Batman Isn't Iron Man

So here's the first time I'm using this blog like as it should be. Specifically, here's a rant that I shouldn't have even posted to Twitter (I did anyway though) because it's easily long enough for an entire blog post. Enjoy!

I get it, Robert Downey Jr.'s Iron Man is the king of the comic book world right now, but does every superhero need an Iron Man suit?

Spider-Man is wearing one in the MCU, Falcon is too basically, War Machine is literally just another Iron Man, there's a ton of this junk in comics stuff right now. Batman wore a powered suit in Batman v. Superman specifically as a reference to the Dark Knight story line where he did the same thing (how else would he fight Superman?), and for most of the recent films with Batman in them he's wearing a suit that's actually pretty top notch, but then in Justice League he goes ahead and wears another Iron Man suit for the final fight.

"I am Iron Man, DA NA NA NA NA NA- I mean, I'm Batman."

And I still get it, Iron Man suits are cool. Of course they are! And and I don't even need to go into detail about how they are functional from both an in-universe and storytelling perspective, but could we maybe STOP depicting every character in them?

Not only does every hero start too look the same if they're all wearing robotically enhanced suits, it also detracts from their character. Take a look at this article about fan art images of Jake Gyllenhaal as Batman. Predictably, most of the renditions shown are of the segmented plates and overly complicated techy suit variety. What happened to THIS!? Okay just joking, but what happened to this:

a REAL batman (also Superman too)

That's Batman! At least, that's an idealized image of Batman with no added fluff, nothing to distract from his Batmaness.

Batman's a tactician. He's a detective. He's an acrobat. He's got gadgets hidden in his utility belt. How does putting him in a super suit affect those aspects of his character? I'll tell you: it diminishes them. No longer does Batman need to rely on tactics, he's got superior technology. Why be a detective when you can just blast your way through the plot like Iron Man? Acrobatic skills, movement, and finesse aren't necessary when your armor is bulletproof. And forget hiding those silly gadgets, wear them with pride all over your damn body and show them off, otherwise the three-year-olds might think you're dumber looking than Iron Man!

It's just dumb and lazy. We don't need everyone in suits. I understand that there is some need to remove barriers to an audience's suspension of disbelief, and putting these otherwise normal human heroes in super suits helps sell the idea that they can fight the big grey super powered villains they always face at the end of the film, but this is an escalating problem. Once you escalate the level of gear your hero needs to fight the bad guys, how do you back down from there? Once Batman starts effortlessly wearing a super suit to fight super villains how do you deescalate the story to the point where you can tell stories about him fighting the regular old Joker again? This is something that I'll be paying very close attention to with regards to Marvel's handling of Spider-man in upcoming films, given that he's got access to that literal Iron Man suit Tony Stark gave him (though Marvel's probably going to do some sort of time reversal reset of the MCU after these next Avengers films so maybe it won't be a problem in any event).

Not every superhero needs to be indestructible and super strong, that's why there are HUNDREDS of different superheroes and teams where a bunch of different heroes with different strengths and weaknesses work together. Put these super plot armor Iron Man suits on everyone and maybe they'll be cool at first but eventually, as the scale of the battles and power of the villains these heroes face has to grow further and further, these comic book story lines will end up with the same problem Dragon Ball Z suffers from. What once was a tight story with comprehensible stakes evolves into a struggle for the fate of the universe where every character is blasting planets into pieces with a punch.  

But whatever, it's just comic book stuff. There are honestly far more compelling stories with less stupid nit picky problems in them. Have you seen Denis Villaneuve's film, Prisoners? It's pretty good.

Anyways that's just my thoughts on the whole everyone's wearing an Iron Man suit thing. If you wanna read more of these rants as they happen, follow me on Twitter @Sports_In_Space (or don't!). 

I just want to play Majora's Mask on my Switch

Here's something game developers used to know: new consoles are inherently worse than the ones they replace (at first).

I remember how, after the initial wave of awe and wonder at how amazing and fun it was to just look at, let alone play a game like Motor Storm in 2007 wore off, I didn't really play my PS3 much for the first couple of years that I had it. I spent FAR more time playing games on my original XBox, which already had a library of games that I loved to play, and I even bought a Nintendo 64 of my own (since my brother wouldn't let me play on our old one) exclusively for the purpose of playing Majora's Mask, which I had heard so much about, yet still not played in 2007.

It was only around 2009 or so that I started playing a bunch of PS3 games, a solid two years after the console came out and I got it. Hilariously some of the first long games I played on it were PS2 games I hadn't gotten to play during the previous generation since I had an XBox.

I bet you can see my point already. New consoles are flashy, they're cool, they're powerful, but they don't have any games.

I'm dealing with this on my Nintendo Switch right now. Sure, Breath of the Wild and Super Mario Odyssey are great games (though I've got gripes with both of them), but they're just two games. These days, I often find myself switching it on only to switch the damn thing off again because I've played all the games there are in the entire Switch library that I want to play, and that's like four games.

Why can't I play Majora's Mask on my Switch? I can play it on my 3DS. I can play it on that N64 I've still got. I can emulate it at 4K on my PC, and I've seen Digital Foundry emulate Super Mario Sunshine on an Nvidia Shield TV (which has a very similar processor to the Switch) so I know it's definitely possible to emulate an N64 game on there. Why hasn't Nintendo done this yet?

I'd pay you, Nintendo. How much do you want? Thirty bucks? Sixty bucks? I'll pay it, I just want more ways to play Majora's Mask.

Maybe I'm a bit weird about Majora's Mask. It's a great game, but I definitely replay it more often than it deserves. But what about other games, what about ALL the other games Nintendo's made for their previous consoles? Are they just going to languish in growing obscurity as time goes on? The Wii U was even actually really good at this, you could play almost any game Nintendo had ever made on it through its backwards comparability with the Wii and GameCube and the virtual console. What happened?

This is what I get for being an early adopter I guess.

Well... here's that video of a fan-made cinematic for a remake of Majora's Mask (this was made before the 3DS remake came out):

*sigh

if only

Hylics is uncommonly good

TIME TO BEAT THE ART

How many actually good JRPGs have you played? It's not like there have never been any good ones. In fact, there are actually a ton of good JRPGs, so many that there wouldn't even be any point in me reciting a list of them to you. Would you respect me more for mentioning your favorite one? Would that be better than you having a strong opinion about my wrong opinion that JRPGs are generally garbage (an opinion I earnestly hold, despite also aknowleging what I've already said about there being a ton of good ones out there)? These are questions that won't be answered today.

(Can a game be a JRPG if it isn't Japanese? Probably not, but whatever.)

Congratulations, you have read the first paragraph. *internally - and congratulations to me for writing it, we should both get a gold star⭐

DANCE! SHE STRETCHES ASTRIDE THE PRODUCT.

I hesitate to say that Hylics is one of those games that is an "experience" because usually that denotes a game like Gone Home or Flower or some other indie garbage that hardly is even a game at all. Hylics is fun, but it's also calming and intriguing and charming.

You control Wayne and his growing crew of weird and wacky dudes. I had one favorite of course. He happens to be the first guy you meet who seems to have any real sentience about him, more than the average npc you find at least; they all seem to give material matters about as much thought as plant would, if a plant was a poet (more on that later). The guy you meet has some crazy name that in 5 hours I never could remember, despite him being my favorite dude in the crew. More so than the spelling or pronunciation of his name, the peculiarity of his misshapen head was what made him unique. Also he didn't seem to wear any clothes. The rest of the crew, including Wayne, the protagonist sort of, are basically just as odd but I didn't love them nearly as much as I did misshapen frozen-yogurt-head guy. He was the worst character, but an important support in battles; it was standard JRPG fare.

It's tough to grasp what's going on at all in Hylics though. It's partially a perceptual dilemma; there's so much going on with the claymation-style visuals and pixel art that it can be hard to discern what you're even really looking at. It's also partially because a lot of the dialogue and text is procedurally generated, a term I have grown to despise since cooling off on Minecraft around 2012 (and especially after the whole No Man's Sky debacle). Here in Hylics however, the procedurally generated text and very weird and surrealist landscapes and abominations you come across on your journey make for an experience (there's the word again) that's at the very least unlike anything you've likely ever had in a game. 

What's the story like? I'm not really sure, and I don't think it's too important either. A lot of the time, text in the game would have me perplexed, going "Dang, none of that bit there made any sense, except for frozen burrito, guess that is a weapon?" The dialogue and narration forgo any pretense of being clear in order to pursue being as psychedelic as possible through basically just stringing together random neat words. Hylics' procedural text engine never produces something that reads like a cynical attempt to be more than what it is, instead it comes across as quaint, funny, sometimes even deep poetry. The headings in this post are all lifted from some of the junk that literally just one NPC said; the whole game is like this.

So while you don't really ever have much of a clear idea of what's going on, it's fine because it doesn't seem like anyone else in the game does either. At one point late in the game (and trust me, this is probably not a spoiler, not sure it's even possible to spoil anything here really) you come across this crab dude and like many other interactions in the game you end up fighting and brutally melting him/it. The crab dude didn't have any idea who you were, he was just trying to run his science lab where they select subjects based on optimal monetisation potential. You leave that area having killed a crab-dude for reasons unknown to both you and him, but you also get like 750,000 bucks 👍 (bucks being the currency in the game).

Hopefully you're getting a pretty good idea of what the heck this game even is, and if it sounds weird that's okay, it's meant to... probably.

Quickly as a final bit here, and speaking of sounds, music's also pretty important to the experience in Hylics too. As I write this, the game's idling in the background and Wayne's crew is just loitering around in his bathroom (where you recover you flesh and will, yep). This track, plays only there in the bathroom so far as I can tell and it's really nice. On the other hand, things like this track play all the time too, and then again a weird one like this accompanies your travels through the main town (this only really works if you're clicking the links man, just don't click this one). So that's the music, click the link, you'll get the point. Music's tough. I studied it for 8 years so my opinions on musical things are all out of wack and I like everything now, including this psychedelic post-rock beep boop stum noise symphony.

THEIR CRYSTAL'S OCEAN MAY AVENGE AND LARD REMEMBERS A MEMORY

Listen, just trust me: Play Hylics. It's good in a way that few games are. It's good in spite of quality and exactness. It's elegant and cool in ways that are quite frankly really tough to write about. So play it and hopefully what I've written here will make sense then. Here's a few more bits:

Should you play Hylics? Yes you should.

Is it going to give you a disease, maybe a psychic disease? It's possible and perhaps even likely. 

How long is it? Cuz I don't have any time. I finished it in 5 hours, other people did it in 2.

How much for this bitch? It's 3 bucks and please don't say bitch.

Any last words, bitch? Hylics was the coolest game I've played in like 2 years and I play a lot of cool games, like Uno.

Also the sequel is coming out this year (maybe?) and it looks even rad-er than this bitch (not me, it, as in the game, Hylics, Hylics 2 looks rad-er than Hylics 1, although it's cooler than me too, the second one, that is)

Here's the preview video for Hylics 2: 

This isn't even my final form!!

pictured: a thing, i guess

Oh boy, here we go with another test...

To be honest, I don't know what I'm doing right now, but I will soon.

It's important to do this every once in a while. The last post was almost 3 years ago and I definitely don't remember even doing it. Who knows what will become of this blog, I want it to be like a more formal version of my Discord server. It could be a place where I post all those long-form tweet strings that I bombard my followers with over on Twitter. (how are the links working so far, good?👍👎)

"Dude, I'm 95% certain that 95% of my tweets are just ME talking to ME. And a solid third of them start like: 'Dude, ....'"

- @Sports_In_Space 

In any event, that should do it for this test. Check around to see if there's anything else posted here. If there is, it means I figured out what to do (YES!).

I ALMOST FORGOT!

Before this test is finally over, here's an embedded video test (it's that poofpoof video):

*internally - hmmm, I guess that worked...