My comments on Miracle of Sound yesterday got me thinking about something. I mentioned how much I liked Open Air by Miracle of Sound, and how I liked how it compared against 'When the World Ended'
What I mentally compared it against also, was Fallout. I find it bitterly ironic that the Russian post apocalyptic story is more uplifting. What's more ironic is that Metro's uplifting is basically Fallout's 'normal.'
Metro's core conceit is that the bombs went off, and things were made very, very bad. The surface is coated in toxic gas, humans and mutants swarm through dingy dark tunnels that are the only barely survivable areas. Humanity is reduced to licking moisture off of walls and eating rats and lichens. Filth and misery pile up everywhere and the tunnels are ghost haunted because people fear that the afterlife itself was blown asunder by the apocalyptic exchange of weapons.
Fallout's conceit is that cartoonishly evil governments fired rockets at each other motivated by greed and blew everything up.
In Fallout, in half of the games you're a dweller in a vault, a place meant for survivors to hide out and then come out and restore the world. The vaults are mostly clean, bright, and well maintained. They have food, shelter, pool tables, and other amenities, and when you step outside, its post-apocalyptic crapshack, with people living in ramshackle houses, even three hundred years after the bombs have dropped.
Fallout is shackled to its aesthetic. Metro conversely has people who were alive when the bombs fell, and who remember the world before. The big differences come from Exodus though. In Exodus the protagonist of Metro discovers that its only Moscow (which was nuked directly) which has air you cannot breathe and a surface blasted clean of all life save for mutant abominations.
The Metro people find a train, and they ride outside and find that they can breathe the air, find that animals, plants and the like are still growing, they find more humans who are trying to live in the post apocalypse. Coming out of the vaults of the Metro and discovering a damaged but LIVING world is a sea change in tone for the series. They thought that humanity was going to die in the cramped dark, swimming in human excrement, with even their ghosts trapped forever. But it turns out there's hope outside, a chance to start over anew. The tone becomes one of optimism and looking forward because they're coming from a destroyed world to a merely broken one.
The russians in Metro, despite the bombs dropping about thirty years prior have already started building new buildings, reclaiming old ones, and generally know how to make a roof that keeps the rain out, unlike the folks in Fallout after three HUNDRED years.
Fallout has you coming from your secure, safe, underground vault into a place that's irradiated, hopeless and destroyed. You then have to fix whatever the problem of the game is, but the tone is one of loss, it pessimistically looks back.
The irony for me is that irradiated, mutant infested craphole sums up both surfaces, but the Muscavites are overjoyed whereas the Vault dweller is terrified. Kind of interesting to me for reasons of tone, but also of how looking forward as opposed to looking back can drastically change your outlook.
Wednesday, February 12, 2020
Tuesday, February 11, 2020
Spook's Review: Miracle of Sound, Level 10
As I've said before, its my blog and I like to babble about all kinds of random stuff. My previous Spook's review was detailing Far Cry 5, and what I viewed as its positives and many sins.
This time, I'm switching to the musical side of things.
Miracle of Sound is Gavin Dunne. He's a musician who I've been listened to for well, ten years now. He's very productive. And while some people think that a musician who cranks out songs so rapidly might be untalented, I think he just likes being paid. And that's always a good mark in an artist.
An artist who wants to get paid is an artist who wants to produce a product that people want.
Miracle of Sound's 'Level' albums are pretty much entirely based on Pop Culture or Video Game themes. As Dunne's matured as an artist however, he's moved from songs that track a bit too directly to their source material to ones that merely capture that feeling. I think this is a positive.
As an example, way back on Level 1, he had a song which was called 'Commander Shepherd' and was based on well, Mass Effect and made express mentions of the various characters and aliens from that material.
Conversely, songs from Level 10 like 'A Thousand Eyes' or 'Open Air' are obviously songs about Bloodbourne or the Metro series, if you know what those series are. Otherwise one is a haunting, creepy song and the other strangely uplifting. That's to say that while Level 1 was video-game-music, this is music about video games. And that's a major positive.
One of Dunne's spectacular talents though is his ability to reward continuity. As video games and other media have multiple interations, he's found a way to link the various Metro, Assassin's Creed, Witcher and other pop inspired songs through the use of expertly layered leitmotifs and lyrics.
'Open Air' is one of my favorites from Level 10 because of how it harkens back to the 'Day the World Died.' One is a song about the fundemental despair of the Metro universe, and then the other feels like a relief, and a shining light of hope.
Mr. Dunne also excels at capturing the feeling of each world that inspires his music. This means that his songs tend to have a diverse tone and feel, that makes each of his albums, and Level 10 in particular, feel like you're listening to more than one artist.
Buy this man's music.
This time, I'm switching to the musical side of things.
Miracle of Sound is Gavin Dunne. He's a musician who I've been listened to for well, ten years now. He's very productive. And while some people think that a musician who cranks out songs so rapidly might be untalented, I think he just likes being paid. And that's always a good mark in an artist.
An artist who wants to get paid is an artist who wants to produce a product that people want.
Miracle of Sound's 'Level' albums are pretty much entirely based on Pop Culture or Video Game themes. As Dunne's matured as an artist however, he's moved from songs that track a bit too directly to their source material to ones that merely capture that feeling. I think this is a positive.
As an example, way back on Level 1, he had a song which was called 'Commander Shepherd' and was based on well, Mass Effect and made express mentions of the various characters and aliens from that material.
Conversely, songs from Level 10 like 'A Thousand Eyes' or 'Open Air' are obviously songs about Bloodbourne or the Metro series, if you know what those series are. Otherwise one is a haunting, creepy song and the other strangely uplifting. That's to say that while Level 1 was video-game-music, this is music about video games. And that's a major positive.
One of Dunne's spectacular talents though is his ability to reward continuity. As video games and other media have multiple interations, he's found a way to link the various Metro, Assassin's Creed, Witcher and other pop inspired songs through the use of expertly layered leitmotifs and lyrics.
'Open Air' is one of my favorites from Level 10 because of how it harkens back to the 'Day the World Died.' One is a song about the fundemental despair of the Metro universe, and then the other feels like a relief, and a shining light of hope.
Mr. Dunne also excels at capturing the feeling of each world that inspires his music. This means that his songs tend to have a diverse tone and feel, that makes each of his albums, and Level 10 in particular, feel like you're listening to more than one artist.
Buy this man's music.
Thursday, February 6, 2020
The Retrospective Campaign: The Curse of Frank Herbert
Like many DMs out there, many nerds in general, I'm a fan of science fiction.
Like some of the older nerds, I cut my science fiction teeth on stuff like Lensman, Dune and Slan. I don't remember much of Lensman (I need to pick it up and re-read it) I do recall that Lensman read like what I'd later identify as a 'light novel.'
Slan is a discussion for another time, but then there's Dune.
Dune was a book that made a big impact on me, and had a bigger impact on my world design for good and ill.
Notably, Frank Herbert put a positively massive amount of backstory and details in the Appendix of Dune, because his primary story didn't waste time with explaining to you what things like CHOAM, the Bene Tleilax or such were. The story just dropped the terms like you knew what they were and kept running. In terms of pacing, this is great. However, its contributed to the reputation the man has for the story being positively opaque on first viewing. He also had countless groups operating in intrigue against one another.
As a DM having countless groups at loggerheads all working independantly in a tapestry of plots and objectives can be helpful for staving off the 'they killed my bad guy too early' problem, but can also heavilly contribute to a sense among the players that they went to the swimming pool and found it almost shoulder to shoulder with other bathers.
One of my players developed a 'web of intrigue' to keep the various power players and their relationships and conflicts straight.
As a DM its easy to get bemused as your players get mystified by not understanding the motivations of enemies, and how they can get so easilly confused by having multiple groups of baddies show up that seem to be working at cross purposes.
I think this is because for many groups, and many campaigns, the idea of the PCs vs 'the big bad' rings true. The idea that all evil, all trouble, originates from one primary source is a common one in JRPGs and in many story-focused RPGs and CRPGs.
To try to ameliorate this I've tried to give the bad guy's certain schticks and tells (like a group having a specific group of humanoid servants they use or the like).
I still wonder sometimes though if I have a complexity addiction when nearly every campaign's party has a web of intrigue, or a journal, or a diagram of enemies, allies and unknowns and their changing allegiances.
Like some of the older nerds, I cut my science fiction teeth on stuff like Lensman, Dune and Slan. I don't remember much of Lensman (I need to pick it up and re-read it) I do recall that Lensman read like what I'd later identify as a 'light novel.'
Slan is a discussion for another time, but then there's Dune.
Dune was a book that made a big impact on me, and had a bigger impact on my world design for good and ill.
Notably, Frank Herbert put a positively massive amount of backstory and details in the Appendix of Dune, because his primary story didn't waste time with explaining to you what things like CHOAM, the Bene Tleilax or such were. The story just dropped the terms like you knew what they were and kept running. In terms of pacing, this is great. However, its contributed to the reputation the man has for the story being positively opaque on first viewing. He also had countless groups operating in intrigue against one another.
As a DM having countless groups at loggerheads all working independantly in a tapestry of plots and objectives can be helpful for staving off the 'they killed my bad guy too early' problem, but can also heavilly contribute to a sense among the players that they went to the swimming pool and found it almost shoulder to shoulder with other bathers.
One of my players developed a 'web of intrigue' to keep the various power players and their relationships and conflicts straight.
As a DM its easy to get bemused as your players get mystified by not understanding the motivations of enemies, and how they can get so easilly confused by having multiple groups of baddies show up that seem to be working at cross purposes.
I think this is because for many groups, and many campaigns, the idea of the PCs vs 'the big bad' rings true. The idea that all evil, all trouble, originates from one primary source is a common one in JRPGs and in many story-focused RPGs and CRPGs.
To try to ameliorate this I've tried to give the bad guy's certain schticks and tells (like a group having a specific group of humanoid servants they use or the like).
I still wonder sometimes though if I have a complexity addiction when nearly every campaign's party has a web of intrigue, or a journal, or a diagram of enemies, allies and unknowns and their changing allegiances.
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