It’s not for you, unless it is
This was most definitely for me. It was just terrible at it.
I am as fond of anyone as saying that maybe something isn’t necessarily for you. Which is a great message to internalize until something is for you and it still blows.
The problem with the idea of “it’s not for you” is that it can easily becomes some sort of precautionary principle that shields a game or a book or a movie or whatever from any top-level criticism. If you think that the Game of Thrones series is awash in unveiled misogyny and way too many gratuitous bare breasts, well, it’s not for you. On the flip side, you could also be complaining that it’s a fantasy piece with a lot of swearing and no clear heroes or villains, which… kind of does merit the “not for you” defense.
Point being, the whole thing is a fuzzy area. But there are a few pretty firm signs that someone is complaining about something that isn’t for them or something that is, in fact for them and just not doing a very good job of it.
Hard Project: Sonic the Hedgehog
When a series resorts to mining out its past, it’s usually because the present is much less interesting.
This may come as a shock to some of our younger readers, and for that I apologize. But you know all of that terrible art on DeviantArt that involves cartoon hedgehogs submitting to Jesus and usually leads directly into some mind-scarring pornography? That’s all based on a series of video games! A series of video games that were originally based around a little blue hedgehog that ran really quickly. You have to understand that the 90s were a different time. (We don’t understand how the porn and the Jesus thing happened, though.)
As funny as that might seem at a glance, the fact of the matter remains that the weird fan culture has become the most relevant part of the Sonic the Hedgehog franchise in recent years. Kind of understandably so, even. The franchise has been showing cracks ever since the Dreamcast days, and the current state of affairs is lamentable but hardly unexpected. At this point, making a new game is quite possibly not a good idea, and it’s definitely a hard project.
Anonymity isn’t the issue
It’s not the fact that you don’t have to look at yourself that lets you get away with it.
After years of seeing comments on the Internet, I’m pretty sure that everyone’s conception of what causes asshole behaviors online is off the mark.
You cannot discuss people being jerks online without someone bringing up that damn Penny Arcade strip. Which is not a sociological paper, I know, but neither is this. Every discussion I’ve seen about people acting like dicks to others online is based around this assumption, that when you give a random person the option to be anonymous they instantly turn into a raging monster to whomever happens to be within spitting distance.
This is neglecting the many people who don’t do this, obviously. But it’s also ignoring the fact that we’re not anonymous on the internet, certainly not in the ways that this line of thinking suggests. We have our user names, we have our identities, we have ways that we’re marked. A five-minute stretch of Facebook makes it clear that anonymity isn’t what’s fueling the behaviors that we take as the price of doing business online. Or, more accurately, it is – just not in the configuration we think it is.
Hard Project: Robotech
So maybe it’s mostly because I haven’t done a column on enormous robots in a while, what’s the difference?
Harmony Gold, at this point, is a spite house that happens to be incorporated. And pretty much all of its spite is directed toward the license that it’s sitting on for the original Macross, which ties into its pet property of Robotech, which is used for nothing. Because wow, that thing is a mess.
The short (and glossing/inaccurate) version is that back in the 80s, Harmony Gold had gotten its hands on some anime that it wanted to syndicate. Unfortunately, syndication rules required 65 episodes to exist before a series could be distributed, and the three series in question (Macross, Genesis Climber MOSPEADA, and Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross) didn’t individually hit that mark. So Carl Macek’s job was to sit down and stitch these three separate shows with different characters, premises, and setting into a single continuity. The result was Robotech, which subsequently had more material produced, making it a distinct entity from any of its predecessors.
As fascinating as that whole nonsense is to talk about – and it really is, right down to lots of polarized reactions that never approach the subject of whether or not the new series is any good – that’s not what I’m here to discuss. Because while Harmony Gold is busy not actually making more Robotech material, a video game seems like an easy way to extend the license. Yet at the same time, making one is really hard to do.
Recent Work
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Chocobo Dash
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Eliot Lefebvre 