Half-Masked

OCRemix.org recently posted a new ‘mix. This one is their very first collaboration between one of their regular remixers and an actual, honest-to-goodness “big-time” composer for video games. Alexander Brandon worked with the reliable Big Giant Circles on a Deus Ex remix. I recommend giving it a listen.

Now, I’ve encountered quite a number of people who have a bone to pick with this website. I can’t say I blame them. The people I have interacted with at OCR have all had a tendency to be egregiously self-important, an unfortunate trait among people of such artistic talent. I have considerable first-hand experience with this. Don’t dare think you can give honest constructive criticism to these people. They know everything, you know nothing, and while they say they still have room for self-improvement, that’s just a formality for us unwashed masses. If you don’t quite like their interpretation of Final Fantasy IV’s “Zeromus”, it must be that you just have some strange disease where you can’t fathom their shining brilliance.

I care not to name names. You know who you are. These are people with too great a gift to squander it in arrogance. Whenever I worry that my readership is low, I look to this website and am grateful that I don’t have a screaming legion of lowlifes praising everything I do as the Gospel. This is what it looks like when you let compliments get to your head. Popularity has been known to corrupt on more than one occasion. It’s never quite up to the level of Tim Buckley self-fellatio, but they cut it close. Unlike Buckley, they get away with it because they’re actually good at something, and have something of real value to offer… Sometimes.

It doesn’t matter what the quality of the result is, they will pat themselves on the back for “forwarding the appreciation of video game compositions” or whatever the creed is this week. And with an army of ass-kissing, easily-impressed fans on their side, just how well do you think a reasonable and polite counter-argument can stand up? It doesn’t matter that constructive criticism is always, without exception, infinitely more helpful to an artist than any praise. You can wrap up one valid complaint in layers upon layers of warm, genuine compliments and they will only taste the bitter core.

Heed my words: You are foolish to cast your opinion in the halls of the Hive-Mind.

…Or maybe I just got unlucky and ran into all of the jerks at once. To be fair, they can’t ALL be assholes. But in any case, this is why you don’t hear me talking about OCR a lot. And it’s not like I haven’t been a jerk to them either. This post, for example. But even after I matured a little and made the attempt to fairly and rationally comment on their work, knowing full well what it means to make the attempt at art and entertainment in the face of a fickle, distracted audience, I was greeted by such epic amounts of butthurt that I had to get out of there. I spend my free time drawing Digimon fan-fiction, and even I think some of these folks need to grow up.

But then, maybe I’m not helping. When I say: rare is the contribution made to that website that lacks in professionalism or appeal, I mean it. I am also being honest I when I say that Andrew and Jill Aversa are better at this than some of the creators of the music they’ve remixed. Star Salzman could be doing movies if he would stop burying his work under terrible songs failing to mimic comedy. Children of the Monkey Machine’s portfolio is the soundtrack to an alien world. Nekofrog is going to be doing a mix of Crocodile Cacophony from Donkey Kong Country 2, and I can hardly bear the anticipation. Protricity has shown a lot of love to those games too. And I am always happy when they release a new album project(with the exception of their vomitous attempt to ruin Chrono Trigger).

So, I’m happy for them, and I hope this is the start of more remixer/composer collaborations. I will continue to listen to what they have to share. But, from a distance. I learned my lesson about reaching my hand into the gorilla cages.

END OF LINE

~A.H.

Before I get started on this set of articles, I think I should get the bad parts out of the way, beginning with the worst.

The worst.

This is Rika. She is the only thing keeping Digimon Tamers from being the best television you’ll ever watch.

She is supposed to be a stubborn character facing difficulty dealing with inner turmoil, but mostly comes off as an unlikeable bitch. She’s self-absorbed and cold to everyone and everything that cares about her, long past the point where she has any reason to be. She pushes her ideals onto others without considering if what’s right for her is right for everyone. This is even the catalyst for all of the misery that happens in the last half of the season. She pushes an infinitely more likeable Tamer named “Jerri” to be as strong as her. When this girl loses dearly, she thinks it’s because she wasn’t strong enough. A malicious entity feeds on this self-loathing. Sure, this girl had other issues of helplessness too, but if Rika hadn’t been there to force her into a line of thought that doesn’t suit her, then this show would have been over 20 episodes sooner. That makes her personally responsible for most of both worlds being totalled by a blob-like monstrosity that got its powers from insecurities and heart-ache Rika provided.

Normally when a character acts out of line, they get their own episode to be confronted by this failure of self, learn their lesson and are stronger for it. Rika is the only character that needed multiple episodes just to become tolerable. When a third of the main cast takes 47 episodes(out of 51) to get me to stop despising her, something is wrong.

DUH-OH!

Don’t call double-standards. Ken was an ass too at first, but he had an excuse. And even if he didn’t, you could say that all of that was a direct result of a dark spore embedded in him by an evil Digimon(all of this is true). And he actually makes the effort to be a better person without changing who he is at heart. Rika just decides to continue treating everyone, and herself, like shit. By the time she straightens up and flies right, it just feels disingenuous and at odds with her established character(the same way making Henry suddenly turn into a saucy Latina would be hard to take seriously).

I understand that sometimes a character being unlikable is sometimes exactly the point of that character, and/or why they’re likable. I do not confuse this purposeful character trait with a failure of character design. But Rika isn’t one of those Dr. House, “awesome for being a jerk” characters. She’s just a jerk. A good jerk has a supply of wit that she lacks. She is a crude and failed attempt at this paradox of character design. Against my own personal feelings, I must acknowledge that Davis is universally hated. But I propose that he’s still got a lot more going for him than this insufferable wench.

If you're wondering why I'm only using pictures of Renamon, it's because every picture of Rika is just her scowling.

She’s not just a “tomboy”, or “headstrong”. This character could have worked, but they go far past the point where it’s possible to care about her. She’s needlessly mean-spirited to no benefit to her or her show. I’m sure she has apologists who feel this somehow emboldens her, but I had just about enough of her dumpy attitude when she single-handedly invited her planet’s near-destruction. Calling Rika a cunt would be an insult to vaginas everywhere.

"Denying others happiness is a crime. Denying yourself happiness is where all crime starts."

Shame too, because her partner “Renamon” is the epitome of Kickass.

AWESOME

END OF LINE

~A.H.

Left 4 Dead 2 is being released in Australia(although somewhat neutered). Also, “Realism Mode”.

It’ll do, Valve. It’ll do.

While I’m here, I might as well comment on the Obama Nobel thing. My guess is after 8 years of an unbelievably shitheaded administration driving the free world into a ditch, it’s nice just to hear someone say they’ll pull us out. And to hear it spoken in a way resembling a high school education. I get the feeling he’s at least trying to do good, which still puts him ahead of every politician ever. Even if his administration is making some rookie mistakes(easing off on the CEO salary caps, for starters). At this rate, he could drop-kick a flaming tanker truck into a school for puppy orphans, and it would still look like he was doing the world a service in comparison to water-boarding, phone-tapping and an unquestionably flimsy excuse to invade a country we have no hope of sustaining.

Maybe it’s not that Obama’s a great contributor to peace, but that he’s just pissing off our enemies considerably less. Everything just looks so new and pristine without the last douchebag running things. It’s a brave new world.

Or maybe it’s just a big “fuck you!” to Glenn Beck. Either way, it’s not a terrible choice, but I’m sure there were better options available. Such is the nature of awards. Hopefully this is a precursor to future accomplishments(or, I dunno, AN accomplishment?).

END OF LINE

~A.H.

*Sigh.*

Recently, I finished off the last of the Digimon Tamers episodes. That is some show. But now I feel like Bloat at the end of Finding Nemo. “…Now what?”

This happened to me with Digimon, Fullmetal Alchemist, and I’m pretty sure a season of Survivor or two. I am overcome with a feeling I can’t quite describe. I don’t regret watching it, it’s just things feel emptier now that I can’t look forward to another episode tomorrow. It’s been so long since I saw this show the first time, it was like seeing it for the first time again. I knew the gist of what was gonna go down, but was unprepared for how jaw-droppingly well it was all pulled off. The first Bio-Merging sequence alone made me feel younger than I’ve been since the 20th century. Jeri and Beelzemon both took me off-guard. I’m gonna miss that show being on my daily schedule.

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by Alex Hill

“Digimon Tamers” is my favourite kind of show, filled with colour and imagination without talking down to its audience. It refuses to reduce itself to anything simple or banal. It is about as good as hyperactive television aimed at pre-teen boys can get. It saw a less exaggerated attempt at planet Earth than we’re accustomed to, and then included monsters and talking bunnies on top of that. And it works! It doesn’t meander or make every episode a variation of the same script. It leads us to a Digital World that is no longer benign, but an unforgiving wilderness where a group of spunky kids could get themselves killed.

(more…)

The term “Rape” refers to any sexual act which is not consentual and most likely quite aggressive.

Having established that, if you willingly go into a place called “The Rape Tunnel“, you’re hoping for something to happen. Let’s not kid ourselves here. At that point, can it really be called rape anymore?

Few hoaxes inspire this much introspective thought…

END OF LINE

~A.H.

by Alex Hill

It was a dark and stormy night...

Halo 3: ODST is the Halo game I’ve been waiting for. It is the first real progression from the original “Combat Evolved”, in presentation and execution. Halo 2 was an abomination, and the third entry did not add to the formula so much as attempt to bring the core concept back to tolerable levels. Even then it lacked something. A sense of exploration and thought, time to wander and room to wonder. ODST does away with much of what has maligned this series, the most shockingly overrated of video games. It’s the first in the series that may actually warrant the praise it will undoubtedly receive.

(more…)

What have I been up to lately? Well, the lack of updates this time can’t be blamed on my usual combination of laziness and complete inability to draw anything the way I want it to look, forcing me to settle with a comic strip that looks like ass because after re-drawing it over and over I just get too fed up to get into the polishing stages.

Remember the Futurama episode with the “Stupid Fingers”? It’s like that for me, but with Photoshop.

Anyway, I HAVE been making comics. Just not Half-Masked. Rather, a (quite ugly even by my standards) 3 page dealie for a contest at deviantart.com. It introduces a few character concepts of mine in an interactive zombie-apocalypse community event something-or-other.

I might have a new Half-Masked up this Saturday, but either way if you’re that starved for something from me(Hah! HAHAHAHAHA!!), you can start from the cover. The logical progression from that point would be pages one, two and then three. Be warned. I may have made the Zombocalypse a slight more cuddly than you might be used to.

END OF LINE

~A.H.