NFTs and Crypto (Wow, in 2024? That's old news, who gives a shit?)

I've on my socials pretty thoroughly expounded on my position on NFTs and the Cryptocurrencies.

These are technological solutions in search of problems.

 Do I really need to explain either concept? Maybe there's one person who needs the cliff-notes; The blockchain is both a system of validating transactions and also kind of a cloud storage, but it's way better at the former than the latter. Just think about a bunch of computers keeping full copies of a database, and whenever something needs to change, all of those computers need to agree that the the change is legit. Non-fungible Tokens and Cryptocurrencies are built on top of blockchains. It is the data that goes into the database. It's resistant to man-in-the-middle attacks but those are relatively rare. And now I've given you a one paragraph version of Folding Ideas' Line Goes Up. It's a good video. You should watch it.

Blockchain technology is interesting but has as of yet only really been great for the grifter; Do you want to run a ponzi scheme without running a ponzi scheme? Invent your own crypto coin. Do you want to part some easy marks from their money? Mint some NFTs. You can even set the system up so the minting cost is bore entirely by the buyer.

And just to be clear, I say 'easy marks' but often there are sincere investors looking to expand their personal portfolios and they just don't know any better. These folks can sometimes be very annoying and very over-zealous but truly, they do not deserve to be scammed like this.

Now, I'm hesistant to put Web3 as a concept in with NFTs and Crypto, mostly because while NFT and Crypto follow the philosophy of decentralization, rather than one company owning the servers your data goes on, it's separate entities cooperating and potentially hosting entirely bespoke data... A lot of Web3 is smoke and snake oil. See the excellent Web3 Is Going Great blog for just how much of a trashfire it's been.

The most solid and promising ventures I've seen are in the landscape of decentralized web applications; Mastodon, Peertube and the like. This is actually very cool. But it's also a trend backwards, showing a version of the internet where private individuals create and share things they themselves host, much like it was before 7 corporations bought everything.

Blockchain is an inefficient solution to a problem that's not that big a problem and the pure electricity cost is staggering. NFTs have yet to show anything worthwhile, there's very little you can even buy with your Bitcoin.

But I suppose none of it matters anyway since the grift has moved on towards generative AI. The crypto grift is dead, long live the AI grift.

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One Way Sonic 06 is Better Than Sonic Frontiers

Photo by Pixabay from Pexels

I'm not one to easily give Sonic The Hedgehog (2006) praise but one way Sonic Frontiers is worse than Sonic '06 of all games is in the... Let's call it the "Sonic dies but the power of friendship brings him back" bit.

For context, in Sonic Frontiers around the 75% mark, Sonic succumbs to Cyber Corruption and his friends have to find a way to bring him back. They trap themselves in Cyber Space again to stave off the corruption. The issue is more with the pacing of the game than any flaw with the scenario, since Sonic remains out of commission for all of two minutes before his friends bring him back again.

Something similar actually happens in Sonic '06 where Sonic is mortally wounded by Mephiles and his friends need to go find the 7 chaos emeralds in order to bring him back. Rather than it just being a cutscene, there's a mission where all the characters go search for chaos emeralds and it's the culmination of the games various mechanics. Rather than Sonic dying and immediately being brought back, the player has to earn that moment and Sonic's friends have to all band together and find the chaos emeralds inside the broken remains of the world.

The actual nuts and bolts of the gameplay in Sonic '06 is still poorly constructed, but the narrative pacing is better in this one moment. There's a ludic element to the events happening on screen and there's a tension that lingers and is hard fought to be resolved.

I just think that's better. I would have liked a couple levels where Tails, Amy and Knuckles had to go into Cyberspace and fight the Cyber Corruption rather than just a cutscene that immediately brings Sonic back.

That said, Frontiers is in its construction still a far more solid game, and while it has issues, it manages to rise above its flaws where as Sonic '06 drowns in them.

That said, a broken clock is still correct twice a day. Good for you, Sonic '06. There's a lot to learn about your failures, but there is at least on triumph to your name.

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The Thing That Bothers Me The Most About Batman

Source: Black Metal Gun by Somchai Kongkamsri

Something that bugs me about Batman is less of like, a character thing and merely that they keep making him bulletproof.

I think a lot of tension gets taken out of Batman stories when he shrugs off 9mm slugs like nerf darts, instead of the incredible gut punches they would be. 

Every Batsuit in the modern era has basically been made into a high-tech suit of armor so advanced that gunfire isn't an issue. It's a writing conceit meant to deal with the fact that Batman routinely goes up against armies of armed thugs and without it he'd be turned into Swiss Cheese.

And while I'm sympathetic towards the idea of not having to deal with it... I also kind of think that it goes against the principal of the matter? The heart of Batman stories is that Bruce Wayne is a very human superhero. One guy using his money and privilege to change his city for the better. He isn't faster than a speeding bullet, he can't shoot laser beams from his eyes, he hasn't inherited the thunderbolts of Zeus, aliens didn't give him a super advanced light construct ring...

Batman is just a guy.

A guy that writers keep trying to turn into Tony freaking Stark.

The Tony Starkification of Batman has always been a sore point for me, Batman's superpower isn't money or super advanced tech. It's his deductive reasoning, it's his ability to get into the mind of criminals, it's and it's his humanity. 

Batman is Halloween Sherlock Holmes. We don't need a second Iron Man.

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Review: Crystalis

Of late I've found myself kind of obsesed with the idea of top down 8-bit RPGs, and nothing really scratched that urge for me in quite the same way as Crystalis for the NES.

The experience of the game was at times straining but I found myself captivated. The music is a notch above what you usually hear from even the best 8-bit soundtracks, the writing is strong and the gameplay has its weak points but it also flourishes when it works.

The things that age Crystalis the most is the lack of checkpointing and its sometimes indecipherable logic. More than once was I sent to a guide to find the path to progression, only to find that I needed to equip the glasses item to look at an inconspicuous wall to find a secret entrance, or I needed to use a lamp on a broken statue and place that statue in a shrine in order to remove the whirlpools blocking me in the sea. I also found myself grinding more than I would have liked to. While grinding isn't strictly necessary, you risk putting yourself at such a severe disadvantage in some sections that it'd almost be silly not to.

Still, the ending of the game is what made it all worth it.

There are few NES games I would classify as having particularly strong stories, it's something inherent to the era, coming from the arcades and without much space to store text in a still developing medium, NES games just weren't as narratively capable for the most part.

Crystalis shattered that conception for me in its entirety.

The story is that good.

I have some experience with the Gameboy Color port but I'd say that despite its improvements, the noticeable screen crunch will make mazelike dungeons even harder to navigate and triple the difficulty of the combat.

Crystalis can be a hard sell, it can be a weird game and it can be obtuse but it can be an intensely rewarding game. It earns my recommendation.

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There's Something About Undertale's Morality That Bugs Me

 I want to float an idea past you.

A videogame is a conversation between a player and a developer.

I think about that sometimes. I think you can classify most forms of art as a conversation between the artist and consumer. Art is trying to say something and hoping you'll listen. You might not get to respond personally to the artist but you can form a rebuttal, or a rejection, or an agreement.

And I think videogames can allow for the most input into that conversation just in the fact that for the conversation to move forward, there must be input.

And I think I hate what Undertale has to say.

Okay, well, that's hyperbolic. I really only have one small criticism of its approach to morality as an all-or-nothing zero sum game in which the onus is entirely on the player to be moral and it instills this idea where you can only truly be moral if you adopt a martyr complex and let tens or hundreds of monsters of various sizes punch you directly in the face and if you strike back at even one, no matter how much violence or aggression they show towards you, then you are put into the track of a middling ending.

I think the misanthropy also really gets to me, humans are usually the instigators, they wronged the monster population, they killed Asriel and children are the only ones with innocence. It feels very born of Christian values, the idea that people are born with sin and only through acting as Christ would are we able to find salvation and like, I just think morality is more complicated than that.

For one thing, I don't think Undertale is a bad game and I think some of the ways it approaches non-violence is fun and unique. And more games should allow for non-lethal playthroughs but I think rather than it being a developer's litmus test, let players choose for themselves.

If anything, I think it only bothered me so much because of the potential I saw within the game to create an experience that would have been, at least to me, an unforgettable playthrough.

Instead... The best I can do is voice my concerns over a blog post and hope it doesn't make me come off as a condescending asshole who was unhappy with the ending he got in a videogame.

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Film Review: Harry Potter And The Philosopher's Stone

Sometimes you just want to be kid again.

Harry Potter and The Philosopher's Stone is the first of eight Harry Potter films adapted from the book of the same name released in 2001. It's about an orphan boy and his first year at a magic school where he learns to be a wizard, plays a made-up wizard sport and then he handshakes the primary villain into the sequel.

There's a lot to like about the first film. It's really the most magical one, really feeling like you, the viewer, are stepping into a world as Harry serves as kind of an audience surrogate. To this day I still have fantasies of getting my first wand, choosing which owl I'll have, thinking about my Hogwarts House, walking the castle and its rotating staircases.

I think The Philosopher's Stone really does sell that fantasy and make good on that promise.

The film's weakest aspect is its CG, while some effects, such as the talking snake and disappearing glass in the opening scene are really good for the time, any render of a human being makes the eyes sad about having the gift of sight. There are also small hiccups in the plot, such as not learning the name of the eponymous Philosopher until almost 75% of the way into the film and practically in passing, Harry's final confrontation with his professor is entirely underwhelming and the film seems to drag until the very end where it sprints, going as far to reduce Ron's chess game to a montage of statues exploding.

Still, I ended up genuinely having fun with The Philosopher's Stone. I feel like these days we're so surrounded by discourse and discourse and discourse that it's easy to forget that going back to these films can be a good time and that is not helped by the author of the books slowly losing her mind and finding fresh new ways to disappoint her entire audience, from underwhelming sequels to her garbage ideology.

I still like these movies, I'm still going to rewatch my copies from time to time and while it is up to you, dear reader, to decide if you can navigate the complex waters of the ethicacy of their consumption, if this was a world where these films were given out for free and the author of the books never saw a penny, I would heartily recommend giving them a watch.

The rest you'll have to figure out for yourself.

Fuck terfs, by the way.

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Review: Crash Bandicoot (Playstation 1)

I was a playstation kid through and through but the PS1 just barely missed me. What can I say, the PS2 was my era. It's only later in life that I even got to play the original Crash Bandicoot trilogy and now the N. Sane Trilogy has basically made those games obsulete. But I think knowing what came before is important to improve what comes after. And to that end, I think it's about time I dug into Crash Bandicoot and analyze for myself its merits and its flaws.

So for the uninitiated, Crash Bandicoot is 3D platformer on the original playstation which served as playstation's unofficial mascot at the time. The story does its job, Crash is an escaped science experiment gone wrong and Dr Neo Cortex is experimenting further on his female friend, so Crash sets out to rescue her and stop Cortex's nefarious plans. Enough context to get you going and put you into the gameplay and that's where the Bandicoot shines.

Most platformers sink or swim based on their level design and this game surprised me with a bunch of really solid levels. The hallway level design works as an adaptation of linear 2D obstacle courses in the third dimension and the crates are a thing of beauty. It's a solid core gameplay loop, run down corridors, jump over pits, break boxes, spin into or jump onto enemies, repeat until done. The visuals also look great for the time, and you can see 3D models and animation starting to mature greatly on the Playstation. Musically it isn't my favourite Crash Bandicoot soundtrack, I'm very partial to Twinsanity's acapella tunes, but it's iconic Crash music. The game can be difficult, there have definitely been areas that have eaten upwards of 15 lives and sometimes the checkpoint placement could be a bit sparse but I found myself enjoying the challenge more often than not.

What I'm not so hot on is the lack of analogue control support. This is more the fault of Sony than Crash, considering the Dualshock 1 wasn't the first controller for the playstation, despite the N64 launching with a controller that had an analogue stick. Without that analogue control, the left stick can be used for movement but it simulates the d-pad, and it does not feel good to use. I ended up ignoring the left stick and played exclusively with the D-pad, but man, if that didn't end up hurting me. I'm not much of a completionist but the tedium of getting 100% put me off even trying on most levels, some I'd get 3 or 4 boxes shy of earning a gem but honestly, I wasn't going to go back. The save system is something that's also pretty unforgiving, we'd had perfectly functional save systems by that point and hiding the save points in bonus levels is pretty infuriating. Worse still, save points only save your progress towards the final level and gems, and not your lives tally, and booting the game up only to go from 26 lives to 4 was almost as big a disappointment as I am to my parents. Sometimes the hitboxes can trip you up, and there are some enemies which will murder you by entering your air space. A lot of the enemy design in general is kind of lackluster, not in the simplicity but the pure lack of imagination. The skunks that walk into the screen and then immediately die come to mind. And while videogame reviews stend to stay away from politics, the depiction of native island in the game can charitably be described as a bad look. The first boss, Papu Papu is like, just a fat islander trying to murder Crash for seemingly no reason. Also some of the level names are just like, woof. There had to be a better name than Native Fortress. And this might be a nitpick, but levels can start without any fanfare. Choose a level, hard cut to a loading screen, hard cut to the start of the level.

The overall experience could be frustrating at times and while there are a lot of missteps or missed opportunities, I'd generally recommend playing at least some of Crash Bandicoot on the playstation if you ever get the chance to. It's not the best platformer on the system, it might even be the worst game in the original trilogy but I'd be lying if I said that I didn't have a good time.

Just take some of the quirks with a pinch of salt and you'll probably get through just fine.

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