Manderlay - A Review

 It occurs to me that I should probably put links to my Fission Mailure Reviews up here.

 Last week's review was late, due to hanging out with Doug during the period I should have been watching the film, but it was of Manderlay, the 2005 sequel to a film I previously reviewed called Dogville.

 Here are yon relevant links.

 Manderlay (2005)

 Dogville (2003)

The Lake House Review Supplemental

 Review here (x)

 You know, the one thing other than 'Keanu Reeves isn't that bad an actor' that was going through my head while I was watching this film was 'this just straight up wouldn't work in Britain'.

 The entire concept of the film is dependent on the two main characters being able to find letters that they leave for each other.

 The letterbox for a British house is in the front door, not on a stick outside of the house.

 Alex would find that first letter from Kate on the doormat and that would be the end of proceedings, because he'd have no way to reply unless the Royal Mail was in on it.

 While I think we can all agree that the addition of time travelling posties would only be an improvement to any film, it's beyond any normal level of suspension of disbelief that everyone in the sorting office would see a letter from the future and not return it to sender for being a bullshit merchant.

 Look, we're British. We don't do that lighthearted quirky shit unless kids are involved.

 And I think it needs to be made clear that Alex would have to put his replies in the postal system. The idea that you could leave a letter for someone else near your house and expect it to be delivered is some weird foreign nonsense, unless you have some blackmail on your postman.

 Even if the Royal Mail did deliver time travel letters (which they wouldn't, mostly on principal and because of cuts), these cutesie conversations between the protagonists would take much, much longer.

 In film, it's instant messaging with real paper, in the British version, they're glorified pen pals. Which wouldn't last for long because they'd both be spending a fortune on stamps.

 Which would be an interesting way to raise revenue, if nothing else.

Guest Post: Murphy Rants About... The Apprentice S11E11+12 (Final)

So, let’s just get this out of a way first: The interview episode was, as always, a complete and utter shambles. People were screaming, things caught fire, loads of people were caught out in lies.

None were more shambolic than Richard and Gary’s interviews, though.

Gary, whose business idea was ‘Celebration Disco’, a mobile disco, yes you read that one right, was caught in several lies right off the bat. First, he said he had been in charge of a one-billion pound budget, which was actually totally untrue, and he said he’d been in charge of a team of six-hundred people, when his team actually only had three people in it.

Worse, when caught in these lies, he didn’t just own up to them. He tried to hedge, saying that he’d been de facto in charge of these things, but nobody fell for it. As one of the interviewers pointed out, Gary liked to exaggerate his importance, and also his business idea was absurd.

Richard may well have done even worse. His business idea was basically a marketing agency, but he wrote his business plan in flowery, purple prose that nobody could understand. Claude said it read like a ‘1980s marketing manual.’

Worse still, he was caught in a bigger lie than Gary: Having said his idea was entirely unique, it turned out that it was an identical copy of another business he owned. A business that would be in competition with the won he’d have with Lord Sugar.

Also, everyone - everyone - hates Richard. The other candidates were talking about how he was an inveterate liar and would definitely come back and say that he’d aced his interview even though it wasn’t true, and they were right. That is literally exactly what happened.

By the end of the interviews, he had just been beaten down. He had no fight left in him.

Vana’s business idea was an online dating app involving games, and while that sounds like my idea of hell, the main problem the interviewers had with it was that dating apps having massive start-up costs and don’t turn profits for a very long time.

It was a problem that Vana didn’t really have an answer to, which is a shame, since she’s otherwise a pretty credible businessperson.

Charleine had much the same problem: As a businessperson, she’s fine, but her business idea - a franchise of haircare salons - was immediately called out as being impractical. All of the interviewers did like her, however.

Joseph, meanwhile, also had a franchise idea, of plumbing and heating businesses. This fell flat almost immediately when one of the interviewers pointed out that any franchised business would lose money because of it.

In general, that was the viewpoint of many of the interviewers: Joseph was considered a credible businessman, but the franchising model was generally seen as doomed to failure in this instance.

Surprisingly, Joseph was all set up to get caught in a lie (“I’ve read Alan Sugar’s autobiography three times, it’s really inspired me, he’s my idol,”) only for one of the interviewers to try to catch him out with a quiz on Lord Sugar’s life and fail. Joseph answered every question correctly. He really is that much of a Lord Sugar fanboy.

In a rather sad moment, he talked about how you had to ‘sacrifice your youth to be successful’, which is just - really sad.

In the end, Richard, Gary, and Charleine were fired, leaving Vana and Richard to go on to the final.

The finale opened on an interesting note, with Vana claiming that her business idea was inherently more morally worthwhile than Joseph’s, which seems a bit of an odd claim, given that there’s no shortage of dating apps, really anywhere.

As ever, the challenge was to create a pitch for their business idea, using a team of former contestants. Vana picked Richard, Charleine, Ruth, and Natalie, while Joseph picked Gary, Brett, Elle and Mergim.

In Vana’s team, the brutal snark against Richard was out in full force, with Vana immediately noting that while he was good at marketing, she didn’t like Richard as a person. It only got worse when they were making the television advert, where Charleine outright said that Richard was the perfect casting choice for a ‘lonely old man’, before remarking that it’d take ‘all of [her] acting ability’ to pretend she was in love with him.

I actually really enjoyed watching Charleine in this episode. She was doing her best to help Vana win, but it was also totally clear that she was delighting in the chaos around her.

Vana’s business plan ran into many of the same ideas it did in the interviews - namely, the owner of the biggest dating app in the world saying it would never work, at least not for turning a profit or even breaking even quickly, and her at first deciding to ignore him, and then trying to find other ideas for funding to cover up this problem, thinking it would spare her from awkward questions.

Needless to say, it did not.

Joseph’s team, meanwhile, was terrible, because he picked people he liked rather than people who were good at their jobs.

In a strange parody of Vana’s problems, all of the experts thought that Joseph’s idea could very easily be massively successful, and they thought he was pretty personable to boot. Even better, Joseph took the time to give them his card, get their cards, and generally network with them, which will be invaluable.

But rather than focusing on his unique selling point - the most important part of the task - Joseph instead had an almost laser focus on things like logo, television adverts, et cetera, all of which turned out pretty poorly.

Part of that is that none of his team are any good at advertising, and part of that is that Mergim is almost cartoonishly terrible at acting, and was cast in the television advert nevertheless.

Nevertheless, in the boardroom, Joseph won, and I’m not even sure it was that close, either. Vana’s idea was - and is - kind of a non-starter.

Guest Post: Murphy Rants About... The Apprentice S11E10

This week, we had a health snack challenge - it’s a lot like every other challenge where the contestants have to make a product and then pitch it, except in this instance, they’re making a product for a niche market. Also, a market that is at least fifty percent tosspots.

Charleine was made project manager of Connexus, while Brett was made project manager of Versatile, and the game was on. In this case, it seemed to be a game of ‘who could screw up what isn’t, actually, a tremendously complicated challenge the most.’

Versatile decided to make energy bars, called ‘Rejuvenate Bars’, which is a solid idea, actually. I’m not even a big health food nut, and I still buy Nakd bars and Trek bars whenever I can, because they are legitimately delicious. They then quickly decided to have a superfoods focus, which is where things got frustrating.

Let us be entirely clear here: Superfoods aren’t a thing. Not a single reputable scientific source backs up the idea of ‘superfoods’ being a meaningful term, because most of the supposed health benefits are total bullshit. Acai berries, for example, are not actually better for you than blackberries, but grocers will market acai berries as a superfood and sell them for three or four times the cost.

And Versatile just never seemed to get this. As various snake oil merchants rambled total nonsense about superfoods, Versatile then went and clumsily repeated that nonsense to other people.

Well, for a time, at least. Due in large part to a failure to measure anything by Charleine, they ended up not having enough of the ‘superfoods’ in their bars to actually market them as that - something which did not get translated over to the packaging, as when relaying information to her team, Charleine just rattled off the data in a rapid-fire staccato that nobody could keep up with. They had to adjust the packaging with felt tip. Felt tip, guys.

(Gary suggested that if anybody asked, they just be up front and honest about it, marking the first and last time an Apprentice candidate has ever advocated honesty.)

In the pitching, none of the retailers were especially impressed, and all of them were dubious about the product.

Connexus, meanwhile, decided to make dehydrated vegetable crisps. If that sounds disgusting to you, then congratulations! You have taste.

They decided to market their product as ‘gluten free, vegan, and raw’, which made me roll my eyes, but if they had pulled it off, might have actually worked: If there’s anything that you can definitely say about vegans and raw food advocates, it’s that they’re wealthy, gullible, and slightly desperate.

Not to mention that Richard was actually pretty good on the branding and marketing side. They fell down when Vana, faced with a recipe that called for a little bit of olive oil, put three times the recommended amount in, something that might not have happened if Brett had bothered to actually lead his team.

The result was something that might be the oiliest, wettest thing ever described as ‘dehydrated’. I actually didn’t realise until we were shown a shot of them in the boardroom: They were dripping with oil. They didn’t look like crisps, they looked like chunks of red onion that had been soaked in a vat of oil. They looked horrible.

None of the retailers liked the product, and in the case of the first retailer, Brett’s absolutely terrible pitch (during which Richard looked like he wanted to garrote the man) didn’t help.

When the two teams got to the boardroom, Lord Sugar hated both products as well, describing the bars as being like ‘soil from Chernobyl’ and the crisps as being ‘impregnated with oil.’ In an Apprentice first, as well, both teams lost, with each team getting exactly zero orders for a sum total of zero pounds.

I wondered if maybe Lord Sugar would fire someone from the team that spent the most, or whether he’d fire someone from both teams, but instead he asked Charleine and Brett to both bring back one person each.

Charleine brought back Gary, and Brett brought back Richard. These were both terrible choices: Gary wasn’t stellar, but he made the best of a bad situation, while Richard was the only competent member of his team.

Brett was fired, but Lord Sugar did say that he was honourable, so there’s that. That means that going into interview week, we have Charleine, Gary, Richard, Vana and Joseph.

Guest Post: Murphy Rants About... The Apprentice S11E9

Okay, I’m going to level with you all here, for most of this task I had no idea what was going on. It was a real estate task, and they’ve never really done one of those before, and nearly all of it flew straight over my head, so I can’t really blame the candidates for not doing too well. It was a bit nervewracking to watch too, as the teams handled vastly larger quantities of money than they ever had before.

Joseph, who has a stupid moustache but has done well on several tasks, was made team leader of Versatile, while Richard was made team leader of Connexus, which seems like an absolutely terrible choice to me.

Weirdly, though, this challenge was Richard’s time to shine, along with Vana. The two of them, it turned out, were really good at wooing developers, at one point covering their lack of a show-flat and floor plans (logistical errors on their part) with a relentless charm offensive that actually worked.

Scott and Brett, also on Connexus, did less well. Brett was fine, but Scott was constantly screwing things up, with one memorable moment involving him flailing at a map and declaring “Everyone’s enjoying the Clapham!” in slightly angry, desperate tones. Brett had to bail him out of sticky situations at multiple points, and by the end of the challenge, I’m pretty sure he was considering defenestrating Scott.

For Versatile, meanwhile, 90% of their problems came down to Selina being pretty terrible. Joseph had a bit of a screw-up near the start when he tried to push for 4% commission, only to be flatly told that he was getting 1.5% and that was the end of the matter, but Selina was like a wellspring of terrible decisions and interpersonal drama.

Most of that drama seemed to come from Selina really not liking Charleine. Charleine was doing a great job selling loads of middle-end properties, only for, during every team meeting, Selina to start browbeating her about being ‘unpolished.’

Bear in mind that Selina hadn’t seen any of Charleine’s sales, and that the ‘unpolished’ remark was actually a criticism made by a client about Joseph and Selina, so the whole thing was just a little bit bewildering, and came off as Selina trying to desperately save her ego by pretending that her clients weren’t unimpressed with her, but with Charleine, whose activities they knew of via psychic powers.

Selina wasn’t getting along any better with the rest of her team, either, with Joseph describing her as ‘manipulative’ several times.

In the boardroom, Connexus won with £79k to Versatile’s £29k - only for Scott, who was on the winning team, mind, to immediately announce that he was leaving the process. This was largely due to Lord Sugar having basically said outright that Scott would have been fired if he’d not been on the winning team, but people were shocked. Charleine audibly gasped. Connexus fled, with Brett herding them out like they were evacuating a room with a bomb in it.

After Scott left, Selina was fired, and it was really never going to be anyone else. Still, with a triple firing a few weeks back, and someone dropping out this week, the numbers are getting thin on the ground. Only Brett, Vana, Richard, Joseph, Charleine and Gary (I always forget Gary) left for the remaining three weeks of the process.

Guest Post: Murphy Rants About ... The Apprentice S11E8

I feel like this series is the one with the most collateral damage. Not long ago we had the disastrous handyman business, and now we have this one, a party-planning business: Usually, that means a high-society garden party or a tour group. This time, it meant a child’s birthday party. The parents had volunteered £2000 as a budget, with the stipulation that they could ask for a partial or total refund, which is kind of the epitome of ‘a race to the bottom,’ because it’s essentially a challenge to see who can piss off the parents the least.

I do have to wonder what kind of parents have two grand to use on a kid’s birthday party, but apparently care so little that they’d leave it in the hands of Apprentice candidates. That’s an odd mix of rich, involved, and apathetic they’ve got going on there. Then again, possibly it came with an offer to have Lord Sugar pay for a second, better party for their kids. Or maybe it was neither of the kids’ birthdays at all, and their parents were just like “Hey, kid, find nine friends and invite them to a fake birthday party, this is going to be fuckin’ hilarious.”

Anyhow, Selena became the project manager for Connexus, and Gary once again became project manager for Versatile. Selena also got to choose someone from Versatile to join her team, and for some baffling reason, chose Richard. This would turn out to be a mistake.

The fun immediately started when Versatile was told that the mother of their party childling had a severe and deadly nut allergy, because it was obvious, from the moment she said that, that they’d end up getting food with nuts in it. And what do you know, they did! Well, nut traces - the kind of warning that gets put on most things as standard, if only because traces of nut might have ended up on factory workers’ hands or suchlike.

This moderate but salvageable fluff was then exacerbated dramatically when Gary was asked if he’d brought Nutella - which might I remind you is made out of nuts and has the word ‘Nut’ in its name - and replied that yes, he had. This wasn’t actually true: The team had bought Cadburys’ Chocolate Spread, but by the time he bothered to check and find out, the damage had already been done, and the poor mother had spent about half an hour sitting three-hundred metres from the party, terrified of actually attending her own kid’s probably-not-actually-birthday party.

But the fun doesn’t stop there! Putting together a set of party bags, Versatile then tried to sell them back to the client for fifteen quid each. They were eventually pushed down to nine quid, which is still an extortionate amount, especially when the party bags were not actually very good. One thing they had in them were these glo-stick necklaces, but it wasn’t long before the candidates were talking about how they could just use the glo-sticks and forcibly place them around the throats of the young boys and girls in their care, and then demand that the parents pay for them and the rest of the party bags.

(They did, in fact, try that plan, but forgot to actually perform the racketeering step, instead just using up the glo-sticks from the party bags and then limply failing to even try intimidating the clients into paying for them, which is a failure on their part, but also probably better than the alternative?)

Versatile did have some great ideas, like an outdoor adventure park and a barbecue, but ruined those ideas by a) Being the most boring people in the known universe, literally draining the hope and joy out of the children with every passing moment, and b) Failing to barbecue things promptly.

Connexus didn’t do much better, starting with a disastrous interview with the client where Selena took her enthusiasm to terrifying levels, pretty much talking non-stop and at one point wheezing “I KNOW HOW TO FIRE BREATHE,” at them. Things got steadily worse when Connexus decided that theri clients’ birthday party would be hosted at a gym.

A gym.

Connexus was rather insistent on calling it an ‘athletics centre’, which I suppose is somewhat apt since it also had a running track, but it was, nevertheless, essentially just a gym. They decided this based on the party child mentioning in passing that she was interested in sports. I mean, dear god, people, there are other ways to use that: Go to a water park with skiing and tobogganning or something. Have a swimming pool party. Endless possibilities.

Connexus also forgot to take their clients’ phone number, which meant that when they decided that they too were going to put together ridiculously expensive party bags to sell to the client, they didn’t have any way to gauge whether the client would be even remotely interested, and so just bought a bunch of stuff hoping they could sell it.

The client did (I think, it was a little confusing) buy the party bags for ten quid each, but she was visibly irritated at being put in that position at all.

Picking Richard also turned out to be an absolute failure as, after being put in charge of the food, he was only starting to get burgers out by the time the first girl was leaving; and he had not only failed to come even remotely close to finishing the cake by about half an hour before the party was due to end, he screamed at Vana like a spoiled child when she asked him about it.

Richard really needs to go.

In the end, Versatile lost, largely due to the party bag fiasco, which means that Richard survives another week despite everybody hating him. David was fired instead.

Guest Post: Murphy Rants About... The Apprentice S11E7

This week’s challenge was the discount store challenge, where contestants have to set up a discount store in the vein of Poundland and its many imitators. Scott, best known for his hardline views on hair replenishment, became the team leader of Connexus, while Gary, who is so bland that I was unaware of his existence until this week, became team leader of Versatile.

Well, apparently half of the candidates don’t know how wholesalers work. One went in asking for a buy-one-get-one-free deal, which a wholesaler would never do since they make tiny margins and profit from selling in bulk, and a fifty percent discount would mean they were making a loss.

Sam, meanwhile, revealed once again that he can’t do numbers at all. Not complicated numbers or anything: Basic mathematics with the aid of a calculator. It was horrible and embarrassing.

So, they got their stuff, tested them out on street stalls, and then bought more of the biggest sellers to sell in their actual shop - that, actually, all went pretty well. It was when they’d actually set up in physical shops at a shopping centre that things started to go really wrong.

For Team Versatile: Richard. Tasked with bringing in shoppers to their store, he decided his primary method of doing this was going to be to scream ‘I AM ICE-SKATING’ while chasing people around the shopping centre. It was horrible and embarrassing to watch, and only made worse by the fact that this is the only thing he seemed interested in doing: If he tried any other tactics for getting people into the shop, we weren’t shown any of them.

For Team Connexus: Everyone. You had Sam meandering around the shop being unable to work tills and apparently unwilling to sell; you had Brett and Vana protesting that being sent out to bring in shoppers was all part of some kind of diabolical political game plan meant to make them scapegoats for an eventual loss; and you had Scott trying and failing to keep everyone under control. At one point, tensions in the team got bad enough that Scott and Brett had an out-and-out, highly aggressive argument.

(This would become somewhat relevant in the boardroom.)

When they got into the boardroom, Connexus had actually brought in more money than Versatile - but since victory on this task is calculated both by sales made and the total value of the stock they had left, Versatile, which had almost three times as much stock value, won. Scott brought Sam and Brett back into the boardroom - Sam being a no-brainer, and Brett having been quite aggressive.

Quite aggressive, but not as aggressive as Scott tried to claim. Scott tried to tell Lord Sugar that Brett had threatened to assault him, only for Brett, Sam, and Karren to all respond that literally nothing like that had ever happened. I’m not sure why he thought it would be a good idea to tell a lie that blatant, but he did, so here we are.

Probably the only thing that saved Scott from being fired for that was Sam’s tremendous incompetence with everything, and the fact that the previous week had been a triple firing already. Sam was fired, and while Lord Sugar seemed to really, really want to fire Scott, he refrained from doing so.

(Some tabloids are reporting that shortly afterwards, Brett and Scott did indeed have an actual fight, so that’s a thing.)

Next week, we apparently have party planning, which will surely be an unmitigated disaster.

Guest Post: Murphy Rants About... The Apprentice S11E6

So, this week’s challenge was for the teams to set up handyman jobs and go around doing ‘odd jobs’, which seems like an even worse idea than the children’s book challenge, because it’s possible to actually seriously screw up someone’s home or business if, say, you’re washing their windows and you accidentally set fire to the building.

Or if you try to put up a shelf and instead put a massive hole in the wall, we’ll talk about that in a moment.

Lord Sugar picked the team leaders for this one, putting construction executive Elle in charge of Versatile and builder Brett in charge of Connexus. Obvious choices there, the teams would probably have chosen the same way.

Things kind of went downhill immediately, though, when it came to putting together the fliers. Connexus decided their slogan would be ‘connexing people together’, which sounds like the slogan of a telephone company owned by Genghis Khan; while Versatile spent so long discussing whether it should be ‘Minor DIY and window cleaning’ or ‘Window cleaning and minor DIY’ that they missed the deadline for fliers entirely.

(Mergim decided to make the best of a bad situation by scribbling notes on pieces of paper and putting them up in shop windows, and was roundly mocked by the team for this, despite the fact that his logic was completely solid: They didn’t have any fliers because their team were fucking about, and it was better to have horrible sub-par advertisements than nothing at all.

Mergim would also be mocked for completely different things later, but we’ll get to that soon.)

Connexus, in an odd turn, didn’t manage to make any money on the first day of the task, because instead of doing handyman jobs, they were doing market research, which basically consisted of wandering around asking if anyone knew anyone who needed work done, to which the answer was always ‘No.’

Versatile did manage to get jobs on the first day, but it would probably have been better if they hadn’t. Apart from sub-team pricer April’s ridiculously low price point (ten quid a job), the sub-team also had Mergim, who, it turns out, is an actual walking disaster area with the most terrific case of Dunning-Kruger Syndrome I’d seen in a while.

The man insisted that he was a brilliant handyman. He insisted on that so hard, even as he was putting up a shelf and having to be gently told by Karren, in the manner of a beleaguered primary school teacher, that you don’t screw in a nail. Instead of putting up a shelf, he instead made a gigantic hole in the wall of a poor woman’s shop.

“That’s pretty bad,” you might be saying, but guess what? Mergim also doesn’t know how to paint. When asked to paint a shop front, he instead painted the shop’s sign. He painted over the sign. That shop has no sign now.

Connexus, meanwhile, did surprisingly well, scoring a lucrative job cleaning a football stadium - which they then failed to complete, something team leader Brett said was due to how professional he was, because apparently Brett takes a homeopathist’s approach to professionalism. Surprisingly, they still got paid almost the full amount.

In the board room, it was revealed that Connexus had brought in nearly twice as much money as Versatile, with £1050 to their £530. Since Elle, the team leader, has yet to ever be on a winning team despite having been in the process for six weeks, she was fired on the spot - leaving Mergim to bring back two people with him.

He brought back April, because she was responsible for the pricing, and David, who had just kind of blended into the background. April was fired shortly thereafter for the catastrophe that was the ten pounds a job pricing, followed shortly by Mergim, because oh my god you can’t put up a shelf or paint.

Which is good news for the rest of the candidates, since a triple firing means one less double firing means some lucky person is going to get to stay in the process for longer than they otherwise would have.

Also, Mergim dreams of being a millionaire. I just thought I’d throw that one out there.

He doesn’t know how to paint.

Valkyria Chronicles Title Card for Murphy 2.0

 He wanted another one, so here we are.

 I wanted to do something like those strategic map things they used to have.

 You know the ones, where there's a big table and people pushing coloured blocks around on sticks.

 Valkyria Chronicles itself does this as part of the gameplay, which is a very nice touch.

 Honestly, though, I was mostly inspired by the beginning of Dad's Army.

 It was on repeat a lot when I was a child.

 I also decided to use outlines this time for a cleaner look.

Valkyria Chronicles

  I'm not going to lie, I traced the symbols and the map. I didn't have the patience to freehand this stuff.

 I did do Welkin from scratch though, so go me!

 Here's the newest part with the new titlecard:

Valkyria Chronicles Title Card for Murphy

 Doug's doing a let's Play of Valkyria Chronicles, and since I can do a draw, I offered to make a title card for him.

 He really liked the one I did for my Anna Let's Play, so I used the same silhouette style.

 Only, y'know, more colourful.

 I'm pretty happy, though maybe still a bit reticent on Welkin's shade.

 The event file can be found here.

 And here's the first part of Doug's Let's Play.

 (He added the smiley and frowney faces.)

A Drabble by a Guest - La Gloriosa Donna

 I'm pretty much dead on my feet right now, so my wonderful friend Doug from Fission Mailure has written a wonderful drabble for us.

 So wonderful I have requested a matching drabble for next week!

La Gloriosa Donna

 She feels him poisoning her with every sphere they pass through.

 This man - this bitter poet herded through the castles of the dead to make note of them, whom she had never met before this moment, stared at her like he could burn her onto his eyes, rhapsodised on her beauty.

 I am as real to him as a painting, she thinks, and the thought rolls like a bezoar in her gut.

 When she takes her place amidst the rose petals, she hopes that the same flame that burns this last poisonous thought out of her will incinerate him.

A Drabble From a Guest

 (Sorry about the lack of post yesterday, the delays with my laptop are really getting to me. But today, we have a marvelous guest post from Doug at Fission Mailure.)

I took a prompt using a random prompt generator to generate two words from a list here. The words were Horror and Eternal, which sounds like the title of the survival horror game.

Kay Mee-mee A-tah

My hand freezes on the airing cupboard door. It had been a decade since I’d shut it, years since anyone had heard the voice, it must be dead by now. It’s safe. I’m safe, and this is just silly anxiety. 

I see the beak in my mind. The fur. The slow-blinking eyes. I shut the memories out and crack the door open, reaching in, groping blindly until I find a towel.

Click. I see the eyes open. Turn to face me. The beak snaps. “Kah toh-loo may- …”

It sounds like forgiveness. I slam the door. The voice follows me.

Guest Post: Murphy's Perfect Dragon Age Game - Final Part

 Doug had some serious internet problems yesterday, which is why this post is going up today.

 We’ve talked about - most everything, at this point, and now it’s time to finish this series by talking about the possibility of branching endings. This has always been a bit of a sticking point with Dragon Age games, as they have tended to have branching beginnings and fairly narrow endings, but this is a hypothetical one, so let’s go crazy.

 Let’s say there are four endings. A Terrible ending, a Bad ending, an Okay ending and a Good ending, depending on how much prep you put in before you go to the final mission. So a little like the last Mass Effect game, except this one will pan out with something a shade more interesting than different flashy coloured lights.

 So, let’s say your final mission is a siege of Nightmare’s stronghold, where he’s preparing his ritual to become an Old God. You’ve got your allies, and like Mass Effect 2, you have to assign certain party members to certain tasks, based on their skills.

 The Terrible ending would be the one that happens if you both do almost no preparation and if you make all the wrong choices during the final mission. Essentially, an ending which is as difficult to get as the Good ending, but because it requires that you be aggressively terrible at it. In this ending, your entire party dies, and Nightmare becomes an Old God, ruling Tevinter and expanding his armies out across the world. This ending would be non-canon, obviously.

 The Bad ending, meanwhile, would be one that happens if you either do very little preparation, make a lot of bad choices, or some combination of the two. Your siege is successful, and you defeat Nightmare, but a lot of your party is dead and his ritual has irrevocably damaged the fabric of reality, causing demons to spill through into Tevinter. With your armies devastated and the Imperium in disarray, it is in no fit state to fend off a demonic invasion, and the coming months and years will be difficult, if the Imperium even survives.

 The Okay ending would be one that happens if you’re good, but not quite perfect. Your siege is successful and you defeat Nightmare, but a few of your party members die and again, his ritual has torn open reality, and demons are spilling out. But your armies are okay, and the Imperium is strong and ready to face another war. While the coming months will be difficult, the Imperium is ready to face the threat under your leadership.

 The Good ending, taking place if you do a lot of prep and make all the right decisions in the final mission. While reality is torn open, you successfully manage to fend off the waves of demons coming through and close the rift. With you as their leader, the Imperium looks towards a brighter dawn, one of, hopefully but not necessarily, reform. All of your party survives. 

 And that covers just about everything one might expect from a Dragon Age game, apart from all the things it doesn’t. I’ve enjoyed writing these posts a lot, and should the mood take me might do so again with a different game series. 

In the meantime, feel free to look up the previous posts in this series, or eye up Reecey’s Let’s Rework posts for Final Fantasy VIII.

Guest Post: Murphy's Perfect Dragon Age - Part Five

 Sorry this wasn't up yesterday, we had a synchronised brainfart.

 So, we’ve talked a lot about plot, setting, characters, but this is a hypothetical game, so let’s ramble about gameplay a bit.

 This will probably be a short post, because I thought Dragon Age: Inquisition’s gameplay was pretty great, and it would fit a story about becoming the Archon of a kingdom perfectly.

 So I do envision some kind of war table mechanic, somewhere where you can dispatch your advisors to do missions, open up new areas, and locate sidequests; this would go along with your regular RPG gameplay, in which you and three party members go traipsing around righting wrongs and suchlike.

 As in Inquisition, your origin could cause slight changes in what war table missions you receive. The judgement mechanic should make a return too, because everyone loves judgement.

 But I think there’s much to be learned from another set of Bioware games here - I’m thinking of Mass Effect 2 and Mass Effect 3. Specifically, I’m thinking of having your final mission and ending be affected by the sidequests you complete, the peoples you recruit to your side, and the resources you gather.

 (But not the weird time limit thing that both games had.)

 So, you can dash through the main storyline and come out the other end with the bad ending, where you win a Pyrrhic victory over Nightmare; or you can devote time to sidequests; having your advisors improve your connections, resources and army; and forging alliances, and as a result head into the final battle with that much more on your side, and get a better ending.

 Another thing I’d institute is some slightly more involved battles between armies. So if, during a sidequest or main quest, you’re called upon to take a fortress, you can prepare beforehand by giving orders to direct different parts of your army to a choice of a few different objectives before you head in with your party, with the result being some changes in how that particular siege plays out (ie; ‘We’ll send our army to sabotage their giant demonic war machine instead of to open up a passage beneath the walls’ meaning that you have to lay siege to the gate rather than sneaking in, but your boss battle near the end is that much easier).

 Possibly these pitched battles could also involve an Origins-oid mechanic where you have two or three armies you can briefly call upon in combat.

 (Also, healing spells. We didn’t have those in Inquisition, and they need to make a reappearance.)

 But the Dragon Age gameplay has always been pretty good, and there aren’t many adjustments that can be made to it.

 Join us next week for the last in the series!

Guest Post: Murphy's Perfect Dragon Age - Part Four

 Last week, I started on your followers/allies for this hypothetical Dragon Age game of awesome, and it involved a lot of pushing to get characters from previous games involved in the advisoring and warrioring action. Now it’s time to finish off companions and look at the rogues and mages that would be in your party.

 Rogues

 Varric Tethras: What? Everyone loves Varric. He’s been in two games already and his popularity has yet to wane even slightly, and since he wasn’t a romance option, he’s arguably a more viable option for this list than some of those who showed up in the last post (hello, Cullen). Varric’s great, everyone loves Varric.

 In terms of what he does, he’d probably fulfil much the same party role as he did before: One of your long range hitters, with some extra focus on laying traps.

 Skoll: Here’s something that has been circling fandom: What if there’s a red lyrium version of Fenris somewhere? With red lyrium now absolutely everywhere as a result of Corypheus, this is definitely now a much more distinct possibility, and it’s hard to believe some enterprising magister wouldn’t want to try an experiment in that regard.

 Thus is Skoll created. A human slave, she has the same strange markings as Fenris, bar that hers are of red lyrium, resulting in powerful phasing powers (and other strange abilities besides), but making her dangerously mentally unstable, especially as the red lyrium spreads throughout her body.

 I am imagining a character very much in the vein of Jack from Mass Effect 2. Abrasive, dangerous, extremely distrustful of Tevinter and people in general, and with the possibility of being a liability if she gets out of control. She’d function as your party’s assassin, using twin daggers and semi-magical abilities to get close to enemies, do massive damage, and then flit away again.

 Yvonna Urvellan: This list is a bit elf short right now, so here’s an elf. Specifically, an elvish Grey Warden, because this list is also a bit Grey Warden short. No nonsense, rather bewildered by how Tevinter-y everything she is (being from Orlais, where things are much more sensible), and steadfastly devoted to doing good in the world, and defending it from Blights.

 I realise this sounds a bit like Blackwall, but Blackwall was boring, and I’d hope this character would be a shade more interesting. I mean, for starters, she wouldn’t have a beard, and also, she’d talk about things other than how awesome being a Grey Warden is.

Mages

 Illyria Aquila: We have precious few characters from the Tevinter elite so far, so here’s Illyria! The eldest daughter of a Tevinter magister, Illyria is a keen Old God enthusiast and worshipper who takes umbrage at the blasphemy of a demon trying to assume the power of her deities, and also may or may not have an agenda towards Old God worship becoming more acceptable in Tevinter.

 Illyria is privileged and deeply entrenched in Tevinter society, which might provide a nice contrast to all the downtrodden people and foreigners we have filling out the cast, and provide a good opportunity for conflict.

 In terms of combat, she’d probably tend towards destructive schools of magic, and her specialism would be along the lines of inflicting status effects and utilising a few heavy damage spells, like Dorian’s Necromancer class.

 Gwydion Hylanda: More elves! More elves. A slave freed to join the Inquisition, Gwydion could be a powerful elven mage, with his characterisation going one of two ways: The obvious route of an angry slave who hates his slavemasters, or the more nauseating route of a slave who has been stockholmed into thinking that his lot in life is a good one, and that slavery is great. Horrible as it is, we know slaves like that have existed in slave-keeping countries, from time to time.

 I think if it were the latter, he’d have to undergo a character arc where he realises it’s not okay.

 Gwydion would be a healer type (we direly need to bring back healing spells), whose specialisation, Druid, would focus on healing, shielding and buffing his allies. The ultimate support mage, essentially, since our mage line-up is very attack heavy.

 Eligos: So we’ve had a spirit taking material form and slowly becoming human in Cole, and we’ve seen a spirit transforming into a demon in Justice, but I don’t think we’ve ever seen a demon transforming into a spirit, and I feel like that’s a storyline that could have a lot of potential.

 In a world rapidly going mad, a magister performs a blood sacrifice of his slaves to summon a powerful Pride demon. It possesses the body of one of his slaves, killing the magister and offering its services to the Archon, because Maker knows it doesn’t want one of its powerful, rival demons becoming an Old God.

 Eligos could be tricky, cunning and manipulative, but also a font of knowledge about demons, the Fade and Thedasian history. Over time, Eligos’ exposure to humanity could start to transform him for the better, causing him to become less Pride demon and more Wisdom spirit. For his specialisation, a Summoner class that allows him to summon your stock enemy demons to aid the party for a limited period of time would be nice.