Doing it Wrighte: Zombies

The walking dead have made entirely too many appearances in popular culture over the years, and through it all the initial creativity involved with the concept seems to have stagnated in recent years. Zombies have a giant variety of interpretations and concepts to work with, but the single most common modern interpretation is the logic-defying plague-spawned swarm of mindless flesh eaters.  Given the shear amount of options that comes in this vaguely defined modern horror concept, a story teller could do a lot of good and interesting things with zombies if they were more willing to step away from the norm. To start with, I'll break the elements of the living impaired up into creation and characteristics for purposes of this article and picture making.

The basic anti-physics of no longer dead creation, seems like a good place to start:

That Other Category: Comics Code Circa 1954 and Today

Censorship in any media is never a good thing when done on a broad scale, partially because putting any legal restrictions on speech is bad, but mostly because the people who write the rules often go way beyond anything remotely sane as far as what actually needs to be censored.  An amusing example of such ridiculousness that I found lying around in a common web place (Wikipedia) is the Comic Magazine Association of America's original Comics Code of 1954 which I feel deserves modern commentary and criticism.

So first to explain this whole thing a bit:

Hidden at the Edge of the World: The Vagrant Soldier Ares

An action driven series in a printed graphical media of any sort rarely stays consistently good over the course of a long series, but Vagrant Soldier Ares by Ryu Keum Cheol (류금철) pretty much does exactly that.  Comics, manga, graphic novels, manwha (which I'll explain in the next paragraph) and printed media along those lines all are in the same unique situation when it comes to the portrayal of action; they can show still pictures and imply movement subtly, but can neither show movement like film can, nor can they leave everything up to the audience's imagination like a novel can.  Ideally, in still graphic style works the text and art work together in telling a story and portraying the scenes within and complement each other, rather than detracting attention one way or another.

Manga, manhua, and manwha are all east Asian words for comics in their own languages (Japanese, Chinese, and Korean respectively), which here in America is creatively borrowed for use when referring to comics which come from said countries because it's a hell of a lot quicker than saying ______ country's comics or sasparillalistictabulousnessosity.  Said fore-mentioned foreign worded drawing collections are generally stylistically similar to each other, especially in comparison to American comics, but, as with all things, author's perspective and culture of origin has an impact on how they present their work.  Manwha distinguishes itself from manga in two basic ways: Manwha is normally read from left to right (though sometimes the author decides to write backwards like the Japanese for some bloody reason...); and their is no major animation industry that constantly looks to it for material, so it's rarely adapted into anything else.

Getting back on topic, Ares itself is set in a Roman eraish style world with probably Greek gods and, well, this is a good place for this:

Building the Theoretical MMORPG: Crafting

Crafting systems in games started back in ancient times when pixels roamed the earth, but have now not only become an automatic include into every RPG, and often appears in other genres as well.  Crafting in each game varies greatly in both purpose and outcome, but in the genre of MMORPG the purpose is to be an economic factor and time sink, and the outcome is boredom and tedium that few people would do if it wasn't for their Skinner box style rewards schedules.  To explain Skinner box from the last section, go watch this video on Escapist's Magazine's website if you haven't already (go ahead, this article isn't going to go anywhere while you're gone; just remember to come back with some flowers and candy to make up for neglecting it's attention).

It's the opinion of this author, and S.Q.U.I.R.R.E.L.S. (Southern Quarter United Independent Reactionary Radicals Engaged with the Legion of S.N.A.P.P.L.E.), that MMORPG crafting would benefit from having several aspects of it redesigned to make it a more fun experience that players may actually enjoy, rather than a time sink done solely for the rewards.  In this article I've broken crafting down into three sections: ingredient gathering, item creation, and crafting economics.  Topically speaking with worded explanatory blocks and bold text:

Ingredient Gathering

Doing it Wrighte: Anti-Physics

Magic, psionics, the force, super science, quantum physics, biotics, miracles, meta-humans, mutants, alchemy, Christmas spirit, and other things along these lines, are all used as a way of doing fantastic things in stories that break all rules of logic and physics.  Since the above list is both incomplete and entirely too much of a mouth full, I'm making a new term for such things that will be used throughout this document: Anti-Physics.  Said term-I-just-made-up (terms made up by this author are canon proper English, and whoever says otherwise is a liar, liar, pants on fire -The Editor)(I do not condone the lighting of lower body clothing of any kind on fire for any reason...though actually witnessing said act would probably make me chuckle a little - The Author) are at best interesting and important elements of vastly creative and well detailed worlds, and at worst contrived plot devices used for convenience and deus ex machina production.  To break down anti-physics into more bite sized chunks for discussion, I've created three sub-categories for anti-physics: Magic, Rooted, and Tech.  So to start with what is effectively the father of all anti-physics, magic:

That Other Category: Learning From SaGa Mechanics part one: The SaGa of the Towers

 The mechanics in Square/Square Enix's SaGa series of games are very interesting and original, especially for menu style RPGs, and deserve to be looked at to see what can be learned from them.  In the "Learning From SaGa Mechanics" articles, I plan on examining the mechanics of the entire series and seeing what  can be applied to tabletop, video game, and MMO style RPGS (what I plan and what will happen are two different matters).

For right now, I'm going to examine the three Game Boy games, starting with the first one, which was originally titled "Makai Toushi Sa·Ga (魔界塔士 Sa・Ga, Warrior in the Tower of the Spirit World ~ Sa·Ga)" according to Wikipedia, but was released over here as The Final Fantasy Legend because the publisher wanted to make more money and Final Fantasy was a well known name already (brand recognition makes the world go round).  So to explain the mechanics a bit:

For some categorical commentary:

Hidden at the Edge of the World: Seizon - Life

Eleven years ago, a manga (manga = Japanese comic and the source of 80% or so of anime (to make a somewhat accurate statistic up off the top of my head)) called Seizon - Life was created, and things that people would consider important happened too, but for today I'm paying attention to Seizon no matter how much my spell checker hates Japanese words.  When I first started to read this three volume series, I was expecting that it would take me three days to do so between getting distracted with the interwebs, eating, and various other activities which a psychologist would probably diagnose as some sort of silly disorder like anatidaephobia (for the curious, that's actually the fear that you are being watched by a duck, and not something I made up for once).  Instead, I found myself having slipped ninety minutes forward in time due to the mystic eastern art of reading three volumes of manga in one sitting.  Seizon was not just an entertaining read, but also stands as a good example to anyone who wishes to write for any type of graphical media of what to do in order to make your work at least 80% more goodererer.

Building the Theoretical MMORPG: Eliminating the Trinity

In the earliest days of RPGs the stereotypical party consisted of the trinity of basic roles: the tank(fighter/warrior); the healer(cleric); and the DPS (wizard and rogue).

Doing it Wrighte: Mr. Freeze

Originally Mr. Freeze was an unimportant batman villain from the age of camp who had an every day run of the mill, "kicking sand in physics face" style freeze gun, and a metabolism that was only fine at temperatures bellow zero degrees of one sort of another.  This all changed significantly when the writers for the Batman The Animated Series had the audacity to give him a good back story and character motivation as well as a new, colder, personality to go with it.  To give the executive summary: