Gametrodon

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  • A Rant about Comics Part 2 – Grump Week

    Hey, so this post is a bit of a bummer. Maybe read Part 1 first, where I talk about a bunch of cool comics you should read?

    For the better part of a decade, I’ve been trying to figure out why I quietly loathe most American comics. I’ve gone through a variety of theories, ranging from reasonable to something an incel might hear and go, “Hey buddy, maybe tone that one down a bit.” I’m gonna lay them out here, and discuss why I’ve discarded each one over the years, including the most recent theory.

    Things I thought in high school

    Theory #1 – Japan is just better at comics.

    Yes, this was a thing I actually believed at one point. Look, I was probably 14. I don’t think this anymore mostly because, despite how I sound about this sort of stuff, I’m not a weeb. Nationalism doesn’t really explain it.

    Theory #2 – The disconnect between artist and writer results in garbage.

    Another high school theory, but one I still reflect on a fair amount. The comic that made me discard this was Death Note. After all, if Japan could turn out something like that via a writer/artist collab, clearly the problem didn’t arise from artists and writers having separate visions.

    Theory #3 – Endless reboots, weird numbering, and other stuff make it effectively impossible to actually READ a comic.

    It’s at this point I started looking inward, trying to figure out if perhaps the problem wasn’t with the comics themselves, but with my consumption of them. These days if I want to read something, I know where to find it, but prior to me really understanding the internet, if I wanted to read comics, I had to actually go find them.

    Like, physically in the world.

    So, my theory was that it was hard for me to ever finish a run of an American comic, given how meandering they were, as opposed to something straightforward an easy to read like One Piece, where each numbered chapter just went into the next, and that this was the cause of my dislike.

    Unlike the other theories above, I think this one actually WAS true, at least at some point. But it’s not true for me as an adult.

    Theory #4 – While both Japanese manga artists and American comic book creators work in an industry that demands too much work for too little pay, the differing ownership models is a motivating factor in quality.

    So I moved onto just blaming capitalism. It would be nice if this was the real problem… but here’s the thing: I still don’t think it is, mostly because the shit that manga artists put themselves through is not the sort of stuff you do if you “just want the money.” You gotta start by having some sort of passion for art if you’re gonna work 12 hour days for 6 days a week year in, year out, and even then, you can just fail.

    Things I’ve thought as an adult

    Theory #5 – I am an immature child, and cannot appreciate comics made for adults.

    Again, another attempt at turning inwards. “Perhaps,” I thought, “as someone raised primarily on Shonen Jump, I simply lack the maturity to read stories that aren’t intended for 14 year old boys.” Perhaps I’m just not cool enough for shit like Rick & Morty, or Game of Thrones.

    Anyway, I spent part of this weekend reading all of Something Is Killing the Children, and y’know what? Nah. Fuck you. It is not my fault that I don’t like your slaughterhouse bullshit where we have kids and their families getting butchered by shadow monsters.

    Also, I think some of it is also that we have enough awful shit in the real world like Epstein and the protestors killed by ICE that I simply don’t have the tolerance to be pulled by the heartstrings about this fictional shit. We have real organizations that should care more about children than they actually do, and allow evil things to harm them. They’re called the Florida prosecutor’s office.

    And lest you think I sample unfairly: this is the shit that’s winning the Eisner for best writer.

    So no, I don’t think it’s my lack of maturity that’s preventing me from appreciating your fine writing. I think it’s the fact that I’m tired of watching kids being shredded like tissue paper in service of a narrative that doesn’t seem to do very much.

    Theory #6 – Anything I read from Japan is good enough for someone to want to translate/localize it, while the same is not true of American comics.

    This is one I came up with earlier this year, and I was convinced that I had finally figured it out. See, any Japanese manga I read had to be popular enough to be localized, or good enough that some fan group decided to translate it.

    This, then, meant that when I read manga, I am only ever reading the cream of the crop: the finest cultural exports of soft power sampled and sifted before being passed across to me. Whereas for any given American comic I picked up, I was sifting through a pile of detritus that could just as equally be someone’s magnum opus as it could be their way of paying rent that month.

    And then I read a bunch of popular modern American comics like Absolute Batman, and DC KO, and there just wasn’t a single one I didn’t look at and find myself annoyed by.

    Theory #7 – Format differences mean that American comic book artists and writers are working with far fewer pages than Japanese manga creators, and as a result end up creating an accelerated (and poorer) product.

    This is the closest I have to a working theory, though realistically, it’s probably a combo of a few of the above. Something like Absolute Batman is working with 24 pages a month. One Piece (okay not all the time) gets 16 pages a week, meaning they get more than double the physical space to work with (admittedly on shorter deadlines).

    Surely, then, this is the reason that stuff like Jujutsu Kaisen can spend 64 pages (4 WHOLE CHAPTERS!) on a side showdown between a literal joke character and the secondary villain, whereas DC KO can’t even spend a full 10 pages on having Superman fight Darkseid.

    One Other Quick Rant

    There’s a trope in American superhero comics that I saw crop up multiple times in my binge-read over the weekend that makes the comics all feel incredibly hollow these days. I’m going to devote a small portion of this write-up to shit talking it:

    The Truth Will Save the Day!

    In short, the idea that if you can just show everyone a video of the Bad Guys doing The Bad Thing, you have won. And just.

    No.

    No it fucking won’t. It probably hasn’t had the ability to do this since 2016. Maybe earlier.

    It’s not just comic books that do this. Disclosure Day by Spielberg also has a similar ending, and The Expanse does a bunch of times as well.

    It rings hollow in our age of misinformation, and I find it harder to suspend disbelief for this trope than to suspend disbelief for the latex skin-suits and tighty whities.

    This narrative needs to die.

    In Conclusion

    A lot of popular American comics kinda suck ass. There is no magic bullet to save the world. You should read Guts County, Hilda the 13th, Nothing Doing, and Wrestleheist.

    I’m going to go jump in some freezing water, and then play Mina the Hollower.

  • Adventure Quest Worlds

    Adventure Quest Worlds

    There are a lot of things that go into writing about a game for this blog. Sometimes it’s desperation. When Sunday rolls around and I scrounge through anything I’ve been playing recently to find something to talk about. Sometimes it’s joy. I prefer when I find something exciting or new, something I want the whole world (or at least the portion of it that reads my blog!) to see. Occasionally, it’s a sort of vindictiveness, where my writing transforms into my one little jab I can make at the developer for taking my money (replaceable) and my time (not so much).

    Today we’re not doing any of those, because this is something different. This is a post about nostalgia. A frankly, it’s probably more about me as a person than it is about Adventure Quest Worlds.

    Just to be as clear as possible:if you do not want to listen to a 30+ year old man ramble about a flash MMO from his childhood, now is the time to leave.

    The Adventure Quest Worlds logo.

    Adventure Quest Worlds is a Flash based pseudo-MMO by Artix Entertainment. I call it a pseudo-MMO rather than a true MMO because most zones are instanced at low player counts. But if you’ve ever played an MMO, you’ll be familiar with most of what’s present here: fairly slow combat, fetch quests, and grinds, all filtered through the lens of Flash and what was technically capable in 2009.

    This is normally where I’d elaborate on mechanics, but I don’t think that’s really necessary here,. Even in the context of the game itself, most mechanics can be ignored. The one thing worth touching on is the class system. Unlike most MMO’s, classes are an equipable item that can be swapped while not in combat.

    An image of the game Adventure Quest Worlds with the class selection menu open.

    In theory, this is useful because it lets you swap from tank to healer to DPS on the fly! In practice, it lets you swap from your trash clear to your boss sustain class. I quite like it, and getting new classes was my primary motivation for playing most of the time.

    Now that you’re caught up, put on your rose tinted glasses, pull out your finest rage comics and le reddit memes, and step into this time machine, because we’re headed back to 2009.

    Welcome to 2009

    Welcome back! It’s Obama’s first term after the Bush administration, there’s hope for the future, and I’m in high school. It is a better time than middle school, but still not a great time. My interest in games is growing, and there’s just one problem: I never actually get to play them. My screen time limit is 20 minutes a day and the family computer is a Mac.

    Enter Adventure Quest Worlds. It’s free*. It’s engaging. And it plays in a browser, so I can play my account anywhere. Home. Library. Friend’s house. Relatives’ places at Thanksgiving. Home again.

    It’s this ease of access that is going to define my experience with the game. Please remember that the iPhone is only 2 years old at this point in time. I won’t even get an iPod touch until 2013. While PC gaming and many of its all time classics exist, (TF2, Myst, Doom, CoD4) they are completely out of my reach.

    An image of combat in the video game adventure quest worlds.

    From this standpoint, then, Adventure Quest Worlds is going to define my gaming habits until I finally get a personal Mac laptop and move on to things like Starcraft 2, Team Fortress 2, and other Steam offerings.

    In a world controlled by parents and tech limits, it is quite literally the first time I have ever played a game like this. And unlike Runescape, the only actual competitor, it’s much simpler. Even better, it’s got weekly content drops. There is always something new, always something to do.

    Glasses off, analysis on.

    With the value of hindsight, Adventure Quest Worlds didn’t do much that other, bigger games hadn’t beaten it to punch on. Everquest had been around for a decade. Wrath of the Lich King has just released.

    Its defining feature to me, a highschooler living on a day to day basis, are its weekly updates. These incremental storylines, drip-fed advancement, and progression content dropped each Friday. I’m sure that other games had things like this, but I suspect that what defines Adventure Quest Worlds was just how consistent these drops were. Some were just quest chains and zones, but some were wars: events in which the community had to work together to defeat the oncoming horde or all would be lost!

    As a cynical adult, I look at these and suspect that the story would continue on regardless of the community’s success or engagement. But as a teenager, I wholeheartedly believed that if failed, if we faltered, the entire narrative would shift.

    The defining feature, then, of AQW, was that it truly pioneered the live service game before we were even using that term to describe video games.

    Rose Tinted Glasses Back On Now

    I look at these things now as a cynic, but back then I was fully on board. I loved the design notes (a sort of a patch update combined with lore that would be published each week) with all my heart. AQW and the Artix Entertainment team is perhaps the only thing I’ve ever felt some sort of deep parasociality for. Of course, that wasn’t a word we would have used for it back then. We didn’t have that term.

    But it existed! I wanted to be them so badly. They were the reason I got interested in game design. They were the reason I started to try to teach myself Flash. More than anything else, this game probably defines my taste in music, to the detriment of my friends and anyone else unfortunate enough to pass me the aux cable. Voltaire, Paul and Storm: these were things I learned about through Adventure Quest Worlds.

    An image of the webcomic Ctnl-Alt-Delete of the comic loss.

    If you want to know how old Adventure Quest Worlds is, there is a cross-promotional area with Ctrl+Alt+Delete. Not the keypress, the webcomic. That webcomic. The one loss is from.

    If I had to describe how foundational this game was to my personality, it might be this story. At some point in High school, my family took a trip out west to visit the great American national parks. Outside of Glacier National Park, I remember very little of it.

    But I remember being in the very first PvP match of Adventure Quest Worlds, because I was matched into Artix, the owner of the company. And I was just completely and utterly awestruck. I have no evidence that this is a real thing that happened. I doubt even he remembers.

    From 2008-ish to 2012, this game, the developers, the community, and everything about it was such a critical portion of my life that it remains in my heart over a decade later. A little part of my soul that cannot be taken from me.

    Returning to 2026

    I recovered access to my AQW account sometime month. I was thinking about the game again after a 10 year stretch because the company ran a crowd funding campaign to try to modernize it. They netted a bit over 2 million dollars for the effort. Not exactly chump change, but not anything exciting enough to be in the headlines.

    Disclosure: I was some of that 2 million.

    I cannot really recommend playing this game as who I am now. Despite its update cadence, it’s surpassed in every way by other games. It’s a worse grindathon than Runescape, it’s less mechanically exciting then any other premium MMO on the market. In an era of Roblox and Fortnite it’s less interesting or accessible.

    The story is, at best, mediocre, and at worst actually bad. As a weekly adventure serial, it was compelling. As a constructed story whose beats I have spent the last two weeks working through, it’s deeply underwhelming. Its endgame hyper grinds are the sorts of things that provoke a sort of twitchy, nervous reaction from me. The sort that I get whenever I’m playing a clicker game, and I find myself opening up the AutoHotKey documentation. Or even worse, looking at Github repos of bots.

    But in 2009, I can’t see any of that.

    Back to the Past – 2011

    This infatuation won’t last forever. In 2011, Minecraft will release. It runs on Macs, I have a personal laptop now, and college is on the horizon. Adventure Quest Worlds will fall by the wayside to modded Minecraft servers, and trying to run a server myself. I’ll try to write my own mods, but will be so overwhelmed by the complexity and community that I’ll give up.

    There’s probably a true story of Adventure Quest Worlds. One that tracks the drama, the weirdness, the major players. One I’m not part of, not in any meaningful way. I was never more than a player. The game means more to me than I do to it.

    Please Step Back Into Your Time Machine

    This isn’t really a proper game review. In a real review, I’d break down and give examples of why the story doesn’t work (relying on parody more than anything else), I’d dissect why the game’s player base has cratered (failing tech stack, poor mechanics, and lower ease of access) and I’d skewer the monetization (why grind for 2 weeks when I can spend $5?). If I wanted to take a positive spin, there’s probably a strong piece in considering how well the SVG art style has aged, even if the re-use of rigging for animations has not. But I’m not doing any of those things.

    Here we are! 18 years of Adventure Quest Worlds. It’s still alive. You can still play it. It’s outlived better games. Fucking hell, it’s outlived actual honest to god human people I know.

    But here it is. Here I am.


  • My LGS cancelled weekly Lorcana, and now the game is dead.

    My LGS cancelled weekly Lorcana, and now the game is dead.

    Non-Clickbait Title: Ravensburger has shot itself in the foot repeatedly, and it killed my local Lorcana scene.

    Okay, so that’s a little bit of a lie. My local game store (LGS) did cancel their weekly Lorcana events, but as far as I’m aware, the game isn’t dead. Yet. But the local population of players has cratered.

    I like looking at weird things that happen in TCG’s, and Lorcana has recently given me an interesting little case study in players at my LGS, and how/when the drop-off happened.

    I also think that for the specific population of players I played with, I can trace back the decline to two or three fairly specific events, and that interests me! So let’s talk about it.

    But first…

    Why does it matter that weeklies are cancelled?

    The store I went to for Lorcana ran casual weekly events. These were non-prized, non-competitive freeplay events. You bought in for $7, got a booster pack of your choice, and were entered in a raffle to win some other organized play prizes.

    These events were the lowest possible entry point to get into Lorcana and connect with the local community. If you are brand new to the game, if you’ve never played a card game before, if you didn’t go out to card game events… this was the easiest way to try out the game in the lowest stakes, most chill energy environment available.

    Without these events, the first rung on a ladder of getting into the game has been removed. It won’t stop weirdos like me who show up to sealed events for games they can’t play, but I do think it makes it much more daunting (and expensive!) for almost everyone else.

    I think this is bad, but I think its especially bad for Lorcana. A lot of Lorcana players in our local were Disney fans first, and Lorcana players second. The traditional label for this would probably be “casual” players, but I don’t think that fits here. These were folks who came to every pre-release and bought cards by the booster box. They might have played the game casually, but they didn’t engage with it casually. They were more interested in making decks around their favorite characters than trying to break the meta.

    Anyway, that’s a lot text to say:

    1. Loss of weeklies was bad because it removed the first step in on-boarding for new players or players who wanted to get more involved.
    2. It’s especially bad for Lorcana because it removed the environment where a lot of players could play the sorts of decks they liked to make.
    Cause #1 – Weekly Challenges

    Prior to Lorcana’s set 9 (Fabled) release, Lorcana weeklies had a point a system. Each week, you could show up, earn points for doing a variety of different things, and at the end of the season, the folks with the most points got some special prizes.

    I don’t want to focus on the prizes here, but I do want to look at the challenges. Some of them notably rewarded playing weird decks. So instead of everyone just showing up with their best deck each week, there was an incentive to build out a deck to try to meet that weeks challenges, or to play a multiplayer game.

    In short: there was a reason to keep things fresh.

    (And as a side effect, probably lower the power level of the decks of the players who really wanted to earn points.)

    When Ravensburger got rid of this, it removed both the incentive to show up every week, since prizes were now just raffles at the end, and it also meant that there was no reason to even try to make a new deck every week. Meaning that on a week to week basis, every week started to feel the same.

    Cause #1.5 – Prize Adjustments

    I debated giving this a full sub-section, but I think its comparatively minor. A bit after the weekly scoresheet changes, Ravensburger swapped out their prizes. Previously, I think there had been things like playmats, pins, and cards. Right now, there are only cards and these really underwhelming card boxes.

    How underwhelming? Underwhelming enough that I, the king of taking free stuff, the supreme sovereign of snatching up game-adjacent garbage, paused before accepting one of these things. I mean, I still took it. But I was unenthused.

    I don’t think that this on its own really did too much damage to Lorcana, but I do know that for specific players, this was highly demotivating. It wasn’t a bomb, but it was a surgical removal of another incentive for that set of player to show up and play.

    Cause #2 – Set Rotation

    Different games have different terms for the idea of set rotation, but all of them loosely follow the same idea: at some point in the lifespan of a TCG, older sets of cards removed from the standard play pool in order to make room for new sets of cards. It can be viewed as a necessity in order to prevent the game from becoming stale, or a way to get people to buy new cards.

    Regardless, virtually every card game does it, and Lorcana was no exception; they called it Core Constructed. And after their rotation, Lorcana required that decks at these weekly casual events be in the Core Constructed format.

    I think this was a terrible idea.

    I do think that Lorcana needed rotation from a mechanical standpoint. Set 1, while not committing any of the flaws of say, Alpha Magic, or base set Pokemon, has some flawed designs.

    Honestly, on the grand scale of “Well that was a mistake,” a free Wheel of Fortune still ranks lower than “What if land destruction was free?” or “What if you could take turn 5 on turn 1?”

    So yeah. Rotation made sense from a competitive standpoint, and a design standpoint.

    But I don’t think it made sense for the large subset of the player base who were Disney fans first, and Lorcana fans second. There were a fair number of adults and kids who could no longer play their favorite deck because those cards weren’t reprinted in Fabled, and so… they stopped showing up for weekly casuals.

    Synthesis

    So when my LGS held their final casual Lorcana event, I was the only person who showed up. I sat around for a bit, did some drawing, then went food shopping while the rest of the store was full of folks playing Riftbound.

    The removal of weekly challenges and prizes disincentivized entrenched players from showing up to play, while also making the ones who did show up bring the same deck week after week. Set rotation killed off a lot of casual decks that didn’t need to be killed off, while making folks who’d never played a card game before feel a bit cheated, and question their investment of time, money, and energy in the game.

    So here’s my guess as to what happens next:

    The lack of casual play will remove a critical part of the playerbase pipeline. The events that are still supported will have lower and lower turnout, as it becomes less and less interesting to play with smaller numbers of people.

    End result? No more Lorcana at the local game store.

    Conclusion

    Okay, so I know I called that part above this synthesis, but I think there’s a much more interesting takeaway here: Ravensburger doesn’t understand their playerbase, and treated them like they would Magic: The Gathering players.

    To be fair, I would have made the exact same mistake if I was in their position. No one has to put me in charge of a possible multi-million dollar TCG yet, based off a brand worth billions of dollars, but still.

    There’s an assumption that the final form of the “hardcore” player of a CCG/TCG is out grinding tournaments, tracking their full collection, building copies of and iterating on meta decks, and just generally fully engaging with the game portion of the collectible card experience. I think in the case of Lorcana, some of the meat and potato grinders weren’t doing that. They were collecting, they were buying tons of cards, and they were making fun weekly decks for character they liked.

    These were the ‘hardcore’ players. They attended every prerelease, they had built decks for store championships, they tracked every set. But the game was only a portion of the experience, not the end state. Lorcana had core players, but they looked and behaved differently than they might in another game.

    Or at least, that’s my crackpot theory.

  • Card City Critters – March Update

    Card City Critters – March Update

    It’s early March, we’ve finished up our largest playtests yet, and that means it’s time for a progress update on Card City Critters!

    Here’s the short version: We’re still plugging away at the game. We’ve run two larger scale playtests that are closer in vision to what we want the final game to look like. We’ve added dozens of cards, a bunch of activities and puzzles, and we’re working hard to add more.

    Now for the longer version.

    After Boston FIG, we were confident that people enjoyed the base battle card game. As a result, we’ve been focusing on some of the other components. In our minds, the final version of Card City Critters is a longer and slightly more involved experience, something a bit more like an escape room or immersive theater.

    We’ve run two playtests of this version of the game. These were 2.5 hour events at local game stores, where players started out by getting a deck, and then solved puzzles, challenged their fellow players, and dueled NPC’s to earn additional cards for their deck.

    These have given us a lot of great feedback, but also illustrated some pain points in our current design.

    A lot of our puzzles are hit or miss. Some people really enjoyed searching through bulk cards, other folks found it frustrating. Most folks have enjoyed our scavenger hunts, but felt let down when someone else solves or gets the grand prize first. Our “find lethal” puzzles are too difficult.

    We’re also still working on our grand finale. At Boston FIG, this was a boss battle with the Magnate. For our first playtest, this was something similar, but we found it didn’t work well with a higher player count. For the second one, we tried something new (but no spoilers)!

    While this worked much better, the boss cards were overtuned, and the result was a sweep for the boss. Whoops! Still, some of these boss cards seemed to work well, so we’ll be revising those ones that worked well, and redesigning the few that didn’t.

    Probably the biggest thing that we’re still grappling with is how to balance puzzles and dueling. Right now, people feel like if they do one, they miss out on the other. We’ve tried a few fixes for this, but none have really worked. Solving this is our next big challenge.

    Still, it’s a bit of a bummer to just focus on what isn’t working, so let’s talk about what is! First up, we’ve got a shop, and over a dozen unique shop cards.

    These include some unique and powerful cards, and players have enjoyed them. It also has our first set of non-standard emblems that you can be swapped out for the base ones! (You might recall that emblems are our deckbuilding restriction: you can have one of each color to go along with your deck, and choose any to flip over. Each emblem you flip prevents you from playing cards of that color in your deck, but gives you a permanent bonus instead.)

    Also, we’ve added a set of cards called fossils! These are cards that you can collect, and then fuse together into powerful dinosaurs, becoming more powerful the more fossils you find, and these have also been quite popular. I need to redo the art on a few of them though….

    So yeah! We’ve been up to a lot. While we don’t have a date yet for our next big public playtest, we’ll be at Granite Game Summit later this week with a smattering of decks and puzzles for folks to try out. We’ll be there on Saturday, March 7th at 10am, so if you happen to be swinging by, feel free to give it a try!

    As always, more updates to come as we continue to plug away on this thing. The best way to stay up to date is to join us over the Card City Critters Discord, where we’ll be recruiting players for playtests, and posting updates on the game, or to join the game’s mailing list here.

    We also might be at PAX East in Unpub! Maybe! Not quite sure yet!

    As always, thanks for playing our game, and more info to come in the future.

  • Quick PAX Writeup

    PAX Unplugged has been great. I’ve been too busy doing a variety of things (Indie Game Night Market! Learning new CCGs! Losing all of my rare cards that I collected over the weekend, and just barely managing to get them back!) to really do too much writing.

    For now, I’ll just say that it was a blast, and assuming I manage to get home, and not end up in a plane crash, I’ll try to talk about it a bit more tomorrow. But right now I need to pack for a way too early flight, and get some sleep.

    Cheers, post more tomorrow.