Who the HELL is the audience for a console review?

First let me clarify that I have no intention to shit on people who're excited for the PS4, who've been hyping it for weeks and are maybe even lining up for a midnight launch. I get that. People get pumped for the technology, but more importantly, for being on the forefront of the new wave. Getting a console at launch is like seeing a band live or catching a movie in the theater - it's a once-in-a-lifetime experience, a chance to be part of history. You get to say "I was the first" and "I was there". That's certainly been overdone in recent years (what doesn't have a midnight launch these days - it's pretty embarrassing that people are lining up for phones that they replace after just a few months), but console launches are still a deservedly big deal. Whether or not there's reason to be excited for this generation, it's still the first new dedicated home gaming hardware to arrive in seven years (sorry Wii U, but... well, Wii U is the one that should be apologizing to me). It's like, even if the movie is A Good Day to Die Hard, there's still an experience to be had going to see Die Hard in the theater. So the community buzz over PS4 (and to a much lesser extent, Xbox One) doesn't bug me one bit. In fact, it somewhat hearkens back to the days when I was actually excited for Gamecube and Wii.

But is it really necessary for the mainstream gaming media to rape that excitement by "reviewing" the PS4 and every last console, device, operating system, interface update, and portable on the market? Does the word "platform" mean anything to anyone anymore? I understand the point of reviewing something like an iPad SG-1, as the core functionality of the device is going to be essentially identical to every other tablet, as every tablet is essentially identical, as tablets are essentially pointless. For electronic devices like phones, tablets, phonelets (hey, I learned recently that's a real thing and totally not a joke word), MP3 players, USB sticks, watches, and coffee cups that come with a defined, boxed functionality, the devil is in the details. Reviews make sense. They are based around the fact that all of those devices support the same software and functionality, differing only in form factor, performance, and interfaces. Want to use Facebook and play MP3s? Any smartphone can, but a review can tell you which can do so best.

A console is a platform for video game software. It plays only video games specific to it. Therefore, its entire worth is derived by what video games are available for it - none of the details are comparable to the details of other consoles, because - unless you're totally game-agnostic - the platforms support different core functionality. SNES and PS4 do not play the same games, so alllllllllllllllll of the other elements of the two systems are incomparable. PS4 has better online? Sweet, doesn't mean I can buy a PS4 and play Super Mario Kart on PSN. SNES has better load times? Awesome! I still can't pop Assassin's Creed 4 into my SNES to take advantage of those lightning-fast cartridge loads.

When an electronic device is reviewed, it's generally done so that the reviewer can provide a purchasing recommendation. "You need this type of device because you don't have anything else that does what it does", or, more often, "buy this particular device over this other similar one". The former really only appears in rare circumstances like the dire tablet outbreak of 2010, when the iPad arrived and performed a role that many felt personal computers had simply been doing too well. So one would expect the same from a console review. It's just that both of these types of evaluations are absurd to perform on day one of a platform's release. The people that want to be on board with the next generation, who are willing to believe this video game console is new and original and more necessary than the last, are the ones I described in my first paragraph - they're in line already. Those waiting to see if the hardware is truly a full generational leap are going to have to wait for software that fully utilizes it. The type that are trying to make a smart PS4 vs. One decision don't even have One reviews for comparison yet, not to mention won't be able to make an informed decision for, oh, say another two or three years, when these platforms actually have any semblance of software libraries. Anyone remember back to 2004 when PSP was declared to be the indisputable champion of the new handheld war? Yeah. Think about how worthwhile console reviews are after that one.

I'm just trying to wrap my head around what kind of person is SO on the fence about getting a new console that they need someone to tell them "go buy it today". If you're that unsure, sounds like you aren't that desperately in need of new games to play. And in that case, why not wait for the inevitable hardware revision and a more expansive software selection? Being unsure about a platform has to be a definitive "no", right? If there's no game you want to play on it, what about the hardware could possibly change your mind? But here comes the gaming media with a product to sell and a paradigm to perpetuate.

Here's a delightful little snippet of sales propaganda that epitomizes everything I detest about the consumerist mentality of the modern gaming medium. GamesRadar, at the end of their review, surmise that despite the lack of recommendable software, Yes, you should go out and buy a PS4, concluding that: "Even if you don't plan on picking up many PS4 games at launch, the system feels like an affordable and worthwhile investment that will do right by early adopters." Let me translate that: "even if there are no games to play on your PS4 and thus it will simply be an expensive paperweight, you should go buy it because you have money, money which would be better off in Sony's wallet than in yours". I mean, seriously - "investment"? Could they have picked a word more diametric to the reality of a video game console? There is NO REASON to buy a console before it has games worth playing - it doesn't accumulate value, it precipitously degrades. This is a marketplace where yearly redesigns are an absolute expectation, price-cuts are bi- or at worst tri-annual, and resale value is virtually null. Recommending consumers buy a console because it'll probably turn out for the best is like telling them to grab the latest iPhone because you're sure Apple's got some great features rolling out in 2016. Like being an "early adopter" possibly could confer any advantage to a console owner. 

What a shining example of the ongoing obsession with boiling everything down to a score or a yes-or-no answer. I understand that we trust journalists to inform us about subjects that we ourselves have not yet touched or cannot reasonably afford to try. But don't we need to draw a line at some point? Aren't we willing to take some risk, have some faith? Trust our own experience a little bit? Have patience, let things pan out? We've been through a lot of rounds of consoles, and there are really only two choices here. If you reach deep down, all the way into your heart's brain's deepest desires, I think you'll find that you're either ready to make the jump or you're not, and that not only will no reviewer change that readiness, but no reviewer is ready to decide for you between PS4 and Xbox One. 

What I'm Playing, October '13

In this feature, we commemorate games I have for the first time started and finished in the last few highly variable time units.

Alright gonna blast right through this because I forgot to fill it in at the end of October. Things got hectic with moving week and all.

Special Recognition for Starting and Finishing:

NAM-1975 (NeoGeo)

NAM-1975 belongs to that very small subset of shooting galleries like Wild Guns and Cabal that utilize an onscreen character, aka arcade third-person shooters - a class of games that I love and wish hadn't died after Sin & Punishment. NAM is credited to SNK and strongly reminds me of Metal Slug, though, as Slug was developed six years later by ex-employees of Irem, I doubt the games shared much personnel. Still, they both nail that perfect level of difficulty between reflex and memorization that I've colloquially labeled "fun". It's hard to describe what exactly makes an action game satisfying without just listing what it's not; it's not pure reflex, it's not pure memorization. At the highest level, there's something about learning to recognize certain setups and how enemies will organically and spontaneously interact to create threat patterns, and through failed attempts and experimentation developing high-level strategies to combat those emergent challenges without needing to know exactly what's coming when. To become skilled at the game, you memorize setups and strategies then reflexively identify situations and match them to tactics, rather than memorizing a sequence of spots on the screen to occupy and targets to shoot, or individually processing every single bullet and relying on reflexes for every move.

For instance, in the first level of NAM-1975, there's this water part. I've learned that the highest priority enemies are boats (and if you shoot the boats the riders will die), the second highest are choppers, and the lowest are swimmers. I've learned to dodge roll, not to run, because the angled bullet fire comes in quick bursts. I've learned not to take the Balcan (machine gun) rather than the Flamethrower, because the flamer has too little ammo and leaves me unable to attack the choppers. None of this has anything to do with knowing where to stand on screen, where to aim, or any specific mechanical inputs. It's all strategic data that I've stored in my head that allows me to intelligently structure a reaction to "there's an enemy" and "here comes a bullet".

NAM's got a blazing pace and plenty of variety, but it does fall short when it comes to boss battles. That's really the only reason it'll never threaten Wild Guns and Sin & Punishment 2 for the position of arcade TPS top-dog - every level ends with the same tedious tuck-and-roll fest, as SNK couldn't come up with any cleverer way to crank up the difficulty than to give the bosses super-fast projectiles.

Games Started:

Pokemon Y (Nintendo 3DS)

And the pacing is officially 'off'. It has now been 16 hours, nearly 120 caught Pokemon, and TWO FUCKING GYMS (at approximately the 8th and 14th hour). Y is chugging along SO slowly. Maybe I shouldn't be stopping to smell and catch every last Roselia, but Christ almighty, every time I think we're ready to move to a town that'll have a gym and give me a real battling challenge, yet another filler dungeon is tossed in. Save it, guys! I'm going to be so burned out by the time I get to the Elite Four that you can call me, uh, Flareon.

I know, I know. "It doesn't mean anything that gyms are spaced out, that's a completely arbitrary structure that you're forcing on the game based on past experiences". That's true. What keeps the trainer journey interesting isn't strictly the idea of a Pokemon Gym every two hours, it's the iterative process of collecting new Pokemon, refining your battling squad, and taking on a concentrated challenge - a test - that allows you to pass through to the next stage of the journey. In the past, those challenges have been represented by gyms. Just because gyms are less frequent doesn't mean the challenge/tests have to be... unfortunately, in Pokemon Y, that's exactly what it means. Thus far the only even remotely structured challenges have been the gyms, and even they have been easy as shit. But outside of that the worst you'll ever see are Trainers with three Magikarps that might know Tackle.

If you're asking: "So, are the Pokemon themselves still getting stupider?", let me just point you to Hawlucha.

I dunno, it's too early to say (which is insane, considering it's been 16 hours), but right now this feels like a game that is strictly made for people who enjoy catching Pokemon, not people who enjoy raising and battling them. But I will give them that there are certainly a shitload to catch and some interesting new tricks to the process, like the ever-annoying Horde battles, more spawning subtleties, a way bigger world with (I think) more optional areas (I say "I think" because I've been going everywhere anyway), and other stuff that's frankly kinda boring to bring up. Not bad stuff, just really specific.

Ultima VII (PC)

I'm not gonna do another first impressions of Ultima VII because I've barely played it since I wrote my first first impressions. I actually hate playing PC games for totally arbitrary reasons: if I've never mentioned before, I don't like sitting at my desk and using a mouse and keyboard, since I do that all day at work. Games are my relaxation time, so I like to be able to sit in bed or on the couch - I've never found a great way for this to mesh with mouse/keyboard (and yes I've tried a lap-desk, and no I don't care for it). Moral of the story is that unless I'm REALLY into a PC game or I'm in some life-phase where I have a lot of spare desk-time (like college), I generally stall after a few hours. If you can't guess from my original article, Ultima VII is probably gonna be one of those cases. The game just fans out so fucking much after that concentrated intro, which isn't a bad thing, it's just an "I have other games to play that are better at keeping me involved" thing.

The Witcher (PC)

Kinda same thing applies here as I just said for Ultima. I actually tried lap-desking this one because I like it so much, but the words are too tiny to read on my TV. I will probably chip away tiny hour-long chunks once a month for the next year until I start forgetting to play it. It doesn't help that I'm having some weird performance issues that I can't even describe well enough to search for on Google - my machine runs the game just fine, but when in free camera mode (i.e. anytime outside of combat) the camera jerks upward every few seconds, really breaking my immersion and making it hard to enjoy looking at the world.

One neat thing I was really enjoying was that the first chapter of the game shakes up the traditional hub structure by spreading the adventure field over the exact same area as the town, relegating night to Danger/Combat time and day to Talking time. The entire act is set in this broad village area with some fields and houses interspersed (there's definitely a term for this and if we were closer to my high school European history days I would know it. Virgate? Kenning?), and during the day, everyone is out and about, frolicking around, giving out quests and selling baubles. When night rolls in, the villagers shut their doors and the ghosts come out, and what was formerly the town area becomes the dungeon. It has almost a Zelda-y feel to it, like the way the towns would shut their doors and the spooks would come out when the sun set on Hyrule/Termina/Hyrule field.

Godzilla: Save the Earth (PS2)

Well, Save the Earth gets a lot of free points for being a fighting game that doesn't immediately feel like the three archetypes (Capcom, Mortal Kombat, and Tekken) we have today. I can't think of any fighting game since Tekken 6, and before that since Brawl, that had me up til 6AM just trying out every last character. But Save the Earth's widely varying roster (and that's just the eight characters I've unlocked) did just that. Aside from some rare camera wonkiness, hard-to-pick-up controls, and a far-too-long arcade mode (~1 hour *if* you win all the fights on first try), there's very little to stop the game from being completely enjoyable. That said, this is a model explicitly designed for disposable fun, so it doesn't exactly promise bottomless depth.

There's a very rock-paper-scissors feel to the fights, with each character mostly oriented around ranged, melee, or grappling attacks. Still, such basic core mechanics leave a lot of room for flashy, distinctive quirks to each character. That's kind of the calling card of the party fighter, and it's also exactly what you want in a tribute game.

As fan service, it's stellar. Even as a neophyte I'm impressed by how loyal the game is to the characters' filmic abilities and styles and how well that's worked into the gameplay. Anguirus uses his spiked back instead of blocking, Mecha King Ghidorah absorbs lazers, Mothra starts as a larva and metamorphoses mid-battle into an imago, Rodan flies instead of walking, SpaceGodzilla is totally oriented around telekinesis, etc. It's more strictly tied to what's been established in the movies than the contriving and occasionally straight-up arbitrary Marvel and DC fighters. Of course, kaiju translate really seamlessly into well-balanced one-on-one fights (I hear they made this famous RPG based on them...) so it's only natural that they all have well-defined and corresponding move-sets. Even in the movies, they pretty much each have a special beam attack, each have a special mode of transport, each have a special throw, etc. The only big disappointment for me is that Kiryu (here called Mechagodzilla III) from 2002's Godzilla x Mechagodzilla is completely lacking its signature Gundam-style detachable shoulder/wrist cannons and backpack. What's up with that? That's the whole point of Kiryu. Though it should be noted I haven't seen the movies featuring about a third of the kaiju, so I can't comment on how loyally presented they are.

Volgarr the Viking (Steam)

Actually started this in September but forgot to cover it. Volgarr is like Ghosts n' Goblins for a new era... in that it's a lot like Ghosts n' Goblins. I actually enjoy the core mechanics more than the GnG series (some have said they hearken back to Super Return of the Jedi) and the individual challenges feel more precise and fairly parsed. That is to say, after you've cleared one screen, you won't continue to be flooded from behind by respawning enemies from that territory.

I don't know if there's a lot else to say about it. It's fun - if you're a fan of Sir Arthur, definitely pick it up.

One note - it's a bit obnoxiously old school in a way that most reincarnations of old quarter-eaters aren't - there's no way to save your progress, neither through passwords or save states. Though the full game could probably be toppled in a half hour by a master, you're going to have to master it to that point to reach the end - though there are infinite continues on hand, unless you've got infinite time to pair with them, you'll have to start from the beginning every time you boot up the game. 

Games Finished:

Castle of Illusion starring Mickey Mouse (XBLA)

A gorgeous finale to a gorgeous game. I love that they managed to make Mizrabel overflowingly cinematic while still retaining the punishing difficulty of the original game's final battle. I'm normally not a fan of talky bosses, as they tend to repeat themselves (The Witcher 2) or distract from the action (Anarchy Reigns), but Sega Australia managed to pace this fight perfectly such that Mizrabel's seamless [flamboyant?] incantation actually makes the rather straightforward platforming boss battle an engrossingly magical moment. I felt like I was playing Fantasia. The voice performance by Nika Futterman as Mizrabel and the crescendoing score by Grant Kirkhope really knock the scene out of the park.

Castle of Illusion immediately joins the ranks of games worth playing just to indulge in audio/visual beauty. I can't think of any game since Baten Kaitos which I have so delighted in witnessing unfold. It's a fun game to be sure, a loving remake to be sure, and even a rare capitalization on the full potential of 2.5D, but what will really stick with me from Castle of Illusion are those menacing saffron storm clouds, the gleaming licorice dragon bursting forth from his swirling river of creams, the orchestral attacks giving way to foreboding tinkling as Mickey was thrown to and fro through watery ruins, and all the other dazzling illusions the castle held. I cannot give a strong enough recommendation for Castle of Illusion, and if you're at all interested in 2D platform design, make sure you check out the original as a companion piece - it sheds a lot of light on just how clever the remake is. 

Who sucks more? Mega Man 7

A long time ago I had an interesting idea that Greg and I would present cases for which game was worse, Mega Man 7 or Mega Man 8. After replaying (about half of) and collecting notes on Mega Man 7, it was hard to maintain enthusiasm to carry on with the endeavor, as I wasn't sure I was willing to waste more of my life playing two games I completely hate in the most uneducational way possible. They're just so boringly bad in that all of their failures are the collected failures of all of the previous Mega Men without any mitigating strengths. Mega Man 7 at the very least is the poster child for a game that fails at the conceptual level and is in no regard worth playing by anyone. It is a void of any idea ever. But that's enough sunshines and sunbows - I now present to you my original, real-time notes on Mega Man 7 (with some slight comparisons to 8). I was just going through old documents and noticed these and actually found them kinda funny, so enjoy. If you've played MM7, you'll know what I'm talkin' 'bout. If you haven't, sit back and enjoy the entire experience of the game condensed into about a hundred words. 

a funnyman's game (mettaur joke)

sprites so big it's painful (one enemy on screen at a time)

gimmicks are old as hell (air man, ice man)

lots of colorful characters (bass, auto, etc)

the shop which is the stupidest thing ever

really fucking dumb bosses (cloud man, junk man (dust man ripofff), an ice guy, burt's man, fucking racecar man, slash beast?)

For the first time ever in a Mega Man game, fight Snidely Whiplash!

weapon sequence isn't clear but that's nothing new

both games only do four bosses at a time

elevator sequence in junk man

intro and middle stages

environmental power puzzle - using electricity in junkman

junk man's stage didn't have much going on, no gimmick. it's junk

get stuck in the junk in the boss room

those invincible spinny back and forth enemies that are in every game come up too often

fucking polar bears

you have to find rush powers like in an X game

junk beats ice... of course!

very weak gimmicks, just kind of an amalgam of other similarly themed ones

Rush search is so dumb

the ice cracker fires ice bullets, right?

yes, and the bullets will split when they hit the ground.

bomb puzzles in burst man... again, after mm5 and 6. 8 has the bombs that walk around and those are neat

burst man chemistry - who would ever use beakers that big? someone with a shrink ray.

ground-sticking spinny things you stop by shooting are in every level so far (maybe) and seem to be invincible to most powers

when metools shoot, it makes the sound that wonderboy 3 makes when you swing your sword

got sent back to the beginning of burst man a lot

mega man is at the very top of the screen during the rising portion of burst man

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

And right there after about five stages is I think where we stopped, or stopped taking notes. That game! I feel confident I won't return to this because I feel confident that there is very little chance I will play Mega Man 7 ever again. Got I hate that game.

Cooking is not a science part 2: But it's a lot like engineering

So the other day I went off about how it bugs me when people say cooking is a science because "it has measurements and it's, like, an experiment". Thinking about it some more, I realized that while those arguments don't qualify cuisine as science proper, they actually do put it somewhere in the neighborhood of engineering. Well, not those particular arguments, but the ones to follow. And I think the same mindset.

Again I'm not going to get too formal here because seriously who cares about this shit but I guess engineering is science applied to fulfill a need. To fulfill a requirement, if you will :wink wink: (only engineers should feel the need to pity laugh at that joke). As I mentioned yesterday, really everything we do in life is an application of science because the world is just sweet that way. Typing on this computer is an application of science. Digesting that milk I just drank is an application of science. Tapping my foot is an application of science. But engineering - like medicine - is thorough and in-depth, the key difference from applications like art being the predefined result. 

There is such a thing as success and failure in engineering: meet the need and you've succeeded, fall short and you've failed. You have to keep going until you fulfill the requirement. You can't fail at painting. You can fail to achieve your vision (ah, to be 12 again (ah, to be the author of this blog)), but you've still created a painting. Many of history's great works of art were considered pretty crappy by their authors - if I'm remembering my high school English correctly, Samuel Taylor Coleridge wasn't too happy with the ending on "Faxanadu", but today it's considered one of the best poems and 2D adventure platformers of all-time. This is kind of a big hint that cooking and engineering have something in common - cooking can go terribly, terribly, terribly, terribly, terribly, terribly, beverly hillbilly wrong. "Oh whoops I didn't expect that adding an extra egg would make the oven turn into a goddamn mushroom cloud!" Etc. Key to observe here are two points: the aforediscussed replication aspect of cooking - that much of the work we put even into creating recipes is simply an attempt to recapture a past experience - and that there is a flat line where food simply becomes inedible. 

The latter, that cooking can outright fail to produce food, is something of a non-issue. While it's a valid failure scenario in the execution phase, if you're regularly churning out recipes that are producing inedible products... man, something's wrong, and you've got bigger fish to fry (try not to burn them) than classifying your hobbies.

The other, that effort in cooking can be driven by mimicry, e.g. "I want to create a recipe for a hamburger that tastes just like a Big Mac" (you fuckin' weirdo) we could think of as an example requirement for the cooking process. For those not from the engineering world, a requirement is exactly what it sounds like. It is what the customer tells you a product needs to be.

I guess Dilbert fans know requirements too. Part of engineering is accepting that there are unironic Dilbert fans.

Once you have a requirement, you then apply your scientific and culinary knowledge in an iterative process to hone a recipe as close as possible to meet the need. This is something art doesn't exactly have - we could make all the hilarious jokes we want about requirements being meaningless, imprecise, and airy fairy, but at the end of the day, there is some universally defined specific need that an engineering product is meant to fulfill, a "yes-or-no" process after work is complete to determine whether it succeeded (a test procedure, if you really want to be a dick about it). Likewise, if you are trying to bake dense brownies and the brownies come out not-dense, well, I think we can agree that's a failure. If you're an engineer-cook. If you're an artist-cook, you might take this opportunity to learn that you like not-dense brownies better after all.

And that's what it really comes down to. Completely a personal thing. Whether the cooking process falls into the engineering world really just depends on how requirements-driven you personally feel. Is there an exact end product you are expecting? Will you feel as though you have failed if you do not achieve it? Or are you just trying to make anything unique? For me I know it's the latter, and it's no surprise that, as I said before, I bake to express myself artistically. I'm always trying to make something different without regard for the result. And I can see where many people out there - and most I know - probably find themselves in the first group, holding themselves to higher expectations and pushing themselves by creating more and more challenging goals. It makes a lot of sense that they would compare cooking to engineering.

But, one last time, say it with me: what the hell does any of that have to do with science? You know engineering isn't a science either, right?

Okay. Philosophy 101 routine terminated. Next week it's finally back to video games in the main. 

Well, video games and Gojira. Come on guys! It's still meeEEE!

The Gang plays DND

Your favorite members of the blogging team - and also your least favorite member - got together this past weekend with friends, girlfriends, and their girlfriend's weirded-out roommate to play a rousing game of DnD, DM'd by yours truly. Let's start with some quick hits:

1. Yourself brought a real samurai sword to the apartment.
2. Yourself chopped off a lot of dicks.
3. Yourself chopped off in-game ducks.
4. That was a misspelling of dicks but I think it's funny to leave it.
5. We ordered a gigantic pizza. Seriously, thing was comically massive.
 

And that brings us to what is far too often the least fun part of DnD: actually playing it.

http://paizo.com/products/btpy8aw4?Adventure-Dungeons-Danger-Horror-at-Dagger-Rock

Here's a link to the one-shot we played. It left a lot to be desired, but there's enough to pick and choose from that something reasonably inspired could be cobbled together given the time and inclination. I had one of those.

I liked the idea: a Lovecraftian-horror with a solid mix of city exploration and dungeon crawling. Descriptions were often cringe-inducingly written and the enemies uninspired, though, and there weren't many realistic ways offered for the player characters (PCs) to become involved with the mystery afoot.

The combat was particularly boring, but for a group with 3 (count them, 3) heroes who had never rolled a d20 before (what choices in life have I made that lead me to saying what I just said?) it was probably good that nothing was particularly flashy. DnD combat can be obnoxiously boring if players aren't moving at a reasonable pace, and this is more of a challenge if the folks playing only have a basic conception of the rules, if that. I've been playing for a bit now (seriously, what choices?) and I still couldn't tell you what 5 percent of the spells in the game do with any accuracy. I would have to just make shit up going off the name. Example: Shocking Grasp. Stuns enemies as player quickly takes hold of something with surprising strength. 1d6/caster level. Nailed it?

Ezio provided some killer character sheets, the highlight being a particularly strong set of names. Julius Gumbersnatch, Bjorn Svenson, Edgar Hearthsbane (I'm just getting this joke), and Cecelia Sneakerton (I got this one before) rounded out our cast of heroes, gallivanting the realm heretofore. These names really set up our newbies for their first taste of playing a role. 

Now, role playing well is significantly harder than it seems at first glance; no one is good at it because, like being a quality DM, it takes effort and commitment that most normal human beings don't want to put into a game. Fair enough. But you don't need to be a Thespo-mat 9000, you just have to have the slightest bit of imagination.  The collective storytelling aspect of DnD, the aspect that makes it worthwhile in my mind, is only as good as the creativity each person brings to the greasy, sticky table. Typically players dream up a character fantastic and alien in some way to themselves. But ultimately, in my experience, it's too easy to slip back into playing yourself: that is, making decisions as they seem logical to you, the player, rather than the character you've invented. It makes sense. It's hard as hell to make difficult decisions thrown at you in the game without the added mental screen of pretending to be someone else entirely. It takes a couple serious doses of imagination and a spoonful of human empathy to do this realistically for any length of time. It would be like continuously doing improv in character. Which is why my preferred method, one I'll term "degrees of Andrew M," is to draw from aspects of your personality but not rely on its entirety as a crutch. I won't pretend I can put myself in the shoes of the female rogue with attitude!! but I sure as hell can play the fitness-nut cleric who sins despite his faith, or the hard-drinking but loyal knight-errant. 

Maybe I'll actually get around to writing a decent one-shot. If I do, I'll post it here! In the meantime I found the whole 2003 Star Wars: Clone Wars on youtube!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XTmIwOLfUlM&app=desktop

Yourself here! Just thought I would add the ending that our particular party experienced upon confronting "The Horror at Dagger Rock", as I later related it to a DnD-vet friend. It would help if Andrew had remembered to mention that my character was named Rupert. Anyway, it went something like this....
[wavy shimmering effect, fade to black]

-The Bride of Dagon bursts forth from the water, towering over the disorderly adventurers. She screeches: "Who dares enter the domain of Dagon?"
-At the prodding of Rupert the Cleric, Bjorn the Barbarian hurls a dick in her general direction, missing wide right.
-The Bride of Dagon stares on with menacing impatience, waiting for the answer to her question.
-Irritated with Bjorn's inability to roll a fucking die, Rupert empties his gold pouch onto the floor and fills the sack with ten dicks. He swings it around his head, but it slips from his hand and slams into the wall behind the party with a sickening squelch.
-The Bride of Dagon, furious at this insolence, casts Mind Control on the entire party.
-After a momentary struggle, the adventurers find themselves feeling warmly toward the Bride, even seeing in her a sort of maternal figure.
-The Bride of Dagon commands the adventurers to join in the ceremony of worship taking place beside her resting pool.
-The adventurers don the indicated ceremonial robes and join the cultists in their ritual.
-THE END.