Health

I got my bed. I sleep like a baby. It’s a good bed – and now I actually fall asleep quickly instead of laying awake an hour or more. My hip doesn’t hurt anymore when I wake up. Bliss.

One day I have to figure out weather I clean/sort things because I’m happy or I’m happy because I’m cleaning/sorting things. Eitherway, I currently seem to find tidying my flat to be a very satisfying task. Creepy.

Art

ToC‘s for the rest of August are in the queue and my next goal is to secure the updates for whole of September. Managable chunks of time, that seems to do the trick for me – that and some time between putting the page up and it being displayed, just so that I get some distance to my art.

I’m proud to announce that the robot-girl-fans beat the furries to fullfilling Rule 34 regarding Traces of Chaos, and the comic’s only 4 pages old right now! The internet, it boggles my mind. But I get quite some traffic from twitter, which makes me smile. Announcing the updates in the twitter stream makes a huge difference.

Other Things

The Lich King is dead. And the Pet-Shammy (Thank you, Pet-Shammy!) convinced a few guildies to go into Blackwing Lair for our retro-raid, so guess what I got?

Seriously, his CLAW's bigger than me...

Yeah, Classic Raider’s MINE. BWL is an incredible fun raid, btw. I’d love to have done it in back when it was actual content, so… ah, 4, 5 years ago? Hah. Time flies. Back then I was totally convinced I’d never play WoW, so that shows what I knew. These days I’m mainly amused by the fact that my tiny tank can withstand things twenty times as big as me – She’s standing infront of that damn dragon’s claw in that picture.

I’m happy to report that kitty’s doing better. :) My threat to drag him to the vet seems to have worked!

I’m still looking for a decent roleplay group in Hamburg. So far I haven’t found one that wasn’t creepy. *sigh* Such a huge city MUST have an active roleplay community, but apperantly I do not know where to look for it. But I haven’t given up yet.

The huntress - art by me

To be honest, my first negative reaction to Metroid Other M hasn’t been fair.  I do worry that they’ll fuck up “humanizing” Samus, but of course that’s no the whole story. First reactions are neither rational nor complete, which makes them so dangerous – it’s always worth digging deeper to see what exactly caused them.

See, Super’s been my first Metroid game. The second I powered up my family’s SNES with that cartridge and saw the loading screen, the game and its heroine had captured my imagination. And the endboss? That nailed it and turned me into a fan of life. I began thinking about what kind of person Samus was and what kind of life she lead, how she felt – normal fandom stuff, really.

Samus Aran wasn’t the first character who interested me enough to write or draw her. She wasn’t the last either, although by now I’ve learned not to get too attached to other people’s characters. But currently she’s the only one I’m a fan of.

See you next mission - art by me

It’s partly because I’ve always been fascinated by the strong, silent warrior ladies, partly because I grew out of my other fandoms either due shock¹ or simply because my interests or world view changed.

But the main reason I stayed a Metroid fan was Samus-the-Cypher – I got enough glimpses of her character to get a basic grasp of her, but still so little that I was free to imagine her how I liked. I soon knew what kind of person Samus must’ve been and how she acted, just like I know exactly who Siendes and Chally are. There’s a whole inticriate world build around my fan-version of Samus Aran – and to be honest, if I’d switch around some of the names, you propably wouldn’t recognize it as Metroid, just that this is a world were the government employs bounty hunters – one of whom happens to wear an alien-made powersuit. It’s my vision of Samus and it’s unique.

And now Other M is going to take this away by replacing it with the official-approved-emotional-life of Samus Aran.

That‘s the sticking point.

The Samus in the Other M game, she will be different than how I imaginated my Samus to be. She’ll behave differently and will have different motivation. She’s totally different character after all, written by other people. She’ll be fitted to the taste of time and the audience she’s intended for – the game has to sell afterall². And humanizing Samus has the potential to be a great marketing move. It might be the key to expand the fan-base, to rejuvinate the series and to pave the way for more Metroid Goodness – which is a very good thing.

Bureaucracy - art by me

But… For me Official Samus will not be able to life up to my private version of her. She cannot. For more than ten years I’ve thought and written about my Personal Samus (even if I’ve rarely shown it) and she got tailored exactly to my preferences.  In contrast the official version will have exactly one game for character developement and she will be designed for the broad public. She has no chance. The best I can hope for is that she’s close enough to my personal version that I can incooperate the new information without any major clashes.

Well, this is my problem and in no form or shape Nintendo’s fault. Conflicts between fanon and canon are common the second anybody grows too attached to characters they do not own. It’s what fuels fix-fics, fan-rages and lots of fantastic and/or craptastic fan art and fanfictions. It’s both good and bad – if something catches somebody’s imagination, they’ll want to play with it. Sometimes it goes to far and people forget those toys and characters aren’t theirs. Human nature.

But that’s what makes concentrating on my original work so worthwile – it’s my universe, my dollhouse, and I’m the only one who shapes it.

Hm. How does “Traces of Chaos, 200 years later” sound? My private Samus would fit great into that setting. She might even keep her first name, although I definitivly would have to design the powersuit…

(Attention, Spoilers ahead.
I know Super Metroid’s been out for 16 years, but don’t say I haven’t warned you.)

One of the most memorable events in Metroid’s history, the one that actually made me such a fan of this series, has been the final boss in Super Metroid and a very emotionally charged moment.  Honestly, the video’s nice, but doesn’t do it justice.  Simple because ingame you’ve spent HOURS building up to this boss, running around on a hostile planet and trying to save/get back that annoying not-so-little-anymore floating jellyfish, which had imprinted on you, ‘coz you were the first thing it saw after it hatched.  And then, it dies, because that friggin boss kicked your ass and the ‘lil bugger was to busy saving your life to defend itself – despite the fact that you’re the walking one-man army.

Yeah.

I remember my first time beating that boss pretty well. In less then ten seconds, I went from “Oh fuck, oh fuck, I’m going-to-die-die-die” over “YAY! METROID! YAY, YAY, YAaaaa…. WHAT?! NOOOOOOOOO!” to “BURN BITCH, BUUUUUUUURN! EAT MY WRATH”. I think it was the first (and only) time I actually screamed at the tv. I remotely remember that my mother came running into the living room, checking up on me. Heck, I was so upset, I failed at the following timed-escape scene and Samus died on me. I was fourteen back then. Or maybe fifteen. And man, I’ve been upset at that boss (stomping it felt so good!), the space pirates and the death of a bunch of pixels.

And yet, apart from the wonderfully creepy opening narration, Samus never uttered a word or has shown any facial expression (16bit sprite, remember?), all was done just with the flow of the game itself.  That huge emotional payoff on that boss? All the result of good and fascinating gameplay. They’ve set never set out to humanize the woman in the powersuit. They’ve never hit us over the head with her emotions or past. It just wasn’t necessary – the short opening recap set the tone and the rest was gameplay. You’ve beat the game, had fun while doing so and they sneaked the story right past you, directly into your brain.

And as small as this story was, it stuck.

For many of the older Metroid fans (including me) Super’s the game every other Metroid has to measure up to. The Metroid series consistently delivers high quality, true, but how good a single game is, that’s determined by the comparison to Super Metroid. It’s the holy grail. It’s been that good, that there wasn’t another Metroid for more than eight years despite the good sales, simply because no sequel would’ve been able to live up to it.

Will Other M manage to do what Super Metroid has done for me all those years ago? I don’t know.

Other M defintivly won’t be Super Metroid. Super’s a thing of the past. It’s a classic, yes, and it’s been very influental in it’s time, too -  But even I have to admit that there are parts of it that feel a bit… dusty. Time marched on and today’s audience expects different thing of a video game. A modern Metroid has to look differently. Other M has to come into its own if Nintendo wants it to be a commercial success.

And so they set out to show Samus Aran’s human side. Oy.

Super worked so well for me because the story got out of the way, but I know some people missed the fact that Super’s had a story at all. They’re going to try and fix that in Other M – but I’m afraid they go to far into the other directions. That their attempts at provoking emotion will turn out heavy handed and clumsy and will get into the way of good gameplay. That’s what usually happen when you try to focus on those things.

But I’m a cynic and I react agressive to drama for drama’s sake – the poor souls who tried to watch Buffy with me can attest to that. Maybe they do their job great, and it’ll be a true enrichment of the Metroid series. Maybe lots of people will like the game and it will still disappoint me – I cannot know.

Only way to find out is to buy and play it – and at least that I am looking forward to.

Fact is, Other M has to step out of Super’s shadow, especially because it’s a direct sequel  – something that never happened before ¹. And I hope it does, because if Other M manages to finally outshine that sixteen year old game it will reunivate the  series itself.

That alone is a reason I’m so exited for it. Besides the basic “wee! more Samus!” reaction. ;)

My fetish for muscled girls is alone Super Metroid Samus' fault...

Still, there’s one thing that might cause me to have some problems with Other M.  It’s personal and has nothing to do with Nintendo, and I’ll talk about that in the next part of this series.

So, there’s a new Metroid game coming up.  When I’ve heard about it, I might have squeeled like a four-year old that just  found a pony under the Christmas tree. Maybe. Well, at least until I got some of the details regarding this game.

The beauty that is Metroid

For those not in the know, Metroid is a Nintendo-only franchise starring your classical armed-to-the-teeth silent protagonist fighting against a whole zoo of evil-invading-aliens while traipsing through pretty and eerie landscapes, solving puzzles in order to pick up stuff that makes your character stronger and allows you to solve even more puzzles. There’s even a story (in the later games more than the first ones), but so far it rarely got into the way of “pew-pew-aliens!”

(If you own a Wii, you should pick up the Metroid Prime Collection. It’s really worth it. )

Some highlights of the series:

1. life-sucking floating space jellyfish¹
2. Quality: depending on the installment you’ll have either a real good game or a grandiose masterpiece
3. a space dragon
4. its pretty, creepy, eerie, lonely and moody settings full of interesting puzzles
5. floating space jellyfish!
6. and what’s maybe the first never-been-kidnapped-and-actually-USEFUL-in-story woman in a video game ever, with her first game being published in 1986 on the old NES.

Anyway, since then Samus Aran has blown up two planets², multiple space stations and a few space ships, nearly completly wiped out the titular life-sucking space jellyfish and countless of heavy armoured enemies. She is stated to be a legend of nearly mythical proportions in her universe.

Lots of boom, lots of pew-pew, lots of puzzles, lots of fun. Good games.

And now, they’re planning to show us the emotional side of Samus Aran.

Erh, what?

…

ABORT, ABORT!

Lets all ignore the fact that developing of a female character in a video game generally³ means turning  her a blubbering, useless crybaby ⁴ or into a lunatic and psycho⁵ -  I’m NOT playing the damn game to dvelve into the humanity of my main-character. I want to go pew-pew and solve puzzles!

Pew pew. Shooting Aliens. Solve puzzles. See fantastic land scapes. Trudge through the ruins of long (and not so long) lost civilisations. Complicated bosses that make me memorize the patterns of how exactly I have to kill them. (I’m goooood at that) That’s what I play Metroid for!

Can you point what’s not on the list? Yeah. Humanity and Emotions.

I’m HAPPY with her being the lonely, silent protagonist!

I know, I know. Time marches on, they’ve gotta try new stuff, and fans always will whine. Yadda-yadda-yadda. QQ more. Facts of life.

And I might’ve just lied to you about the not-looking-for-emotions part. A little bit. I’ll tell you why in the next part.

YARGH!

No wonder my schoolmates abused me, if I made them feel like that.

Funny thing is, I wouldn’t have minded being treated that way a year ago. That’s the problem with growing a spine: You suddenly become very much aware that certain things annoy you.