Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

games

Krisis's coverage Dungeons & Dragons and 5e-Compatible supplements, board games, and the occasional video game.

Pokémon Go through the eyes of a newbie trainer

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I am lying in the middle of my living room floor, likely creating a puddle of sweat beneath my back, and it’s all because of Pokémon Go.

pokemon-go-logoLet’s back up a few days.

Pokémon Go is an augmented reality mobile game that was released last Wednesday across the United States by Niantic Labs (formerly of Google; now an independent company). In it, you run around in the real world while throwing virtual digital balls imaginary fantastical creatures. Oh, and apparently you go to church. A lot.

Okay, okay, I know a little more about Pokémon Go than that, but only through the past few hours of firsthand experience. Honestly, I only understand what Pokémon even are in the vaguest of terms. I was just aging out of spending my money and time on stuff like games, cards, and comics by the middle of the 90s, so I wasn’t even aware of the existence of Pokemon until I met E’s little brother in 2002.

Even then, I only understand it as an execution of several geeky archetypes – characters who collect things, summoning of creatures, opposing elements in a fighting game, and evolving creatures. I have no concept of how any of the games play or the story behind them.

As reports from seemingly every single person I have ever met about their Pokémon Go play experiences began to crop up over the weekend, a familiar urge began to bubble up inside my gut. Yes, it was the special brand of agita created by OCD Godzilla. There were people out there playing a game about collecting things, and if I didn’t start playing it right now I might miss content and experiences that would never be available again.

On the other hand, there is no part of Pokémon Go that particularly interests me – not the IP, nor the augmented reality. Plus, I’m never aimlessly walking around other than with EV, who I categorically prevent from fussing with screens, digital games, and IP other than Marvel’s. (Sorry, I’m weak.)

On the other other hand, “FEAR OF MISSING OUT,” roared OCD Godzilla from his position just below my spleen. [Read more…] about Pokémon Go through the eyes of a newbie trainer

Friday Night Horror

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2015-08-28 21.44.19It’s Friday night, and while we have to get up tomorrow at the same time we do every day because that’s how toddlers work, we’re still throwing caution to the wind and starting a game of Eldritch Horror after 9:30, which guarantees we’ll be up past midnight.

A few months ago E and I vowed to take one “non-screen night” a week where after EV was asleep we’d put down our laptops and turn off our Netflix binging to do something together. Except, the first few weeks were… well, a bit awkward. We don’t really like crafting or cooking together. Playing music could wake EV. I proposed a book club, but we were unable to come to agreement on what to read.

The answer was obvious: games. If we had more two-player games, we could turn no-screen into a game night. This especially appealed to me as an only-child with a mom who was mostly into very literal games like Trivial Pursuit and Monopoly. There’s a whole world of fantastical board games I’ve never had the chance to play! As I was beginning to press the game option with E, one of my favorite comic authors – Kieron Gillen – posted an Instagram shot of him playing Cyclades. My interest was piqued, and after researching it on BoardGameGeek I decided it was up my alley.

BoardGameGeek is the sort of website I can disappear into, never to return – combining thoughtful reviews with thorough data and user forums. Cyclades was every bit as beautiful and ingenious as I could have hoped, like a weird blend of Risk, Catan, and Jason & The Argonauts – and, I set out to find more games I might like just as much. I immediately purchased its exceptional expansions, Hades and Titans. Then we had a board game gold-rush weekend where we acquired Jaipur (2p, genius), The Castles of Mad King Ludwig (awful and fiddly), Kemet (brutal and satisfying), and Eldritch Horror.

I had read the warnings about the Cthulhu-infused Eldritch Horror. Complicated, involved to set-up, sometimes crushingly difficult – it sounded like a game I might like, but I wasn’t so sure about E.

I needn’t have worried. E could not resist a globe-spanning pre-WWII story of sealing away Lovecraftian horrors before they could destroy the world – especially in the form of a cooperative game full of powerful female characters. It took her watching just one game of my solo play to volunteer.

Fast forward a month: we have all three expansions, plus many accoutrement like special dice, card sleeves, and box organizers, and we are just getting back to it after taking a break after a week-solid sprint against the Ancient Ones. Tonight we’re facing Syzygy. Wish us luck! Perhaps if we survive I’ll come back with a more proper review.

Gina’s Bachelorette Adventure, Pt. 2

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When I left you hanging a month ago I was planning my best friend and bandmate Gina’s bachelorette party with two of her other best friends, and we were all determined it had to be the best party in the history of all parties.

On a Rt. 36 trolley during the actual bachelorette party, as shot by Kelly's partner Gudrun. Wondering what the pins are and what our shirts say? Keep reading. (Oh, and is that Gina in the background? What is that thing she's wearing as a hat? Hmm...)

One month out from the event we were still trying to piece together dozens of ideas for an Amazing Race-style event when I had an epiphany: Gina’s party would be a video game. Here is my actual verbatim pitch to fellow BFFs-of-Gina Kelly and Mikki:

I know I am completely insane and you can say no to this, but what if the way we put a wrapper on the entire day is not that it’s Amazing Race but that it is a giant Gina-themed video game, a la her lyrics in “Fisher Price”? It wouldn’t change any specific task, but it would give us a way to theme the events. We could even make up a little “Strategy Guide” to give to her at the beginning with hints and stuff :)

Or, I am insane.

Even if I was insane, Kelly and Mikki are equally so, and they immediately bought into the idea without a moment’s pause and continued to fire off increasingly more ridiculous plans for the day, such as:

I was thinking it would be fun to get gina a labcoat for the chemistry [demonstration]…decorated and bedazzled of course.

Kelly's party favors, all based on 8-bit video game graphics. I have one of these pinned to my book bag and I still have not the slightest idea of how they were assembled or how Kelly worked out the patterns.

While I was excited that they liked my idea, I was also terrified that I now had to transform a day wandering the streets of Philadelphia with 20+ guests into a live action video game. Not just any video game, but a decidedly retro one that would click with a group of people who grew up on classic Nintendo – and, for many of them (including my co-planners), hadn’t played a video game since!

It was at this juncture that I pulled out my Nintendo and SNES and started skimming through instruction booklets.

Most old-school video games share a basic architecture. A character has to accomplish something (return home, free the princess, kill all the zombies, etc), defeating increasingly difficult challenges (monsters, puzzles, etc) along the way. Their victories yield rewards (points, items, etc) that serve to increase their sophistication (levels, powers, etc).

Gina’s journey was clear – she had to complete all of the previously disconnected Amazing Race challenges to move through the city. We were lucky to have a starting point on South Street and an end west of the city, making a sensible (if not linear) world map.

Mikki's stencils, corresponding to our various city challenges. Note the mix of incredible realism (the amazing camera, the pig silhouette, the Kanye glasses) with pixelized video game ephemera. Click through to see a larger version of her handiwork.

I drafted an intro to Gina’s game booklet as a sort of proof of concept of merging 80s video game hyperbole with our shared pithy sense of humor:

Gina F____: Chemist By Day, Rock Star By Night – The Almost Married Edition! is an epic adventure that will take our hero, Gina, on a journey from one end of Philadelphia to the other to transform her from Chemist By Day, Rock Star by Night to Chemist By Day, Rock Star By Night, And Also Bride!

In GF:CBDRSBN-TAME!, Gina will visit key locations of power to defeat challenges, level up, and energize her POWERFUL BRIDE POWERS. Along the way, complete special tasks on the TABLE OF PERIODIC ELEMENTS OF GINA & WES board to complete her special WESLEY QUEST.

Gina won’t be able to defeat GF:CBDRSBN-TAME! alone – she will be abetted by friends and buoyed by special power-ups during her journey.

Powers? What powers?!?

This is where my cohorts saved me from writing our event to death with their amazing creativity. While trying to dream up rewards, Kelly thought of making a grab bag of pixelated party favors. Meanwhile, after hearing Kelly’s idea for the favors, Mikki began to design a series of elaborate stencils. The idea was that each one was based on one of our challenges, and could be sprayed onto the shirts we planned to give to all the guests.

With a cohesive visual interpretation to tie the video game concept together, the layout of our game was suddenly much clearer. Now I simply had to figure out how Gina could play this game along with twenty of her closest friends.

Tune in next time to hear about my concept of gameplay as our preparations became increasingly frantic with less than two weeks until Gina would take the controls of her own personal video game!

How to succeed at (the (video) game of) life.

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My life is a lot like a video game, and this blog is a lot like my life, because this blog talks about my life and thus resembles it.

(My musical other half Gina debates the topic of life being like a video game in a song, asserting that “there’s no extra lives, you don’t get big from a magic mushroom, and you don’t find coins in an underground room,” but let’s leave that argument aside for a moment.)

The timeless style of the Red Mage

I remember the first Final Fantasy, for Nintendo. It was my (and millions of others’) first exposure to the concept of an RPG. Sure, older kids had played some D&D by 1987, but that was the demonized (heh) occupation of confirmed nerd. FF brought that nerd-dom to the spoiled kids who already had their own NES.

(Nope, no bitterness there.)

In the original Final Fantasy each character was an archetype: Fighter, Thief, Black Belt, White Mage, and Black Mage. That meant you were good at that one thing, and mostly that one thing only.

The exception was the Red Mage. He could cast black and white magic, plus fight a little. Oh, and he was styling with a long coat and a pimp-hat.

This seemed like the perfect solution to six-year-old me (and probably a lot of other people, too) – why waste time with characters who are only good at one thing if you could have one that’s good at three? Why not just have a party full of Red Mages?

Of course, game developers realized this, and so the Red Mage wasn’t quite as kick-ass as we had hoped. He could fight, but not as well as the Fighter. He could cast spells, but not as advanced as the White and Black Mages. A party full of them would rock at the easy levels, but probably wouldn’t stand a chance in the end-game.

In effect, game developers rewarded specialization. The jack of all trades wound up the master of none. Also, he had a branding problem – we called him a “red” mage, but wasn’t he more like a grey mage that could also hit stuff?

(The myth of a character that’s good at fighting and hurling powers from a distance continues in video games to this day, called a “Tank Mage.”)

Maybe six-year-old me liked the Red Mage so much because I was a Red (Tank) Mage. I was good at science and math, strong at writing and social studies, and eventually on stage in plays. I’ve always delighted at being self-sufficient, which meant being good at everything.

A decade ago if asked to describe my strongest skill in one sentence, none of my friends would have answered with the same “Peter is/does [x].” I didn’t have a brand. I went on my merry way, doing everything, but I wasn’t the greatest at any of it.

That’s the story of my blog, too.

November is Na[tional] Blo[g] Po[sting] Mo[nth], a month which challenges us to blog daily. It sounds easy, but you have to maintain it through Thanksgiving! And, in some years, through getting engaged to your wife!

This year for NaBloPoMo I’m trying something a little different. I’m branding Crushing Krisis. Up above us my tagline reads:

The collected crushes of Philly singer-songwriter Peter Marinari
(The longest-running blog in Philadelphia, est. 2000)

I’m setting an expectation – this blog is not a Red Mage. It’s about the things I love the most, Philly, and being a musician.

So, this month it’s going to be exactly that. And, just like a video game, I get a new chance at it every day.

Take that, Gina.

But I Regress, pt. 5

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Last time I exposed my Behind the Music Monitor lost year-and-a-half, during which my free time was entirely composed of playing City of Heroes while drinking Grey Goose martinis.

This is the official version of Risk, as far as I’m concerned. It takes a relatively undynamic game of war and turns it into free range Stratego.

I shirked City of Heroes and plunged that same amount of time into being a musician, and within one year I joined an acappella group, wrote new songs, rebooted CK on WordPress, and nudged Arcati Crisis towards becoming a real band.

That was 2006. My geekdom laid low for the next four years. Sure, I got addicted to Battlestar Galactica, but sci-fi tv and movies have always been a shared domain of E and I (one of the many factors rendering her as “best wife ever”).

Otherwise, I just played a few tournaments of Lord of the Rings Risk against myself (don’t judge, I was an only child) and idly kept pace with Joss Whedon’s scripting run on Astonishing X-Men.

I have been convinced since day one that there is some secret drug-taking component to Katamari that would render the King of All Cosmos sensible. 

I even bought a Playstation 2, ostensibly to Dance Dance Revolution my way to fitness like Elise’s brother, but instead mostly played Katamari Damacy, and later X-Men Legends and Marvel Ultimate Alliance – both a safe comics fix so long as they were closed-loop RPGs and not MMORPGS like City of Heroes

Or so I thought.

We put in an offer on our house on May 5 and that weekend we were pretty stressed – I stressed myself sick by Monday. Grumpy and home alone, I ordered Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2 to have something to new bash between haggling with our sellers.

The beginning of the end of my responsible adulthood…

MUA2 tells a pretty darn accurate story of Marvel’s 2006 Civil War saga, wherein Iron Man and Captain America got into a major spat over whether all heroes should be registered with the government. Their brotherly quarrel spills out into the entire Marvel Universe, resulting in some major changes to the status quo.

Or, at least, that’s what Wikipedia told me.

A few weeks later it was May 21st, the night before Gina, Wes and I planned to jump out of a plane. I was stressed-sick again, but dragged myself out to a happy hour for a co-worker, and wound up rambling down to MikeyIl’s Movement & Motion: One Night Art Show @ Brave New Worlds.

A comic book shop.

It had been a long time since I had been in one, and everything was foreign. Why was Wolverine on the cover of X-Force? What was Blackest Night?

Since nothing made sense, nothing was tempting. I wanted to support Brave New Worlds with some business, so I decided to pick up a trade paperback – a graphic novel collecting a run of several single comic books.

At a loss for what I’d be able to jump in on cold, I grabbed the most familiar thing – Civil War, and the accompanying tie-in with Ms. Marvel, an old favorite (I was amazed she had her own title!).

This was the beginning of the end … a four-month re-emergence of focused geekdom that in some respects would make my lost year of City of Heroes look like a serious addiction to gummy bears.

I’ll tell you about it next time, but suffice to say it has a lot to do with my Guide to Collecting X-Men TPBs, which – not coincidentally – was born on May 22nd.