Join in with our mass-collaborative fanfic!

Over at the Mass Effect Fanfic Forums AKA 'Rascarin's Shack' (I will be pushing to make that the official name) we play a game - please come join in!



It's called the One Sentence Story.
We're writing a jokey Mass Effect fanfic, between all of us - each of us writing one sentence at a time. Someone writes a sentence, then it's up to someone else to volunteer to write the next one. Then someone else, and so on.

As a result of so many writers, it constantly veers on the ridiculous with people making wierd gags and trying to outdo each other with impossible-to-follow sentences.

We did this before earlier this year, and it was a big success. We got new members and became a more social and chatty group as a result.

We recently started again - and it occurred to me to advertise a little here! The new Mass Mass Effect Story is called 'Attack of the Scones' and you can see it HERE.

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The first story was so good we unleashed it upon Fanfiction.net - where it bewildered and amused the Mass Effect crowd.
HERE IT IS, reviews and all.
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So if you fancy contributing a sentence or two, click the link at the top of this article, sign up to the forum and post away.

Game Review: Braid (Third version)

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Pretentious? Moi? Then perhaps I shall reverse the flow of time and undo these pretentions? Mwa ha ha I'm so clever.
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This is not the first lengthy blog / review on the subject 'Is Braid Art?' and it will not be the last.

It is, however, the first game review here at Fanfiction Shenanigans AKA Buch and Knight's Old-Fashioned Fan-fiction Pub.

EDIT: This is the updated, less angry version, after I had calmed down and finally 'got' how the game works.

EDIT EDIT: I also added a bit at the end, after I finished the game.

"Braid" is a downloadable, short, 2D platform/puzzle game on the Xbox 360 and I believe now you can get it for PC.

This started as a thread where I was venting in the ME fanfic forums. It became so long that I thought I'd put it up here on the blog, and just leave a clipped version at the forum.
The version I posted was very angry at the pretention the game has - and it really does, but I had barely played the game itself, so annoyed was I by its narcissistic style.

I just bought it, and at first I was very impressed... but a couple of hours in, I think I hate it as much as any game I've ever hated, albeit for completely new and original reasons. It's not just that I sucked at it - I really sucked at it for that first hour or so (and the game makes no attempt to ease you in) - it's also that it seems to present itself so proudly and arrogantly that I'd like to punch the creator in the face.

On the official site, there is an 'official walkthorugh', written by said creator, which starts off by painstakingly walking you through every step of the easy intro stage - and then tells you not to use a walkthrough, and ends.

This did not help with my frustrarion.

http://braid-game.com/walkthrough/walkthrough.html

It says you will spoil the game if you use a walkthrough, and promises that if you just try to solve the 'not unreasonable' puzzles, then you will feel clever and great. I just wanted to punch this website in the face.
The front page of this site has a list of grand boasts, like "Every puzzle in Braid is unique. There is no filler" and "Braid is a platform game in a painterly style..." (wow, you know a long word. I bow before you. Please accept 1200 microsoft points as tribute oh mighty Creator) and "Braid does everything it can to give you a mind-expanding experience." So far it had given me a wallet-shrinking and curse-word-vocabulary-expanding experience.

This game has a 9.5 out of ten at Gamespot, very positive reviews all round. I've read up on it and discovered that there is a very, very good ending to the poetic, dreamlike story (wish I hadn't spoiled it by reading ahead) and even a rather nice political subtext.

But all of this is presented with such arrogance and such contempt for the player, that I can't stand it. The levels are preceeded by blocks of text which set up a vague but good story about a relationship breakup in deeper and deeper layers. But the little passages read like an angsty poem by a school kid who just got dumped yesterday. Big, sweeping mixed metaphors and words that have been found in a thesaurus and shoved awkwardly in the middle of sentences that don't quite make sense because they're so poetic and whimsical. At first I thought the game must just be so damn good that it was above me. I was awed and intimidated, which I suspect is the point of the game. Then I concentrated, re-read the lines and realised that no, sometimes they just don't make sense.

It's little things like this. I got this quote from the wikipedia page-

He [the author, Johnathon Blow] has also said that he "would not be capable" of explaining the whole story of the game, and stated that the central idea is "something big and subtle and resists being looked at directly.

Oh fuck off and give me a real walkthrough.

Several hours later I felt the need to amend this review with a list of things that are undeniably excellent about the game -
- The music is lovely and haunting.
- The art is impressive, even if it does know it.
- The attempt to take the classic platform game hero (esentially this is based on Super Mario - there are lots of unsubtle homages) and show him as a human being, albeit an angsty, poetic one - what would his motivations be in rescuing this Princess? How did he come here? What is he becoming? etc.

Then I got to playing, determinded to give it a second chance, and I actually won a couple of levels.

Now I kinda like this game. And I am dreadfully embarrassed by my earlier tirade.

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Real men, and real game reviewers, are not ashamed to admit their mistakes.

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However. Let me say this. Braid and its writer are so unbelievably full of themselves that you will find it a challenge not to hate them at times. If I meet this guy at some convention or whatever, I'm punching him.

It's a unique and story-driven platform puzzler. That is all. It's not art. And its writing leaves a lot to be desired.
It is, however, testament to the game that whenever I pressed 'backspace' during the writing of this amended article, I got a little trippy and felt that I was reversing time with the button.

(That could also because I haven't slept since yesterday.)

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FINAL UPDATE:

I finished the game. It was fun, although the last few stages were ridiculously hard and I had to use a walkthrough. Shockingly, this walkthrough did not ruin the game as warned. Indeed all the statements on the website turned out to be bullshit - there was quite a bit of filler, for instance.)

The last level was very, very good in terms of the story and how it presents it. There's a little gimic relating to reversing time which made me want to applaud. Then you have to read a lot more bad poetry while the themes are made more vague for no reason, and the story of the game is compared needlessly to the creation of the nuclear bomb. That bizarre comparison really jarred with the rest of the game, making it seem a bit awkward.

The ending was going beautifully - better than anything you see in games and genuinely expanding the medium..... until it got too far up its own bum and became deliberately inpenetrable.
The rest of the game was just the same.
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Three pretentious faux-watercolour backdrops out of five.

Fanfiction is for losers

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This is going to be another rant. I've been thinking about the incredibly uncool stigma fanfiction has.

I'll say this right away - I know it's never going to be cool. In my spare time, rather than going out and meeting people or playing sports, I stay in a single room and type stories based on computer games and space movies, and hope that the strangers who read them will leave a review. It's extremely nerdy.

But!

Did you see the movie Terminator: Salvation recently? How about Star Trek? Did you ever see Jaws 3 or 4? Alien Ressurection?

Those scripts are one step away from what we do - and that's a big budget. They were no better than the good fanfics (Jaws 3 and 4 were far worse), they were made as tributes by gushing fans who use too many references (I'll Be Back, CGI Arnold, The photo and tapes of Sarah Connor etc etc etc.) The Director of Terminator 4, one McG, even uses a catchy net-like pseudonym instead of his real name. He also did 'Charlie's Angels'.

That's a fanfiction writer, right there. Not even a very good one. He just gets paid millions for it.

These are movies made as expansions to classic nerd favourites that the directors and writers loved. They were not written by the same writer as the original, directed by the same director, or had the original cast (except for Spock's brief role in the new Trek and Sigourney Weaver embarassing herself in Alien 4.)

These are good mov..... Star Trek was a good movie and we all loved it. But please remember that it's just a fanfiction script that happenned to be written by rich, succesful writers and got picked up by JJ Abrams.

There are hundreds of better Star Trek sequels, spin-offs and reboots which nobody noticed when they were online and which weren't comissioned by a studio. Certainly, there are billions of piss-poor fics in which two random characters meet, have terrible out-of-character dialogue and then have sex.
But then, Star Trek had a random, out of character coupling too - remember? I loved that scene, but if I were reading a fan script in which Spock and Uhura kiss in a lift after Vulcan exploded, I would have instantly discarded it and handed over a critical review.

I don't know what my point is here. I must sound very angry and impotent, like a yapping, chained-up dog barking at cats across the street.

I'm just saying. 20% of fanfiction I read is really good. And 60% is better than Joss Whedon's script for Alien 4.

So stop making fun of us, internet. You're hurting our feelings.

(And I LOVE Joss Whedon. He's like a god to me. If I live to be a hundred I will never equal 'Firefly', 'Hush', 'Once More With Feeling' or 'Dr Horrible'. He is a god.)

More Twilight bashing

I promise this will by the last time I use this blog to whine about Twilight, and I will try to shut up about it in general.




I'm still reading it, and I'm about half way through. I'm enjoying the humour and the lovely, romantic fantasy. The sheer charmingness of Edward is nice, even if it is ludecrous, badly-described and startlingly misogynistic.

He's handsome, he's smart, he loves classical music, he's a loner with lots of secrets, he's graceful, strong and gifted, funny and in a slightly mean way. Best of all, his relationship with Bella (AKA the reader inserted into the plot) consists entirely of instances of her getting into trouble and him rescuing her. She is utterly helpless, and literally feels faint when he speaks. Yes, literally.

See what I mean? I am enjoying the book (though I still resent Meyer's ridiculous success) but I just can't talk about it without entering into these prolonged rants.

Anyway, I was reading yesterday and Edward finally came clean about being a vampire. And I started wondering if that proves Christianity. You know, he's a vampire. So what does that mean? Doesn't that imply the existence of God, or at the very least, some kind of magic? Why doesn't this occur to Bella? This is Earth-shattering.

And I wrote a short parody about it, which also takes potshots about all the other issues I was whining about.

That's right, this whole post was just a way to get you to read my new fanfic.

Click here if you please.

New Story: The Marvelous Misadventures of Darth Bane

Master Buch and I have just finished collaborating on a new parody for Fanfiction.net. Tis called "The Marvelous Misadventures of Darth Bane" and it chronicles the "Rule of Two" creator through all the highlights of his life.

You may find his by clicking here.

Again, I just have to state that we're not making fun of this series of stories by Drew Karpyshyn because we hate them. Far from it. If we hated them, we wouldn't have read them.

So, there ya go. We love Karpyshyn: plotholed stories and all. But, you know what they say about what you do to the things you love. You...make a parody of them on Fanfiction.net. I'm pretty sure Washington said that...

A Character With Your Voice

I believe I've mentioned one of several "enigmas of writing" in this blog, but just in case...there are many enigmas of writing in my eyes. Lemme 'splain what this means to me.

Writing is a delicate process. It's the fine tuning of what you want to say, and what the reader wants to hear. Entire books have been made as allegories for some greater message, because it's not as simple as explaining it verbatim; sometimes you have to sell it.

It's something that I don't mind, as long as I'm not being jerked around by the author. An author like Matthew "fucking" Stover would never go so far as to dropkick you with the message he's trying to get across; he puts it in there, and you only see it if you want to. There are others where that's all they do is take you aside and tell you: "Here's how the world works, in my humble opinion." Nothing's wrong with either approach, to me. That's how literature works. But there are some that just baffle me. Their approach is caught in the middle. They are the enigmas.

Orson Scott Card is one of these enigmas. To me, at least.

My first experience with OSC was near the end of high school. My friend let me borrow a copy of Ender's Game and it was one of the few books that I've read in just a couple days. I loved that book. It inspired me so damn much. That book became one of the "Holy Trinity" for me: the works that inspired me to be a writer. It takes its place up there along side R.A. Salvatore's Icewind Dale Trilogy and Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic.

Of course, I did the only logical thing a person in my position would do: I went out and bought the sequel! Speaker for the Dead, it was called, and I read it front to back during our annual trip to Yosemite. It wasn't that it was a bad book or that it was terribly written. Actually, it was far from it. The thing that confused me was that the book didn't feel like a sequel. It didn't seem like this book had any place in Ender's story. It didn't seem like it was Ender that I was even reading about!

It was an odd thing. A very odd experience. Speaker for the Dead is still a really good book, in my opinion, but still.

Then, I did the only logical thing from there, and I went and bought the third book, called Xenocide. Then, something terrible happened:

After reading Ender's Game and placing it among the most influential works to ever come into my life; after reading Speaker for the Dead front to back in a couple days during a goddamn Yosemite trip...I was twenty pages into Xenocide when I said, "Done."

There wasn't just something off about this third book in the series, there was something fucking degenerate about it. The entire first part of the book is a dialogue between two random characters about the finer points of Buddhism. Now, I had just taken an Intro to Philosophy class, and while I can't say I'm well versed in that life-style, it seemed like OSC had done the same thing I had: taken an intro course and got to work writing.

I was dumbfounded. How could this happen? How could a series that had been so inspirational to me so suddenly take a turn for the worse?

After...years of research (not consecutively, of course. I don't have a lab set up for stuff like this), I've discovered what so many others have discovered about OSC: he sets up a good universe--a popular universe--then hijacks his own characters and has them do the talking for his beliefs.

Is this a good thing, though? Ender was nothing more than an innocent boy in the first book. Sure, there were probably some Mormon undertones there, but I didn't catch them. Looking back at Speaker for the Dead, they're as plain as the sun in the daytime...and that's plain. Ender travels to a Portuguese colony in space and changes their lives with a new way of thinking, much like the Mormons attempt to do. The message being, the only way to change a culture is to completely understand it. No one knew why the Piggies acted the way they did, then Ender shows up, does a little digging and everyone gets along.

Again, is this right? If you establish a character a certain way and a certain tone, are you allowed, as the author, to completely change the story arc's meaning? Is this an integrity thing, or is this an "I wrote it, so I have a right to direct the story in this way" thing?

OSC has fans--some very dedicated ones--but could his works have been more respected had they not been hijacked in such a way. For those who are only aware of OSC, Ender's Game is always the book they know him for. Not the Shadow Saga, not the Alvin Maker Series, or the Homecoming Saga...Ender's Game.

Was it an opportunity missed, or just the way the chips fell? Should he be praised for getting his views out through his stories, or crucified for such a blatant hijacking? I don't know. Maybe nothing's wrong with it. Maybe everything's wrong with it.

I might never know, but I'll keep researching in the meantime. Back to the lab!

For Forks' Sake

See that image to the left? That's a massively sucessful author.

I'm reading Twilight at the moment and I have to share this with everyone who will listen.

I can't tell you how angry I am about this.

In chapter one - CHAPTER ONE - the author Stephanie Meyer - the published author - who is paid for her work.... paid money...

wrote this...

( just after the narrator/protagonist Bella whines about having to do P.E. in her new school )

wrote this.....


"Forks was literally my own personal Hell on Earth."

What? No, Stephanie, no it wasn't. It wasn't literally Hell, was it? Was it?!?! Do you mean 'figuritively', Stephanie? Metaphorically?
Did you know that 'literally' means the exact opposite of what you were trying to communicate? You unbelievble moron?

I just can't believe that someone who doesn't know what 'literally' means is selling 53 million copies.

I'm not pretending to be angry here to be funny. I'm THAT pissed off. The most popular author in the world now does not know what the word 'literally' means.

I found some small solace here...

http://www.twilightsucks.com/forum/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=23&t=3331