Feb 2018 Archive, part b

Note that I’m good for SPaG and continuity, but don’t know enough about World of Warcraft (only played for some days several years ago). You may still need another beta reader for canon compliance.

My e-mail address is hidden from the spam bots on my Wiki User Page.

HG

Okay, so I haven't actually played all of these, but they all have excellent reviews, which counts for something.

Star Wars Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy
Star Wars Jedi Knight 2: Jedi Outcast

These two older games are $3.50 each and, I'm told, feature the best lightsaber combat of any Star Wars game. It also has first-person shooter elements and (of course) Force abilities.

Arma 3: Hardcore military simulator, with heavy emphasis on group tactics. Currently $13.59 for the base game or $23.79 for the Apex Edition (which includes a bunch of DLC). You're going to need a clan if you want to play seriously, but luckily there's a web page where you can search for open ones. I'd only buy this game on sale because of how serious a commitment it is; a single mission can take an hour or more from briefing and role assignment to completion.

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt
Excellent dark fantasy RPG, currently $20. I haven't played much of it (sadly), but what I've played is absolutely perfect. Right now, the GOTY edition is the same price as the base game; effectively, all the DLC is free. Just make sure your computer is beefy enough to run it.

Some things I can suggest:

-Mount and Blade: Warband: Okay, if you're here, you'll probably like Warband. It's a medieval RPG/Combat sim, and you can command armies and order around soldiers, and there's also a multiplayer mode that supports over 100+ man matches, and... what else do you want?

Maybe an active modding community, an expansion/new game/DLC thing where you play as a viking in a game version of RL Scandanavia, another expansion where you can fight in multiplayer set in the French Revolution? Because it has all that too.

-Civilization: It really doesn't matter which. Just... one of them. Do I even have to explain?

-Dawn of War I and standalone expansions (although Soulstorm is... not the best): Do you like RTS games? Do you like Warhammer 40k? If so, buy these. They're great.

-A game by Zachtronics: Really, any of them, provided you're a programmer. Save for Ironclad Tactics, they are some of the best puzzles for programmers out there.

-Strife, Veteran Edition: Strife is a proper, old-school shooter, built in the Doom engine. But it's also an RPG hybrid with an interconnected word, actual story, and voice acting, where Killing All the Things isn't always the best way to proceed.

-Quake (any of them), and Doom (1, 2, and 4): What can I say? These games are pure, absolute classics, have great campaigns (well, Quake 1 and the Dooms do, at least), great multiplayer (if you can set it up and find anyone online), and are just all-around fun.

-Half-Life: This one's a tad frustrating, but I've been playing through it, and overall, I've been enjoying quite a bit. Grab the sequel, while you're at it.

-Portal (and Portal 2): Go play some of the funniest games ever made. Great puzzles, as well.

-Psychonauts: Portal is funny. This is, too. It's a classic 3rd person platformer, mostly getting by on the writing alone, but there are some great levels here as well: The Milkman conspiracy stuck in my head for well over a decade, long after the name of the game it was attached to had faded.

-To The Moon: More of a visual novel than a game. Do you like crying? this is for you.

-N++: Remember N? did you like N? play this. It's good.

-Bastion, Transistor, and Pyre: Look, just anything Supergiant makes. Their games are gorgeous, play well, and have good stories, and that music and voice acting...

-The Stanley Parable: You probably know it already. It is good.

There is soooo much more. But that's what I'm listing for now.

Here's a page about what that means. This sounds like exactly the kind of year we need right now. Unconditional love, finding stability, positive action, focus on the Earth. Let's do it!

~Neshomeh

I'm signalboosting this as much as I can. I don't personally know her, but this is a valid cause and I want to support it in any way I can. I wish her as much luck as I can in this coming year.

I'm not nearly as up on The Hobbit as I am 40K, but I know my way round a gag. You can contact me at h heath [one thousand nine hundred and ninety-two in numerals] at that place where the mail is hot. =]

I have a working-ish knowledge of 40K and the Hobbit was my entire childhood. My email is, strin michael is at gmail dot com.

Scape provided the shirt, and I just photoshopped the rest.

Shallot.

And a Flower so obnoxious that even the other ones can't bear its presence. Not that the sympathy for them go much further than that, they're still inflicting it on other Agents to get it out of their way. These ones get all my sympathy.

Now, I wonder where that bogus Department will go from there...

In no particular order, as my brain feels scattered today:

I like how you've presented the Shallot as one of those by-the-book, micromanaging Office Space bosses. I mean, I hate him, and the wheedling way he talks, and his self importance, but I like the way you've presented him. It's well done. I also love the very defining moment when he interrupts his agents bonding naturally to oversee some regimented bonding instead. I also also loved seeing the reactions of the Board of Department Heads, noticeably put off from their usual calmness.

I like that you've taken a Sue-tracking bracelet, something usually used as a source of at least light drama pertaining to a character's core personality and identity, and applied it in a way that turns the bracelet into pure slapstick comedy, and which ultimately isn't a judgment on the character it's a attached to, but only there due to a bureaucratic misinterpretation. It's a fun change. You also kept the times Bogbrush had to appease the tracker infrequent enough that I never quite knew when his dialogue was going to degenerate into advertisement, which gives all such instances the sense of interruption they need.

I like the way you handled the Cube. From the scene that introduced it, I didn't expect it to turn out to be such a problem. Heck, I was outright amused by the conversation between it and Karen. But then, even after Karen moved to the new division, it kept getting mentioned, and kept getting mentioned, and I starting growing uneasy as I realized this wasn't more of the irreverent sort of comedy as the rest of the story, but an actual, serious problem that would need to be addressed eventually. But I'm also glad you dealt with it, at least part of the way, right here in this story, and also that the first step towards eradicating the Cube's mental effects from Karen was also the catalyst for the true bond-forming of the non-Flower portions of the team.

—doctorlit, drawing lots of uncomfortable connections between the Cube and the Tommyknockers right now

Right! I really liked this. The characters were fun, and the juxtaposition of comedy and serious drama was pretty solid (and if you weren't expecting it... have you ever READ Scape's stuff? :-P).

Also, The Shallot is wonderfully hateable. Maybe just because I'm a programmer, and the majority of programmers, IME, have a loathing of those sorts.

Fairly irreverent, at any rate - which I'm not saying is a bad thing. I second Nesh in asking whether the NPCs will ever actually publish anything - if they do, we'd be up to four different in-universe print publications that actually exist (five, if you include the Manual). Goodness, that's practically a library!

Mortic is very sad that people see him as stuck-up. He was grumpy around the WhatThe newbies, but that was a special case...

Anyway: fun, but really weird.

hS

Because all I can think is that flash patch probably means something extremely rude in Heptapod. ^~ (And not to knock KittyEden, but if you can find a vector-ish tea stain you like in a solid color, I'll doctor up a higher-res version like the others on the wiki.)

But seriously, I enjoyed this story a lot. I was skeptical about a new division just on principle, but I love the idea of the SO and the Board making up some nonsense just to placate an annoying Plant and have somewhere to chuck people they don't know what else to do with. I believe there is precedent for this being exactly how they handle problems like this. ^^

The (sub?)plot about Karen and the Cube kinda threw me, it being a very serious element in an otherwise very silly story, but in a way that makes me want to know more about it, not less. What is the Cube, really? Where does it come from? How real is it? Why Karen? Where is it now? Should we be worried? 'Cause we've got people who can deal with that pudendum if necessary, just sayin'.

If only our friendlier psychics weren't so well-behaved with their powers that they didn't notice the problem... or maybe the background psychic noise of HQ interfered, or the Cube is just good enough to mask itself from casual notice. Any number of possible explanations. ... Sorry, I digress.

The SEP field was a nice (temporary) solution to the problem, though, and the moment of everyone coming together as a team was just plain nice. {= )

Other things I liked... Caroline. The acronym NPC. Bogbrush and his Sue-tracker problem. The Shallot and his terrible personality. The fact that the NPCs are basically Buzzfeed.

Is there going to be an actual publication associated with this, by the way? Such things are a lot of work and difficult to sustain, history tells us, but even one or two issues as an example would be awesome. ^_^

~Neshomeh

And that is indeed an excellent walrus.

And tea stain badge. Yes, that's what I meant!

Also, clever trick with the SEP field, there.

We'll see how Dax handle her 'vacation' from Intelligence (You're not getting the idea that Intelligence is the worst Department to work for out of my head). Also curious to see how Lorson's story will come into play in this spin-off.

Oh, one last thing... Does Dax do Sunset Shimmer too?

I liked the interaction here. It's a good example of an agent pair classically not getting along, but still respecting each other, and being willing to live and work together in spite of their differences.

I like the potential behind an agent having a bounty on them in a continuum they'll inevitably end up working in, too.

—doctorlit is shocked that RC number was still available after all these years

Dax is a lot of fun to be around, and feels very much like the antithesis of Agent Ix - someone at peace with their body and identity via its mutability as oppose to someone at war with themselves over bodies they force themselves not to have change. Meanwhile, Lorson seems like someone it would be interesting to get to know, and I look forward to reading exploits of their careers. =]

Wow. That was a ride. I know nothing about Warhammer beyond, uh, memey pictures posted online, but I feel like you guys painted a good picture of the battles there, and the general mood of seriousness and pessimism that seems to be the thing, there.

I like that you've brought together two very serious, somber, large-bodied men, and spent a lot of time developing an emotional bond between them. In addition to their own ongoing character development, it makes a nice contrast with the Sue in this mission: one hulking space cyborg thinks only of himself and interacts with his fists, while our big PPC boys are supportive of each other and keep their violence in check until the moment it's needed. Tom is also a welcome source of humor and light-heartedness throughout the mostly gloomy environments of the mission.

Little moments I liked: the warsheep, the Python chanting, Huinesoron's rant, and Tom's arrival on the battlefield, flanked by rock-and-roll speakers.

One typo I noticed: I believe you wanted "gates of Bree"?
". . . the agents hadn’t bothered to look ahead, and were suddenly yanked to the gates Bree with the abruptness of a poorly written transition."

—doctorlit, rebelling against imagining movieverse!Thorin in his mind's eye

But as is my habit, I spotted some technical errors:

it seems our Stu was was born in a ‘test-tub.’
Paging the Repetitive Department of Repetition.

Then I cannot even kill the man who was partially responsible for making my brothers and I the shadows we are?
Shouldn’t this be “my brothers and me”?

HG

Is this the first completed mission in the Warhammer 40,000 continuum? If so, congratulations on breaking new ground. If not, the mission is still good and the wiki is inaccurate.

I ope your spin-off will continue for long and be as fun as that mission was to read.

One thing though *Look again at te way the bit captain behaved*. Are you sure the captain you neuralized didn't decide to change name after the mission to something like... Cato Sicarius? Because cool spin-off or not, I'f that's the case, I'mm not sure I could forgive you for creating the Worst Ultrasmurf Ever.

Might get around to writing a proper review, but my brain's frazzled.

I just wanted y'all to know this was good and I enjoyed reading it, even if I know... uh, nothing about 40k. Cheers.

Here's the mission on Neshomeh's Archive. And I believe all three of these are adoptable:

Mini-grox
* Tera
* Slaneesh (comes with panties on his head)

Mini-Balrog
* Arcenstone

~Neshomeh will be adding stuff to the wiki in due time.

I mean, I'm biased because I betad, but I think it turned out really really well! (Expect a return of the armored ovoid if I ever write a deliberate badfic where it would be actually appropriate. Because that is far too funny to not.)