by Неизвестный
“What do you think you are, Nick? Some kind of fuckin’ philosopher?”
Why did he ever befriend the pig man? What was he doing here?
“People like us aren’t meant to think about this shit,” continued the pig man, spitting flecks of half-masticated doughnut onto Nick’s jacket and into his coffee mug. “People like us, we don’t think. We just do. Get up, go to work, no staring into collide-o-scopes or fuckin’ staring at people neither. What’s wrong with that? Are you saying that’s not good enough for you?”
Oink, oink, oink.
Nick wanted to collide his fist into the pig man’s face, but instead, he said his goodbyes and left. He was thinking about great adventures and rebellions.
***
He stopped at the waterfront and got out of the taxi. He was surprised they’d bought his excuse about needing an extra shift, an unprecedented request.
He looked around at the architecture. He saw those oppressive glass towers devoid of personality and the concrete boxes, but now he noticed the street vendors and shop owners filling the gaps. This was the first time in years he’d felt autonomous. He lit the pig man’s cigarette and tossed it into the front seat of the cab. It slowly sunk out of view as it melted through the fabric. It was a good day to quit.
"If you stand in one place while the world turns, you end up falling off its edge." He had read that somewhere. Maybe he had written it himself in a coffee-and-hate-stained notebook; maybe it was a line of terrible love poetry. Either way, it seemed illogical to complain about passivity and remain passive yourself. It was no longer enough for him to be a random collider in a cell. The monotonous predictability of life was more toxic than his nicotine addiction.
Suddenly from inside the taxi came a violent catharsis. The chassis burst outward as the fuel inside gasped for air. Glass shards rained onto the worn concrete, and then came the flames Nick had been yearning for. They flickered unpredictably. Nick smiled and watched them dance into the sky, which was now showing the first hints of day. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d actually watched the sunrise. He breathed deeply, filling his lungs with a mix of cold dawn air and acrid smoke. He watched the smoke billow, moving as liquid, jittering with flecks of flame. As he turned and walked away, there were more collisions to be made, and he knew they wouldn’t be random anymore.
Good Losers Are Pretty
Andrew Vanden Bossche
Pretty Monster smiled as much as her sprite would allow and patiently endured the applause. The panel had just started, and she wondered how much longer they were going to clap. More than likely there wouldn’t be any questions for her. The ones with the answers to Perfect Summer Storm Forever, from frame data to character design (or at least, more answers than anyone else) were Tim Kawasaki and June Snow. The pixel people were there to look pretty (which Pretty Monster did well, though strangely) and be friendly, which she wasn’t so good at in person. Captain Summerknife was, though. He jumped on the table, tore off his sunglasses, and shouted,
“SUMMERWAVE NEXT! YOU’RE THE REAL REVOLUTION!”
And then the crowd was cheering and clapping all over again, and he threw back his head and laughed while the sunlight streamed through his half-real pixel-flesh. Pretty Monster could never hear it without having to pretend she wasn’t giggling. No one was a better crowd pleaser than the Captain, and even if the slow startup and pixel-thin range on his spinning piledriver made him the third worst character in the game, no crowd cheered louder than one watching him win with it.
As the crowd settled down, Pretty Monster picked up her phone and browsed the forums again. The results of the convention tournament were already up. Notorious low-tier master Little Hexes flew in from New York to come back from the loser’s bracket and win grand finals with Captain Summerknife. There was an embedded video of Hexes (just a kid, barely older than the first game) posing in sync with the Captain. She scrolled down for the full results, and down there she found Lilliput, playing as Pretty Monster, coming in sixth.
She thought about checking if Lilliput had posted a match analysis on the forums yet. It made Pretty Monster happy to read them. Her fans and players were the clever and hopeless, finding silly things for her to laugh at and coming up with new tricks and tech to win the impossible game of playing with the worst character in Perfect Summer Storm Forever. She was nervous when she first started posting on the forums, but her fans were ecstatic: “A REAL LIVE VIDEOGAME?!?!?!?!??!” was the first response she ever got, and she put that post in her signature, partially because it made her laugh and partially because she liked the enthusiasm and partially because it was true: that’s what she was. But right now the forums weren’t enough to make her feel better, not even a little, and when she felt like this as she sometimes did she couldn’t help but feel guilty she turned out like this, tormenting thousands of kids trying to win with a character as unplayably bad as she was.
The lights were dimmed and the panel was starting, but Pretty Monster was far away. All over the world she was losing. She was losing in American double elimination and Japanese 2v2 combination cup. She was losing to the infinite combos of Misty Mako, she was losing to the thousand stings of the Witch of Wicker Wood’s softly falling stars, and she was losing to the high-low unblockable of Mr. Mikado’s delayed overhead slash. Her life bar was hitting zero in the summer storm stage of Summer Knight Kite and the alien landscape of Kid Mars and her home stage of Midnight Lake. She lost in South America and in the USA and Europe and Japan. She lost on the latest re-release on PSN and XBLA and she lost on the arcade-perfect Dreamcast port, and she lost on the machines still humming in the corners of bowling alleys in the Midwest. She lost on the bootleg systems in Brazil and she lost on emulators all over the world. She’d been losing since she was playable in Perfect Summer Storm, but she’d been no Geese Howard when she was the boss of Summer Storm 2. She lost to scrubs still complaining about how cheap her throws and ground teleport were. She lost to noobs who couldn’t even pull off a dragon punch. She lost to trolls exploiting Glorious Goodnight Girl’s Time Shatter glitch. She lost to Daigo and she lost to Justin Wong and she lost to the kids down the street playing in their basements.
The imported issue of Arcadia she bought on the show floor had it all in mathematical fact: 3.5:6.5 loss/win ratio, according to that month’s rankings. It was down from last month and up from the month before, and the number had been higher and the number had been lower, but pixel for pixel, no one in Perfect Summer Storm Forever was worse than Pretty Monster.
The crowd had settled down and Tim had begun explaining the history of Summer Storm and the quiet future of their company, Believersoft. Summer Storm was the last big hit out of Believersoft before they got too small for the world, a last ditch attempt to save the company by throwing their coolest, weirdest, most reckless ideas together, and it worked long enough for them to survive. Not many games are like Summer Storm. Not many fighters were also mysteries. Not many fighters let you win by flirting. Pretty Monster liked hearing Tim talk about Summer Storm, even though she had already heard everything he had to say about it twice over. She enjoyed the dark, too. Big bright places weren’t made for her. Her character profile was very specific, and what she did and didn’t like was hard-coded into her:
Likes: Small places, water, cool evenings, books, night flowers, quiet times, easily frightened people.
Dislikes: Crowded places, urban sprawl, the scent of gasoline, bright lights, monster hunters.
Pretty Monster was made by some rules, and what she thought and who she was, what she had done and would most likely do, were as fundamental to her as her walk speed and the active frames of her heavy punch. Summer Storm was a fighting game, but it was more than a fighting game, and there was more to Pretty Monster than Tim and June ever thought there would be. They hadn’t planned on her being the worst character in the game. It wasn’t the only thing they hadn’t planned on.
Pretty Monster and her pixel-brothers and pixel-sisters passe
d through the world like the spectral glow of light from a CRT. It wasn’t so unusual; Nintendo made an add-on for the Famicom in the early eighties that made videogame characters more real. They thought it would be pretty good for marketing and it was, even if, like the games themselves, the characters never acted exactly how their designers wanted them to. Making something solid out of metaphor was hard, but Nintendo had good engineers. It worked well enough, just not the way they were expecting; Mario jumped away into the mountains to hunt turtles and pick mushrooms and was never heard from again. Now he’s just another myth in the foothills of Kyoto, a hologram, a chimera, two steps out of step with the world, a forest spirit, a modern Youkai. Nintendo retired making pixel-children around the same time as the Power Glove. Nowadays, as soon as a ROM is dumped online, someone hooks it up and out they pop, pixel ghosts who wander the world like they’re really there, more or less.
Pretty Monster was pretty, of course, but it was hard to tell exactly what she looked like. Her shivering sprite shifted like a river of myths, a rainbow of blue serpents, green plants and orange beasts. They were talking about her now, and the lead artist June, strange June Snow, was talking about how much she loved drawing her. But it was in no small part due to how carried away they got that they didn’t know what to do with what they ended up with. Pretty Monster didn't work like anyone else, changing shape and moving like a river of monsters, giving her a dangerous potential to screw up everything in the game, top to bottom, so Tim erred on the side of caution, nerfing her from the moment she was born. It was hard to think of ideas for what she could do without making her more broken than anyone else in the cast, whereas Mr. Mikado, with his cool black uniform and pockets full of white stones and curved daggers, was easy, half-copied wholesale from every other fighter around. He played like an eccentric Ryu and pros picked him up instantly. Everyone liked him, but no one liked him the best, except people who liked to win. No one who liked to win picked Pretty Monster. Those people were playing for something else, and Pretty Monster wished she knew what it was. People who liked Mr. Mikado played in the tournament. People who liked her came to these panels. It made her happy and also troubled her.
“Being worst is better than being second worst,” Mr. Mikado told her once. “No one remember the one that’s not even good at being bad.”
Strong words from the second or third best in the game, but he was right. Sly and dangerous, the main character Mr. Mikado. June was telling the audience he was made with the image of “an untrustworthy person you can’t stop yourself from liking,” and while he was a bad hero and a bad person he was a good friend, and he was never wrong. Mr. Mikado was quick to point out that there was really no such thing as “the best,” no objective way to determine if one character was better than another, and he was right about that too, even if it wasn’t much comfort.
All the tier lists could say, all anyone could say, was who was winning the most, not why. Maybe not enough people were playing the low tiers. Misty Mako had no poor matchups, but she was the hardest character in the game to play correctly. The only competitive players to make it to big tournaments are ones who know what they’re doing, and some of the best players don’t use the best characters. The greats don’t play the game, they play each other. One of the tops players in Japan, SuperGoose, wasn’t just the top player in Perfect Summer Storm Forever, he was the top player in every fighting game. He picked his games based on what tournaments were paying and what his sponsors wanted him to do and he won every time because to him it wasn’t the game that was the challenge.
It was all too complicated to predict, and the ones who made the game understood it least of all. Maybe if the active frames on Pretty Monster’s Out of The Depths special move were longer, it would change everything, like if the hitstun on Mr. Mikado’s jumping heavy punch was shorter, he wouldn’t have an unblockable mix up and he wouldn’t be the second or third best character in the game. Just like Mikado said, you never knew. They used to think he was the best by a mile. Then they thought he was mid-tier at best. Then they found his unblockable and he shot right back up again. Pretty Monster, on the other hand, was both the worst and hardest to play. They were related. If she was easier to play, she might be a bit higher. She knew it and at first she wished she was, if only because then maybe more people would play her and do better with her. Maybe she’d have more friends and wouldn’t have to worry about being a burden on the ones she had.
Games don’t always turn out the way you'd expect. Misty Mako wasn't supposed to have such an easy infinite loop. Pretty Monster was supposed to not be the worst character in the game. Captain Summerknife blogs about cosplay and social justice when he’s not at tournaments; they didn't mean for that to happen, though it was in his nature to strike poses and fight for justice. Being bad for competitive play didn't matter to Captain Summerknife. He had only one dislike: INJUSTICE, in all caps. He was not as simple as he looked or acted. He knew, and still knows, it's better to be cool than bad. The people who play as Captain Summerknife are the showiest lot. Some of the best players in the scene play Captain Summerknife. Grapplers are crowd pleasers, and the Captain is a silly, quotable crowd-pleaser, fun to win with and begrudgingly fun to lose to.
But Pretty Monster couldn't help thinking about just how bad she was. The last Summer Storm game came out in 1999, and Believersoft was working on other things now. They put a cameo of her in Red Winter, and she liked that, but it wasn't the same as Summer Storm. Being an enemy in a single-player game was like doing a job. Being played by a person was like turning into a human being, or what she thought it must be like to be a human being. Pretty Monster asked June and Tim why she was the way she was and they said her guess was as good as theirs. “We made Pretty Monster with the image of someone shy who might also want to eat you,” June was saying. They showed all the concept art of her and all the dialogue they wrote and the design document and everything they could find. Pretty Monster liked seeing it all again but didn't understand what they were trying to show her; all she wanted to know was why she was so bad. At this rate, she was never going to eat anyone.
June asked her to pose while she showed slides of Pretty Monster’s concept art. June had gotten better at drawing since the last Summer Storm. She explained how she drew so small the animation team had to keep magnifying glasses around the studio to see the details of her designs. Tim explained how they came up with the moves and attacks based on the drawings:
“We initially thought the shape-shifting would make her really feel like a final boss, but when it came time to make her playable we really resisted the urge to make her less weird. We thought that would disappoint the fans, so we spent a lot of time thinking about how we could use all of her animations while still making her fit as one of the characters.”
Pretty Monster thought this approach was a bit irresponsible. She didn’t need to ask if this was the reason why she was so bad at their game, and it might have even been the reason Believersoft never made it big. Pretty Monster had over three times the animation frames of the other characters. That struck her as phenomenally inefficient, and it was: sprites cost dollars. She felt a little guilty about how much she had cost to produce, but June didn’t, and Tim didn’t, and the fans didn’t.
It was time for the Q&A. The audience usually asked the same questions every time, but Pretty Monster decided to pay attention anyway.
“Who inspired you to make games?” asked a fan.
“Ray Bradbury inspired me to make games,” said Tim.
“What do you hope to see in the next generation of gaming?” asked a journalist.
“I want more young people to make games, but I want them to make games not because of my games, but because of things they did as a kid, like catching bugs in the summer. I want to play a game about catching bugs in the summer with the girl I have a crush on, because that was something that happened to me. A game based on a game about catching bugs might be a fun game, but I’m getting older. It’s not the s
ort of game I want to play anymore.”
“Why did you make Summer Storm?” asked another fan.
“Because I wanted to make a game about catching bugs in the summer with the girl I had a crush on,” he said.
To Pretty Monster, Tim Kawasaki felt just like the title screen of his game: calm and laconic, the sunlit rainstorm over a field of dry August grass. June, though, felt to Pretty Monster like the title screen of the game she had been lead designer on, Midnight Lake. Midnight Lake gave kids nightmares, though it never got the company in too much trouble because it was hard to explain exactly why it was so scary. If moms and dads went pale over Mortal Kombat it was because they understood something their kids didn’t. When they tried watching Midnight Lake to understand why it was making their kids cry, it was because the kids understood something they didn’t. There was no blood in Midnight Lake, but there were glitches and lights and a mystery that kids spent quarter after quarter on trying to solve. June’s monsters seemed to not be completely trapped behind the screen, and she liked her heroine Misty Mako, poor doomed Misty Mako, so much she put her in Summer Storm. At the end of Midnight Lake, the monsters are the ones everyone loves the most. June Snow said that was why it was so scary, and why even though she is the most popular character, no one can quite forgive Misty Mako. June was funny too, which is why Summer Storm was such a pretty and bright and cheerful and hopeless game.
“From a gameplay perspective, what gave you the idea for Pretty Monster?” asked a fan. The question didn’t surprise Pretty Monster. She was used to being talked about in the third person. Out of all the characters, she was by far the most curious. But she was surprised to see that the person asking was Lilliput, still holding the custom controller painted in Pretty Monster’s colors that she won sixth place with. Lilliput knew Pretty Monster inside and out. She figured out nearly everything that she could do, and when she won and especially when she lost, someone would ask her if she’d do better with another character. And she would, probably. But in Summer Storm, she wouldn’t play anyone but Pretty Monster. “I can’t win without her. I think it might be hard to explain, but I’m better with her than any other character. It’s the game I want to play,” she’d say, though it didn’t make sense to anyone but her.