Eruditorum Press

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The Flowers in the Dustbin (Super Mario 64)

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No comics reviews this week. I just can’t. We’ll see about next week when we get there, but I was thinking of winding down the feature anyway, so peg your expectations accordingly. Instead, here’s this week’s Super Nintendo Project.

The future arrived in late September 1996, untethered to any major gift-giving occasion. My assumption in hindsight is that my mother, giddily triumphant after scoring one on the sly and apparently correct logic that Toy Works was still a place that would get a shipment but was not a place where they’d sell out in thirty seconds, couldn’t resist giving it to me immediately. It seems as though I must have known the Nintendo 64 was coming, just because it’s hard to imagine myself as a person who didn’t know things like that a new Nintendo console was coming out, but I honestly can’t even remember a trace of anticipation for the future. Perhaps that’s just where I was in late 1996. Certainly it was something of a low point for me, as adolescent depression’s teeth sunk in deepest and my academic performance began to degrade in the face of a simple and blunt inability to drag myself through page after page of rote busywork.

So it’s perhaps not a surprise that I was at the time unimpressed by the future. But oh boy was I. I beat Super Mario 64, but my desire to go back and collect further stars was essentially nonexistent. My objections were numerous and diffuse. I saw the “hunt for six stars in a level” schtick as little more than flagrant cover for the fact that there weren’t actually very many levels in the game, found the camera thoroughly unsatisfying, and hated holding the weird M-shaped controller by the middle and right prongs.

Most, though not all of this, was unfair, at least as a judgment of the future, in that it amounted to peculiarities of the early-version tech involved in Super Mario 64. Yes, the multiple stars per level were a workaround to deal with the fact that the cartridge could only hold so many of of the big 3D levels, but with subsequent games in the 3D star-hunt format this restriction loosened, and levels started getting the number of stars they could interestingly fit instead of six come hell or high water. The camera, likewise, gradually improved its basic AI, and the eventual switch away from the four-button C-Pad of the Nintendo 64 towards cameras controlled by a second analog stick took away most of the annoyance involved in Super Mario 64. Likewise the controller design, rooted in an understandable but still fundamentally erroneous guess that the D-Pad would remain the primary control mechanism for most games, was subsequently ditched, with future controllers, whether Nintendo’s or not, positioning the analog stick in more ergonomically pleasant locations.

(A side note on the multiple stars per level. On the one hand Super Mario 64 is focused on the search for a singular and defining object – a golden star around which entire worlds are organized.…

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Hyrule Haeresis 4

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Blasphemy, they would have said.

The story of handhelds is the secret story of the video game industry. Always overlooked in conversations about “bit eras” and “hardware cycles” and “console generations”, the handheld side of the medium has from the start been relegated to the kiddie table of the master narrative of history. This is in spite, or perhaps because, of the fact that until quite recently handhelds were the best selling consoles on the market, and even today the “casual gamer” epithet is applied almost exclusively to those who are in possession of smartphones and tablets (that is, roughly 100% of the populace).

It is perhaps not altogether difficult to see why: Accessibility was always going to be a sticking point for a culture fundamentally built around the exclusivity of privilege necessary to have the latest up-to-date technology at any given time, and handhelds are built to be accessible, using older, established kit in inventive new form factors to keep costs down and ergonomics up. And there’s nothing gamers fear and despise more than low cost and ergonomic, for to them such things comprise the mark of the weak-willed and the infidel. So shunned was the Game Boy and its house for receiving allegedly pared-down ports of superior home console titles, and mocked were those who dared besmirch themselves by owning one. Why would you waste money on inferiority when you can get the same game but better for the NES and Super Nintendo for almost the same price, the gamers derided? Never mind that not everyone can afford a home console, or has room for one, or needs or wants one, and never mind that not everyone wants to spend their entire life slack-jawed and complacent in front of the reassuring glow of the TV screen.

And never mind that Nintendo has always built their name in the video game industry on the back of hardware like the Game Boy. Nintendo’s first real breakout in games aside from its early arcade cabinets was the Game & Watch, a series of simple handheld LCD games that doubled as watches and could fit in one’s pocket, marketed towards the average person on the go. In those days, and still to this day to an extent, Tokyo was a city of foot traffic, and something as simple and elegant as the Game & Watch was a surefire success. And if it wasn’t for the Game & Watch, we wouldn’t have the NES controller, and by extension every home console controller ever made. Or at least, it would have looked dramatically different: It was the unique cross-shaped input on the Game & Watch version of Donkey Kong that inspired the now-ubiquitous control pad. And it was that same Donkey Kong Game & Watch which also featured a unique dual-screen clamshell layout (also seen, curiously enough, on the Game & Watch version of the original Zelda no Densetsu alongside the same control pad), that gave rise to another influential Nintendo handheld.

And so, it was to fall to The Legend of Zelda, biblical canon of the gamers, to legitimize the Game Boy in the eyes of anointed.…

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Co-Owner of a Lonely Heart

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Judging the first part of a two-parter is always a pain in the neck. (Remember when I thought Under the Lake had promise?) And there are other factors complicating this, like the nagging worry that Class isn’t ever going to transcend the fact that you can snarkily describe it as “The Sarah Jane Adventures with fucking.” Certainly we’re in familiar territory here, both in general and for Class, which is to say that we’re running through a fairly standard set of genre paces with a couple of unique spins. In this case, the basic mode is the mid-season finale, with the most obvious model being the “Surprise/Innocence” two-parter of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.  Class is at least consistently good at throwing itself into whatever it’s doing with zeal, and so four episodes in its reliance on old standards has consistently been outshone by the flare with which they’re being done. All the same, my fondest and most adamant hope for the second part of this, or at least for something in the back half of the season, is that we get an episode that’s actually doing something new instead of adding a bit of spice to a cliche.

All of which said, once again the cliche is very tasty. Ness continues to be very good at striking a balance between the show’s instincts towards taking place in a TV school and its instincts towards emotional realism. The scene among Ram, April, and her mother is probably the highlight in this regard, with Ram being perfectly pitched both as a genuinely decent guy (“I didn’t want her to think bad of you.”) and as a mildly rebellious “bad” kid (“I had some condoms.”) It’s a smart balance, and more to the point one that’s ultimately derived from Doctor Who’s own longstanding balance of melodrama and actual drama. (And, of course, from Buffy.) And there are other bits of genuine intelligence around this. The “April feeds back into Corakinus” beat is entirely expected. Corakinus asking to cuddle after sex, on the other hand, is absolutely inspired. (Less successful – Tanya’s “I think they had sex” seeming to exist entirely to set up the moronic “Ram and the Shadow Kin?” joke.)

This last parenthetical also brings us to the things the episode is doing that at least offer real potential for going in a boldly original direction. The most interesting thing the show has going for it remains the Charlie/Ms. Quill relationship, which is clearly being pushed gradually to the forefront. It’s frustrating that this is often some of the clumsiest writing, with Tanya and Matteusz getting to flail uselessly against Charlie’s conviction of his moral rectitude, both on the slavery issue and on the owning weapons of mass destruction issue. This sets up the odd phenomenon of a plot that’s simultaneously the show’s best hope of turning in something that really makes you sit up and take notice and that’s flopping around on the table unsatisfyingly.

In a similar and more successful vein is the new head teacher, Dorothea, who tragically isn’t played by Sophie Aldred or Jackie Lane, but who is otherwise charming.…

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Swinging My Dick In My Hand (Super Mario RPG)

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One final guest post from Anna Wiggins. Also, just FYI, we’re currently $1 below the threshold for Class reviews on Patreon, so if you were enjoying those, you might want to toss me a buck.

It was always going to end like this. When life transforms into narrative, wyrd into orlog, endings become inevitable, foreshadowed in a way they never were at the time. This is the dread magic of stories. And tragedies, in particular, only ever end one way.

In the Spring of 1998, a fourteen year old trans girl, closeted even from herself, tried to end her life in a patch of woods in rural North Carolina. She had run out of hope, her every refuge invaded. No one came to save her, and she didn’t know how to save herself.

Super Mario RPG was released two years earlier, of course. She never even played it; in retrospect this is surprising. It was a Square-made RPG, manifestly her favorite software developer at this point. But it slipped past her radar, probably by being part of the Mario franchise. Playing it now, I think she probably wouldn’t have liked it. The combat system is turned-based, but with poorly cued proto-quick-time events thrown in. The RPG elements are pretty simplistic: three equipment slots, a handful of stats that monotonically increase, 4-6 magic attacks per character, a shared MP pool. It stays on the shallow end of the RPG pool, and feels more like ‘turn-based Mario’ than ‘Mario-themed Final Fantasy’.

By 1998, her older brother had a Playstation. The SNES was starting to collect dust, unused except for the occasional return to Secret of Mana, Chrono Trigger, or Final Fantasy III. She still preferred the old sprite-based art of the 16-bit era; the character and concept art of Final Fantasy III seeming entirely more palatable than the blocky polygons of Final Fantasy VII. More broadly, though, VII just felt less inviting to her. It had snowboarding and large-breasted characters serving explicitly as eye-candy for boys. These things feel out of place in her vision of what video games ‘for her’ are like.

So it would be facile to suggest that Super Mario RPG destroyed the refuge she had in video games, but it stands as an important symbol, at least. Video games fell distinctly into the categories ‘skill-focused’ and ‘narrative-focused’. RPGs were designed to be narrative-focused. It was ok to be bad at them, because the goal wasn’t to be the best, just good enough to watch the story unfold. Super Mario RPG had more narrative than most Mario games, certainly, but it was still part of a franchise that was solidly in the ‘skill-based’ category, the games her brother and cousins would play and boast about, loudly, to each other. She rejected it on principle. It was an invasion, this RPG from the other side of gaming, from the world of Mega Man and Ninja Gaiden and Sonic the Hedgehog. And arriving as it did at the end of the SNES era, it was like a death-knell for the sorts of games that had sustained her for so long.…

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Comics Reviews (November 2nd, 2016)

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Bitch Planet #9

Righteous and angry the way you want tis book to be, but… who’s Eleanor Doane again? I mean, the issue tells me somewhat, but clearly she’s a big part of the book’s underlying mythology, and, well, that’s always rough when a book’s as sporadic as this. This would work if it were coming out on an actual release schedule, but the “an issue every once in a while” is just killing it, and I’m increasingly contemplating switching to trade for it. 

Animosity #3

The meta-arc of this one is feeling cloudy – there’s a big jump between the second issue and the third, enough of one that I went back to the second to refresh my memory, which was a mistake because I’d forgotten just how clumsy the end of that issue was, making the jump even more jarring. But on a single-issue level this is golden – an unsettling and provocative look at animal-human relationships that’s an absolute joy to read. I suspect its problems quite fitting together will eventually overwhelm it, but for now this is a highlight. 

The Wicked + The Divine #23

An ambitious high-concept issue in which Gillen proceeds to get a bunch of real journalists to roleplay interviews with his characters and then write up those interviews as though they were real articles. There’s literal authorial self-insertion. Add to that some gorgeously lush portraits by Kevin Wada and you’ve got something that’s obviously a lot of fun, and that manages to seed hints for where the next arc of WicDiv is going as well. Shit like this is why this is one of the best books on the stands. …

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The Secret Song of Ayarynne Underqueen

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The Foreseen One

The first song tells of her birth. But this song comes from the Southern Lands, so it isn’t really a song. It tells of how the Underqueen was born in 2E 555 to the Devils of the Isles, but fled to travel Nirn instead. She was not the Underqueen at this time, and to the Devils she was their pre-ordained queen and saviour. She knew Mundus needed rulers (though she didn’t yet know what that word really means, because it is a Secret Word) and this is why she chose to Wander. It was said she spent lifetimes or ages wandering Nirn before returning to the Isles to claim her queendom, by which point many in the Isles had talked themselves into forgetting her as a Historical error. But some knew and remembered, mainly the very old and the very young.
 
But some other in the Isles remembered the Wanderers from the Before Time, and they were afraid of her return. The Devils feared her dangerous trickery would cause the Isles themselves to Wander, such that they could never again be charted on a map. And because the Devils of the Isles value Order and Mapmaking and above all else need to Be Seen, they cast her out and called her Unforeseen (because the Devils cannot hear the Wind-Whisper of Blessed Kyne) and would not honour her.

On Her Name and Deeds

Ayarynne (for this is what she was called at that time) was to become Queen of the Isles, but because she had sought the counsel of those outside the Isles and wished to reinstate the old mythogeneaolosophy of the giants before they had been elves, she was branded a heretic and a blasphemer and this is why she was then called the Witch-Queen. Queen Ayarynne knew that she was destined to rule, but that she would have to once again travel outside the Isles to do so. With her eyes set on the Imperial City’s Ruby Throne, she first journeyed east to seek allies among the forest dwellers and cat people of the wild kingdoms.
 
The Empire was in ruins, and pretenders to its name and corpse vied for the throne. Each wielded an army of necromancers who fought tooth and claw in service of Memory such that the Imperial Province of Cyrodiil would not be drowned and sunk under the rainstorms of Kyne. The Shaman-Queen of the Isles made her way across Tamriel to Cyrodiil herself, but she did not seek the crown for the same reasons the others did or that they might believe she would: She was guided by the Hawk, whose voice was hers, and she rallied her troops of elves and cats and men under her banner of wings. Under her own auspices, Queen Ayarynne found and wielded the Staff of the Sun’s Missing Eye, which remembered the Truth-That-Was-Not in Ald Mora and pointed her North. It was said by some that she knew in that moment where her destiny called her, but she spoke on none of it.
…

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Serious Bubbles (Steven Universe)

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Hi all,

So, it’s been a while since I’ve put something up on Eruditorum Press.  My bad.  Got caught up in work-related travel, and then there was the return of the intestinal bug, and, well… I apologize, because I’ve been sitting on this awesome Giant Woman podcast for two weeks now, where Shana and I talk more about Steven Universe.

Steven Universe! 

In this installment of Giant Woman we cover Bubble Buddies and Serious Steven the 7th and 8th episodes of Season One.  And as both of these episodes are quite good, so too is the conversation around them, although to be fair I blew it in my analysis of the Beatles’ song “Strawberry Fields Forever” as an influence on Serious Steven, as I completely neglected to mention that the song is a fusion of two different takes.  Seriously, where was my brain at?

As always, you can get your Giant Woman fix at the Oi! Spaceman library of podcasts right here.…

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Nightvisiting Review

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Something of a holding pattern episode, executing a bog standard premise whose primary virtue is clearly that it’s cheap and depends primarily on interior shots in which two people talk or street scenes in which static monster tendrils are strung about. This is, of course, not something to complain about – “the cheap one” is a thing Doctor Who has always had to grapple with. Sure, it ends up being the downside to the decision to drop the first two episodes together, in that you don’t really want your cheap holding pattern episode to come on your second week, but that’s a pretty minor complaint. And on the bright side, Class is intelligent enough to burn off “people are mysteriously visited in the night by their dead relatives” as the cheap midseason episode, which is more than can be said for Babylon 5, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, or, the most obvious comparison, Torchwood.

On top of that, “Nightvisiting” has what can increasingly just be described as Class’s usual instinct to avoid genre defaults in favor of more interesting routes. For one thing, at no point are any of the main characters particularly tempted by the Lankin, so that at no point does the drama hinge on the fact that the audience knows genre tropes and the characters don’t. Particularly satisfying, after two episodes focusing pretty hard on his trauma, is Ram’s reaction to Rachel showing up at his window, which is basically to go “nope” and run like hell. But Tanya’s consistent and intelligent interrogation of the situation and eventual self-rescue is good stuff as well.

There are certainly some ways in which the script is sloppy. The idea that Tanya’s family constitutes the biggest reserve of grief in London on the two year anniversary of Tanya’s father’s death is… sloppy, though wisely buried in the denouement when things are happening quickly enough that you don’t notice. On the other hand, the sequestering of Charlie and Matteusz in the bedroom, lampshaded explicitly by Ms. Quill when they finally make it down to involve themselves in the plot, is hard to treat as anything other than a particularly clumsy bit of storytelling that serves to keep Matteusz at an odd remove from the main characters, dropping out of the story for an episode and then popping up having been thrown out of his house, as opposed to us getting to see him get thrown out. It’s odd, because there’s no obvious reason for him not to be given roughly the same weight that Tanya, Ram, April, and Charlie get, and yet he very clearly isn’t. It’s also a bit puzzling to do this as your third episode, such that your ghosts are all characters we’ve never seen before, which ends up being somewhat underwhelming. Tanya’s father is at least well-set up by the previous episode and the intro montage, but Mrs. Quill’s sister is an utterly damp squib.

But for everything that’s clumsy there are bits that are deft and intelligent.…

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Comics Reviews (October 26th, 2016)

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The Ultimates #12

Well, they solve the artist-swapping problem that’s been killing this book, but the solution – getting Christian Ward in to do the final issue – is an odd one. Ward’s great, but he’s great at weird cosmic psychedelia, and this is an issue pretty heavy on people sitting in hallways and offices of government buildings. With a ton of plot information offloaded to, basically, “see other comics.” And a setup to The Ultimates2, which I admit I’m not immediately excited by. The result is one of those very comicsy things, a final issue that fails utterly to bring anything to a satisfying conclusion. Still, the Ms. America stuff was nice, as it always is. 

The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl Beats Up The Marvel Universe

Finally got to check this out. Good, and at times delightful (the “draw Squirrel Girl” activity pages were brilliant), but I definitely came out of it feeling like an OGN was more Squirrel Girl than I necessarily wanted in a single dose. By the end it’s just not sparkling anymore, and the laughs felt fewer and further between than they did at the start. Not because the book isn’t still good, but because I just don’t think the Squirrel Girl style is suited to that sort of longform. This felt like a flabby and overlong issue as opposed to an OGN. Still good, but definitely not $20 of good. 

New Avengers #17

Apparently this is a Civil War II tie-in? This isn’t even a red skies crossover. This is just an issue of New Avengers. Of course, since Civil War II is a car crash and I’m kinda less than impressed with Bendis’s “let’s tell the female writer who’s being harassed off Twitter that it isn’t comics fault” schtick today not actually being a tie-in as advertised in the cover fails to lose this book any points. Which means it gets to stand on the strength of its gonzo Al Ewing plotting, which is a perfectly good thing to rely upon. Nice emphatic twists that point towards an exciting resolution for the story Ewing’s been telling for more than a year here, and that presumably sets up U.S.Avengers whenever that starts. 

Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur #12

A delightful wrap-up to the second arc, which maybe on the whole feels like it went on longer than it needed to (the first one did too, actually – six issues is a rough length for a superhero book). There’s really nothing but good things to say about a comic that involves a rampaging lego triceratops. But as it happens there’s top notch character work and some of the funniest responses to a profession of love in comics to boot. 

Ms. Marvel #12

A tight and charming done-in-one with a shockingly good guest artist in Mirka Andolfo. Kamala goes to visit family in Pakistan and, inevitably, ends up fighting crime. Good character beats, a delightful opportunity to see a superhero story in an unusual setting and dealing with different issues.…

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