common themes throughout: Mario, hit points, stars, and plenty of baddies to squash.

If you haven't realized it yet, I'm a huge Mario fanboy, and that has perhaps colored my opinion of these games. Use common sense. If you don't like RPGs or Mario, there's a chance you might not like these games. But there's a chance you may, because they go above and beyond the typical RPG call of duty and do something unique and fun. Just remember to watch out for stray Bob-ombs.

Odds and Ends

Final Crisis

Here we go again; it’s that time of year. DC Comics has just unleashed it’s newst world-changing Mega-Crossover, Final Crisis. For the uninitiated, this is the third in a supposed trilogy of Crises that began in 1985 with Crisis on Infinite Earths and continued in 2005 with the recent Infinite Crisis. Final Crisis is supposedly the bookend to everything the story momentum of the DCU has been building towards over the last few years.

So far, it’s pretty underwhelming though. Now please note that SPOILERS are ahead, so if you plan to read Final Crisis, but haven’t yet, don’t go any further. The issue opens as the author promised it would, with the First Boy, Anthro. In a very cool opening sequence, he is given fire by the self-styled Prometheus, the New God Metron, and uses it to fight off the vandal hordes of the villain who will later be known as Vandal Savage.

The story shifts to the present day, where Dan Turpin, a minor Superman character created by Jack Kirby, finds the dying New God named Orion and watches as he dies. The Guardians of the Universe freak out and cordon off the planet because of a Code 1011, deicide. This proves to be a rather ridiculous elements for reasons entirely beyond the author Grant Morrison’s control

You see, DC has been killing off the New Gods in droves lately, in their year-long weekly series Countdown to Final Crisis as well as an eight-part miniseries know aptly as Death of the New Gods. The characters have been so over saturated that any awe and mystery they should have has been replaced by the tedium of an overused character showing up in places he doesn’t belong. Morrison manages to recapture a little of that, but only if you look at Final Crisis in a vacuum, independent of the failure of a weekly series that counted down to it.

After some good scenes involving Libra, the new big bad of the DCU for the time being, Dark Side (who is, of course, Darkseid himself) and surprisingly the Monitors, one of the most annoying and overused groups throughout Countdown. Morrison manages to make them more interesting in a few pages than Paul Dini and company did in 51 issues.

Of course, it wouldn’t be a big crossover without a hero killed off to show how serious the villain is. This time around the victim is long-time JLA mainstay J’onn J’onnz, the Martian Manhunter. I went in expecting to be outraged and frustrated by the decision, but in the context of the comic it caused a surprising amount of apathy. J’onn hasn’t been used much lately, or at least not used very well. He is off the Justice League, he has a stupid new costume, and his recent mini series was, as far as I’ve heard, mediocre at best.

It sufficiently establishes the stakes of this new world Libra wants to create—a world where Evil wins. I’m not sure how long the death will stick—after all, J’onn is one of the classic JLA mainstays and had a wonderful showing on the Justice League animated series.

Overall, Final Crisis issue 1 just makes me interested and curious about where it’s going. It didn’t turn me off from the whole crossover, but at the same time, it hasn’t grabbed my full attention yet the way Infinite Crisis and Crisis on Infinite Earths did when I first read them. But this is only the first issue, so I suppose whether or not this has all been worth it will be revealed in time.

GameOverthinker 8

In other news, the Game Overthinker video blog that I mentioned in my previous entry has updated again. This time around the topic is race and video games, and the insights by moviebob are very astute, in my opinion.

Gamers by and large are not a racist bunch, at least not anymore so than the rest of the population. When we see that the game is set in Africa, we simply accept it. The fact that the protagonist is a white guy and the zombies this time are all black didn’t occur to most of us until certain parties began complaining that the game was racist. To us, they’re just zombies, no matter what color their skin is.

Of course, there is obviously a potential to be offended if the game is not placed in context. But then, hen has the mass media ever cared about context when it comes to video games? From what they tend to report, Grand Theft Auto is a game about killing hookers and beating up old ladies.